the associate vice president of policy at the david rothenberg center for public policy at the fortune society and welcome back to both sides of the bars where we continue to discuss critical questions about how the current criminal justice system works its intersections with social justice and highlight the efforts that are being made to improve the lives of everyone that is affected by it we ask you the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments with us on offices and programs in eight connecticut cities he is also the co founder of progressive prison ministries michaud is a career adviser at the fortune society and at the age of twenty seven after having only one involvement with the criminal justice system she was sentenced to thirty years in federal prison for drug related charges thank you jeff for joining us today thanks for having so jeff i would love to start the conversation with you to hear a little bit more about the work that you do edge organization but also to hear what from your perception both personally and professionally what are some of the major hurdles that people face once they are exiting prison from the reentry into criminal justice organization based in bridgeport but we do have programs in and offices and cities in connecticut we're probably the most respected criminal justice organization for programs in the state we've been around for thirty four years and two years ago i was as pointed as you could have director proud to say that i'm the first person in the united states formally incarcerated for white collar crime to be appointed the c e o of a major criminal justice organization so it's something i take seriously and i realize that a lot of people are watching us in the criminal justice system especially those of us who've been to prison and so you know we we deal with people to respect and dignity and care  connecticut's a lot like other places in the country i mean certainly we are more progressive than most same is probably true in new york in a lot of ways but despite having a progressive policy in connecticut and leadership at the department of corrections under our under our wonderful commissioner scott simple connecticut has run out of money so all these reforms definitely stood still while we're trying to figure that out and it's the coffers of a lot of social service programs including including criminal justice programs so the things that we would have otherwise the competition in terms of housing and employment and drug and alcohol and mental health and wrap around services not so much right now in the way we would like to do them so what we're struggling to find other ways certainly we have to lean much more heavily into private fund raising luckily bridgeport is in fairfield county one of the wealthiest areas of the country and we have wonderful supporters in greenwich and darien who came in and others from the affluent communities but you know it's difficult to make them understand often that  criminal justice issues are are everybody's problem for a lot of reasons and that crime is everywhere and punishment is everywhere and the more they relate to that and they develop some empathy and compassion and hopefully what it means is that we can  form better private public partnerships to fund creative forward thinking programs that can solve some of these hurdles from you know hurdles to home thank you and so the federal deal jay has outlined underneath  former attorney general eric holder that there are approximately forty five thousand policies rules regulations on the books a series of legal ways for people to be discriminated against if they have a criminal conviction so it's forty five thousand legal ways at least and it is and that is of course not taken into consideration the biggest immeasurable barrier which is the perception the negative perception too often of who we're talking about when we do see people leaving prison or reentering and so michel from your experience both as a career adviser but also as someone who served a tremendous amount of time in federal prison  can you speak to some of those if not all of those forty five thousand barriers and particularly the most immeasurable one perception well coming home i would say that is so hard for employment and housing especially i go to the halfway house from at that i was released for about three weeks and from the outer half way house is for the for the viewers who may not know what a halfway houses ok sorry a half way house is a place where they send you before you go back home which is it's like a monitored thing you can only go out if you have a p so once you enter you cannot leave unless you have a pass to leave that place for about six seven hours it depends on the best you get so when i went there i wasn't really that familiar with it so while being there i learned that if i wanted to go out employment i had to get a passport that if i wanted to not even visit home because i couldn't do it at the time if i wanted to go shop and i had put in a pet if i wanted to go to the store i had to put in the bass so for anything you can just go out you had to get two thousand and sixteen i found out that i was after one year of waiting my sentence was commuted so when that happened i was very excited but at the same sum i was a shop and say that because don't really believe that it happened even though it did because i waited for so long you know and when it did happen it was like a huge we have been lifted so even though i received that i still feel that i was not free and i say that because even now i don't feel like i'm free i'm not in prison physically so i come home i do get a job right away but i don't keep a job and i don't think that was ready at the time saw by me losing a job ok i have to find some kind of program that can help me so when i get another job i can keep you so i went to fortune and when i went to fortune i went there for employment services i went to the employment service workshop which is a two week workshop where they equip you to you know get back and said work for us you want to say it and they teach you how to interview skills if anybody at your budget convention how to answer it you know in the right way and you know it to be truthful but don't like be so open like given up a lot of information i don't know how to say it but i wanted to get it out so they acquit me with the tools to get to where i am at the day so i graduated the two weekend employment workshop interned there as a receptionist and then now i've been the one year and the position that i'm in now well congratulations think yeah and so so it seems that that although we talked about some of the barriers it seems that one of the major ones obviously is access to employment and i would even add to that and say access to survivable employment right and just having a job making a wage does it mean that it's a livable wage and so what is some of the ways that your organization and michaud in your role that you help folks navigate