Reimagining Prison

A conversation with Rudy Valdez, the filmmaker behind the HBO documentary The Sentence, which highlights the toll mandatory minimums take on families; Vera Institute of Justice President Nick Turner on “reimagining prison”; and the news of the week, ICYMI.

This week on Off-Kilter, we take a deep dive into mass incarceration and the urgent need to completely reimagine prison here in America:

First, Rebecca talks with Rudy Valdez, director of The Sentence, a heart-wrenching, and incredibly personal, documentary film that premiered on HBO last week, highlighting the toll that unjust “mandatory minimum” prison sentences take on families — including his own. The film is the culmination of hundreds of hours of family footage that Rudy originally began shooting to make sure his sister Cindy wouldn’t miss out on important moments — in the process he became a filmmaker and an activist for criminal justice reform.

Later in the show: This past week, the Vera Institute led a bipartisan delegation of U.S. criminal justice reform leaders on a trip to Germany and Norway to compare those countries’ prison systems to the nightmare that is mass incarceration back home in the U.S. Rebecca talks with Nick Turner, President of the Vera Institute of Justice, about the trip and Vera’s “Reimagining Prison” initiative, which aims to “radically alter how prisons function by infusing human dignity into every aspect of correctional operations.”

But first: The White House Council on Economic Advisers declares war on socialism, the GOP can’t stop lying about pre-existing conditions, Trump’s on the campaign trail selling a fictional middle-class tax cut, the admin makes moves to define trans folks out of existence, and much more, as Jeremy Slevin returns with the news of the week ICYMI.

This week’s guests:

• Rudy Valdez, Director of HBO’s The Sentence
• Nick Turner, President of the Vera Institute of Justice
• Jeremy Slevin, CAP’s director of antipoverty advocacy (and faithful sidekick)

For more on this week’s topics:

• Watch the trailer for The Sentence and check out the full film streaming on HBO
• Learn more about the Vera Institute’s “Reimagining Prisons” project, which draws on lessons learned from European prison systems and asserts a new governing principle on which to ground prison policy and practice: human dignity

For more on this week’s ICYMI topics:

• Have all the fun digging into the CEA report “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism”— and read Dylan Matthews’ delightful takedown over at Vox
• Here’s ThinkProgress’s reporting on how 36 vulnerable House Republicans are telling the same lie in their campaign ads even though all but four of them have voted at least once to eliminate protections for people with pre-existing conditions — and here’s more on the Trump admin’s latest attack on pre-ex (which comes as Trump racks up all the Pinocchios for his own endless lies on this front)
• Read Rachel West on how expanding Medicaid in the remaining 17 holdout states would save **14,000 lives a year**
• Trump’s middle class tax cut is fake but GOP Tax Scam 2.0 is very, very real
• Get caught up on the Trump administration’s hideous effort to define trans folks out of existence
• Here’s the AP’s deleted tweet calling the migrant caravan a “rag-tag army of the poor” and more…
• Rare good news! A federal court blocked Georgia from throwing out absentee ballots because of signature mismatches (the latest chapter in the voter registration goat rodeo playing out in the Peach State less than 2 weeks out from election day)

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, we take a deep dive into mass incarceration and the urgent need to completely reimagine prison here in America. I talk with Rudy Valdez, director of The Sentence, a heart-wrenching, and incredibly personal, documentary film that premiered on HBO last week, highlighting the toll that unjust “mandatory minimum” prison sentences take on families — including his own. Next I talk with Nick Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, which just this past week spearheaded a bipartisan delegation of U.S. criminal justice reform leaders on a trip to Germany and Norway to compare those countries’ correctional facilities and prison systems more broadly to the nightmare that is mass incarceration back home in the U.S.

But first it’s Jeremy Slevin, still typing in front of me and told me he was ready to start taping but it looks like he’s not so I’m just going to keep a little bit of filler –

JEREMY SLEVIN: Oh, I’m ready, I’m ready.

VALLAS: Oh there you are!

SLEVIN: I need that last bit of typing to get me in the zone.

VALLAS: Hey, were you doing the thing where you google “good news this week” is that what you were doing?

SLEVIN: I got some good news right here.

VALLAS: Oh you already had it.

SLEVIN: Yeah, yeah.

VALLAS: Man you’re like, it’s like the kid who did his homework for once and the teacher’s like whoa.

SLEVIN: It’s like the kid who is doing his homework at the beginning of class when they find out the teacher’s going to collect the math homework because they only do that once every two weeks?

VALLAS: Was that you?

SLEVIN: No?

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Oh man. I really want to —

SLEVIN: Was it you?

VALLAS: I really want to meet your family at some point, I do. I feel like there’d be a lot to talk about.

SLEVIN: We’ll bring them in, ‘In Case You Missed It’

VALLAS: Oh my god, that’d be a whole family segment? No, I was not that kid because I was super —

SLEVIN: Studious?

VALLAS: I was super, super type A like, I was the annoying gunner kid who always had my hand in the air.

SLEVIN: I’m shocked. I know no one at CAP who’s like that, it’s really surprising.

VALLAS: Yeah I know, I’ve chilled out a lot though, haven’t I?

SLEVIN: Yes. [LAUGHTER] I’ll leave that there.

VALLAS: Oh, probably for the best. So, OK onto the news of the week a lot going on in a lot of fronts that we aren’t talking about but on the poverty and inequality front this week, there’s been a lot of lying, Jeremy.

SLEVIN: Oh yeah.

VALLAS: Quite a lot of lying, in fact I feel like that could probably be the lead into most of these episodes that we do for this show. But this week I have to say feels categorically different in terms of just the sheer volume and magnitude of the lies that we are hearing out of the Trump administration and Republicans right now.

SLEVIN: There’s just been a decision I think to make, can I say make sh*t up.

VALLAS: Well you just said it.

SLEVIN: I just said it, you can bleep me I’ll only say it that once.

VALLAS: Well I like to say I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission so I suppose how could I fault you? But yeah I think you’re right. I think the decision has been made, we’re two weeks out from the midterms, at this point what do we have to lose? Well, an election so let’s just lie.

SLEVIN: Right and half the time the media will just cover the lie and when they fact check it it will be a separate story like a day later. So a long as our lie gets heard, we win.

VALLAS: So the first lie actually takes us to our headline of the week.

SLEVIN: Yes.

VALLAS: And Dylan Matthews, a friend of the show and one of my favorite people over at Vox and yours too I think gets credit for this particular headline which I am going to take host’s privilege to read and then I’m going to make you talk about it.

SLEVIN: Oh read away.

VALLAS: Dylan, props to you or whoever wrote this, the White House, the headline read, “The White House Definitely Not Scared of Socialism, Issues Report on why Socialism is Bad.” Jeremy this is actually a real news story.

SLEVIN: Yes, this is not only a report from the White House, this is from their Council of Economic Advisers, which is the traditionally academic economist led, it was Christine Romer under Obama. This is usually above the political fray.

VALLAS: It’s the people with the propeller hats, right?

SLEVIN: Exactly. And they issue really wonky papers essentially and under Trump it has gone in the gutter. The name of this report is “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism” which is like, oh this could be an interesting analysis of maybe Nordic style social democracies versus other European countries. No, it is a screed basically comparing Democrats, particularly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Mao Zedung, Vladimir Lenin, ‘The Communist Manifesto’, it is so entertaining in its’ absurdity and it’s so beyond laughable that you’ve just got to love it.

