Zombie Repeal

Everything you need to know about Graham-Cassidy (with special guest Topher Spiro), plus Harvard’s decision to deny Michelle Jones because of her criminal record. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Earlier this month, Michelle Jones became a household name after her admission to Harvard’s Ph.D program was reversed due to her criminal record. NYU admitted her, and that’s where she’s begun her studies this fall. But Harvard’s controversial decision to override its history department’s decision to admit her has spurred a renewed conversation about the lifelong stigma formerly incarcerated people can face. Glenn Martin, president of Just Leadership USA and Ed Chung, vice president of criminal justice at the Center for American Progress, join the show to discuss the particular stigma confronting people convicted of offenses we choose to label “violent.” But first, Rebecca and Jeremy sat down with Topher Spiro, vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, for the latest on the GOP’s final hail mary pass to repeal the ACA.

This week’s guests:

• Topher Spiro, vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress
• Glenn Martin, president of JustLeadership USA
• Ed Chung, vice president of criminal justice at the Center for American Progress

For more on this week’s topics:

• Everything you need to call your Senator and give them a piece of your mind about Graham-Cassidy
• ThinkProgress breaks down how people with serious health conditions would be screwed under Graham-Cassidy
• Follow Topher Spiro on Twitter for real-time updates on healthcare
• The New York Times has the full story on Michelle Jones’s rejection from Harvard
• More on JustLeadershipUSA and how people with records are fighting for policies to give people a second chance

This program aired on September 22, 2017.

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. Earlier this month Michelle Jones became a household name after her admission to Harvard’s Ph.D program was reversed due to her criminal record. I’m joined later in the episode by Glenn Martin, president of JustLeadership USA and Ed Chung, the Vice President of criminal justice at the Center for American Progress to talk about Harvard’s decision and the lifelong stigma formerly incarcerated people can face, especially if they’re people this society chooses to label as violent. But first with the latest zombie GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and end Medicaid as we know it continuing to rage on in the halls of Congress, Jeremy Slevin and I sat down with Topher Spiro, CAP’s health care guru to find out the latest on the bill, where it’s headed and how you can get involved in trying to bring it to an end.

[MUSIC]

I’m Rebecca Vallas, host of Off Kilter, Jeremy who are you.

JEREMY SLEVIN: I’m Jeremy Slevin, sidekick, is that my official title of Rebecca?

VALLAS: Well for Off Kilter.

SLEVIN: For Off Kilter. And in general, but that’s a different story.

VALLAS: We’ll get you business cards. Topher, thanks for being here.

TOPHER SPIRO: Thank you, thank you.

VALLAS: So just to bring us up to speed, it’s called Graham-Cassidy, that’s what people have started to call it. It’s as I said, the latest Republican hail Mary pass to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also to end Medicaid as we know it. What’s in Graham-Cassidy, what do people need to know, and what’s the current posture?

SPIRO: What we should really call it is the worst dumpster fire of all the dumpster fires that have come before because it’s actually much worse than previous versions of Trumpcare. Now let’s break that down. First thing, on preexisting conditions, the last version of Trumpcare, it took away essential health benefits so if you’re someone with a preexisting condition who needed prescription drugs or if you needed mental health care, you were at risk. So the last version of Trumpcare did impact preexisting conditions, this one goes much, much further. It allows insurance companies to charge higher premiums for preexisting conditions and you know, they will argue well, it’s not really taking away preexisting conditions because insurers would still be required to offer coverage. But that’s meaningless if insurers can jack up rates by thousands of dollars. We put out a study and Center for American Progress with estimates for various conditions so people would be priced out of the market and essentially completely wipeout protections for preexisting conditions.

VALLAS: So let’s make this concrete before we move on to what else is in the bill. So if there are about 130 million Americans who have some kind of preexisting condition.

SLEVIN: Almost half the country.

VALLAS: Almost half the country, right. It could be as minor as oh I used acne medication when I was in high school right. That’s the kind of thing that has actually caused people to end up being denied coverage back in the days of sort of the wild west before the Affordable Care Act prevented health insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of preexisting conditions. Republicans have been saying, oh no, people with pre-ex conditions are fine under this, we’re not actually taking those protections away but it’s as you described, sort of a shell game where what they’re saying is that states are going to get to decide, right, isn’t that how this works?

SPIRO: Right. States decide and CBO in it’s previous estimate, you all know there’s not going to be a CBO score this time.

VALLAS: Because there’s not time.

SPIRO: For the last bill, CBO did say that about half of states would take up these waivers so that still applies. About half, in half the country would be at risk for taking away preexisting conditions.

SLEVIN: So that could mean someone with life threatening cancer could see their rates jacked up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, is that right?

SPIRO: Yeah, our estimate for metastatic cancer was an increase of $142,000 a year, in a year.

VALLAS: So a person battling metastatic cancer actually there’s a woman who was famously blocked by Trump, she was tweeted about what the bill would do to her, she’s got stage four cancer and she was saying oh my God, this would mean that I’d be paying $150,000 or more a year in increased premiums just to have access to the healthcare Republicans are saying I still have access to. Trump promptly blocked her on Twitter because you know, no comment. But that’s the kind of thing that would actually be now permissible if this goes into effect.

SPIRO: Yeah, some people say well would states really do this? Well if you’re also slashing funding to the states then in some cases they may have no other choice because otherwise they won’t be able to provide subsidies for policies that would cover everything and have protections.

