i want to just briefly really briefly introduce our panelists so that we can get right to the business at hand to my immediate left is chelsea nelson we're really thrilled to have her here with us tonight chelsea is a social justice advocate turn viewing in organizer most of her work in the last three years has been with people who have criminal backgrounds and she says that nothing has been more rewarding in her career she sits on the board of correctional industries which oversees many of the jobs within prisons she has worked in the past with the i b e w currently she's working with professional and technical employees she's interested in sharing with us tonight how she's working to create a society that values people regardless of race gender class background or anything else and really excited to hear more about her work next to chelsea kelly little fernandez is professor of history and african american studies in the u c l a department of history  she's also director of the bunch center for african american studies she is easily one of the nation's leading historians of race policing immigration and the purser ration in the united states her award winning book me history of the u s border patrol explored the making and meaning of the u s border patrol in the us mexico border lands arguing that the century long search of the u s immigration law enforcement in the borderlands is a story of race in america her new book city of inmates conquest and the rise of human caging in los angeles university of north carolina press twenty seventeen which i have to say i started reading on the airplane coming here and it is an amazing book so i'm excited to hear more about it at looks set to centuries and unearths the long history of incarceration as a social institution bent toward disappearing targeted populations from the land life and society in the united states and she really is interested in connecting the history of faculty of the university of michigan in ann arbor and in the departments of africa afro american and african studies history and the residential college and of course her recent book blood in the water the yet ok so and i just should say about whether to do that and it's the case with kelly as well but both of these scholars connected to the activism chelsea will be talking about  they both have work to establish themselves as public intellectuals and so in that sense the sort of triad that jim was talking about scholar teacher and activist i think we have a panel all of those tonight so with that in mind going to turn things purse to thank you julie and gemma and everybody for being here i have to say i am i'm a little bit really emotional about being here because this is the first place i well the first generation of last year was the first place i ever ever gave a talk as a graduate student and to be here this many years later and to see my own former graduate student melanie newport here is just it's just a very emotional time and all my really good friends who are so glad to be here and i'm glad that we're all here together to talk about this issue of incarceration and as it relates to the labor movement and i was thinking as i came in here today that this is it really caused me to reflect a little bit about where we are when it comes to this discussion of labor and incarceration because in two thousand and six some of you might remember i gave a talk on prison labor at the change to win headquarters in d c and i remember that moment so distinctly because it was something that was very new to me trying to sort out i think new to a lot of us are trying to sort  out and since that time there's been a virtual explosion of really really important work on this topic and kelly's of course is a shining example of that in addition to all the activism so i feel like i wanted to use this time to of do more of an overview of this question of what is what is the some relationship between prisons and the labor movement or or what should it be or or what  what exactly do we make of prisons and prison labor as activists as historians because it seems to me that i do quite a bit of these talks and it really strikes me that still very muddy to people exactly what should the position of the labor movement be prisons particularly because certain issues like guard unions remain very contentious and because the issue of prison labor i think is quite money in people's minds and then of course there's always the issue of private prisons and what does this have to do with that so in my remarks today i decided what i wanted to do was to be visit all of this in just more of an overview kind of way in the in the spirit of opening it up to discussion and to really suggest that i think that it's important to make this less muddy to be really clear about what we're talking about when we talk about prison labor and to really address head on this issue of guard unions and to really think through what the problem is with private prisons and i promise you i won't go over time that sounds like a big bill but but really what i wanted to do was just kind of the soviet view and the the upshot of the talk is to argue that in fact prisons are incredibly important to the labor movement and that it's something that in all of our walks of life that we should be really clear about why so that we can spread that work so let's start with what does it mean to talk about prisons and labor part of this is obvious we're talking about the labor that prisoners do inside of prison so that hurt we've got we are not so clear necessarily in how complicated that question is so  impact that first of all what do we need when we talk about prison labor well first of all yes we're talking about prisons doing labor inside and i didn't some respects it's really much clearer to us in the