VALLAS: Twitter had some real fun with this report and not just with the headlines but I would love for you to go through some of the high notes or the low notes depending, and actually some of what was amazing and what was getting called out on Twitter and why it was so fitting that Vox had such a great takedown in the form of Dylan Matthew’s piece as I mentioned because some of his Vox colleagues actually get named in the report.

SLEVIN: Yeah, they compare a Vox report on the benefits of government healthcare which would include Medicare and Medicaid, some popular programs, they compare that to Lenin and Mao. “Modern journalists,” this is a quote, “and analysts routinely claim that single payer programs are more efficient and thus are similar in spirit to Lenin and Mao who justified government takeovers on the basis of the virtue of single payer programs.”

VALLAS: You know what I love about this? I feel like it was written by committee. So you had the people who the very serious pointy headed people who wrote sentences like “echoing historic claims about state run enterprises it is claimed that the government monopoly will be more productive by avoiding waste on administrative costs.” And then you’ve got Key and Peele, someone else comes in and goes “and thus are similar in spirit to Lenin and Mao.”

SLEVIN: Then Trump was like wait can I get an edit on this?

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: He was actually editing by Twitter.

SLEVIN: Yeah he’s like let’s add in — well he doesn’t know who Mao is, who am I kidding? They then say, “The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin)” that refers to farm owners in Bolshevik Russia or pre-Bolshevik Russia, “landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren).”

VALLAS: And then they name Piketty.

SLEVIN: “Piketty (2014) concludes that the Soviet approach and other attempts to “abolish private ownership” should at least be admired for being “more logically consistent.”

VALLAS: This is amazing so basically everybody who’s anybody should want to be named in this report.

SLEVIN: Yeah, oh yeah, you know all the major socialist leaders, you’ve got Marx you’ve got Lenin, you’ve got Mao, you’ve got Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

VALLAS: Right.

SLEVIN: It’s just such a rhetorical leap.

VALLAS: What I’m picturing as you do this is Mount Rushmore, you’ve got the faces of great socialist leaders and then you’ve got Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

SLEVIN: In socialist America we’ll change Mount Rushmore to have our leaders, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Sanders and Warren.

VALLAS: So we’re being somewhat flip because that’s what this report deserves and it was pretty much panned by anyone with any part of a brain but that being said there is some level of signifigance to this that’s worth unpacking because this is basically the White House position on everything that is the opposite of their agenda which is to take health care away from everyone, to make sure that everyone is poor except for super rich people who are already rich who are going to get richer. This is actually their attempt to defend their policy agenda.

SLEVIN: Yeah, yes, I mean it’s significant on a political level because it shows how deserpate they are and you see it in the campaigns which we’ll get to in a bit which is tagging every Democratic candidate with the ‘Medicare for All’ label because they are scared of the ambition and the popularity of these programs.

VALLAS: Which Bernie Sanders as his face is currently getting erected on Mouth Rushmore which we tape, one of the things that he has been really successful at doing and which his presidential run was really successful at doing was helping people see that pretty much everywhere else in the developed world besides the United States has things like healthcare for everyone and child care and public education that’s really high quality and paid leave and all of these other things that are pipe dreams that come with a high price tag for people, many of whom in this country can’t afford them. And so here it was saying wow we could actually be really different if we were any other developed country, that was maybe really scary to people who don’t want those things to be the way of life in the United States. Cut to oh my God it’s socialism and this report is so desperate to make those things look bad and unachievable. It actually all starts to really hinge on a pickup truck.

SLEVIN: Right, they eventually compare, so I think this is the somewhat substantive part of it, which is before smearing everyone who supports expanding health coverage by comparing them to Mao and Lenin they then that about the social democracies who Sanders and Warren are more likely to use as a model which is countries like Sweden and Denmark and Norway the social democracies in Scandenavia. And their point is that basically they are poor. Ultimately people, for some reason they use pickup trucks as an example. That people in Denmark would have to work 6 hours as opposed to 4 and a half hours to own a pickup truck, to pay for a pickup truck, of course that ignores all sorts of tradeoffs which is that they’re much more equal societies, that a lot of people in the US can’t afford a pickup truck at all and also of course that pickup trucks are horrible gas guzzling vehicles that pollute the atmosphere and maybe there’s something to be said towards disincentivizing vehicles like that. I think that’s the one substantive point but they never acknowledge that hey, these are moral choices, do we want a society where we encourage certain types of behaviors which may come with some cost but will ensure that people don’t die for lack of access to healthcare. They instead smear the entire position of anyone to their left and equate it with Mao and Lenin and Marx.

VALLAS: So I’ll leave it with some words from Dylan Matthews, as he puts it, “Whether “socialism makes it more expensive to buy a Ford Ranger XL” is a sufficient debunking of socialism, I’ll leave as an open question.” And so will we. The lies that we were talking about before, right, are the throughline for a lot of the news for this week and next they take us to Trump’s big new promise to the American people they he’s current spouting everywhere as why people should be voting Republican and that’s a middle class tax cut.

SLEVIN: That’s coming anyday now, Congress is about to pass even though they’re not in session and they’re currently campaigning.

VALLAS: Which maybe reflects some level of wizardry on Trump’s part which we’re not aware of that he’s going to get Congress to pass legislation when they’re not in session and also something that they wouldn’t be able to take up on this time frame. But he’s going out and saying this and it’s getting picked up by the news outlets!

SLEVIN: So he is promising a middle class tax cut that they’re working on it very hard right now and what’s I think really disheartening is that the media’s first reaction is Trump promises middle class tax cut before the election, or Trump promises middle class tax cut without first saying this is made up, there is no possible way for this to happen. And this is why they lie because if they just say something they know it will get covered even if eventually people catch on the first instinct is to report a news makers words because we’re used to a newsmaker having some bearing to reality. And we haven’t adapted to the fact that this newsmaker i.e. the president does not care about reality.

VALLAS: So he’s sort of post-reality is his approach to existence. And as you were saying before we started taping you end up with all these headlines that just pick up what he said, Trump promises middle class tax cut. And if that’s all people are seeing then it has the effect of taking his words, making it I guess real, as real as it needs to be for people to be seeing and hearing and believing it and then it was sort of don’t ever get to the second step which is the first paragraph of the news article which is OK he said this but also it couldn’t really happen and here’s why.

SLEVIN: Right, right, and it also tacticly acknowledges that their tax cut was not targeted towards the middle class and that they know that people know that so that they have to say ok don’t worry, that whole 1.5 trillion tax cut that we’ve built our entire reelection campaign on and our entire first two years on, we’re doing another one, that one’s going to help you. We’re making it up but we promise it’s going to help you.

VALLAS: That’s such a great point it reflects an understanding that the American people know that they haven’t been helped unless they’re the people who have been able to buy a boat to put inside their boat like Verne Buchanan and his butts. Yeah a boat inside a boat Jeremy, get with it.

SLEVIN: Did you say his butts?

VALLAS: No. [LAUGHTER] What is happening?

WILL URQUHART (PRODUCER): There is no chance we’re cutting that, that is staying in.

VALLAS: Alright, Jeremy the decision’s been made I don’t know what got said but Will’s leaving it in. I hope it wasn’t you calling me a muppet again because that we really traumatic, I’m still a little bit upset about that, a little bit upset. So the lies don’t just stop there, but wait, there’s more, I feel like I’m doing one of those infomercials and saying not only is the shipping and handling free but you’re doing to get two of whatever you already said you didn’t want one of.

