The Profound Harms of Prison with Dr. Reuben Jonathan Miller

This episode features a critical conversation with Dr. Reuben Jonathan Miller, assistant professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work,  Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago and author of the new book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. Dr. Miller’s book tells the story of prison release and community reentry through the experiences of individuals he worked with closely and followed for over a decade. In our conversation, we discuss how disadvantage is the root of crime, which is cultivated and perpetuated by our laws and criminal justice policies. We undercover the difference between true accountability and our present forms of punishment and discuss how prisons do not adequately achieve safety for anyone in our society. When thinking about ways to enhance security and pursue justice, we discuss the importance of creating a sense of belonging for all, as our work demonstrates how individual and local-level alienation causes global harm.

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Transcript

Abbie Henson: [00:00:02] Welcome to critical conversations. My name is Abbie Henson and I'll be the one conversing with our guests. And I also serve as an assistant professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona state university. After the killing of George Floyd, my social media blew up.

I kept seeing posts and reposts as stories, all about criminal and social justice issues. However, much of what I was seeing were just. Flat words that lacked voice and depth and nuance. And so I wanted to create a space where those words could come alive. I wanted to engage in dialogues with people who had actually been impacted by the criminal justice system, whether through their own experience research or both, I felt this was the moment to think critically to examine the complexities of our system in place today.

And to figure out how to move forward in a way that allows for equity and true justice. So I started hosting live webinars, both in an attempt to have the audience be active participants either by raising their hand and joining the conversation, or by contributing a question to the chat box and to also build a sense of community and togetherness in a time when we were.

So isolated through quarantine, but because of zoom fatigue, and with people starting to slowly move their lives beyond the home has places open up. I wanted to figure out a way to keep these conversations going away from the screen. So I started this podcast in order to reach a broader audience and keep these issues in your ear.

As you move throughout your day. And while it can be really overwhelming to think about how to change a massive system, that seems so ingrained in the fabric of our society by participating in these conversations. And yes, you just listening to this podcast is participating. That is where we see true change beginning.

Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining me in this critical conversation with Dr. Rubin Jonathan Miller assistant professor in the crown school of social work, social policy and practice at the university of Chicago and author of the new book, halfway home, race, punishment, and the afterlife of mass incarceration.

Dr. Miller's book tells the story of prison release and community. Re-entry through the experiences of several individuals. He worked with closely and followed for over a decade. In our conversation, we discuss how crime is the root of disadvantage, which is cultivated and perpetuated by our laws and criminal justice policies.

We uncover the difference between true accountability and our present forms of punishment and discuss how prisons do not adequately achieve safety for anyone in our society. We think about ways to enhance security and pursue justice by discussing the importance of creating a sense of belonging for all, as our work demonstrates how individual and local level alienation causes global harm.

I hope that you enjoy this episode feeling engaged and please as always continue the conversation once the episode. Yeah, 

Reuben Miller: [00:03:29] my name's Rubin Jonathan Miller. I'm an assistant professor in the crown school of social work, social policy and practice at the university of Chicago. 

Abbie Henson: [00:03:38] So you just wrote this great book, halfway home, race, punishment, and the afterlife of incarceration.

I ate it up in two days and. So I think something that you do that I think is so important is that as an author, as a scholar, you really bring in your vulnerability and your story. One of the purposes of this podcast is really to get into the nuances and the complexity of these issues that we so often.

Either brush over or think in very limited terms. And so the idea that your questioning was so nuanced, right? You have this insight to ask, not just, you know, walk me through the first day back, but walk me through what it was like to reenter your child's life, or was it even possible to reenter and understanding the.

Much broader impact of incarceration. And I think that's something like you'd call it the afterlife of mass incarceration, and you're talking about the experience returning home, but I think it's also the afterlife of this movement, right? The afterlife. The social implications of what mass incarceration is.

The current state of society that we're in today is the afterlife of mass incarceration, right? We, the relics of mass incarceration are still very present in many neighborhoods. The idea that mass incarceration has quote, unquote ended, or at least plateaued is. A very privileged position to believe.

