hello my name is jamie and i'm a creative writing teacher and a grant writer at the fortune society welcome to both sides of the bars a discussion driven show that examines the legal system from various perspectives including people most impacted by the system we discussed critical questions about how the current system operates momentum for change within social justice movements and the impact these issues have on the lives of everyone that they affect we ask you the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments about today's episode with us on twitter using at the fortune society s o c today's show is titled closing riker's a holding space for history and vision there is a mass incarceration crisis underway in the united states that has been persisting for decades america is home to roughly the same number of people with criminal records as it is for your college graduates holding hands americans with arrest records could circle the earth three times if all the rest of americans were a nation they would be the world's th largest nation larger than canada larger than france and more than three times the size of australia now  york city holds criminal legal system reform as progressive reform priority it is also currently home to a building mega jail complex constructed in one thousand nine hundred and thirty two known as rikers island before meeting today's guests it is imperative that we st make space to recognise that moves to reform the legal system started with people confined by those same systems and we will begin today with thoughts left behind from an internationally recognize justice policy analyst and political activist at the ellis mr ellis wrote prisons and prison populations are reflection of what takes place outside of the prisons the direct relationship constitutes the basis by which we propose that there are no prison problems only community problems once we begin to address community problems prison problems will also be addressed so let us hold these powerful thoughts with us as we navigate today's discussion now i'm honored to have with me two guests today who are fiercely working to address community problems utilizing innovative yet pragmatic strategies st we have ms ca clark she is currently the associate vice president of strategy with exodus transitional community a real interests a reentry service provider located in east harlem she previously worked at the fortune society and taught me most everything i know about writing  s she is an active member of the beyond rosie's campaign close riker's and free new york campaigns cantor is a woman's community justice association board member and adjust leadership usa two thousand and eighteen leading with conviction alumn dale currently serves as the deputy executive director of the close riker's initiative at the new york mayor's office of criminal justice after previously serving the administration in various positions he's a strong believer in the need for criminal justice reform before working at the mayor's office jordan served as a fulbright scholar in madrid spain and as a special education teacher in harlem in two thousand and seventeen jordan launched hire harlem an organization that promotes businesses that hire locally reinvest in the community and or are owned by people of color thank you both for joining us today really excited please will jump right into it seemingly an obvious question but still utterly necessary for each of you why do you want to close rikers do you want to start wreckers was a sign of a different era when the point of jail was pure mission punishment retribution not to reengage individuals not to rehabilitate not with  thousands and thousands of beds and that's the thing that really drives me here for you and i think for me i spent four months incarcerated on records before being transferred to a new york state correctional facility upstate new york and i got to see firsthand the trauma and abuse and dehumanization and the glad that we experience as incarcerated people and them specifically as women and i think for women you know what drives me the most is knowing the statistics specifically in new york city around how many women have experienced you know physical or sexual abuse as children how many have you know untreated trauma seventy five percent have mental health concerns approximately eighty percent are single mothers so when we're talking about women you know this is really the exciting thing for me to focus on is how can we really imagine and recreate a society that will provide these women with the support opportunities they need to succeed and that will keep them safe during this healing process and not re triggering trauma which is exactly what writers like with us does just want to say always thank you for being so consistent in this in this fight and it  is a professional passion but i know even just being in close proximity to you as as a coworker as a colleague as an admirer as someone else in in the work this is personal apps and it is of this critical junction of being at a point where closing rikers is a possibility and that borough based community jails are the next step yeah so in one thousand nine hundred and one there was about twenty two thousand people impetus for close rikers was really heard in the streets from community based organizations demanding that rikers island be closed you read about in the papers the new yorker of course the queen's brother story which  there's a feasible alternative and that we need to do well here charmian do you how do you feel about this next step for these community based jails i think it's really interesting in the time that we're in right now i think as advocates we've pushed so hard and i think at the end of the day we want to really reimagine the entire system i think it's a goal to get down to zero incarceration number right where no one is in cages and i think we have a lot of work to do to get to that point and a lot of discussion around accountability and what those systems look like and i think the way that the advocates have been pushing and it's not just advocating and testifying but it's also being at the busy with you know the city government officials and the leaders in order to create legislative change in order to create procedural change in order to you know redefine what a win means in the judicial system i mean we have a lot of of work that we still need to do but by allowing us the space to be in these you know on these platforms we can really augment change and then how have those with lived experience how have they influenced and and really had helping in providing solutions throughout this entire process those thought leaders well in speaking about e l o he was one of the st ones to say those closest to the problem are closest to them to that space so they can their voices can be heard and they really can be making change so you know we're just leadership it's redo leadership training programs it's one of the programs that i completed and it really helps us talk about our trauma form our stories create are a powerful voice for us to go