SLEVIN: One of a tax cut.

VALLAS: Right, it’s going to be a potato microwave things that I’ve never understood how those are supposed to work. So the lies continues and perhaps are some of the most appalling and offensive in the health care space and it comes down to preexisting conditions.

SLEVIN: So this not just Trump although Trump tweeted this morning that Republicans will protect —

VALLAS: Oh giving away when we’re taping, good, check, done that.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: I’m pulling up the tweet, “Republicans will totally protect people with preexisting conditions. Democrats will not. Vote Republican.”

VALLAS: This is not just Trump though. ThinkProgress did an analysis and found that 36 of the tightest congressional races the Republicans are running basically identical ads and messages saying that they will protect and have protecting preexisting conditions. All but four of them voted for the ACA repeal bill which explicitly and in no, in clear terms did away with protections for preexisting conditions and that’s not the only way that they’re trying to undermine preexisting conditions. The administration has a lawsuit right now to do away with protections for preexisting conditions and in fact issued a rule this week, the day before Trump’s tweet to say that, to make it easier to sell junk plans that don’t protect preexisting conditions.

And at the same time and we were talking a lot last week about Mitch McConnell, he also just last week promised that Republicans are going to continue to try to repeal to Obamacare if they keep control of congress and also double down and said hey we’re really worried about this huge hole in the deficit that we just blew by giving tax cuts to people to boats inside their boats and so now we’re going to come back and cut Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid to pay for. That was just last week. So this amazing confluence of timing even by Republican standards and even by Trump standards that here we are, two weeks out from the election, they’re terrified about being handed a whole bunch of pink slips and losing some power and so they’ve decided just to throw everything out except for one core lie and so while they watch Democrats run on healthcare because Democrats are the ones who have been standing up and trying to protect Americans’ healthcare, Republicans have decided they’re going to run on healthcare too, it’s just going to all be complete lies.

SLEVIN: Yeah and Martha McSally who was one of the fiercest advocates for repealing the ACA has a direct to camera ad across her state in Arizona where she’s running saying that she is leading the fight to force insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. She not only voted for the bill, she stood up at the conference meeting before the bill and was like let’s effing get it done.

VALLAS: This is the repeal bill.

SLEVIN: This is the repeal bill.

VALLAS: To take healthcare away from tens of millions of Americans.

SLEVIN: That’s Martha McSally.

VALLAS: Right.

SLEVIN: And now she’s defending, defending her supposed protection of people with preexisting conditions.

VALLAS: And championing it, holding this up as if she’s a champion of healthcare. The Trump tweet, I just can’t quite get over, Republicans will totally protect people with preexisting conditions, Democrats will not, exclaimation point, vote Republican. You actually can’t make something up that is less true than that if you were going to try to summarize the last couple years of health care.

SLEVIN: The ‘totally’ is the dead giveaway. It’s like when your mom’s like oh did you take the trash out? Totally!

VALLAS: Hey did you do your homework?

SLEVIN: Totally.

VALLAS: Right at the beginning of class we just learned earlier. And then at the same time of course he’s also been going really hard and so have other Republicans in congress on that Democrats are going to destroy Medicare. So it’s almost as though what they’ve done is listen to and study Democrat, progressive talking points really about Republican attacks on healthcare and they’ve just taken them and they’ve inverted them and made them about themselves.

SLEVIN: Yeah, it’s gaslighting.

VALLAS: That’s right.

SLEVIN: Trump did this in the election. I remember he was like Hillary’s totally in cahoots with Russia! It’s like I know you are, but what am I?

VALLAS: That’s exactly what this is. So and on the Medicaid front just to note some really cool research out this week, a little plug for one of our colleagues Rachel West who did some really cool analysis, spoiler, and it has to do with Medicaid, spoiler, Medicaid expansion is really good and it has lots of really positive effects. Anything you want to say about that that folks should know, we’re going to come back and do more on this next week.

SLEVIN: This is hat tip to Rachel’s finding that it would save 14,000 in the 19 states that have not implemented expansion yet. So the lie that they are standing up for not only people with preexisting conditions but people with disabilities, people who have healthcare needs while simultaneously saying with the other side of their mouth saying we want to cut Medicaid which is the biggest insurer, now is bigger than Medicare is the biggest insurer in the country, it’s a great piece that puts shame to that lie.

VALLAS: So and shame where shame is due, also just want to give a quick plug to some absolute deep horror in terms of truly offensive things said by people in the Trump administration this week. Special award to CMS administrator Seema Verma, she oversees the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and had a special tweet, “It’s disappointing that so many healthcare,” quote, she’s got this in quotes, “‘advocates’ don’t trust the American people to know what is right for themselves and their families. CMS is giving states their voice back #stateinnovation”. This one was just unbelievable to me because this —

SLEVIN: What is that even code for? Is that for Medicaid cuts?

VALLAS: This code is actually code for taking health insurance away from unemployed people by destroying Medicaid which is what this administration is doing, what she is currently overseeing in the states —

SLEVIN: #innovation, yeah, nothing said innovation like healthcare cuts.

VALLAS: Yeah like letting people die in the streets, the thing Trump promised he wasn’t going to do so that, just putting that out there given that it’s a little disappointing to me that the current CMS administrator, I’ll put “administrator” in quotes, back to her, if she wants to put quotes around us as advocates, thinks that her job is to strip the American people and their families of health insurance but hey, we’ll leave that one here. So moving away from just lies and adding in some other dimensions on this, the migrant caravan has been getting a lot of press attention and some of it not using super great language. Here we’ve got to call out the Associated Press.

SLEVIN: Yeah and by the way there are plenty of lies about the migrant caravan so we can get to those.

VALLAS: You’re saying that through line still works here?

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: We can still keep it. But the AP in covering this migrant caravan, and basically what it is is people fleeing central American countries where there are sky high levels of violence, some of the most violent countries in the world and they are fleeing for their lives, this is sponsored by church groups and they’re coming first to Mexico but some of them are planning on continuing to the United States to seek asylum as refugees which is protected international law. And then the US determines whether they can stay as our producer Will mentioned the last time one of these happened only three people were let in. But that’s essentially what they’re doing. The Trump administration has seized on this as fodder ahead of the midterms for their base. And the media chose to cover it with this headline, this is the AP politics Twitter, “a ragged growing army of migrants resumes march towards US”.

VALLAS: I don’t like “ragged” or “army” but that’s not even their worst tweet.

SLEVIN: Yeah, that’s not even their worst one. “Photo gallery: Central American migrants march through Mexico like a rag-tag army of the poor”.

VALLAS: Ooohh, so bad, so bad, not cool guys! And they deleted those tweets, right?

SLEVIN: Yes, yes they eventually deleted those tweets.

VALLAS: Got a lot of criticism, understood that that was not cool but just your friendly reminder that language choices do matter and glad that those tweets got deleted but gotta call them out too. But quickly we would be remiss if we did not mention and this is a conversation we’ll have in longer format down the road because it is still very much a developing story but we’d be remiss if we did not mention one of the most horrifying news stories of the week which has to do with the Trump administration effectively trying to erase trans people out of existence.