SLEVIN: And we have to remember, dozens of states refused to expand Medicaid after they had that option. So it’s not like states are always the best laboratories.

SPIRO: Yeah, of course. And also remember before the Affordable Care Act states didn’t have this protection so there’s every reason to believe that they would go back to the wild west as you call it.

VALLAS: So moving on just for a minute from preexisting conditions, there’s a lot else in this bill, a piece of it, and you actually just alluded to it, a piece of it that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as in past efforts to repeal the ACA championed by Republicans is that it literally would end Medicaid as we know it. What would it do to Medicaid and what does that mean in terms of states bottom lines as a result?

SPIRO: So this is another reason why the bill is one of the most severe forms of Trumpcare, because it caps Medicaid and that ends Medicaid as we know it because Medicaid is an open ended entitlement, meaning as long as you’re eligible you get the care that you need.

VALLAS: That’s a guarantee.

SPIRO: It’s a guarantee. If you cap Medicaid arbitrarily, at a rate that doesn’t grow fast enough, doesn’t grow with the cost of health care, doesn’t grow with enrollment when there are recessions or when people struck by hurricanes need care. If there’s a zika outbreak and people need Medicaid, it wouldn’t grow. Estimates have found, estimates just came out today that capping Medicaid over the long term, the cap gets more severe, it sort of clamps down on the Medicaid over time.

VALLAS: So bad now, even worse later.

SPIRO: So it’s bad by 2026, but a study just came out today from Avalere which is an independent health consulting firm, they looked at it over a longer term horizon through 2036 that that policy alone, just forgetting about the cuts to Medicaid expansion, would result in 1 trillion dollars in cuts over 20 years to Medicaid.

SLEVIN: And what would that looks like in people terms? Obviously we don’t have a CBO score this time so we don’t know coverage loss. I think it was something like 14 million would’ve lost Medicaid over some of the earlier senate plans. Is this on par with that?

SPIRO: Well this cap that we’re talking about applies not to, this is aside from the cuts to Medicaid expansion. So this is cutting funding for people with disabilities, for children, for other adults.

VALLAS: For veterans.

SPIRO: For veterans, this is a cap that applies across all of Medicaid to seniors. And so there would be coverage losses from that, we don’t have an estimate for that. But when we’re talking about the bill as a whole including cuts to Medicaid expansion and to ACA subsidies, we put out an estimate, commonwealth fund put out an estimate that in 2027 when the ACA funding is fully repealed, so it just expires, at least 32 million people would lose coverage and that tracks a previous estimate from CBO. So we’re just not making that up out of thin air. And then as we’re getting ready to come onto the show I saw the Brookings Institution just released a study like 15 minutes ago, there’s no CBO score so this is the best that we have to go by. Brookings, fairly non-partisan policy wonks estimated that in 2026, 22 million people would lose coverage, that’s right before the funding cliff so then 2027, that’s when people go over the cliff.

VALLAS: So we’re talking about potentially as you said, the worst of any of the repeal efforts that we’ve actually seen yet and it’s like you took the worst part of all of them and jammed them into one single dumpster fire to use the Topher Spiro term that now should be used to describe this bill in every news article about it. So to also take it back to what this means for states, it was actually pretty amazing to see, I believe it was yesterday, a letter came out from literally every single one of the fifty state Medicaid directors, all of them, all fifty, I’ve never seen anything like this. You haven’t seen anything like this either.

SPIRO: I’ve been around health policy for many years and yeah, it’s very rare to have that degree of consensus.

VALLAS: And they signed onto a letter saying they oppose Graham-Cassidy and that this is not something that would be good for their states or for the residents of their states. And they’re joining basically every single advocacy group, every single disease group.

SLEVIN: Every doctor group, nurses, everyone.

SPIRO: AARP.

VALLAS: Disabilities groups.

SPIRO: Even the insurers.

VALLAS: Is there anybody who actually likes this bill?

SPIRO: Just on that Medicaid letter though, I want to pull out one quote. I can’t quite quote it exactly.

VALLAS: I think I have it.

SPIRO: They said it’s the largest intergovernmental transfer of risk in history.

VALLAS: From the feds to the states.

SPIRO: Maybe I got the exact wording.

VALLAS: You actually did.

SPIRO: That’s exactly right and when you think of it that way it’s frightening.

SLEVIN: Can I ask about the opioid crisis? I think something that, in the earlier stages, even some Republican senators were demanding increased funding for the opioid crisis. Of course Medicaid helps a lot of people who are suffering from opioid addictions and cutting it dramatically would result in possibly more overdoses. What does this bill do on the opioid crisis?

[LAUGHTER]

SPIRO: So unlike the last version there is no pot of money for opioids. So it does absolutely nothing and then the massive cuts to Medicaid, another study came out this morning saying $713 billion in cuts to Medicaid through 2026. That’s devastating for people who are hit by the epidemic and the reason why is because Medicaid is the main source of treatment, evidence based treatment and we know that this treatment works and we know there’s plenty of studies showing that Medicaid expansion led to a huge increase in access to this treatment. So it’s saving lives and ending it, cutting back Medicaid expansion will result in deaths.