and i would love if you can make a clear distinction between individual barriers and systemic barriers  employment is probably one of the one or two largest issues we have and family reentry we always take a holistic approach because getting someone a job or is or them keeping that job is impossible if they have mental health problems or they have substance abuse problems and so we look at an approach where we're actually trying to help them reenter and become a ineffective in successful member of  society not an easy thing to do especially since there's not a lot of employers out there that are willing to take a risk on form incarcerated people although i'd say in some ways that's changed now maybe it's because there's four percent unemployment and they have no choice but to take some risks or what they consider to be risks that they wouldn't have otherwise taken but i would say that for the most  part we are looking for entry level jobs for people because it gets their their foot in the door and some have been very successful i mean we hire fairly regular hires former incarcerated people and at one point fully thirty or forty percent of our workforce that worked in our in our in our agency were formerly incarcerated people but even now for example i'm form incarcerated head affirm our director of community affairs fred by modeling that we get to show that the business community and also the rest of the ecosystem whether it be donors or government or whoever that you can be responsible people who can have employment at higher levels and obviously one of the things you want to do is raise the ceiling because and raise the floor at the ceiling so this few of us you're one of those people  who can be a role model for the floor a little bit harder because we're pretty people you know an entry level positions and if they can't be themselves or their families then then it's a problem and a lot of people don't understand for example the federal tax subsidy programs or connecticut has something called step up where we actually subsidize people in connecticut those programs were great except that no very few people took advantage of them they didn't know about it they were poorly promoted they were poorly promoted so we're battling that all the time and i think that the answer has to be more than just simply career fairs i think career fairs are great but but still  what we need is the opportunity to go into large scale employers employers that have that that employ tens of thousands of people and penetrate that and so that we can have systemic change throughout the country and we can and we're trying to be a leader in that yeah thank you for that work and thank you for making it this thank you so much i would love for you to you know talk about your reentry experience from from the lens of women particularly women of color as we know women in general but particularly women of color are the fastest growing population of people who are entering into prisons and jails and obviously that's alarming for many reasons but also that means that a large majority of them also we entering at a much more rapid pace and so i would love to kind of hear it from your perspective you know what were some of the major barriers that were unique to women but a ticket the women of are exiting federal prison because there is a distinction to make between state facilities and federal facilities right so as i said for me given a job really probably not even a month after being out of prison  to keep the job then i was fired by another employee not even a h r person manager or anything like that so add it in really understand even though it's some story behind it can see it now but when i was any program that i can do that would help me better quit me for going back into the workforce and keeping my job because i don't want to be an employee so i was told that i can do t transitional work program which is a program for people like myself that either you've been paroled or you have done a lot of time and you've been out of the workforce so when i went to that i was interned as a on and so there are many women who leave facilities in our reentering that have children particularly in the federal system we're seeing more and more women who left children at a very young age and unfortunately serve tremendous amounts of time and come back in those children are entering into early adulthood and so from your experience working with women who have children and trying to create or nurture those bonds again somebody you need barriers at that prisons because you know one would argue and say that that's not employment is one major pressing issue that needs to be addressed but also family reunification is another right because it's hard and i can speak on like i don't have children but i can say i've known people that did and to get that relationship back with their children is hard just like for me with my family still to this day i don't feel like i know them like they are not the same people that i left when i went away twenty years ago they my family but do they really know me do i really know them i don't feel like that so i'm still today trying to bill i know people who still don't have their relationship with the children they want their relationship with the children about right when we talk a lot about employment and housing for obvious reasons because there needed to stabilize a person but then you know family bonds are something that's also needed to give someone longevity it is so i would say that you can send you to try to build their bond and is not don't force it you know just let it happen naturally is weasely what i can say because i still like i said even though i see my sisters on once three or four times a week you know like from friday to sunday i see them you know for about eight hours a day because i'm with them but at the same time i have other family that i'm very close with but what i was that's how i felt and now i feel like we like this sense after home for me and it's sad because these like my first cousins my mother sisters children we all grew up together and when i felt there we was this now we this year and i've been trying to build but it you know working with the folks that you work with and that you service helping them to kind of make somebodies connections what is what is a method that you use to help the people that you service to kind of we  reestablish those ties and we've heard from the shabd is the about mothers but also for fathers and there's an estimated two point seven million children in this country who have a who identifies having at least one parent who is incarcerated and so how do you help folks to kind of navigate that well again that's a really hard thing i mean it's it's personal and there's a lot of trauma and there's a lot of shame and guilt involved in all of this is especially when it comes to leaving children behind i was no different so it was it was a it a family tragedy you know the advice i give people when they come