olden days what that meant than it is today right back in the olden days we know about chain gangs we know about convict leasing we know about that kind of stuff but what does that really look like today well to understand today we've got to understand what happened in the interim which was that in the end you know basically on the eve of the new deal the depression there was a really really important moment that the labor movement was front and center on which was to tackle head on this question of exploitative convict leasing to tackle head on this question of prison and labor and because the labor movement was a very central party to that push to get credit to stop exploiting prison labor there was a whole slew of regulations put on prison labor and those regulations stayed in place largely intact making it  interesting to capital to do any labor inside prisons because it wasn't profitable you couldn't sell things over state lines there was no real reason to do it we get mass incarceration and quietly while the labor movement is essentially asleep at the wheel businesses set about overhauling all those regulations and nobody's paying attention but what that meant was a very complicated product which was that state prisons were sites of prison labor and they always had been right making things for inside of the usent for government sales but they get a whole needle overhaul marketing overhaul so i invite you to go to any of your states and look up the prison industries and you'll see all the millions of things you can order in the catalog from trophies to dentures to glasses and then federal prisons get that same kind of boost to this kind of public labor right making things like kemel our vests that used to be made outside  factories now being made by federal prisoners you know breaking down dell computers right so lots of labor goes into to prisons and it's also in marketing genius right a marketing arm of federal prisons but what's really interesting is that private businesses get to access prisons again and had not been able to since prior to the new deal s literally is sometimes formal arrangements like through this thing called pyar won't bore you with the details contracts but also in formal relationships so using prisoners to do work that outside workers would do and these distinctions matter because it has to do with the level of exploitation and it has to we have to know what we're talking about when we talk about prison labor but the upshot of all of this is the fundamental question that i get asked a lot which was so what does it matter this is a very contentious up subject many people have  to say is that it actually matters a great deal it's a complicated question on the research in part because we don't have a lot of data on how much this actually nets a company or how much of actually costs a city to put labor in a prison but we do know that it has a significant effect on the movement of jobs from the outside world into the inside world ok so that is with those kevlar vests right i mean when we had world war two there was a boom of the wartime industries that doesn't happen so much right and we have say the iraq war not that we should ever put our eggs in wartime economy's going to be really interesting so it has has a movement of jobs impact but the other thing is that it has a dampening wage effect right if you can move jobs into a prison even if you can't quantify exactly how much certainly that ever present threat of moving jobs in the prison has an impact on unions and unions are very vocal about it at the local level if you just ask them they'll tell you exactly which jobs have moved into prison and perhaps even most importantly it has a really devastating effect on the union protections on the outside too right which is to say advocating for osha protections advocating suhr if you're going to break down computers that cadmium is not blowing around the room things like that now all of this should not surprise us that it has all of these kind of subtle effects but some would argue that at the same time it has another effect which is that it does train prisoners for jobs and we're going to that question that there is a part of this that is true so the problem is not so much prison labor that is to say prisoners doing work the problem is exploitation so i'll get to get back to that in a minute so impact the economy i'm going to make the case that it does in ways that we need to think about as labor activists but it isn't just about the economy when it comes to prison labor it is also this question of privatization we hear a lot about private prisons and i to jump in here to say this is also a very muddy subject that we need to be clear about there's the building in the running of prisons right that kind of prison privatizations you know corrections corporation of america which is now civic or things like that entities have huge power politically to have really regressive laws passed in local communities labor laws in addition to drug laws this ng of prisons the privatization of servicing prisons matters a lot  talk about privatization in a way the private prisons are the red herring what we should be talking about is the privatization of the servicing of course that's right the medical care the phones the the laundry services the medical transport the telephone so it is the case that prisons matter to our economy and again because the issue is exploitation talking finally about prison guards and guard unions how does this all fit into this so this is where it gets really thor and i have had and i know some of us have had some pretty intense debates with people about what to do about the fact that guard unions are in this mix or a labor activist but we're also a prison activist how do we reconcile this whole issue of  