SLEVIN: Yes, so they’re considering basically what you said. They are considering narrowly defining gender as your biological condition determined at birth. This is part of their administration wide effort to rollback any protections for trans people. It’s being pushed by the Department of Health and Human Services which is encouraging all departments essentially to just determine gender based on biological basis that is quote, “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable” this would have enormous consequences.

VALLAS: They are basically trying to say and there is another quote from the memo, sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth. So they’re not hiding the ball here at all basically this is state sanctioned erasure of trans people and it’s being carried out by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services. A lot more to come on this front because to be clear this is a memo that’s been circulated, this is not a change that has been enacted yet or implemented but it’s something we know the administration is thinking about and that Trump wants to see go into effect so a lot more to talk about on this show in the future about this horrifying, horrifying news story and just in the meantime I want to say to all my trans friends, loved ones and listeners we stand with you, we love you, we see you and we will fight with you. Jeremy, I really hope you came with some good news. I heard you googling good news this week so -

SLEVIN: We have some good news. So this week in attempted voter suppression. So Georgia, which has been leading the way in voter suppression trying to bar thousands of peoples’ voice there from being counted, the attorney general there who is actually running for governor so the federal court —

VALLAS: And we talked a lot about this last week with Brentan Mock from CityLab, if you want to know more and haven’t heard that episode go back and listen he walks us through exactly what’s happening with the exact match voter registration system but Jeremy, what’s the latest?

SLEVIN: So essentially they had been trying to block thousands of absentee ballots for example in Gwinnett County, which is Georgia’s second largest county, Black, Latino and Asian-American voters are way more likely to have ballots rejected than their white counterparts. So it was a deliberate attempt to block certain people from voting. The federal court just ruled against that. They cannot reject these absentee ballots for spurious reasons like mismatched signatures, essentially those votes will be considered a provisional ballot so they can notify voters of the issues and the voters will have a chance to rectify that and make sure that their votes are still counted.

VALLAS: So lots more to come as the fight over suppressing votes happens and plays out in Georgia but became pretty clear exactly how much Brian Kemp the Republican nominee for governor and the secretary of state himself has a serious conflict of interest in continuing to try to suppress the vote in the election he’s currently a candidate in. he actually said some stuff that got leaked that shows he knows exactly what he’s doing. He talked about how scary it would be if everyone really actually exercised their right to vote. So in case anyone was wondering whether this could be anything other than intentional voter suppression I think we need wonder no more. Jeremy thanks for coming and filling us in as always, I didn’t even say anything about your sweater but it’s beautiful.

SLEVIN: Thank you.

VALLAS: Yeah.

SLEVIN: Great note to end on.

VALLAS: It’s the dad-iest of dad sweaters that I’ve seen today but a beautiful one. Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. At first Rudy Valdez thought the fifteen year prison sentence given to his sister Cindy Shank must have been some kind of clerical error. The judge must have meant to sentence her to 15 months, Cindy had been convicted of conspiracy on drug related charges stemming from crimes committed by an ex-boyfriend of hers who had died years ago. But after doing a bit of googling, Rudy realized it wasn’t a mistake after all. Cindy was one of the many thousands of Americans who each year are given so called mandatory minimum sentences which required judges to dole out incredibly long prison sentences when someone is found guilty of a particular crime even if they themselves don’t think that those sentences are fair. Cindy’s time in prison inspired “The Sentence”, a documentary film that premiered on HBO last week highlighting the devastating toll that unduly harsh prison terms like Cindy’s take on families and loved ones. Rudy Valdez’s is the film’s director and I spoke with him by phone to get the story behind the film.

Rudy thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

RUDY VALDEZ: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So listeners of the show might not know this but you actually weren’t a documentary film maker when this all started. You started shooting film back in 2008 right after Cindy was locked up to capture the family moments that she would be missing starting with her daughter Autumn’s dance recital. When did you realize or when did you decide that you would be making this footage into a documentary film?

VALDEZ: Yeah that’s exactly right. I wasn’t a filmmaker when I started this and it’s so funny that you bring that up, that’s actually the shoot or the time I went back that changed everything for me. I was living in New York City at the time and I was flying back to capture moments of my niece was 5, so my sister could watch them one day. And I happened to be back because it was Autumn’s first dance recital and I was filming her get ready and Cindy happened to call, completely organically and she says this line to Autumn, she says, “Do you know what mommy’s going to do when you go to dance? I’m going to lay down in my bed, I’m going to close my eyes and I’m going to think about you.” And I remember hearing that line and seeing Autumn’s face and seeing everything that was racing through her mind and realizing that I had an opportunity to maybe tell a different side of this story. There has been amazing films about the war on drugs and mass incarceration. The Jareckis’ had an amazing film called “The House I Live In”, Ava Duvernay’s “13th”. These are all, they’re amazing films out there. But I felt I had an opportunity to tell almost a supplemental film about the kids left behind, about the family left behind, about what the longer lasting implications of these sentences are. And I dedicated my life to telling the story and to becoming a filmmaker to be able to tell this story.

VALLAS: What did you end up having to do to become the filmmaker that you never set out or expected to be as a part of this project?

VALDEZ: I got a job as a production assistant on anything that would hire me. Commercials, documentaries, movies, anything I could get on because I had zero film experience. I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t know anything about that and I eventually turned that production assistant job into learning to become a sound mixer and I worked with a sound mixer for a little while and then became an additional photographer and turned that into becoming a cinematographer and this is all over the course of nine and a half years. And I end up carving out a little career for myself in film, shooting some for Sebastian Junger and Robert DeNiro and Whoopi Goldberg, among others. And just trying to become the best storyteller and best filmmaker that I could in order to be able to tell this story.

VALLAS: We were talking a minute ago about one of Cindy’s daughters Autumn and one fod the major themes of the film really is that it wasn’t just Cindy who was sentenced to time behind bars. Her children and her family were too. There are some really heartbreaking moments, one in particular where the kids are fighting over the phone wanting to talk to her and it’s like they’re trying to be as close to the phone as possible because that’s the closest that they can get to her. Could you talk a little bit about the effects that these harsh and unjust mandatory minimum sentences have had on your family and on Cindy’s family?

VALDEZ: Yeah, one of the things I like to address when I talk about the sentencing and I talk about the girls is this film certainly isn’t about Cindy’s innocence. We acknowledge that she’s guilty and she made some mistakes and she made some poor choices. What didn’t really sit well with me was her sentence, the sentence she was given and the fact that she was given the sentence nearly six years later, after she had rebuilt her life and after she had really proven that she’s not a detriment to society. Then the government comes and sends her away for 15 years for, regardless of what she had done, she’s a first time non-violent offender. And is given fifteen years and what really propelled me to make this film was, is the girls. And the fact that they weren’t even alive when these things happened and they came back and disrupted their entire life. It was difficult to watch them fight over the phone. It was difficult to watch them have their mom be a phone. And that’s what she became. She became this voice from somewhere else and they would get to go and see her every now and then but watching them deal with the absence and deal with all of that was very difficult and really it is the theme of the film; absence and the true cost of all of this.