back from prison is that if you're like hyper focused on a career hope or hyper focus on a job you kind of missing the opportunity because there's a spiritual moment is a transformative moment that everyone i know who've been to prison have gone through and mostly for the good some not everybody but mostly for the good so when i came back from prison when i decided i was going to do is i was going to volunteer and because i wasn't going to get a job of my dreams when i got back but through volunteerism i was able to get to places where i wouldn't otherwise have gone and gotten to and also i got to prove myself so after voluntary for a couple of years i decided i would apply to seminary and i applied to you know the logical seminary right here in manhattan and i went there for three years and i got a master of divinity and i came out and i started to work as an associate pastor in an inner city church in bridgeport now that was not on my trajectory it's like i didn't you know i would you know i mean i was a jewish lawyer isn't in manhattan and then i moved to being a baptist minister in inner city bridgeport and there's no like direct route for that you just have to kind of follow where god lead yes and but through that experience what happened was that i  was able to find myself and find my inner my inner authenticity and that's what i tell people i mean you have an opportunity to reinvent yourself so you know if you think you're going to reinvent yourself by by not volunteering or not being faithful are not doing those things you know your guy was going to an entry level job at popeye's or something but where you read this is an opportunity to throw yourself into your passion and decide who you really want to be every person i know every single person i know who has done that their life goes in a direction that they would never have planned but things make way that that are beyond their wildest dreams and that's also true with children michelle said i mean you can't force yourself back into children you can't force yourself back into family but somehow by being someone who is trustworthy and and forthright and authentic things happen in their own  way and i think that i think it's very a very wise of her to say that yeah and so you know you both sit here is exerting very very exceptional stories and i myself have a very exceptional story and one of the things that i'm always very very conscious of is how we remove our selves from being called exceptional but acknowledging opportunities that we've received and so obviously going to you know  union seminary is one thing getting a commutation from president obama is another and so what would you say to someone who is listening or looking at this show right now who doesn't has has not had access to those exceptional opportunities what would you say to that person who is facing very much the same struggles that all of us have faced when reentering just quite honestly feeling like it's not to happen and that they do want to do something that might put them at risk for me entering into the criminal justice system i would say it's a never give up because i know that it was very hard for me and although i didn't see that light at the end of the  recognize i always have to put my my privilege my white male privilege on the table there's no doubt about it that things happen in this society in this country and you know for for people of privilege but my reality was that my family had no money and so when i i never even considered for a second for a second that i was going to go to college i just went to college and i paid for it myself and i worked full time and i went to college and then when it was time decide to become a lawyer i had to do that and i worked full time and i became a lawyer and i don't know that that's different than anybody else who decides what they want to do is devote their life to something more higher better i don't think i have an exceptional story but i do think i do think that what i'd like to be is a power of example for people that you don't have to be limited by what you think your personal situation is you can actually do in this world what you so much at least some of the things that you want to do yeah yeah yeah and so lastly you know we have a few more minutes left you know there has been a slowly growing trend across the country that says that we are slowly ending mass incarceration that the number of two point three million the number that's used to describe mass incarceration in this country that that number is on a downward spiral slowly but surely there are some states that are reporting lol the lowest levels of crime in conjunction with the lowest levels of incarcerated populations and so cities are doing the same and so there are a lot of elected officials politicians stakeholders advocates that would that would love to acknowledge that as a symbol of that mass incarceration is at an end however we all work at organizations that are right at literally  in many examples at the door when people walk through and so what would you say to that someone says jeff michel i hear you but we're fixing the problem mass incarceration is almost at an end what would you say to those people it's not true that it's not true and every bed in every prison in this country is full and if they're not if they're not carrying state or federal prison numbers then they're immigration detainees  that are just prisoners in another in another suit and and so we're actually imprisoning in this country more people now than we ever have and so it's it's just a little bit of a shell game and i and i i was in a prison with half the population were immigration detainees and what and at the end of sentence at the end of sentence they go out into the into the lobby the fear and when i say fear from both sides like you could commit a crime today and someone could be in prison that committed the same crime you committed and you would get a lesser sentence than the person s and prison and whatever a lot less in effect right now affect the person that's in prison that committed the same time so until they make you feel on both sides or retroactive have you want to say we still don't have that mass incarceration because why you feel like ok this person is coming in but he's not going to get them much you still got people sitting in and two thousand and thirteen i wrote a short memoir is about seven chapters slay a story of my childhood and me getting into trouble and i was out of prison when i wrote that book so it doesn't tell that part but at the same time it does give a general idea of how i grew up as a trial and so when i got arrested got it and was in a minimum or the high price i had to pay to ok you know the numbers of yeah well thank you both for about the fortune society please check us out on the web at fortune society dot or g or on facebook by typing in the fortune society my name's cool camera badge and i appreciate you joining us as we continue to critically look at both sides of the