gardenias so i just want to talk about that because i think it's also really really important first of all i want to say that if you look at the long history of guards in this country i don't think that there's any way to argue anything other than the fact that guards are in fact workers are in most prisons and places paid pretty abominably with pretty terrible working conditions that create pretty awful outcomes on the ground for everybody concerned but mostly for prisoners so i think we can agree that their workers the question is should they be unionized and if so what does that have to do with prison reform well i would make the argument that yes they should also be unionized because all evidence shows that guards that are in unions in fact treat people in the inside more humanely their working conditions are better prisons are run more safely actually now there are some exceptions and i'm going to get to the just way because what i'm not knowing what everybody is thinking right now is what about california what about rikers island what about new york and california because new york and california are always what are pulled out as those are the reasons why we should not think about guardians or we should not consider that unions are suspect when it comes to prison well first of all i want to want to say about that is that old guard unions are not inherently in fact if you look at the long history of prison guard unions what you find is that cars have often in fact been on the side of improving conditions in prisons most recently we had a lot of prison strikes and in two thousand and sixteen and even in places like alabama the prison guards came out pretty clearly for the fact that the prison conditions were abysmal and that the prisoners needed to be understood for why it was that the protests happen but what about california well let's be clear that what happens in california is quite unusual very unusual in fact california forms the california peace officers association in the fifty's it's not really a union the teamsters try to make it a union they fail at their efforts and then later on and about two years later there's a whole nother attempt to turn it into a much more of a traditional union with the traditional considerations that unions would have and they fail again by the eighty's this union if you really want to call it that is largely a protective association a political protective association that we all know plays a devastating role in three strikes gets funded by all these right wing organizations but it's not the kind of union that i want to focus on when we think about what this bigger question is about labor and prisons similarly in new york and similarly in new jersey these prison guards of prison unions are incredibly regressive and by the way they were asked me until they kicked ass me out and became these regressive conservative associations so we've to be really careful what we mean when we're talking about current unions the fact of the matter is we're going to blame guardians on massa cursor ations we're not paying attention to our history some of the most importantly some of the some of the states with the highest levels of incarceration don't have a union insight never had a union don't have the unions played absolutely no role in the building up of the cursor state and in fact when you look at most districts where there are unions very carefully you'll notice that what they're advocating is not to keep prisons open they're actually advocating just for jobs and would be perfectly willing to have those chubb not be prison jobs and one of the ways we've seen this happen very clearly is that when they often a lot of times when they argued to keep prisons open if you look really carefully what the language says it's because completely overcrowded it's going to be a completely regressive situation for everybody now sounds like i'm letting everybody off the hook i'm actually not guard unions are can be incredibly but the question is what to do  it the question is what is the message and the message is that if you're working class person you have to think about employment in different ways and you have to think about jobs in different ways and the fact is that asked me for example has been really at the forefront of fighting prison privatization and fighting a lot of the incarceration and regressive prison i'm sorry drug laws and so forth in a lot of states so we just have to be really clear what we mean about unions and what we mean about what the impact is even at the california peace officers association which is the worst of the worst if you actually go on their website and you look at the current climate they have a whole thing called beyond prisons and it's a really interesting campaign because it's about how this is a failure it doesn't work it is it is devastating to families communities except raff and what they're arguing for is different forms of employment in the state of california even the c c p so it's a why does it matter he said because prisons render shoed swaths of the american working class permanently unemployable because prisons are dangerous work places because prisons are barbaric inhumane piece places to cage people and everybody in them is a working person or potentially working class person if we could just get them a job so this kind of message about who the enemies are who's on the inside of the outside is something i think it's really important for us to he so again just to close  know that we're going to put you know a lot of detail on all this prison labor matters the problem is that labor per se the problem is exploitation of labor there's nothing wrong with job training nothing wrong with working the problem is when you're not paying people on the inside and you're not paying people on the