your social vice president of policy at the david rothenberg center for public policy at the fortune society and welcome to both sides of the bars a discussion driven show that examines the criminal justice system from various perspectives including those most impacted by the criminal justice system we discussed critical questions about how the current 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 asked you the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments with us on twitter at the fortune associate and at a cumberbatch today's show is titled accomplices not allies what the criminal legal system reform movement needs the term mass incarceration has become infamous and well known in low income communities of color not only because of the policing practices that accompany the dragnet of arrests but also because of the under resourced educational employment and public benefits systems to name a few as well however mass incarceration will not end sole because of the efforts of these same communities undoubtably these efforts need to be led by those communities because those closest to the problem are closest to the solution similarly as a civil rights movement was led by those most impacted men and women of color they also benefited from allies of all colors and economic status is similarly in the air of mass incarceration the movement to dramatically change the criminal legal system as we know it also needs accomplices my guest today is roy waterman who serves as a jewish council for public affairs criminal justice project manager his project is focused on educating and empowering the jewish community to advocate on criminal justice reform at the national and local levels fostering relationships and building alliances between jewish and communities of color policy work to improve law enforcement practices and developing pilot projects in the field to support communities in crisis roy is also the co founder of drive change a vibrant social enterprise nonprofit that uses the mobile vending industry to train empower employ in teach transferable skills to formally incarcerated young people ages eighteen to twenty five or twenty five years old who have been released from adult jails and prisons in the new york city area roy thank you for me so tell our listeners folks who are watching us all over the country who when they hear criminal justice system or criminal justice reform they get their  jerk reaction is not places like the jewish community so tell us a little bit about your project and why you took on this responsibility of the project and why in the jewish community  been for nonprofit organizations when it comes to reentry and when you left drive change or your go a little over a year ago you know i'm a chef as well and have a catering business so i went back to doing catering but as long as well is doing a lot of public speaking and i was being offered opportunities or different organizations a lot of them we know and i was just like you know i wasn't feeling you know the right synergy i wasn't feeling like i was the right place for me like a cumulation of couple different things so when this opportunity came about our father really intriguing because i felt by our jewish organizations looking for someone to lead them in criminal justice so automatically i thought they were going for white jewish thought right like i thought that automatically after light you know speaking to one of two people who knew about the organization they said no absolutely you should go look into them and see what it is they're talking about so when i'm in it i went and we sat with the d c and we spoke in life when i spoke and i have told him who i am and what i'm about it was just like you know it was incredible you know i felt like you know from learning from them as well because for me it's about learning from the jewish community about what their core values are right like what what do they believe and what they stand for and what a lot of people don't know because you mention and you bring in the beginning about the civil rights movement is that the jewish community was heavily involved in the civil rights movement right they were right there watching what dr martin luther king they were right there being arrested with us and they weren't directly impacted right but they saw that there were injustices that were happening and they felt the need to be involved because they were dana greenwood it why because they know what it's like to be marginalized when they came to this country and it was like to be segregated against when they came to this country and it was like these different restrooms different like different restaurants different everything so we have a lot more similarities when it comes to communities of color with the jewish community a lot of people whatever mitt because traditionally in june in communities of color we look at your jewish community as just white people right white americans and what we don't realize is that they're not white americans they've been through a lot of the humanizing you know the great denigrating different like treatments of light that allow them to feel inadequate digestible because here i am a black man who is not jewish speaking about the holocaust but i tell them like listen i'm going to speak about slavery and i must speak about mass incarceration so i'm going to speak about things that don't make me feel comfortable so i said the jewish community has to get to a place where they have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable so how i'm going to talk about what my pitfalls of my ancestors were and what we continue to experience i'm going to talk about the holocaust and the pain associated with the holocaust and what that what restoration was needed what were dempsey what was needed what like healing what was needed for them to move past the holocaust besides them also being are receiving reparations right and i am i talk about that and i talk about slavery and how slavery trauma and we realize that her people her people and we need healing restoration and dignity to move past a lot of different things but it's hard to heal from something that continues to impact you every day right so slavery never ended is morphed into a new beast right so we continue to see this around the country we have over two million people who are impacted seventy million americans that are walking around one out of every three blacks one out of every six latinos that impact the justice system in this inexcusable so be involved with this here now today is the reengagement with the modern day civil rights movement which is to end mass incarceration and what has been your what has been the jewish communities general reaction when whe n they do see a black man talking to them about the holocaust but also educating them about what they could do as a community as i said in the intro on the federal and local levels yet so surprisingly so when i took the role i expect t perspective of a person who is impacted and i always believe in i always say that there