VALLAS: I want to get into the politics of this but I also want to say one other small piece about, it’s actually a huge piece but I’ll say it quickly about the impact on people with disabilities. I often missed in discussions about what ending Medicaid’s guarantee as you described would mean for people with disabilities is it’s not just taking away their health insurance. It’s not just taking away their ability to go to the doctor. For millions of people with disabilities in this country Medicaid is the funder that provides them with kinds of services that they need in order to live independently in their communities instead of in nursing homes and also to work and so in a lot of ways this bill is a huge anti-work bill for millions of people who would be pushed back to the sidelines like they were decades ago.

SPIRO: It’s really an attack on their way of life, it’s an attack on their quality of life. Medicaid is everything to them, it’s how they remain independent. They have close bonds with caregivers and to take that away is just cruel.

VALLAS: Jimmy Kimmel I think has been better than maybe anyone in helping to popularize what this really means in human terms. We saw him give multiple monologues throughout the week where he really pushed back on some of what one of the proponents of this bill, Senator Cassidy actually was claiming which was that the bill passes the quote, unquote “Jimmy Kimmel test”. What was that and what’s this fight between Jimmy Kimmel and Senator Cassidy for anyone who lives under a rock and hasn’t seen it?

SPIRO: The Jimmy Kimmel test is that anyone who has a kid with a birth defect like Jimmy Kimmel’s son should be able to get access to the care that they need. And Senator Cassidy was fully on board with that a couple months ago.

VALLAS: Came on Kimmel’s show, actually.

SPIRO: Yeah and used his name, invoked his name repeatedly.

SLEVIN: He coined the term “The Jimmy Kimmel test.” Bill Cassidy of Cassidy-Graham.

SPIRO: And I think what was significant was number one, Jimmy Kimmel understands the policy and you saw some coverage the day after that they interviewed experts who said Jimmy Kimmel’s actually right.

SLEVIN: The senators are wrong.

SPIRO: He increased understanding of the bill but I think there was something about calling Cassidy a liar that really struck a nerve and I think before Jimmy Kimmel a lot of the press was reluctant to engage on the issue of preexisting conditions and I’ve been sort of beating up the press on Twitter for not covering this widely. Jimmy Kimmel opened a door to the press, they felt like they could now talk about it because they could go to Cassidy and Graham and say respond.

VALLAS: As opposed to taking a side in this.

SLEVIN: Well and it made it a reality television fight. It’s done so well. It was no longer a backroom bill.

SPIRO: That was the impact of Jimmy Kimmel I think really which is that it really opened the floodgates for the press to cover this issue.

VALLAS: So let’s talk about the politics here. So all eyes are on really the same cast of characters as the last time the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and end Medicaid as we know it was really gaining steam about a month ago. And we’re thinking about John McCain yet again, we’re thinking about Lisa Murkowski from Alaska yet again and also Dean Heller is sort of back in the news from Nevada as well as Susan Collins. What are we hearing in terms of what this bill would mean for their states and what are we hearing from them?

SPIRO: And don’t forget about Rand Paul.

VALLAS: You know, you can never forget about Rand Paul can you?

SLEVIN: Or can you. [LAUGHTER] It was nice and pleasant until you reminded me of Rand Paul.

VALLAS: Well in any order you want, Topher.

SPIRO: Well at least the guy is consistent and he said this morning, I’m not going to take bribes and I’m not going to be bullied. And hopefully you know, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski are in the same camp here. Look this is very simple. If this bill passes it will be because either John McCain or Lisa Murkowski go against their word. Cause they’ve been very clear, Lisa Murkowski, in the case of Lisa Murkowski on both substance and process and John McCain on process, this is not regular order. I know we’re going to talk about that later but if they vote the way they have been talking about these issues then the bill should go down.

VALLAS: So you mention bribes, there’s it looks like there’s sort of a backdoor attempt to bribe Lisa Murkowski in the works, right. And so we’ll see if she goes for that. But I want to talk about regular order here, right. I mean this is something McCain has not been a shrinking violet about. He has said over and over again going back to actually the speech he gave right before he voted yes on a motion to proceed but then ultimately voted no on the underlying bill. He gave a whole passionate speech on the senate floor about the importance of regular order. I felt like I was living a ‘West Wing’ episode at the time. What would regular order look like here under John McCain’s standard.

SPIRO: Well just to draw out the other statements he’s made first. You know, it wasn’t just that speech. After the vote he laid out in two statements the reasons for his vote. So he would be going against every reason that he gave for voting no last time. He wrote an entire op-ed in The Washington Post about regular order.

VALLAS: That’s right.

SPIRO: And like in the last week he’s been almost every single day talking about regular order. So what does that mean? Regular order here means to have not just one public hearing but a series of hearings in the committees of jurisdiction that would be the Senate Finance Committee, and the Senate Health Committee. It means not just hearings where you have testimony from experts and stakeholders, it also means having markups in the committees. Markups means a session of the committee where the members are allowed to make amendments to the bill. They talk about the bill text, they made amendments and then they what’s called report it out of committee to the Senate floor. So there’s a vote in committee first. That’s what regular order would be.

VALLAS: This is the kind of stuff you see in Washington everyday.

SLEVIN: And John McCain knows this right, because he just did it. He led the effort to pass the National Defense Authorization Act. Which I think went through multiple days of markup, multiple hearings, markup on the senate floor. Dozens if not hundreds of amendments offered by both parties. Voted on by the full Senate.

VALLAS: So he’s familiar with the concept of regular order and what it looks like.