outside and the only one who's making any money are the companies we've got a problem that's a working class issue that's a labor movement issue and the bigger problem is the caging if human beings and if we really want to stop that we have to figure out a way to think about labor activism and prison activism in tandem rather than in opposition to one another and i would say we shouldn't automatically write off guard unions we should think about ways retool labor in communities that have been sold prisons as the only option for employment thank you in particular now many of you probably know that recently attorney general jeff sest sessions has vowed to aggressively prosecute and die documented border crossers and i want to talk about this historically and politically a little bit if u s attorneys comply with sessions order our federal penal system is set to grow and grow massively and in fact we'll get to in a moment private companies will probably be the site where the vast majority of that that growth happens attorney general sessions has also vowed to more aggressively prosecute drug crimes on the federal level so it's drug crime and immigration crime it's going to be filling our federal prisons what i want to do tonight is really lift up the issue of immigration crime which is something we talk a little bit less about there's one really critical for us to talk about unlawful entry for a couple of reasons first the criminalization of unmonitored border crossings was a strategic apt to criminalize a targeted worker gro charges which is the driving cause of incarceration the federal penal system today are latinos namely mexican mexican immigrants so we would talk about race and mass incarceration in modern america we have to start talking about immigration crime and we have to start talking about unlawful entry in particular i think one of the reasons we haven't talked so much about immigration crime is that we're really not connecting the dots between latino history and ma incarceration we talk a lot about black and brown incarceration in the age of mass incarceration we know a lot about african american history and how we arrive at this moment we know a lot less about latino stories on latino immigration and how it has created a different historical pathway to the federal state and local penal systems and i want to lift that up a little bit today and particular i want to talk about i want to share the story of when and why and unlawful entry became a crime in the united states and i think that is a story can help us to understand the particularities historical particularities of mass incarceration that impact the latino community in the united states now it is not always been a crime to entertain as states without authorization this is a fairly new creation in fact for the vast majority of us history immigrants to enter the united states without any fear of punishment in battle government in particular this fact changed on march fourth one thousand nine hundred twenty nine when congress invented the crime of unlawful entry in response to a very particular crisis of labor immigration and race that was unfolding across the american west where we are here but in particular in the us mexico border lads now as many of you i'm sure in this room have written about by nineteen twenty four congress had largely adopted a whites only immigration system banning all asian immigration and the strictly most immigration to northern and western europe but one of the native us in congress tried to restrict mexican immigration to united states with employers across the southwest would fight back and they would argue that we need access unfettered access to mexican workers now since the turn the twentieth century of mexicana immigrants have increasingly become an important sector within the working class of the borderlands the american west in general and in one thousand nine hundred maybe four hundred thousand mexicans living united states by night thirty one point five million mexicans are living across the united states about ten percent of the population of mexico this is a labor migration that led to this growth of the mexican population as states however one of the distinctions about mexican immigration during this time here is that employers had no intention and no hope that mexican immigrants would become mexican americans the thought was always that mexicans with labor in the united states and then leave but never settle here north of the us mexico border in particular you can hear this in the language of  business lobbyist explain to congress in one nine hundred twenty six that quote the mexican is a homer like the pigeon he goes home to roost mexicans were not immigrants they were so called birds of passage and it was but by nineteen thirty more or more mexican immigrants were indeed settling north of the us mexico border they were starting businesses they were buying homes and most important their raising families and they were giving birth to an entire generation of mexican american children the native us in congress at this point are really closely monitoring the rise of a mexican american community or community cross the america west and they they charge these employers across the southwest with recklessly courting the racial doom of angle america at its southern border through mexican immigration and the western employers agreed that mexican should not be allowed become citizens in california they write with greatly prefer some set up in which our peak labor escalating conflict between nativists and congress and employers american west that we arrive at a very particular carswell compromise that remains with us today in particular a senator for the dixie future of mexican immigration to united states member everybody agreed that mexican