should be no conversations about any sort of type of reform without having people who are directly impacted lead in those conversations and i would go even further than that because i'm big on language and say that how do you reform something that's working perfectly fine right we like to use these terms loosely that the system is broken when the system is actually working perfectly fine what we have to do is break the system that's created which is buil institutional racism and now reimagine what it looks like to being cost free in america we live in a society was about crime and punishment when we need to live in a society where it's about personal accountability and restoration and those two things don't exist in our current justice system right it's really about you do something you get locked up you do five ten years you get released and figure it out yeah right and as we know within the first three years which is the like the hot barely time for people to be really intercepted by the three years things in four years things or even longer because they violated something which was ultimately created for you to violate in essence anyway right so so yes so like for me it's personal you know  d i've been it's like astonished by i've been well received by the community i've been embraced we do our conference in april here at the sheraton hotel and we say community meaning jewish the jewish community and i was just i don't know two months ago i spoke at the anti defamation league conference in front of eight hundred people for ten minutes about criminal justice reform so i've been received by the community that they want me to come speak in a lot of different places around the country and it's been like kind of like a whirlwind in a way but in essence i'm still like building this program this project where i'm like right now trying to establish barrel projects in five different cities and strickly the jewish community involved to now partner with communities of color because like i always say we don't want to create things without having people color people who are directly impacted at the table leading those conversations and how is the how has those local communities because i think when people think of the jewish community think of a tight knit community close door community yes very secretive in some respects and so i'm curious to know how does the advice and the instruction that you're giving saying that you as a community in some respect have to be a part of a larger community which is around criminal justice reform in it which is around bill reform how has that been received it's been received surprisingly well because i go to core values like when i talk about the cord the values of judaism and we talk about what those are right and like caring about humanity and like all those different things then how can you lay back and see the injustices that are happening on a daily basis whether it be due to police brutality police t incarceration or friendly disenfranchisement or discrimination on any level we're seeing it every day unfortunately we know you know and i think that when you're educated and i want to talk about educate are much talking about formal education higher education i'm so much just being educated on what's going on in the world you realize that the media vilifies people of color when they break the law right and it's done there for very long time and we have to understand that that's not done by acts and that's done by design so now when you know that then you can cipher through what has been told to you by looking at things on t v in serious of like wow what is actually into this no you go even deeper what leads to mass incarceration poverty wow also was part of poverty healthy sustainable food options so not only do we have people who are poor committing crimes because they have no access to opportunity livable wage jobs housing stable housing all also how about the fact that in their neighborhoods is not processed food or fried food so now what happens is we are also living in diabetes high cholesterol high blood pressure so it's all this whole system when you roll it up into a ball  realize that you can't just address like mass incarceration when our dressing poverty without addressing healthy sustainable food sort of so many different aspects as i like to say to these different levels of peace that we all complain and i always so people that there's no one organization or no one person that can fix this entire system we all have to play out collect their respective partisan interests like do the work we can and so i want to definitely come back to the food justice  aspect of your work and your critique you know that lends to your analysis but i before we get i want to ask you a question about so you know you're working in the jewish community in through your work and your engagement with  that you can specifically offer to some of our viewers and listeners who may want to engage other communities that are just like the jewish community and then secondly are there any particular communities that you feel we as a of the nonprofit world but is still criminal justice right so we are dealing with like core values of like religion so like when you look at the various different religions that exist they all have similar values right like love your family be good to your spouse love your neighbor take care of your family you know like all those things believe in god serve god like all those things are based off the same principles you might call them different we might have different names for these different higher powers but the principles are all similar in nature so now we realize that wow you know what different aspects of religion i believe personally are more created to keep segregation in the keep unity the more you are more segregated the easier it is to control you when you're different patches but now if you're thinking on one accord it's harder for me as a government to control you as people who are advocating for rights of other people so whenever we can show that unified effort whether it's a unified interfaith group or like all the organizations black brown white asian like whatever the demographic of the people are whenever we show a unified front we are always stronger in numbers all the time so to speak as far as where we  focus should be when it comes to advocacy when it comes to reform you can't have this conversation when i mention the chicago like two weeks ago we had seventy people shot we have fourteen people killed and we have to act as at the end of the day and i had this conversation with several different people because like you know it's unfortunate it's disheartening when i have conversation and dialogue with people and they point to these young people or this or that and they do the finger point thing where it's the big  little use right and it's not really addressing the issue saying like why are they doing this like how did they grow up right like you know when you're incarcerated when you get arrested for crimes you know before you get