cumberbatch and i'm the associate 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 ask you the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments with us on twitter at the fortune s o c cumberbatch today's show is titled incarceration nations and international look at incarceration my guest today is dr a professor at john jay college for criminal justice founder of the prison to college pipeline and author of incarceration nations boss has traveled the world examining the imprisonment system of other nations and how the u s model has influenced those systems boz thank you for joining us today thanks for having me so i would love for us to start the conversation nationally and talk about this notion of mass incarceration as we see it as a country and then i would love to talk about how other countries view our imprisonment model and how that model has impacted those countries themselves absolutely so when you in your work in writing incarceration nations in working in state prisons in teaching at a very prominent college what do you would you say is your interpretation of the term mass incarceration in what are some of the nuances that our viewers should be aware of when they do hear that term so i think mass incarceration captures the way that the car several state or incarceration prison stuff the criminal justice system has wormed its way into so many facets of life  and and impacted so many people in one way or another and that's what i think that term mass captures that it's not only about the obscene numbers of people who are incarcerated but all the web of people who are impacted and that means families wives children communities thinking about this as as as an epidemic as a kind of disease that has spread all over and has its tentacles everywhere and i think that's that's what that term most suggests to me and so in writing your book incarceration nations talk to our viewers about one the premise of the book but then also why you traveled the world looking at other nations in their imprisonment systems so by way of background i mean i come to this work primarily as an educator i got involved in i founded the prison to college pipeline program at john j started volunteer in prison so the the i started volunteering in prisons about sixteen years ago just because i was getting letters from people in prison who had read my articles and seen some of the films that i've been involved with and which led to my official izing that through john jay and starting the prison a college pipeline and in a nutshell the prison a college pipeline is a college program in prison that also has a large  so it's about making education the centerpiece of a person's time in prison but also a person's time upon release and taking advantage of college and the college community both while someone is incarcerated and also when someone is coming home and starting again and building a life and creating community and so i've been i started planning the program about a decade ago and have been kneedeep in it ever since and i think the idea for the book kind of came to me fairly early on in that process because i think we started to see a shift in the discourse in this country around mass incarceration and i feel like and i know people who've been at this far longer than i have present company included who can speak to the fact that for many years it was so unpopular and no one wanted to talk about prisons and no one wanted to fund programs and so on and then due to a whole host of things that started happening in clued in films like thirteen and books like the new jim crow it became a much more mainstream topic and which is kind of where we're at today which is not to say there isn't loads of work to do anyway but it's present in the discourse but the thing that i noticed was that number one in an international context and i've always been a traveler i've done a lot of writing about culture and arts internationally especially in the caribbean and i  it was a total waste land as far as the discourse around prisons no one wanted to talk about it whatsoever it was reminiscent of what it felt like when i first started getting engaged with this work and the other thing is that i felt like there was still too much of a  economic bent to the discussion about ending mass incarceration because it's cheaper and it was always these equations that were put forth and i felt like we really need to talk about this from a philosophical perspective and step back and say what are we doing when we warehouse human beings and what is the impact of that and why are we approaching why do we have imagined that this will make us safer and so i wanted to do those things together and which led to my starting the journey that led to incarceration nations and so talk to our viewers about some of the countries that you visited and some of the work that you've done with some of those government officials right folks who are in some have access to some of the highest offices in some of the countries that you visited talked of us about that so i chose countries kind of based on i wanted some kind of geographic diversity to try to hit as many confidence as i could and each each country kind of focuses each country is a chapter that focuses on a particular issue that resonates in that in that country in particular so i went to nine countries i started in rwanda i ended in norway it was rwanda south africa uganda jamaica brazil australia singapore thailand and norway and for instance the thailand chapter focuses on women southeast asia has a very disproportionately high number of women who are incarcerated on politically as foot soldiers in drug the drug industry and therefore become victims of the war on drugs in a very profound way i looked at solitary confinement in brazil i looked at the private prison industry in australia and i think the kind of undercurrents of the book is the idea that america has foi ed this very ugly very bereft very morally economically philosophically bankrupt system on the world and to me that was actually a great revelation i think i didn't realise the extent to which the copycatting has happened both historically like starting in the nineteenth century with the birth of the modern prison system up to this day and so when we talk about issues in this country that are very live issues and this debate around solitary confinement around privatisation and prisons around the war on drugs all of these are things that the american system created and then  globalization originally through colonialism and then through globalization and so it's actually a really frightening thing to go around the world and see this like cut and paste version of justice because you think about the incredible diversity  world and the people in it and the communities in and how they think about justice and community and peace and safety and the idea that there is this one very stupid for lack of a better term cut and paste model  right down to the physical architecture of these prisons i mean i was in this year alone i spent i was in south africa for three months i was in chile a in brazil and in all of those countries i went to prisons that look like eastern states penitentiary  in pennsylvania which was one of the first two is considered the first to modern prisons in eastern us copied in over three hundred instances all over the world so it's like a physical manifestation of the way th researcher i'm someone who likes to engage and i love teaching and i love building with people and being in classrooms and so in every context when i would go to a country i would try to do something be involved with the program and for the most part i was working with n s some