SLEVIN: Just saying we’re going to hold one sham hearing effectively and that’s regular order, this does not pass muster.

SPIRO: And if you look carefully at his reasoning for regular order, it’s not just checking some boxes, it’s that he believes that at the end of the day there’s got to be something on health care that’s bipartisan so that everyone’s bought into the reform. Everyone is invested in the solution and has an incentive to make it work, that we’re not using healthcare anymore as a political weapon. So I think that’s what underlying his concerns about process and of course, this is the worst process perhaps in history. The Senate historian said, was quoted as saying, it’s for sure the worst process in over a century.

VALLAS: I hadn’t seen that.

SLEVIN: I didn’t even know there was a Senate historian.

SPIRO: And he said that actually about the last go around. So this is even worse because there’s no CBO score and they’re clearly doing like this sham hearing on Monday in the Senate finance committee which everyone who lives in DC should show up to. Make some noise.

VALLAS: I assume you’ll be tweeting its location.

SPIRO: I already did.

VALLAS: Like I said, you know —

SLEVIN: twitter.com/topherspiro ?

VALLAS: Or you could be on Twitter and just look for his handle cause like a normal person.

SLEVIN: Or google Topher Spiro, there’s many ways to find it. It’s tough not to find it.

VALLAS: So I want to think about the days ahead and kind of what we expect. When are we expecting them to actually try and come to a vote? You mentioned the sham hearing on Monday. They’re rushing things through so fast that there isn’t even time to have a CBO score which is even worse than last time when we at least had a CBO score. And we’re expecting a vote as soon as next week, right?

SPIRO: Yeah, so there’s the hearing Monday. On Tuesday is this special election in Alabama, I don’t really follow this that closely.

VALLAS: I think that’s right.

SLEVIN: Roy Moore, Luther Strange.

VALLAS: This is why we’ve got Jeremy as a sidekick.

SPIRO: The reason I say that is because that Senator won’t be here, so the vote can’t be Tuesday, so we’re looking at Wednesday or Thursday. There’s, I think the 30th is Saturday.

VALLAS: Yes.

SPIRO: But Friday is the Jewish holiday, or Saturday?

VALLAS: Saturday is.

SLEVIN: Friday night.

SPIRO: So really they have until Friday to do it.

VALLAS: So it’s going to be a jam packed week. I realize we neglected to talk about Nevada and we need to do that because of some recent developments. So Nevada has been another state folks have been watching and Dean Heller has been a target for many who have been hoping he’ll listen to his governor. What have we heard from Nevada’s governor? Does he like the bill, does he not?

SPIRO: Uhhhh, Dean Heller. [LAUGHTER] He really screwed up. He signed onto this bill, put his name all over it months ago before analyzing the impact, before CBO score, before consulting with his state, with his governor and it’s totally backfired. Governor Sandoval who’s super popular in the state.

SLEVIN: Unlike Dean Heller.

SPIRO: Unlike Dean Heller, he signed the letter from bipartisan governors led by Kasich and Hickenlooper —

VALLAS: Opposing the bill.

SPIRO: Opposing the bill. Governor Walker from Alaska was also on that letter. And but in addition Sandoval yesterday, for him the letter wasn’t enough. He decided he wanted to really go out and attack this bill yesterday. And issued a scathing statement, I don’t remember the exact words but he said basically that it was a false choice that Heller was giving the state of Nevada because of the massive cuts and he even put out estimates from his own state agencies saying that for Nevada it would mean cuts of up to $2 billion. And Heller all this time has been claiming that the bill would actually increase funding for Nevada so this was really quite devastating.

SLEVIN: These are two Republicans of the same party.

SPIRO: Yeah, yeah. And one’s respected and one is not.

VALLAS: I actually wanted to read —

SLEVIN: The senator actually running for reelection by the way.

VALLAS: He really doesn’t mince words in this statement. It’s pretty amazing, I actually wanted to read part of it. He says, as you said, “Flexibility with reduced funding is a false choice. I will not pit seniors, children, families, the mentally ill, the critically ill, hospitals, care providers, or any other Nevadan against each other because of cuts to Nevada’s health-care delivery system proposed by the Graham-Cassidy amendment.” And he closes the statement by saying, it feels like he wrote an open letter to Dean Heller, right, it feels like the biggest sub tweet of all time. “I have said many times before that I will not support legislation that may result in a cost shift to the State or result in Nevadans losing insurance coverage. I cannot in good faith support the Graham-Cassidy amendment.” Do we think this matters at all to Dean Heller?

SPIRO: It’s funny in that last sentence that he didn’t say Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson.

VALLAS: Right! He should’ve put his name in there, right?

SLEVIN: Because he’s on the bill.

VALLAS: But does it matter at all to Senator Heller?

SPIRO: Well I think if he were to flip again it would, I don’t think he’s going to flip again. It matters to Senator Heller because it matters for his reelection chances I think. So you know, it’s just a gift to Jacky Rosen who’s running against him.