VALLAS: And part of what the film really captures incredibly powerfully is that it’s not just the fact of Cindy being behind bars for this incredibly and unjustly long period of time. It’s also how her time in prison plays out and impacts that what might seem like small changes in her situation to folks who are far away from the criminal justice system and from mass incarceration, it might seem like small stuff. But “small stuff” in big scare quotes can have huge impacts for the family and their ability to be part of her life and vice versa. I’ll give one example. There’s a point where Cindy is moved from a women’s prison facility an hour and a half away from the family to a much, much farther away prison in Florida, which drastically reduces how often the family can see her and the film shows Cindy’s mother, her father, her siblings struggling to get themselves ready for these arduous visits. So it isn’t just the length of time she’s behind bars that has real hardship causing impact on the family.

VALDEZ: Yeah exactly and, not to correct you but I will say the closest prison she was at was actually seven hours away, I wish she would have been an hour and a half away. That would have been wonderful. The first prison she was at was in Pekin, Illinois, which was I think a six and a half, seven hour drive away from, maybe eight hour drive away from where the girls grew up and then she was moved to Florida like you mentioned, which is a 22 hour drive away, really a plane ride away. And then from there she was moved to [INAUDIBLE] Kentucky which was about six and a half hours away. That’s one of the themes in the film in the sense that when you talk about the overall criminal justice system and sentencing even if you don’t care about my sister or care about her daughters, one of the things that you should be concerned about is recidivism. People coming out and going back in and the cost of that to our taxpayers, one of things that everyone says, we want people to be able to come out and be a contributing member but the key factors that keep people from going back are connections to family, are conections to the community, are support. And I feel like those examples of only being able to see and touch and be with your loved ones every few weeks and when she was in Florida she saw her children once a year. That’s, all of those days and months and years are putting a larger and larger fracture between her and the very thing that is keeping her from going back in when she eventually comes out. So it, I chose to tell this story and to show these things because we have to look at the bigger picture in all of this. You may not care any of the emotional side of this but you should care about the financial side on the very least. Because these are your taxpayer dollars at work.

VALLAS: Now getting Cindy out of prison was obviously core to what you started this project to do. And spoiler that is ultimately the outcome after nine years behind bars, she is ultimately granted clemency by President Obama but your goal in making the film was a lot bigger it feels in watching this that just freeing Cindy and bringing her back to her family. And I’m struck by this because the end of the film is full of happy reunion moments and of course everyone is so happy and so relieved to have her home. But it’s not a film with a happy ending per se because it remains a story rife with injustice. Cindy has lost nine years with her family, with her kids that she and they will never get back.

VALDEZ: Yeah and my personal goal was to always to try and fight for Cindy to get home as soon as possible but that was never really the goal of the film. I told that to Cindy very early on, that I was never going to stop making this film and use it as an example of why she deserved to be home. I felt like that that would almost cheapen the experience and cheapen the film in the sense that she’s the only one that deserves to get out. I told her that I wanted to tell the larger story. The only way to really make a difference and for this to really be for the greater good the plan was always to film until she came home. And it just so happens she was given clemency and I was able to capture that part of the ride the way it unfolded but I always planned on going the full route with this. And with that said, she was given clemency and she came home. I could have very easily been like well I don’t need to release this film. I don’t need put my family through this scrutiny and the cynicism that comes with releasing such a personal film but I thought this is the promise I made to them. That they allowed me to tell their story, my family allowed me to tell their story and they were open and honest and vulnerable and I wanted to release it because it is for the greater good. It’s not for my family. It’s for the people who are left behind, the people who still have loved ones incarcerated with ridiculous sentences and it just shows that there has to be a better way to do this.

VALLAS: So the film has been incredibly well received, it’s gotten lots and lots of attention, it premiered at Sundance, it was picked up by HBO where it recently premiered and aired and got all kinds of fantastic and well-deserved attention. But apart from buzz, apart from people paying attention to it and seeing it and tweeting about it, what results are you hoping come out of this film?

VALDEZ: Well I hope that it allowed people who’ve been fighting this fight for 30, 30 some odd years to use the film as a tool. I don’t think there’s going to be one person, one organization or one film that is going to make lasting change. I think it’s going to be a combination of a lot of people and a lot of voices and I hope that this film is part of that collective voice that is saying that we need to take a different approach to incarceration and to sentencing because right now it is not set up as a justice system, it is set up as a for-profit system and I think that as long as it’s that it’s never going to be a justice system.

VALLAS: Part of my reason for asking that question is that the film was obviously shot during the Obama years, during a time of significant momentum around criminal justice reform, around addressing harsh and unjust mandatory minimums, that’s often called sentencing reform. Now it’s been released during the Trump presidency and momentum for sentencing reform for addressing mandatory minimums, really for addressing anything significant in the broken criminal justice system feels a lot more stalled in congress at least, although significant momentum remains at the state level for change and for reform. What do you feel in this current political moment which is very different from what it felt like you were shooting this? What are you feelings releasing it in the Trump era for better or for worse?

VALDEZ: To me I feel like I made the film very apolitically. There isn’t a right or left bent to it. I don’t go into the history of the policy, I don’t go into when it was stalled and when it was moving forward and that’s on purpose. Because I think that in order to have true criminal justice reform, it does have to transcend politics in a way. I think that it has to be a hearts and minds change that happens in this country. I think that we have to as people, as humans understand that we can no longer profit on the backs of disenfranchised communities anymore. I think that from the beginning of this entire process when I said I’m going to fight for my sister I was faced with a lot of cynicism in a sense that people were like, well that’s never going to happen. And when I started making this film a lot of people were saying well that film has been made. Nobody wants to see that film. And now that the film is released a lot of people are saying what a terrible time to release this film, nothing is going to change. but I’m an optimist, I have eternal hope that it doesn’t matter when something was brought out. It couldn’t afford to wait. If we wait for the perfect time for sentence reform or criminal justice reform or anything, we’re going to be waiting a lot time. And I’ve taken all of these ‘probably nots’ and probably never going to happen and turning them into maybes and turning those maybes into yeses. The way I’m approaching it is I’m not attacking anybody with my thoughts or the way that I’m approaching, I’m approaching people and saying there’s a better way that is just for everything. And we all want, whether we’re on the right or the left side of these aisles, we all want the same thing. We want a justice system that works. We want our tax dollars going to the right things and we want them used in the right ways. We’re just caught up in a lot of this rhetoric, this partisan rhetoric of hard on crime or soft on crime and we need to look at it a different way and be smart on crime and not dumb on crime. I think there’s a lot of layers to this criminal justice system that need to change and I think there are a lot of layers to fixing it as well.

VALLAS: What does Cindy think about the film? I know she’s seen it a few times, what are her thoughts?

VALDEZ: I think she’s very proud of it. It’s interesting, I showed it to her right before Christmas, right before Sundance last year. And we didn’t really talk about it. I could tell that she was really processing a lot of emotions watching it, she said she loved it at the time but we didn’t do an in-depth talk after or anything. And then she came to Sundance with me, with the rest of the family and she sat through every single screening and I actually stopped sitting for screenings because it was just too emotional for me to keep watching. And it was after I think the fifth, maybe the sixth screening, she looked at me and she said, you know what, it’s actually a good movie. And I was like what have you been watching? What’s going on? And she wasn’t even really able to watch it at the beginning because she said she was just processing watching the girls grow up. She couldn’t hear a lot of it, she couldn’t see a lot of it because it was just so emotional for her to see the girls in their bedrooms and see them at grandma’s house and see them running around, see them on the other side of these phone calls that she remembers. And so it took her a long time to actually process it but I think ultimately she was very happy with what the film has been able to do and how it’s been able to touch people and [INAUDIBLE] to relate to something for people who are going through this so I think she was pretty happy with this.