countries like singapore you can't get in without the government so i would engage with the government for the most part i went in with n g o s and i would teach or participate in a workshop program anything that let me just engage and not be you know standing on the sidelines and so that led to a lot of conversations with organisations and coalition building with both grassroots organizations and also eventually to conversations with governments about how can we buil together and how can we think about solutions and improvements and both small scale and larger scale and that's where that's where i am today with the work and that the next step was the development of the incarceration nations network which is kind of i guess the motto is correcting and connecting because i really like the term corrections and that's allegedly what we're supposed to be doing right and corrections also doesn't just mean correcting the you know the flawed people inside it means correcting the issues that caused incarceration in the first place that impoverished communities the you know all the systems of racism and and that produce you know prisons and funnel people into them so and then connecting because this idea that we shouldn't be doing this work in silos and that is true on both a local level and on an international level that we can have this conversation in a global context and there are so many things that that are gained when we put our collective heads together as a global community addressing a crisis that was born essentially because of one country and think creatively about solutions and and how we can address this and so see sailor who a little bit more about the vision for the network what kind of platform it will serve in its ultimate intended purpose so it's it's very much about building connections between organizations so getting all on the same page international or going to national organizations who are engaged in this work from different angles so the first major project that gaging and really it's the organization is about kind of pulling together under one heading a lot of the work that i've just been doing in terms of building partnerships globally up till now that the book led to i mean when the book came out it led to my doing a lot of talks both nationally and internationally and creating even more networks and building the connections with all of these wonderful people that are trying to impact change globally and i said well let me put this under one umbrella and figure out what the mission should be and so the first major project that i'm working on is a multimedia platform web platform for organizations doing for lack of a better term prison reform work or as i prefer to say prison reimagining one and who are thinking innovative lee around criminal justice reform and all over the world and so that and so as part of that they'll be a big database and you'll be able to click on various countries and you can click on kenya and you can click on cambodia and you can find out who's doing the work there and that is a very simple thing but it's enormous there no such thing that exists like that and really it's been amazing to me as i travel the world in this globalized world that we live in when you think it's not that hard to find out what's happening over there but it is and what it will be to have all these organizations on the same page literally is very powerful and then of those we've selected with khan in consultation with all of the justice consultants that are part of incarceration nations network seventy organizations that will look a little more closely at and i'll personally visit some of them do some filmed interviews with clients who can speak to how this organization impacted them the good work that it did and will kind of feature those on the website and you'll be able to watch some videos and understand a little bit more about how these organization and vision the problem in a vision the solution and ultimately that's about kind of demonstrating how similar a lot of those problems are i mean really entry for instance is a crisis all over the world i've never been in a country where that wasn't at the top of the list of there are no services there are no resources for people coming home from prison and of course we know what that means rights and creates this revolving door so the crisis of women women and incarceration globally the narrative is almost identical from one country to the next and so i think it's powerful to see that and then powerful to think about what are the innovative solutions that are happening so that's the first major project but it's also i'm also very interested in bringing a lot of different people to the table to change the narrative and change the conversation and so how do you do that well it can't just be preaching to the choir and it can't just be academics talking to each other it has to be what happened in a sense what happened in the u s where a lot of people came to the table and are still coming to the table from all walks of life whether it's people like you and me who are engaged in doing the work or and you know professors academics but celebrities influencers people who can you know artists people who can speak to this so i've already been doing a lot of worldwide events awareness raising events with individuals who are directly impacted at the forefront of that giving there isn't really a platform i think obviously in this country there's been a great shift in the movement in thanks to the work of people like you who've who've put directly impacted people at the forefront and not just as you know being one little token at the table internationally that doesn't exist and it's still work that is unfortunately being done by people outside that space but when they have a platform to engage in the work to do the work it's a really exciting things that we do film screenings when the platform is done we're going to have two big events high profile events one in new york and one in johannesburg south africa with directly impacted people there speaking gauging celebrities and influencers there who can bring this to a mainstream audience but you know turn the needle in terms of who's thinking about this and who's talking about this in big ways so how do prisons a college pipeline in the linkage to education as you mentioned as a  centerpiece how does that interest in how is that involved in the work of the network so yeah i'm glad you asked that because that is another big component of the work of course i'm deeply invested in education and love teaching more than i wear a lot of hats and i always say my favorite place to be anytime anywhere is in the classroom with students whether incarcerated students non incarcerated whatever but in  in doing this work internationally i've had the chance to engage with a number of universities and departments of corrections in various countries who are interested in building prison to college pipelines and i use that term not as  again it's not a cut and paste model that i can here take this and and then impose super impose it on your country but rather it's it's kind of a philosophy that is guided by two what i see as basic premises one is that universities have a role to play in creating safer communities and building safer and more just worlds and to the idea of the pipeline piece which is that any work that that begins inside must continue on the outside and i think i see a lot of that lacking in especially internationally all these organizations will run to do some program inside prison but they're not available for that person when that person comes home from prison and you know that that's a problem and so in some