VALLAS: So we mentioned very briefly veterans but I don’t want to gloss over that either. We talked about McCain and his apparently love for regular order that only extends to certain things in Washington and apparently not others. Or maybe not, maybe he will actually make a huge reversal and being a critical no vote again. But it’s absolutely undeniable that McCain is perhaps one of the most vocal people in Washington in terms of expressing care and support for our nation’s troops and for our nation’s veterans. He himself is a veteran and uses that bully pulpit frequently to talk about veteran related issues. But this bill is an absolute disaster for veterans and in particular, analysis from CAP that came out earlier this week that found almost 600,000 veterans would lose their health insurance just through the Medicaid piece of this bill. Not even getting to what it would mean for them because of the loss of preexisting condition protections and rates and premiums jacking up etc. how can McCain in good faith continue to look himself in the mirror or even look the American veterans in the mirror, well not, there’s a lot of mirrors in my metaphor but my point I hope is clear. How can he possibly not be a no vote on legislation that rips away basic coverage and services for veterans?

SPIRO: Well I mean, everything you say is true and is a good point but I think McCain, his objection is not on substance, unfortunately. It should be, he should care about the substance but we have to remember that he is actually very conservative so we shouldn’t lose sight of that. He is, his whole concern, objection is on process and he’s an institutionalist. He cares about the senate. He cares about deliberative democracy. He wants to make sure that the senate operates the way that it should. Now and in the future and I think, I hope he doesn’t want it as part of his legacy but he would essentially be breaking the senate because that’s what it would be. I mean this would be breaking the senate. It would be ramming through a piece of legislation that is one of the most massive pieces of legislation, effecting ⅙ of the economy, tens of millions of people with literally zero debate, no CBO score, no hearings really. Ram through in a couple weeks/

VALLAS: Without a single Democratic vote.

SPIRO: Without a single Democratic vote, very party line with arm twisting, with bribes. It would just I think what worries McCain is that when the tables turn, if Democrats come back into power, that we will just do the same thing back to them, ram through single payer. Which we will.

VALLAS: You heard it here first. [LAUGHTER] For everyone watching, you heard it here first but that’s the plan. But first what do people need to be doing to make sure that this bill does not become law.

SPIRO: I think really just keeping up the calls, showing up at the hearing on Monday. Spreading around information that you see on coverage losses, on preexisting conditions, making sure that your voices are heard. We know that pressure worked last time. And I’ll just give you an anecdote with Lisa Murkowski. She was talking to a constituent who said you know, I’m really scared and I have cancer I can’t even focus on keeping myself well, taking care of myself. And Senator Murkowski, after that met with reporters and said this really had an impact on her. So it matters, your stories matter, and you never know what will make the difference. These are human beings and some of them are human beings.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: We’re checking on Mitch McConnell.

VALLAS: I’m getting it in now, most of them are human beings but we’ll see how many are actually human beings when we have the votes in. If you have not yet called your senator today, please do so now. Keep watching while we’re doing this and go ahead and call and multi task.

SLEVIN: I will add, if you’re in a blue state, you can go to trumpcareten.org. Indivisible has set up a tool where you can reach out to your fellow activists in red states to make sure that you’re still reaching the senators whose votes really matters in this. And if you want to find an event CAP Action, where we are has a sight called resistancenearme.org where you can find an event to go to.

VALLAS: And as you know if you’re a regular listener of the Off Kilter Show, you know that Jeremy only interrupts me to say things I was already going to say. [LAUGHTER] So thank you for that Jeremy. I was also going to say if you don’t know how to call your senator or if you’re new to politics and to activism you can go to www.trumpcaretoolkit.org and it has all the information you need to blow up these senators phones and their twitter threads as well. Topher, thank you for taking the time.

SPIRO: Thank you.

VALLAS: For everything that you’re doing, everything you’re tweeting and for hopefully killing this latest zombie attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act and end Medicaid as we know it.

SPIRO: We’ll know by the end of next week.

VALLAS: We’ll know indeed. Topher Spiro is the healthcare guru and other things at the Center for American Progress. 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. Earlier this month Michelle Jones became a household name after her admission to Harvard’s Ph.D program was reversed due to her criminal record. NYU admitted her and that’s where she’s begun her studies this fall. But Harvard’s controversial decision to override its history department’s decision to admit her has spurred a renewed conversation about the lifelong stigma that formerly incarcerated people can face and the particular stigma confronting people convicted of offenses that we choose to label as violent. I’m joined by Glenn Martin, president of JustLeadership USA and Ed Chung, VP of criminal justice here at the Center for American Progress to unpack what’s going on here and thanks so much to both of you for taking the time to join me.

GLENN MARTIN: Glad to be here.

ED CHUNG: Thanks Rebecca.

VALLAS: So just to bring folks up to speed before we get into this in case folks haven’t been following this story quite as closely as we have, Michelle Jones was convicted of homicide as a young teenager after a period of addiction and violence that she herself was facing that all culminated in the accidental death of her baby. She was sentenced to three decades in prison but was actually released after twenty [years] because of good behavior and after she became a nationally recognized and even award winning historian while she was behind bars in Indiana. She was then recruited by a range of top Ph.D programs including Harvard’s with professors in those programs going so far as to complete applications on her behalf because she didn’t have internet access in prison. Some people, some professors at top ranking universities including Harvard have called her the strongest candidate last year, even that they’ve ever seen in their careers but Harvard then took the extremely unusual step of reversing its own history department’s admission of her to their program, claiming that she downplayed her role in the death of her son. Glenn, what was your reaction when this story first hit headlines.