VALLAS: What’s next for Cindy now that she’s home? What has it been like having her home and having the family reunited? And how is she thinking ahead to what comes next?

VALDEZ: Yeah, she has kind of had this extended honeymoon coming home. She came home under the Obama clemency and then this film was done and we got into Sundance and then we got picked up by HBO and then won the audience award. It’s just been this constant honeymoon, celebration of her coming home. And I think that in a lot of ways she hasn’t been forced to sit down and really look at life. She’s certainly getting her life going and she’s working and spending a lot of time with her girls but I think the buzz from this is going to die down fairly soon and she’s been able to really sit down and look at life and not only her but also the girls and the rest of the family are going to be able to see what the long haul looks like for everything else but right now she’s very positive. And it’s in sight, there’s like you said before, there was this happy ending almost but there’s still this reminder that she did lose nine and a half years and she’s never going to get that back and so I think there’s ramifications on her and the girls are going to be long lasting and there’s still a bit of a fight ahead of us.

VALLAS: Rudy in the last minute or so that I have with you, after your experience not just making this film but living through the experience as a family member of someone sentenced to so much time behind bars in such an unjust way. Again, not getting into the issue of guilt versus innocence but rather the justice or injustice of that sentence and whether it’s commensurate of that activity it’s seeking the punish. What is your one thing that you would change about the broken criminal justice system from your perspective as a loved one harmed by it.

VALDEZ: Yeah, one of the things I will say is I don’t like to call it a broken criminal justice system. I think that we need to understand that it’s working exactly the way it’s designed. It’s set up for people to fail. It’s set up to take advantage of people in disenfranchised communities. I think if I could change anything, if there was one magic thing I could change, it would be take the profit out of it. I think if we can take the profit out of the justice system we can start to see some real change. because as long as there’s money to be made, it’s going to be really hard to change the way it’s being run.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Rudy Valdez, he’s the director of “The Sentence”. Rudy, thank you so much for taking the time and I really appreciate your sharing these very personal thoughts with Off Kilter.

VALDEZ: Thank you so much, I really, really appreciate it.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. “Prison in America causes individual, communal and generational pain and depravation built on a system of racist policies and practices that has disproportionately impacted people of color, mass incarceration has decimated communities and families. But the harsh conditions within prisons either ensure safety behind the walls nor prevent crime and victimization in the community. It is time to acknowledge that the United States has used incarceration as a tool of racial subordination and to radically alter how prisons function by infusing human dignity in every aspect of correctional operations.”

So opens a new report entitled “Reimagining Prison” authored by the Vera Institute of Justice, which this past week led a delegation of US criminal justice reform leaders to Germany and Norway to visit those countries’ correctional facilities and to compare them to the nightmare that is mass incarceration back home in the US. I spoke with Nick Turner, president of the Vera Institute after he came back from the trip. Let’s take a listen.

Nick, I’m so glad to have you on the show, thanks so much for taking the time.

NICK TURNER: Rebecca thank you, I’m really excited to be on it with you.\

VALLAS: Before we get into the trip, tell me a little bit and tell listeners a little bit about this Reimaging Prisons Initiative that you guys are heading up.

TURNER: So three years ago we took a trip to Germany not unlike the one that we just took last week to try to learn a little bit about how that system functions and explode our thinking of what a working justice system should really do. Americans can be pretty parochial and so we wanted to see something really different. And when we got back from that trip, what it really generated in us was a recognition that we needed to be bolder when we think about incarceration and its purposes and the values that underlie it. And so we undertook this initiative that we called Reimagining Prison. Which I don’t know, maybe on some level it sounds a little bit Orweillian and it’s not intended to but it’s really to stop and force ourselves and do what I would describe as generational thinking around the what, how, and why of prison in America. And should we, and how to revisit all of those questions. And produce an argument for why we should be doing something really different and so that’s reimagining prisons in sum.

VALLAS: And I feel like it’s helpful to hear you put it in those terms because often conversations about criminal justice reform start from a place of we have this broken criminal justice system and that might be a platitude that people understand now, it’s gotten enough attention that people are aware, our criminal justice system isn’t working per se. but then there’s the OK what do we do to change it and that often doesn’t get connected to any sort of real understanding of how almost everywhere else in the world and their criminal justice systems look totally different from what we do here and so let’s use that a little bit as a segue into talking about this trip. Who was it who went? It wasn’t just the Vera Institute. You guys actually set up a whole delegation.

TURNER: Yeah so we brought this delegation that probably numbered around 35 altogether. I joked at the outset that it’s like when you plan for your wedding and you think your yield will be 2/3rds of the people will say yes we can make it and then it turns out it’s a much higher ratio than 2/3rds. And that’s what we experienced on this trip, that it was really just a ton of appetite from folks. It ranged from the corrections director of Mississippi who was the only and actually first black woman to run a corrections agency to leading advocates on the left and right, many of whom are formerly incarcerated or have family members who are incarcerated. To the soon to be sheriff of Charlotte, North Carolina, to a correctional union leader in Michigan to people in philanthropy. So it was this diverse and heterogeneous set of people. And that’s what actually made it incredibly fun. Everyone on that trip was a leader in their work here in the states, but we were all students on the trip and we were all learning at the same pace and being exposed to things that we hadn’t seen before and going into this process of discovery so it made it a really powerful adventure.

VALLAS: So walk us through the itinerary. You guys saw a lot of different things and it was a very emotionally charged trip from what I understand.

TURNER: It was really, it was really emotional charged. The first thing that I should say is why did we even take the trip in the first place. And I would say there are really two reasons that we thought it was important. to inspire bold and breakthrough thinking about the kind of reform that we should be demanding and encouraging and pushing in the United States. So to see countries that do things in a dramatically different way if you take Germany they incarcerate a tenth the rate we do, 80% of the people who are being prosecuted, their sanction is a day fine and then a very small minority go to prison

VALLAS: We should probably explain what a day fine is. It’s basically someone paying a fine and it’s not a standard amount, it’s tagged to their ability to pay so that you’re not getting into the kinds of Ferguson problems that we have with fines and fees.

TURNER: You go it exactly, you got it exactly right. And it lasts for a series of days. There’s proportionality and parsimony just to use these legal terms in the German system. So sentences are, you don’t see these massive, 50, 60, 70 year, life without parole sentences. A life sentence in Germany is 15 years. And so the use of prison is far less and for far shorter period of time. So we wanted to inspire some bold thinking, we wanted people to see that and to see how prisons are operating. But the other thing that I think is definitely really important to mention, and this gets to the emotional aspect of it was that we wanted to surface plainly and directly and purposefully an argument about why history matters and how we, the way government works today and to practice and policies. So the German system is fundamentally rooted in a commitment to human dignity. And if you were to ask yourself well where does that come from? It comes from the 1949 German general law which is essentially a constitutional document, the very first provision that says the job and responsibility of the state is to protect human dignity. And that is a direct response to the Holocaust, where it goes without saying that respect for human dignity was anything but, and it was obviously one of the most terrible chapters in the history of human kind. But what the Germans did was they said we have to acknowledge that, we need to atone for it and we need to make sure that we do something and that we reverse ourselves and banish that way of thinking, that way of acting going forward.