american should not become mexican citizens it is billy's who proposed criminalizing unlawful entry why does he do this well according to u s immigration officials mexicans made about one million authorized lawful border crossings into united states during the one nine hundred twenty s but many more mexican immigrants and two united states without authorization they would walk around a port of entry and formally cross the simply did was very very inventive he shifted the focus to monitored border crossings and he suggested criminalizing them the idea here was that they wanted to push mexican immigration into the door through the ports of entry where the mexican entry and united states we turn on and turn off at will that we had total control over mexican labor migration tonight states so according to police is bill which he put forward to congress in one nine hundred twenty nine cross in united states through anywhere other than a u s court of entry would be a misdemeanor while crossing into the united states after deportation would be found and i saw a lot of people i think think about this law as being about sovereignty be a criminal subject to fines and imprisonment but it was a law that was crafted to target mexican workers in particular now with stunning precision the criminalization of unauthorized entry  march of one nine hundred twenty nine caged thousands of mexico's proverbial birds of passage by the end of the nineteen days tens of thousands of mexican workers have been convicted and in prison for the united states i really want to hammer this home during the one nine hundred thirty s unlawful entry is the second leading cause of incarceration within the federal penal system almost nobody has written about this it completely lives under the radar beneath alcohol in particular alcohol related charges and as planned mexican immigrants comprise over ninety percent of all those who are convicted of unlawful entry charges the first prison that they built is called law to not and it's a sprawling prison farm located near el paso texas it was overcrowded within months of opening in the early one nine hundred thirty s the second prison that was open tucson prison camp number ten which was a convict labor facility located near tucson and in particular this facility the imprisoned we're building a road that wound up in through the santa catalina mountains to a little town called where the settlers in arizona were were you know or where establishing a health resort so they could you know get away from the sweltering heat during the summer months the third prison that the u s bureau of prisons built was terminal island just outside of los angeles it was cited there outside of los angeles which was home to the largest mexican community anywhere north of the us mexico border ok but prison capacity was still insufficient and the bureau of prisons had a contract with over a thousand city and county jails to hold all the mexicans who were being imprisoned on unlawful entry charges this is one of the early blooms of what we would now call mass incarceration is happening on immigration charges it was only the outbreak of world war two that broke this carswell boom that was created by polices law when u s citizens you know head up to the front lines in the factories mexican workers were once again eagerly recruited but still to keep them from becoming mexican americans the u s and mexican government established the first several programs that ensured mexicans would only come up here on short term contracts and then go home and now l hundred fifty four something happens and that's the federal prosecution of leases law dips significantly stays low until the end of the twentieth century why does this happen the war on drugs the war on drugs begins to to culturally politically shifted lisa's law itself as well by nine hundred ninety six inherits ment's haven't been placed upon these as law so that undocumented immigrants who are also convicted of a drug charge are now facing up to twenty years in federal prison in other words the war on drugs a centerpiece of what michelle alexander calls the new jim crow balloon the penalties for breaking  adopted a so called enforcement with consequences approach to immigration federal authorities increasingly prosecuted unauthorized border crossings the number of prosecutions for unlawful entry never peaked above five thousand between  ninety one and two thousand and three in two thousand and four with this new policy they soared to thirteen thousand not since the one nine hundred thirty s were so many immigrants going to prison for breaking the law in two thousand and five the u s district court in texas experimented with a new program called operation streamline which simultaneously schaffel's tries and convicts of eighteen and up to eighty immigrants at one time by two thousand and eight  was churning out over fifty thousand prosecutions and convictions and imprisonment every year by two thousand and fifteen the rebirth of unlawful entry prosecutions has sent nearly a quarter million immigrants to made immigration crime the leading charge within the federal penal system and cost the federal government over seven billion dollars and now today we know that there is still more to come and april attorney general sessions traveled to the arizona border to announce his plan to relentlessly enforce lisas law they call it unlawful entry they call it discord or on the border i more immigrants and to hire more federal judges to hear unlawful entry cases if these additional funds are awarded immigrant imprisonment will again surge and force an expansion of the appeal system but of course we have to ask ourselves where these unauthorized border crossers go well we have two clues and feather in february sessions rescinded the order