MARTIN: You know as someone who served 6 years in prison for a violent crime also, a robbery and has been home for fifteen years helping others, you know I was struck by the fact that this country continues to ignore the fact that criminal record based discrimination is a surrogate for race and class based discrimination, whether it’s deliberate or unintentional. And here you have a candidate that fits every notion that we have of redemption and transformation and second chances. And if she can’t get an opportunity, imagine the majority of people who are emerging from our criminal justice system each year, over 630,000 annually are trying to get a job at the neighborhood McDonalds. I mean she exemplifies exactly what we would hope our criminal justice system would produce and what it actually really produces and yet she finds herself in this situation of having her record, the one thing she has little control over, being the determining factor in terms of her ability to attend this institution.

VALLAS: And Ed, I’ll let you chime in as well.

CHUNG: Yeah, I’m a former prosecutor and I think one of the things that we hear from prosecutors is the fact that you want people to be accountable for what they’ve done and you want people to use the time that they are incarcerated to better themselves. And all of that was done by Michelle Jones here. She spent as you were saying three decades in prison and she used that time probably more effectively than anybody else, all three of us besides Glenn maybe, and you Rebecca definitely more than me but a lot of people she outshone her other people in a similar situation but also people who weren’t arrested or people who weren’t incarcerated. And for somebody who has shown that much initiative to make her life better and to provide opportunities once she gets out, it’s a real shame that she won’t be able to do this and pursue her career going forward. It’s everything that we ask of people who are in the criminal justice system. And to not be able to pursue her dreams at Harvard is really a shame.

VALLAS: Now obviously she’s landed I would say perhaps somewhat softly in that no from Harvard but yes from NYU, also obviously a top school but I want to take your point Ed and take it one step farther which is actually and I think we’re going to focus this conversation mostly on violent offenses because that’s a conversation that often doesn’t happen but just worth noting for the record, even a minor criminal record, even folks who just have an arrest that never even led to a conviction or folks who have misdemeanors, those folks can face really forever barriers to higher education as well as employment and housing and more as Glenn notes. So obviously a situation that is incredibly rampant. But Glenn, I want to bring you back in because you noted your own personal experience here as someone who was labeled a violent offender. I want to hear a little bit from you about what that experience has been and what your story has looked like in terms of rebuilding your life despite the obstacles that were thrown up against you.

MARTIN: Sure. You know, in this country everyone is sentenced to a life sentence. And I say that because whether you get a year in jail or thirty years in prison, the fact of the matter is that the scarlet letter of a criminal record sits with you for the rest of your life. For me, I think the most recent incident is about two years ago, which would be 13 years after exiting prison I get invited to the White House to meet with senior policy advisors to the then President of the United States only to find out that my 21 year old conviction barred me from access to the White House under a presidency that was definitely taking a look at mass incarceration and collateral consequences. You know what strikes me in Michelle’s case also is that the institution pointed out that they thought she didn’t do enough to articulate the details of her crime and yet we have a criminal justice system that doesn’t create the space for people, not just to be rehabilitated, but to really repair the harm that they’ve caused and to deal with the trauma associated either with the crime itself or the very trauma that might have led people to engage in criminal behavior in the first place. And then the idea that people would emerge from that very system that leaves no space for rehabilitation and then be able to not just articulate the details of the crime but deal with the trauma in the midst of writing about what that experience was like. I just think it’s totally unfair to suggest that people should be able to do that. And as someone who engaged in criminal behavior myself before I went in prison the truth is it took me years before I realized that I needed to sit down and talk to folks who could help me determine why I engaged in that behavior and what it’s meant and how I saw myself up against the rest of society and so on. And I was lucky enough to earn a quality two year liberal arts degree while I was in prison to sort of help me make that journey. But the majority of people go in and out without any sort of treatment, therapy and I would imagine would have an equally difficult time articulating why they ended up locked up in the first place.

VALLAS: And one of the professors actually I want to bring in a quote here which I feel like so exemplifies what Michelle Jones and folks with records or histories of incarceration are really up against. One of the professors at Harvard who was one of the ones trying to explain the decision to reverse her admission was actually quoted as saying, that Ms. Jones would have a hard time adjusting to Harvard and here I’m going to quote, “where everyone is an elite among elites.” So I think you can hear pretty clearly what he’s saying and what he’s not saying in that, right. So he’s basically insinuating that people who enter Harvard from non-elite backgrounds somehow don’t deserve their places in that class or are destined to fail. Ed, your reaction.

CHUNG: I think it harkens back to what Glenn was saying where we’re talking about issues of race, issues of class and how that is all compounded if you have any interaction with the criminal justice system. And it’s not only if you’re imprisoned for one year or thirty years, it’s if you have a conviction on your record and you have a suspended sentence or you have a conditional discharge or whatever it may be. Once you have that record, you are deemed to be a second class citizen in this country and it is hard for people to get over that stigma continuously through any aspect of their lives, whether it’s education, employment, housing, any basic thing that somebody would need in order to be a productive member of society. And so it really is an articulation, that’s probably a more blatant articulation than what we see from other employers or from other aspects of society and those are the types of hurdles that really needed to be taken down and overcome through the work that all of us collectively need to take on.

MARTIN: I’d love to weigh in on that.

VALLAS: Please, Glenn go ahead.