Contrast that with America’s ability to come to terms, to educate our young and to own our legacy of slavery and all of the other iterations of racial oppression or white supremacy that exist that I think are now manifesting in mass incarceration. We debated, we haven’t really atoned for it, we argue about what the reason for the civil war was and so as a country we haven’t gone through any kind of process of reconciliation and healing and naming. And so a huge purpose of this trip was to say we need to own this history and we can look to Germany as an example of a country that has done just that. And so we talk about race a lot in the context of the criminal justice system in America and what we were really positing, what Vera was, one of the first and most important things we can do to address that stain of racism is to embrace a commitment to human dignity.

And so the thing that made it super emotional for people was that we began the trip by going to, the very first excursion we took was to a concentration camp outside of Hamburg that at one point had been turned into a prison. And the point of that was really locating, beginning our excursion and the history that is Germany’s and the reason for the commitment to human dignity and later on in the trip we also visited a memorial for murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. And it was very powerful to sit in those spaces and to contemplate what had happened but also to reflect on how that country has tried to deal with it. And I don’t want to white wash and pretend that it has been a simple process that is not ongoing and that there’s not disagreement but there’s at least a broad recognition. And so but you can imagine being in those places and thinking about the destruction of human life, systematic and people thinking about their family members and then also thinking about what’s happening in America and so that brought out a real rawness.

VALLAS: You bring up human dignity and that’s a phrase that seems to have almost no place in the American criminal justice system. But before we get to what’s wrong with the US system by comparison, would love to hear you talk a little bit about how that commitment to human dignity in Germany plays out in terms of what is the role of human dignity, how is it protected within their justice system?

TURNER: That’s a great question and there are so many ways that you see it in operation. So let’s just start at the very, very base which is the system, the value system based on this foundation of a commitment to human dignity that manifests in a variety of ways. It manifests in a sense that when someone is imprisoned, that being imprisoned is the punishment. Being incapaciticated, having your liberty taken away from you is the punishment. And after that, there is no more punishment. Everything about the conditions in which you live and the way you were treated needs to be organized around helping you to heal and to ultimately be successful when you are released. So that itself is rooted in a commitment to you and your humanity and your individuality. So Germans’ talk a lot about people’s right to privacy in prisons. So the doors of the prisons don’t have peepholes and windows because residents’ privacy is respected, shouldn’t have people being able to peep in and look. Residents have keys when they are able to leave their cells for a period of time, they can lock their door because that is their private domain. All of the attributes of being a citizen in society, of being able to read a newspaper or being able to cook or get training or education are retained in German and Norwegian prisons also. So again it is a respect for humanity, people vote in prison. Germans were astonished when they learned that we bar in almost all of the states, people from voting and that we also bar people after they have been released. And I can go on and on. People were called by their names, they’re allowed to wear their street clothes, they’re allowed to decorate their rooms as they wish. If they want to put up pornography that’s fine, if they want to smoke, that’s fine, that is incident of being a human being.

People have telephones in their rooms, they can have TVs. So that’s rooted in a desire to normalize the environment and make it as much as what the outside looks like but it’s also rooted in a commitment that these are the things that make us human. We have names, we express ourselves by what we wear, by how we decorate the places that we live and there’s no desire to take that away.

VALLAS: Now someone who’s listening to this might be saying wow that also sounds fine and good and boy does that sound a lot different from the US system where you’ve got people wearing prison issued clothing that all looks the same. You’ve got people all piled in like sardines, the concept of privacy is something that doesn’t even appear within our correctional facilities for the most part and the rest of the comparisons I think are probably self-explanatory to people who are familiar with even pop culture images of US correctional facilities. But someone might be listening and thinking yeah, but then doesn’t that take the punishment out of doing your time? Would the US end up creating the wrong incentives if we were to make time in prison too cushy? What would you say to someone who raises that kind of a question?

TURNER: Well I think that when someone raises that kind of question what they aren’t atune to is what depravation of liberty feels like. That that’s an incredible punishment to be deprived of the ability to go where you want to go, when you want to go there, to be locked into a cell even if you’ve been able to decorate it and do what you will. That is a punishment and that’s what the germans say. We’re taking away peoples’ liberty, their freedom to associate with whom they want to, their freedom of movement and that is a punishment. And then after that you don’t want to dose them any further with punishment because it’s going to damage them and because people are going to be our neighbors we should really be focused entirely around constructive activities and constructive engagement that helps people to succeed when they’re going to be released. So that exists in Germany and that exists in America just as well. Are you going to, we face a choice, if we want to deprive people and humiliate them and take away their personhood because we think that that’s the right dosage of punishment, what does that look like when they get released? And so I think that it’s very commonsense. In America we’re so accustomed, generationally there’s no one who can’t catalogue mandatory minimums, three strikes you’re out, life without parole and so that has become normed for us and we think that that’s actually the right price of punishment but we’re so extraordinarily aberrational compared to the rest of the world that what we think it’s a norm and entirely reasonable. It’s actually deeply unreasonable when you look at how we compare with other places.

VALLAS: You mentioned most people end up being released at some point and that’s true there, that’s true here, about 95% of folks who are being bars can be expect to be released into their communities at some point and so it is something that needs to be prioritized. A lot of folks from before the day that someone goes inside you need to be thinking about reentry. And yet the US criminal justice system sets up almost every barrier we could possibly come up with to reentry, whether it’s making it impossible for someone to find a job that pays decent wages or to find safe and stable housing or to get into college. These are issues we’ve talked about a lot on this show over the years. How do the outcomes differ in Germany as a result of not just this prioritization and protection of human dignity but also the fact that people aren’t losing basic rights like we take for granted here in the states?

TURNER: So I think most Americans will rush to what they think is the most important outcome which is well what’s the recidivism rate and how does it compare? And I’ll say without getting to scholarly about it that it’s actually, that is, it’s a difficult thing to measure, apples and oranges because Germans and Norwegians measure recidivism in a different way than we do but I’ll say a few things. One is that in the Norwegian system, the success rate is not coming back into contact with the criminal justice system. It was much better than what we have in the United States. But every level of the system, we would see remarkable outcomes. So I’ll give you another example. So part of the German prison system is they have something called open prisons. You can be sentenced there, you can spend all of your time, you can be stepped down into an open prison after you spent some time in a quote unquote, ‘closed prison’ and when you’re in an open prison. You have a cell, which feels like a dormitory room and you’ve got a key to it and you leave during the day and go to work or go to school and go spend time with your family. And the absconding rate was less than 1 percent. So imagine that, a system that preparing you to be, to go back, to be normalized, to go back into everyday society and part of that preparation is saying you need to be able toe work and take the bus to work and make choices about the route you’re going to take or what you’re going to wear or have to negotiate relationships with people. And then you’re expected to come back. And 99.5% of people come back on a daily basis. So I think that’s a remarkable statement about the degree and autonomy and trust that can exist in a system.

I think the last thing that I would say when it comes to outcomes what neither Germany nor Norway had is what we see in this country, which is in this country we have a system of mass incarceration where you can’t possible just confine the outcomes to well did this person recidivate, you have to look at the outcomes of what happens to the family. The economic cost born by spouses, the trauma experienced by spouses and children. The descendant, the poverty that exists for families, the likelihood that a child of an incarcerated person will return, will themselves go to prison. The impact of that on entire communities in terms of their economies and their resilience, and here in America we have these concentric circles of what some people might call quote, unquote ‘unintended consequences’. But are really outcomes of the system we have and that doesn’t exist in Germany and Norway.