sentenced they have something called a pre sentence report ri officer who comes in he actual whole bunch of questions like where was your upbringing like the girl going to perhaps hole like where did you grow up all those things are not the questions we asked of the kids in chicago right and we need to be axin these questions and we need to find out what is going on there as far as a systemic problem that's allowing so many guns to go into this community because you know where the guns coming from first of all and we have to access those that and we have to say how many people of color are bringing in shipments of guns or even shipments of drugs so we have to address those issues but more importantly and i always say this in a lot of people don't agree with me when i say this but i stand by what i believe in that's this i felt like you know we don't want a current ministration stands that and i don't expect much from the current administration but when president obama was in office i felt like he did chicago tremendous disservice especially being that he was the center of that state i think felt like he did focus enough effort and no resources and enough manpower into really pouring in into the like chicago infrastructure to help prevent what is happening now right like even when he was in office every weekend thirty forty people get shot right it wasn't in the report it is widespread it might be him a little more widespread reported now because we have this person occupying the white house and a lot of people like him so it's easy to like report this stuff now  but something needs to be done unfortunately it's like we have people more violence in their words that are being killed out there we have people who are advocates and who are leading the fight to bring forth peace that are getting murdered out this you have to access so what can be done i don't have the answer for me personally though i believe a lot of resources have to be poured into the community a lot of educational programs vocational training programs is a good start i think i believe that basic  libya we need to stop incarcerate people who have substance abuse problems and put them in substance abuse treatment centers so we start compartmentalizing where people need to be at will be fun and so talk to us now live in more about food justice yes so first of all what is that all right because i think there are people who will hear that and say what does that mean you know and i would love for you to talk a little bit more about how your  it's you know it's not just looking at the finished product for once cooked it's understanding with the animals where where they grew up at where they were born that how they were fed how they were raised by all those things factor into food justice because what we don't see a lot of times when when we go to a restaurant or our plate is served with food on it is the treatment of the animals and unfortunately there's some films that you can see one is called i make chinese restaurants in the neighborhoods and we have the access of like how was that directly leading to high blood pressure high diabetes high cholesterol cancer or multiple different levels of cancer that are happening in our communities all these things are always tie everything into the food we consume a lot of people look at things like that i believe that a lot of diseases we get are from the animals we are consuming so when we know that then we saw it's taken a step back from consuming a lot of different meats only pay more attention to what we consume me just because something says organic doesn't mean a lot anymore either so happy with it when they consume organic stuff it automatically means it's one hundred percent great africa years ago from like from the co founder dr change from talking to farmers that when they first came out with the like or what organic meant it was a checklist of like fifty sixty seventy things that you had a checklist to say before you put that organic label on your package and now it's been condensed a six or seven less than ten things so that tells you that there's always a way to cut a corner to pull wool over people's eyes and make them think they're eating healthier when and actually they're not  ultimately why food lead to being a part of dr changes because food was therapeutic for me to out my almost thirteen year sentence and i realized their food had the uncanny ability to bring in family friends and even enemies to give the willingness to turn learn a willingness and not say that you know it all and a willingness to like be a self starter and work in a team environment and the sky's the limit so you can be the foreman krakatoa person at work as the person is pushing a broom or the dishwasher today in five years later you can be the executive chef of only that rest on so this is why the food industry to me has been one of the most you know one of the best industries in this course we live in new york where you know there unlimited restaurants every day one opens every day one closes so the opportunities always do to work in the food industry it really does about skill set and more than anything so in the last few minutes that we have i would love for you to articulate to us  what is your vision for this movement around you know dramatically changing the criminal legal system and what can our viewers who in some respects will be in isolated communities just like the jewish community what can they do to get engaged to become educated and to start talking about these issues ok so first i would say what from a policy perspective that my o organization and we you know we do a policy we write resolutions and we are in support of sentencing reform which is a sentencing correction reform act and that's a federal  so it was a build outs were poles during president obama's last term and was on the verge of passing and the reason why it didn't pass is because a lot of democrats thought they could get a better deal when hillary clinton got into office unfortunately we know that clinton never got into office so now we're in a place where we have something another bill that's being proposed called the first step and that bill's is basically around prison reform so it's about improving like the conditions around prison however it's not addressing sentencing and i was so people to fundamental core issue of any sort of prison term is how much time you get sentenced to so it doesn't matter in the back end if i address a year being eight months or six months but if i s fifty years fifty years or fifty years you know i want to we want to address the issue of sentence in what judges power in discretion district attorneys have entirely too much power so we need to address the issue of sentencing so that we can say like ok we can address the issue since is enter just mandatory minimums that need to be retroactive so people who've been sitting up in prison for long periods would automatically want this path who automatically get back dated so a lot of them will be up for release immediately both sides of the bars