MARTIN: After 15 years of working nationally as an advocate for criminal justice reform, if I had spent this much time at places like Harvard and Yale and NYU when I was teenager I might not have gone to the prison in the first place. The fact of the matter is that I find myself in rooms with folks from ivy league institutions all the time and my experiential knowledge is just as valuable as their more traditional academic credentials in my experience. I run an organization JustLeadership USA which actually injects in the leadership experiences of people who have served time in prison as part of the solution of mass incarceration. So I am just baffled at how one would minimize the level of intelligence and expertise both traditional and non-traditional that Michelle brings to the table.

VALLAS: I love one quote from Michelle Jones when all of this kind of came to light she said, “Forget Harvard, I’ve already graduated from the toughest school there is.” Kind of a nice and well deserved middle finger back to folks like the professor I quoted. Glenn, back to the issue of people that we as a society choose to label as violent offenders. You mentioned that any sentence is a life sentence. And that’s something we’ve talked a lot about on this show which really is, it sounds hyperbolic to people who haven’t experienced it or maybe aren’t familiar with the data and with the stories of people who face literally life long barriers to being able to get a job or an apartment or a home or into college because this stuff really doesn’t ever go away. But this is especially the case for people that we as a society choose to label as violent. You are one of those people because of the nature of the crime that you were convicted of. But this is also something that advocates looking to achieve change and criminal justice reform whether through sentencing laws, ending of mandatory minimums or whether through policies to actually give people meaningful second chances. A lot of the advocates working on these issues are actually in many ways taking steps that might be counterproductive as we think about how to ensure that people who are labeled as violent offenders aren’t sort of thrown into a dark room with the door locked forever as we help the lower hanging fruit of people who are non-violent.

MARTIN: Sure. When I came out of prison and ultimately found a job after visiting about 50 different employers at the first desk of a public interest law firm, I was struck by how many folks who label themselves as progressive in the field weren’t being intellectually honest about how we got here. I mean the fact of the matter is that mass incarceration comes out of ratcheting up punishment for everyone involved in the criminal justice system, not just the folks with non-violent crimes. And we have a criminal justice system that’s hugely bifurcated where we use labels that define people and draw really bright lines that don’t match the reality of people and people end up in the system. And whether it’s violent versus non-violent or offender versus victim, the fact of the matter is that our system has turned into this huge conveyor belt where it’s just easier to label people and send them on their way. But the person who gets arrested for drugs one day might be the very same person who might’ve gotten arrested for a violent crime the next day and that shouldn’t change one, the way we treat them but two, the opportunities available to them once they emerge from the criminal justice system and I think people have really bought into this idea that you put people in prison and you throw away the key and you lock the gate and the fact of the matter is that 95% of people who go to prison are going to return home at some point and the question is how do we want them to return. Whether it’s a violent crime or a non-violent crime.

VALLAS: I misspoke earlier, I said that Michelle Jones had been sentenced to thirty years in prison. She was actually sentenced to 50 years in prison and was released after twenty for the reasons that I mentioned before. But Ed, this is something that you’ve seen from the perspective of a prosecutor actually bringing these cases. Does that concept, that binary of violent, non-violent, even really make sense?

CHUNG: Well it’s interesting because we in the criminal justice, or practitioners in the criminal justice system like to label people instead of labeling the act or actually defining the act. And the labeling of people sticks with you for a long time or for a lifetime in a lot of situations. So even if you were to consider for example, for whatever purpose you want, a particular act to be a violent act, it is completely to say that a person is violent because as Glenn was saying, it’s not only about whether somebody who has committed a nonviolent felony or nonviolent crime later could potentially, if they were caught, may be convicted of a violent crime, people who haven’t been convicted of crimes at all who actually acts of quote, unquote violence like if you get in a bar fight or you get in some altercation with somebody else but you’re not caught or arrested.

VALLAS: Or domestic violence that goes on everyday.

CHUNG: Exactly, I mean there are so many situations where that happens where we don’t label a person but because you were caught up in the criminal justice system, now you’re labeled a violent felon or a felon and that sticks with you forever. And so the question is whether or not it makes sense to continue those labels, especially for example, if you’re in prison and you’re considered a violent felon, you don’t get the programming in a lot of situations or access to programming or you don’t get good time credits if you do fulfill a particular programming that is intended to make people have a better chance to succeed afterwards so the way that we label things, we should take a look back and see where these labels have started from because as we all know, prior to maybe the recent five to ten years, a lot of our criminal justice policies were just done on a moral basis or on a gut feeling intuition basis and we really need to dig down to see what those consequences are of labeling people the way that we do in the criminal justice system.

VALLAS: Glenn, I think you were trying to get in there as well.

MARTIN: Yeah you know I totally agree that violent behavior tends to be situational and should not be attached to the individual. You know I just look at the recent storms that we had around the world and how we talk about getting provisions to those Caribbean islands for instance that were harmed by the storms. Why? Because the longer people go with scarcity, the more chance that they’ll engage in violent behavior and I think it’s just an outright admission that a person is not a violent person but people are put into situations that breed scarcity and there are a ton of other examples. People sometimes engage in violent behavior but that doesn’t mean that people should be labeled with the worst thing they’ve ever done for the rest of their lives.

VALLAS: Well and of course to state the obvious, there are a lot of situations that our society condones as ones where violence is OK or is even the right response. So whether that’s self defense, whether that’s stand your ground laws, this has obviously been a huge discussion and one that is absolutely fraught with racial undertones as well. I mean this comes up in a lot of contexts so is it fair to say that our society is sort of struggling with or maybe needs to be struggling a little more with kind of the concept of what is violence and how do we even handle it through our social policy? Ed, you looked like you wanted to answer that.