and testify at these these arenas and it's unfortunate though a lot of it falls back on trauma so a lot of it is stuff as advocates if we've experienced prolonged trauma then we have to work through it's not easy telling our stories it's not easy getting up and testifying day after day it actually read triggered me for a long time i used to have nightmares when i would come home after you know for the whole st two years that i started public speaking so then it's crazy in that support network around to really help us move through that and we're just leadership what they're also doing and as you know creating national campaigns it's a national organization busy so we're working with you know the group of people in a way on their justice aisle a campaign w close the creek campaign so in philadelphia they're closing down the detention center there also and what just leadership role is this really go and find the people who are on the ground already doing this work in these these communities in these other states and providing them with the technical assistance and support how can we help build up the rest of your you know campaign leaders and directly impacted people to really have that change and what i've also seen a really big shift in is people with the right who are directly impacted their voices being leaders  like the lipman commission or different house forest with the mayor's office with the legislative council meeting with the city councils they're really coming to us for different advice and and you know working collaboratively to create some solutions and then pilot them and implement  again those closest to the problem closer to the solution and furthest away from the from the resources and then you did the speak briefly of that it's not of these other national campaigns that while certainly close riker's is specific  to new york but it really is busy a model for elsewhere elsewhere in the country and just leadership certainly is has their hand in their and there are support and guidance in doing that and i just want to add these are they also have another campaign in milwaukee where they're you know trying to work around that detention facility and then they have a campaign coming out of columbia south carolina which is actually the working futures campaign and this is a bill of rights for formally incarcerated people busy so it's the bill of rights that we want for employment for housing and you know how we don't want to be discriminated against how we want equal rights and so that we're trying to also launch and create that more of a national movement but it's quite needed right now out of columbia carcer recently we actually changed the plan based on hearing feedback from form incarcerated women and incarcerated women rose so rigidly we planned to have decentralized women's housing in the four facilities but after hearing extensive feedback we decided to centralize episode because that's the majority of women want to and that's you know just an important point certainly and set out so that it wasn't just directly impacted leaders are people who are formerly incarcerated but we did focus groups on rikers island with the women who are incarcerated i was on singer today so it's not just the voices of people who used to be there but it's also the voices of people who are there right now yeah and but again laying laying the sort of groundwork for collective leadership that for any individual that rikers the possibility that it could still remain open personally no i don't have concerns with that i think the rhetoric around if we build it they will fill it is false it doesn't have any merit because right now there's approximately seven thousand open beds in new york city between records island and the run the rest of the detention facilities and so if the administration was really about incarcerating people then those seven thousand dollars beds would be empty right now they have a great opportunity to you know increase in cars ration as opposed to decrease in and so i think that's you know our number one point that you know we're really and we're not going anywhere right so there's advocates on the ground over one hundred and fifty partner organizations are dedicated to you know closing rikers and we're going to keep pushing and we're going to keep pushing the mare's office and one thing that we're pushing now is advocates is to demolish the buildings on riker's as they get close down and that's something that we're still going to keep pushing for and fighting for but i feel very strongly with this administration that we can get this done also again we're we're coming from a very specific point of view but again it's also we talk about rikers island we talk about the harm that's generated on the island corrections officers are included in that too so i'm actually curious to sort of enough to teach a class yeah a creative writing class so also so we're saying that there is these kinds of offerings for staff we can also highlight some of the folks that are doing that are doing the work and bringing light now for folks that are still there  any thoughts on programming that's offered for detainees in terms of what should be offered or what is offered i guess that's that's that's not your that's at your discretion but even now like what what are programs that that the mayor's office is certainly behind but that are actually being offered in real time yeah so last year we announced that every person who's detained will be offered five hours of programming a day i think that is important milestone to ensure that people do have access to services we recently increased the full day educational programming to twenty to twenty four year olds before it was just offered eighteen to twenty one year olds and we offer like osha training and other license training to help improve jobs upon release units and ample space for programming in the housing and that's really important one because it allows for more tailored programming into if an incident does occur or currently in the system they have to shut down entire facilities which means people can't go to programming in the new design if an incident were to occur which would be much much less likely because the smaller housing units and better lines of site newer facility that can't be weaponized you would only have to address one housing unit as opposed to close down an entire area which means that people will have more programming which is really important so certainly community members have expressed concerns that in reference to the  property value will decrease community violence near jails will increase and that because from like there is will simply be transferred to the boroughs so how do you respond to each of those in line with national statistics in new york city this analysis shows that there was no observable impact on property values or on crime rates in fact for three out of the four sites the property values near the detention facility actually exceeded the larger neighborhoods so busy there was actually more of a property value in those neighborhoods which you would