against using any additional private or public private prisons but the trump proposed budget would also pull one billion dollars from federal prison construction projects so what does that mean that means that if the u s attorneys prosecute more and more immigrants from lawful entry or on drug crime is likely that private companies will step up to cage the men the women and the children who break the law who defy white supremacy and if the current trends persist mexicans will still comprise the majority immigrants in prison and this is notable because we are now living in time when large numbers of central american refugees are arriving at the us mexico border and when more mexicans are returning to mexico than coming to the united states so why do i say this well as a rojas notes in her recent book from deportation to prison quote those most likely to be prosecuted are mexicans who violated deportation order and charged with reentry after deportation and those more likely charged for re entry are not first time border crossers they are not foreigners but reside in the united states many speak english and have undeniable ties to the united states even if these ties are not formally recognize in other words enforcement tactics have shifted and they are currently targeting mexican immigrants who have settled in the united states in turn one thousand nine hundred twenty nine law designed to stop mexico's immigrant workers from b mexican americans is still legally politically and socially and active force a dominating active force in the us are so landscape and hears a head it seems as though only private companies will stand working for a labor union for the last four years how many of you are part of union this is a quite group normally it's like whoo yeah city went to school there i grew up there were to school at utah state university went on to work on my master's degree and worked for the university i was intending unfortunately  terminated because of my sexual i don't like such a bummer then did i would say there's always a silver lining in the situation because it led me to seattle i've been here for the last nine years and i will also say that a lot six years ago i and i will also say that when i lived in salt lake and when i moved here i always claimed that i was not a political person i was a people person not a political person six years ago i was introduced to pieces of legislation that i felt was making seattle my new home a when that's when i became interested in politics and i knew about labor unions i knew very little about labor unions but i knew that their political priorit is were things that were interesting to me and things that allying with with what i believed in so i wanted to get involved and i also knew about six years ago that the labor unions were g out in an election we were losing initiatives some were losing the candidates that were there were running that we were endorsing throughout the country a lot of them were losing and i wanted to know w and i would go to unions and i would say what are we doing what are we doing to like mate seattle seattle and the like so excited and and i was told you know we just got it care members got to educate our members and i wasn't satisfied with that answer so i started doing a lot of work and throughout my community service work i learned that people with criminal backgrounds could potentially be the largest  talk a little bit about that because i am continuing to learn and every time i learn something new i want to chuck some across the room because it's so frustrating we hear the term debtors prison i didn't know what it meant and well i really learned about legal financial obligations sooner i went to you good leadership and i said hey what can we do to organize people with criminal backgrounds in seattle or in washington state you can vote if you have a criminal background once you're done with probation it's different state by state so sometimes when i say things you might say oh it's different in my state it's very confusing and complex because it differs you know wherever you go so we up with a plan some way bring leaders in the area we came up with a plan and at this time this was about three years ago now we planned a workshop we planned a workshop and we invited in they came to the washington state labor council and i was supposed to be leading this workshop and i woke up in the morning and i was like holy crap i freaked up and i'm scared i'm going to be like i'm willingly going into know i sat in this room and i was in this workshop and it took me about twenty minutes to just like throw up my hands and apologize because it took me a hot second to realize that i had bought into this narrative that these people were scary that i was better than them and at that moment i don't think i had ever felt like so much shame in a single moment and i'm a gay mormon so  couple times a week now there are some incredible some of the most incredible people that i've met are currently has were in this room behind bars and it's heartbreaking and i've learned a lot of personal stories i've learned a little bit about history about our prison system about our criminal justice system and i would say it's my life's work to to do something about it if you heard the little baby cry in the back that's my baby she's eight weeks old and i would say you know there are some things that are hard about parenting and i would say that right now it feels weird to her raise a white baby for me it feels weird because with the history that i know i know that right now is eight weeks old people you've heard different than they view black babies i know she'll have more opportunity i know she'll be safer and it feels weird and i got to meet bryan stevenson not too long ago and he told me he said did you