CHUNG: Yeah I think you raise a really good point about the arbitrariness of how we label people as well. So one, an act that may be considered violent based on a declaration by a legislature to say that this is OK, the same act in a different context or in a different state or in a different jurisdiction could be completely against the law and now you’re stigmatized for the rest of your life. And so it is a real hard conversation because obviously the issue of violence and public safety is something that everybody is concerned about. But the idea with how we as a society and how the government responds to this is really important because what the government does is really what sticks with people for a long long time. And so I think these are again, really hard issues and really deep issues but I’m glad we’re raising it here because it really needs to be discussed.

VALLAS: And I also just want to say I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge, no one in this conversation is trying to discount the reality of the crime that occurred. A child died, there’s a lot of confusion around the circumstances of the child’s death. That’s a lot of what’s been reported in the last week or so since Michelle Jones’ kind of un-admission broke and became a headline. But it also was a situation that was extremely difficult for her and this is another challenging conversation. Our society doesn’t just decide which things are legal and illegal. It also decides when we should consider mitigating factors and a young woman who at the age of 14 is facing domestic violence, abuse by her own parents, addiction, trauma, all kinds of situations. Obviously a very complicated situation and now one where I’m trying to discount the underlying crime but it feels to me and I want to turn it back over to you, Glenn, it feels to me that the parallel conversation that’s happening here is when are we ready to allow someone redemption? What does redemption mean and is it even a meaningful concept in this society if we’re going to say after someone has served their sentence, served two decades behind bars and become literally a national treasure within the minds of historians because of the work she’s managed to do against all kinds of obstacles and even a lack of internet access behind bars. When are we ready to say that someone deserves redemption?

MARTIN: You know our criminal justice system pays a lot of attention to punishment and punitiveness and retribution which all plays a role in our criminal justice system. But our system has become devoid of things like opportunities and second chances and redemption and transformation and things like parsimony and proportionality. The fact of the matter is that someone who, you talk to victims about what they really want. Most victims say I want the person to never do it again. And we know that if people come into the system and we don’t address the underlying issues that got them there in the first place, whether it’s mental health, trauma, lack of opportunity. That people based on statistics probably will engage in some sort of behavior again. And so we have a criminal justice system that turns out two-thirds of people who go back within three years and normally not for the same crime actually, even if they have a violent crime because age out of criminal behavior. But at the same time, if we want a criminal justice system that repairs the harm that’s been caused and that allows the individual to return to society redeemed and prepared to engage in employment and housing and education and so on, then I think we need to rebuild our system from the ground up. And before we do that, we need to ask ourselves what sort of values should underlie that system. Because if we keep doing what we’ve been doing we’re going to get the very same outcome that we’ve been getting which is not just that people are punished repeatedly in the system for long series of time where you have diminished public safety but then they have the stigma of a criminal record for the rest of their lives, it seems that they can never overcome the original experience.

VALLAS: So in the last minute or so that I have with you guys I also just want to pull out one of the silver linings that I saw from this conversation and from some of the news coverage and some of the quotes of people involved in this series of events that now have ended up in the news coverage. And that’s that some of the proponents of Michelle Jones being admitted to Harvard, some of the folks who actually took it upon themselves to fill out the application for her because she couldn’t without internet access, they actually saw her former, her background as a former incarcerated person as an asset because of her desire to work in the criminal justice space and because of the growing academic interest in incarceration itself. Are we potentially at a moment, maybe even a crossroads, where we could start to see the scales tip in a way that people start to realize that the experiences with the justice system which now actually describes 1 in 3 Americans is actually something we should be seeking as part of diversity. Ed, first your reaction and then Glenn.

CHUNG: Yeah, I think it’s interesting to have this particular conversation, especially when the issue of diversity in higher education is prominent in our conversation today. And diversity can take a lot of forms obviously. Racial and ethnic diversity is a really important one here but life experience is also very important and I remember my college experience. I came from a small school in rural Ohio and the type of people that I interacted with when I was in college, the more diverse it was the more I learned. And you go through in college these kinds of roller coaster type of waves where you learn from other people as much if not more than you learn from your professors. And I think it’s really interesting to have this conversation in the context of education but the same philosophy goes forward when we are talking about interaction in everyday life too. And so I really do think that when we’re talking about future opportunities for people we can’t just pay it lip service and say we need to do this and that. We need to make sure that the type of experiential diversity permeates everything that we do and we can’t do it just by osmosis. It has to be a deliberate way to go forward and make these changes to whatever institutional policies there are because otherwise it’s just not going to happen.

VALLAS: Glenn, you’ll get the final word.

MARTIN: You know the first time somebody said to me you should go to college I was sitting in a prison cell facing 6 years of incarceration and sitting in class and learning sociology and psychology and religion and Russian literature, I mean I experienced more freedom in those books in a prison cell than I did growing up in a tough community in Brooklyn, New York. And the fact that we would surprise people who make it to the doors of our higher education access to me is not just antithetical to our articulated values in the United States of second chances but really a disservice to all of the victims that rely on the criminal justice system in the country that’s going to help make people whole again and keep them from reoffending.

VALLAS: Glenn Martin is the president of JustLeadership USA, an organization that if you don’t know much about it you should check it out. Ed Chung is vice president of criminal justice for the Center for American Progress.

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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.