VALLAS: What do people in Germany and Norway think and did you have any of these conversations with folks there? What do they think of the US system?

TURNER: It was remarkable. From prison administrators to some young men who we met who were serving sentences in this maximum-security prisons in Norway, they knew our system very well. There were some kids that part of our delegation met in Hamburg juvenile justice system and they said as much as I don’t like being in prison, I am so happy I am not in your country. I’ve seen documentaries, I’ve read about it and what you all do, I can’t understand it but it makes me feel lucky to be here. Prison administrators were astonished at the depravation of rights that we have in America that we don’t allow people to vote, that we bar people from voting that we bar them from a wide array of jobs when they’re released. That they, all of the incidents of being an individual, of being a human being are stripped away. They would look at us quizzically to say I can’t possibly understand why you would even do that. It seems so unconstructive and impractical. So there was, a deep knowingness of the way we do things in America and a polite judgmental-ness, which I think is totally well earned. But I was really struck by how much they knew about the way they do things. And how they were so pleased to see an American delegation coming to learn and there are lots of other delegations that have come to learn so they are happy to be able to host that kind of experiential learning.

VALLAS: You mentioned up top when we started talking that a big part of why Vera undertook this Reimaging Prison Initiative, a big part of the impetus behind this trip and the previous trip was really about trying to reframe the current debate and hopefully broaden, shift the Overton window on what reform starts to look like and I would read into that a little further to assume that part of what you’re thinking about is helping people to see the realm of what’s possible if you get outside of just knowing what our criminal justice system currently does and has done in the past. Do you feel that current criminal justice reform efforts and I mean that broadly because it’s been several years of the past few years, we’ve had bipartisan efforts especially in congress, also in the states to try to overhaul the US criminal justice system. Are those efforts thinking big enough? And I’m going to assume I know the answer to that question and I’ll ask a follow up already to say if not, where would you want to see that conversation go? What are you hoping that this trip, the attention it’s getting and that this reimagining prison initiative is pushing, where do you want this conversation to go?

TURNER: So Rebecca you do know the answer to this question no we are not on almost every level thinking big enough. But I will say that I also understand why we’re not. I have been doing this kind of work one way or another for close to 25 years and we are in a moment right now in this country where there’s a growing public that cares about our issues, criminal justice reform where there’s great activism and mobilization that hasn’t existed for fifty years. This field has become so much more populated. There is bipartisan support and it’s an ahistorical moment. So in a way, what I would say is that nothing of our previous history for the past few decades is necessary predictive or has taught us to be ready for the moment that we’re in. we spent the last few decades playing defense and trying to get wins. So now what I think we need to do is push much, much harder and much more boldly but I understand behaviorally why we don’t sometimes. I think that one particular area where one of the reasons why we focused on this reimagining prisons campaign and publication and brought people to Germany and Norway is when I think our field I think advocates, I think philanthropy, I think many institutions have failed is they haven’t devoted enough attention to conditions of confinement. The argument sometimes is we want to dramatically shrink our system of mass incarceration or we want to abolish prisons altogether so why should we be spending any time thinking about the conditions, that’s just tinkering with the machinery and I think that’s a flawed argument. 2.2 million people who are locked up on any given day who are brothers and sons and fathers and mothers and sisters. If someone who and maybe many of the listeners to this podcast for whom we should care deeply about how they are treated, that they’re treated with respect and treated like humans and given a chance to success. So I’m simply unwilling to accept an argument that addressing the system of incarceration and all of its conditions is not part of addressing mass incarceration. So I want us to think much more boldly than I see a lot of my colleagues thinking and I want them to own this work as being part of our mission. And then I also think that it shouldn’t just be the incremental, let’s create a program here and let’s expand cognitive behavioral therapy and let’s try this small evidence based program. I think we have to get to the fundamental basis of why we imprison the way we do and we have to deal with the culture of prisons and really figure out how to reshape those things. I say it like that’s a super easy thing to do but I think what I’m really just trying to say is that we’re not going to program our way out of this. We’re not going to evidence-based program our way out of this. We have to be much bolder and really try to challenge the what, how and why of incarceration and that’s what we’re trying to do at Vera.

VALLAS: In the last couple of minutes that I have with you and I wish I had hours because there’s so much more that I want to talk with you about in this space and on the heels of this trip —

TURNER: I’ll come back, you know! I’ll happily come back.

VALLAS: Part 2 coming, don’t worry guys, there’s more where this came from. But you mentioned, and I think it’s so important just to focus on this a little bit, you mentioned that the delegation that you brought was this incredibly diverse set of folks, stakeholders from pretty much every walk of the criminal justice reform space. But you also mentioned in the course of that that it was bipartisan and so you had representation across the political spectrum. Here you are, and a lot of folks might be thinking about this listening right now, here you are with this initiative, this trip, this report, all landing in the Trump era in a time where a lot of folks have long ago declared that bipartisan criminal justice reform momentum to be somewhat dead because of this current political moment, what would you say back to that and where is it that you hope this conversation goes in the weeks and months ahead, recognizing that this isn’t the Obama years with the political moment we had previously where people were looking at and seizing on and saying that was the moment for big change

TURNER: Yeah I guess that I would just say that the idea that broadly supported across the entire spectrum of political, criminal justice reform is dead simply is not true. It is clearly wounded in DC and there’s no one can’t possible make an argument that what is happening right now on the federal level approximates the last two years of the Obama administration when I think there was much more momentum, whether it was legislatively on the hill or trying to move the Department of Justice in an entirely different way but we see, we have to remember that the criminal justice system is 90% state and local. And the federal government has nothing to do with that, it might set the mood and maybe what comes out of Washington ends up chilling ambitions for some people. But I’ve seen it in many more places actually galvanize people to say no. I’m going to embrace reform even harder than I did because now’s the time to stand up for what we believe in and so if we have this contrast in DC I’m going to muscle up and do something even more bold than I might have done before. And we see it in lots of places. And we’re working with Vera itself, we’re working with reform minded prosecutors who have been elected on platform that you couldn’t have imagined 4 years ago. And it’s all across the country and their very serious in their commitment to change the culture of their offices and to be more data driven and figure out how they can really make measurable changes to the number of people incarcerated or to racial disparities. We see it in ten states we’ve worked in in the past few years to dramatically reduce solitary confinement and the states are as varied as Louisiana and Minnesota. We are working in multiple states to bring college education back into prison and to do it at scale and so there are efforts in states to repeal restrictions and to increase funding in a big hope that we at the right time will be able to help move the ban on the use of pell grants at the federal level and to repeal that ban. So I think that there’s — I think we’re in a dangerous rhetorical time and there’s a lot less hope in Washington but I also look at what’s happening around the rest of the country and see how busy my staff is and the demands that are being placed on them and know that the momentum has not seized at all. If anything, it has sped up.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Nick Turner, he’s the president of the Vera Institute of Justice and he’s been talking about the Reimagining Prison campaign that they have underway there in partnership with a range of other criminal justice leaders. You can learn more about the project on Vera’s website at Vera.org. you can also find it on our nerdy syllabus page, the report, lots of other goodies that go with it. And Nick thank you so much for taking the time to join the show and for this amazing initiative to try to shed light on how things could be different and how very different they could be.

TURNER: Rebecca thanks so much it was really fun to talk to you about it all.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.