capacity any education program that begins on the inside must continue on the outside however that look so those are the two broad components of it and then within that the hope is to collaborate with institutions and with governments to build versions of the prison to college pipeline and so the countries that i've been engaging with are countries that i know best that i've spent the most time in and have built the strongest relationships and so that's jamaica trinidad south africa and brazil and in each of us countries it's not it's not my program it's their program that i come in to build with them on and our students come in who is the first graduate of the prison a college pipeline here in the u s and very very wise individual has come with me both to south africa went to jamaica to build with the university and the government there around what their version of prison to college pipeline will look like and actually we launched in south africa on mandela day in july which was incredible very stunningly moving and you launched another chapter  dollars pipeline we launched it's called it's with stellenbosch university which is a university about an hour outside of cape town and they're currently working in a prison they've started on a very kind of small scale skeletal basis but it's there connected and so they named the program that and they've been going now for for a couple of months but we had an official launch date on on the eighteenth and yvonne spoke and the students spoke it was really really moving and so how many students have you have completed the prison to college pipeline here in the u s and what are some of the countries that you're looking to replicate something like the prison the college pipeline so the  number it's a pen is how we define complete the program we've had almost a dozen graduates thinking both associates and bachelor's degrees but we have i lose track because thankfully we have students coming home every how it feels like or where every month but we have at least about seventy five students who've come home about two thirds of them are in school or have completed school we're in touch with almost all of them who are kind of part of our community are we call ourselves a family and so we have get togethers we have a holiday party every year and so and we define success in is not it's not just about did you get the  degree but are you are you in a good place and of course we don't only define it as did you go back to prison you know we set the bar higher than that and are you satisfied are you now happy place and so that looks differently for for everyone for some it looks like getting the bachelor's degree going on for a masters of a student applying to law school currently who graduated from john jay but for others it looks like you know work in a solid job but i had two children i'm in a healthy relationship i come to the holiday party every year and that's beautiful and then they'll shoot me a text and be like miss you love you like that success and so and now we have inside we've got fifty students at otisville correctional facility which is upstate and we've now have a right here in the city at queens borough correctional facility which we're really excited about because obviously with the proximity it's a lot easier to build about and we hope to grow our numbers and do all kinds of innovative things over there so i would love for you to talk very briefly about what you see in terms of the future of mass incarceration not only in this country but also what could we achieve here that as you mentioned right as what we implement here is replicated in other countries and so i would just love for you to talk very briefly about what  you envision is possible around issues incarceration so i'm a supriya i'm an optimist i am by nature but i also cultivate optimism because i think to do this work you really have to you know you have to do it with joy you have to do it with optimism you have to do it with love and really push the boundaries of what's possible and i think what i get excited about is anything that's breaking down the wall whatever that means you know so when i think about for instance the book my book ends in norway i went to the famous open prisons of norway and in scandinavia that is a tradition of and it's not every prison in scandinavia is open but when you mean so it might have some kind of a wall but it's not really going to have a barbed wired you know forbidding evil looking wall but most importantly it means that it's it's a porous entity people can leave go to work come back go to family leave come back they remain connected to their communities even during their incarceration and i think when i think about progressive open prisons that can look different kinds of ways that's as close as it gets to me for like the oxymoron term progressive prison those kinds of open prisons are the models that i envision as because and then when the people are you know confined when they don't have their liberty over night or whatever it is they're in gauged in  positive work while remaining connected to their community while remaining connected to their families and so when i think about the push both here and internationally i think about open prisons and i think about of course i think about de carson ration all of the policy shifts that have to happen i mean in the war on drugs are dealing with violence in our communities restored of justice proceedings how can we literally create a case by case scenario where incidents are addressed through the context of restorative justice but and i think about any space of confinement involving that kind of porous relationship and i think actually tell you a funny story because the norwegian prison that i visited it's called vast oil island it's quite famous it's in michael moore's documentary it's i mean it's a gorgeous island in norway it's run like an eco camp  the it's a really remarkable place and the individuals who are incarcerated there leave the island in the day and they wear regular clothing i mean it's as you may know as as i've ever seen something called a prison to be and the warden there is a very progressive guy we've talked a long time about and we've always stayed in touch and the other day i was researching open prisons and thinking about because i'm going to visit a few of them as part of this project and look at some new models and how the that's progressing and i noticed that there was one in the czech republic right just outside of prague that hope and that's a pretty big deal in in an eastern european context and so i got really excited and the next thing i know i'm on facebook and i see tom the warden and the norwegian prison he's visiting that he and his caption was oh it's good to see that our work has started here so what moved me about that was finally someone is exporting that is not the us you know it's the norwegian model that people are going after to after now as opposed to our model which doesn't work which is you know bankrupt in every way  thank you the time has flown by how can our viewers learn more about you learn more about your work learn more about the network and how could they be helpful while i'm on i think my twitter is on there it's at bob's dreissiger and my  incarceration nations network dot com is the website to learn more about the organization of my email super easy to find if you google me awesome awesome well thank you and thank you for sharing your wealth of experience your funny stories and your analysis with our viewers pleasure and thank you to the viewers for tuning in if you're interested in finding out more about the fortune society please check us out on the both sides of the bars