know one one in t maybe so so what are we doing what is the labor movement doing well i would say that a couple days ago i got i got home from harvard business school so prestigious and this scale chamber of commerce sent me the which is very unusual why did the seattle chamber of commerce choose to send somebody from the labor movement for business school to talk to other leaders around the country about cross sector collaboration  they sent because we have word that in seattle there is you know we have seventy three cranes in the sky and this city is booming here because it's like the third fastest growing city in the country and every industry across the board needs people in the chamber of commerce is freaking out because they don't know where to find them and i would say and while i know where to find them right now people with criminal background they're facing nearly forty four thousand when it comes to housing and employment forty four thousand are straight so you want to talk about the job training that heather was mentioning we're taking a position where we really don't care in washington state and i will also say that as a union member i am speaking for the unions that i and i work for not only and so i should make clear but we're taking the position that if you want to train these people make sure that they have a job with them on the outside what's happening right now is in washington say they're making i process inside for a different companies and then when they get out they're not qualified to work for that company because they have a criminal suggest you go it will blow your mind i think and i think that you will be like a changed person i was so washington state would make eyeglasses we have the cuticle of furniture facilities let us know how we can change these jobs so these people will be ready to work when they get out and by the way let's make sure that they have interviews before they get out whether it's practicing interviews or in an interview if they're a couple months to the gate into the gate means they go home let's have them have their start date before they get out we know that if they have to go structure to structure meaning there's a lot of structure inside of created if they go home and there they don't know what to do then the chances of them are sitting recidivate eating is much much higher so we can find a way to get and from structure  structure their rate of success goes through the roof so how do we work with the chamber of commerce and and you know get people working so that's one of the things that we're doing  i want to talk about so you know i said that the the issues that people with criminal backgrounds face aligned with union thing you help getting jobs i kind of talks about that we also have pretty apprenticeship trainings incentives prison there seventy three cranes in the sky that means every building trades building trade union is i mean their life competing with each other so much to get these people to join their union so we have prepared to ship inside a bar in side three of our presidents two of the women's prisons and we're opening one up in a male prison and we're working with all of the trades they've come in they test the inmate i don't like that word our brothers and sisters inside and if they pass the test inside their direct entry into that particular trait they're a citizen rate for that if they go through that program it's almost it's incredible it's been a very very successful program there's been a lot of research done if people have if they're inside for an addiction they need to use their hands be busy be tired and so it job in the trade is a good fit so they need help getting jobs they need help getting housing and i was hoping to have more of a discussion here anybody know some of the issues that people with criminal backgrounds face when it comes to housing yes there is it is so the number one predictor of any person ration is poverty the number one indicator of homelessness is impartial reaction whether directly or indirectly and so we have that maybe a company of all heard of located seattle distinct like john thank you for this money think you for doing buying so tell me and them to us and you know you've done so much good work and he said you know it's my personal mission to help solve homeless personal mission to we do as activists and leaders in whatever you know in whatever way were leaders to push our our business community to really look at their hiring policy let's talk about why we're  paying people with a broad brush saying if you have a criminal background it doesn't matter what it was doesn't matter how long ago it was i think that that one only help the recidivism rate but we know all help with our homeless epidemic that we have in this country so they need help getting jobs they need help with housing they need help with their debt there's a cost for incarceration and oftentimes the inmate is responsible for the costs of  do so you don't it doesn't go into collection only the other things expected that the individual no so you get out of prison did an individual that is a good friend of mine got out after serving six years i went in with four thousand dollars in bed after the cost of incarceration and all of the interest and collections and all that stuff more than one hundred fifty dollars and then taking him without a person cannot get him to get a that's this legal financial obligation thing that i'm talking about and it's a vicious cycle if you want to start with the debt at the start of the debt hundred fifty thousand dollars maybe less maybe more promotion but they fired this woman because recruit background and so we started diving into that and and how often that happens it's where paul and you have made a mistake or i mean how many of us have never