almost think was going to be the opposite right yeah but this is what the study shows are and then i think what was the other thing mental health trauma intergenerational poverty normalization of violence when we talk about all these things i really want to job description for a staff member that matches those kind of unique needs right now so when i think of who would i want to provide these services to you know my women specifically that are inside i would want to be mental health care professionals educators employment trainers and when jordan was speaking about employment one thing that i see as as a gap of what's currently happening in programming on the island is the lack of of funding for hard skills training and so there is some funding for it but it could be you know it's there needs to be a lot more funding in her own hard skills training and a lot more opportunities for different careers people cannot come home from women karst ration expression if they've cycled in and out for an extended amount of time and then get you know a minimum wage job and everybody's in society is going to expect that they're going to be ok when they have a ton of child support arrears when they have court finds in quantities that they have to pay off when the cost of living in new york city is skyrocketing so connecting people to more career or careers as opposed to just jobs and then what kind of training and certifications what would they need to get those careers how could we provide them inside and then also maybe connect them to the outside of it so then back with staffing it's really really imagine in redesigning what we want the staffing to look like and i think that's going to change the culture significantly and again when we're talking about specifically new york city the department of correction officers half of them come from communities that the majority of the people who are incarcerated not from impoverished communities lack of opportunities so we don't want to regardless of if we're both of us of what happens around staffing this is a two thirds to karst ration effort and so there's going to be a significant reduction in the number of officers once we get to community based shells that's just realistic grain and we know that the staff in structure in the way that records the set up makes it only over a one dollar to one dollar ratio and that's part of the problem right with out with the money that we keep investing in these systems so i think being really thoughtful around how can we transition correctional officers who join this job because they wanted to help in rehabilitate and support people into more roles that allow them to actually do that as a whole is to being just a security officer absolutely absolutely and now it's interesting that there at least it was to be i don't know it's i think there was an expression sort of an expected faultline of opposition but there of another fault line of opposition what do you say to community members who are opposed to building these specific community jails not because of the increased traffic or the resulting not impact on property value but because they do not believe in investing in any new confinement settings because the shouldn't that's yeah that's exactly what this conversation yeah it's really about so we're all working and to see a day where we see no one in cages abolition as a goal it is not a strategy and i think that is you know something i've been toiling with myself it's like ok if we want to get zero then what are the steps that we need to take we can't just be out here ransom and protesting and that we want to get to zero but then have no solid strategy in place to get to zero and i think as directly impacted people it's very frustrating for us because we're the ones that lived through records island so if you want to get to zero today that's fine we're all trying to get to zero when it doesn't when we're not getting to zero today though what happens to my women who are being raped and abused and traumatize right now on rikers as we speak what happens to them i think we need to have a lot further conversations more conversations around accountability and what do we want accountability to look busy like if we're and if it's not going to be incarceration then what is that next step and i think right now unfortunately i think people are coming from a good space where abolition is the space that they're coming from but their rhetoric is actually being counterproductive to closing riker this two thirds we can't work on the other one rd that are very serious violent crimes that we need that there's victims involved and we need to make sure that those victims have some type of retribution right so i think coming up with those kind of conversations and those kind of questions and really working through them we need to do this collectively but we also need to realize that if you did it if you weren't a person that was on record island then you can understand why it's so imperative busy that we get you completed in u s history from a from a city standpoint if the rest of the country or to engage in something like this we would take a massive bite out of mass incarceration that's why i'm just so passionate about it right and that's why a lot of people are so passionate about it and i think there are well intentioned people that are pushing back against this and they genuinely believe this is the wrong thing but we're not in a society right now they could actually have zero people detained or incarcerated right there just  and so we have a responsibility to operate within the realm of possibility while believing in a future that's even better yeah but to forego on closing rikers which tremendous things had to happen for this to  be possible right i think is a mistake and let me remind you just two weeks ago a man died from dehydration on rikers that was just two weeks ago so this is still happening right now today and they need to be moved off the element media yeah absolutely and it's also i think holding it sounds like what you are deeply involved in is also a long term strategy exactly this is and the whole point is to get everybody home you know i mean and  but again in the process of not leaving anyone behind that we're not willing to leave anyone yet and it's and again know what no one wants to partake in harm reduction in that kind of way like we want everyone to come home but if this is the means of doing this and we're here right so we improve is to change but to be perfect is to change often so to our national audience and especially the people who are watching from behind the walls we are with you we salute you thank you i hope this inspires the larger audience to research efforts aimed at improving conditions of confinement while ending mass incarceration in your community if you're interested in finding out more about the fortune society and the work that we're doing please visit our website at fortune society dot org or on facebook by typing in the fortune society this is jamie molesta and i appreciate you joining us as we critically look at both sides of the bars