Reuben Miller: [00:05:28] Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you think that if you think that going from 2.4 million people in a prison, to going to 2.2 million people in the prison on a good year, which popped back up to 2.4 million people, I think last year, and it's back down to 2.3 million people, if you think outpacing, but doing a little better than you used to, but still outpacing every other nation in, in the, in the history of the Western world is.

Is it the end of a thing? I don't know, like our assessments, our assessments are just different. Like assessment strategies is very different, different things, but this point about the afterlife I wanted to, you know, have you, I want to, um, thank you for picking up on that. Absolutely. Like the point of the book is about how mass incarceration has transformed the social world in ways that we did in formal and informal ways.

So we could count the number of people in a jail or prison. But even in the formal counting of it, you're missing these millions of people that, that are, that are, that are living, who are moving in and through community. And you're missing the many millions of people who pass through it before. In other words, you're missing the social structuring.

End of something that we're calling a social structure. You're missing it. The prison is an institution. Mass incarceration is an institution. It's a social institution. And so we're missing, we're missing the institutional dynamic of it. In other words, you don't have these, of course, forgive me. I'm just, I'm just like having a wrap for the, for our listeners, but like, To say something as institutional, as to say that it's something that, that it is a set of practices that have occurred over time as much a concrete thing that we encounter a place to go, the prison or the jail with people who work there.

And who've been touched by it as it is. A way to understand the world that we live in and something that shakes everything else. The fact that tagging me as a criminal and everyone from my neighborhood is a criminal. Whether or not we've committed a crime does work in the world. And I, and I, I wanted to reveal as I try my best to reveal some of the work that it, that it does.

And this is the ASCA life is the lingering effects. It's also the beliefs about me and people like me. But not just black people. This is this, this is very important, you know? Um, Black, you know, I'm black man proudly, happily live in a black neighborhood by choice and on and on. But by mass incarceration, does doesn't impact black people though.

It impacts us disproportionately. You know, there's a really interesting article. I think it was the Washington post just yesterday. It was like, now that mass incarceration is impacting white people, you know, maybe there's room for change, but it's not just now impacting white people. It's been impacting white people.

There's been a million white people in jails. Across the country. The problem is that the country operates on this racist calculus that links blackness with criminality. So powerfully that we can't see the million white people that we've locked in a cage. We can't see the, the fact that 38% of white men will be arrested by the time they turn 23 in this country.

We've known that since 2016, that's when that paper was published. It was also like that paper was worked on for probably two or three years before that week. So we've known this for half a decade. Murray guys. Chuck has been telling us probably for a decade that if you, if you let every black person go from an American jail or prison, you'll still have one of the largest prisons in the world.

Okay. So it doesn't stop at the threshold of the black family. So then the impulse for a reform, I think should be ethical, moral. I think you should not do this because it's an evil thing that comes from my faith tradition, but there's also some self interest here. We, we, we dammed up our country, look what we made.

Look, what we've done is this, the country is, is this what we want? Like, that's the, anyway, I'm jumping ahead of myself.

Abbie Henson: [00:09:19] I mean, no, a couple things. I think I'm almost seeing the prison as like the nuclear bomb. And then you have the after effect, right? You have the cloud that just. Filters out through the community. And so, yes, there's this prison, which yeah, you're saying is this institution have a place to go, but it's so far removed for so many people that it becomes so abstract.

And I think. It's obviously very purposeful why that's done, but it, it, it then permeates into all of our belief systems, all of our social structures, our neighborhoods, and it's not. The idea of incarceration, you can take that literal to prisons and jails, but incarceration is also boundary system, a limiting of opportunity of areas for success.

And so when we think about freedoms and I think we can move now into this idea of, of holding freedom, ransom, and the idea of accountability and the idea that. There are so many people who are not free from birth, right? Like the, the incarceration is not just. With handcuffs, it's being shackled at birth to social perceptions of what blackness means in America.

Reuben Miller: [00:10:53] Yes. And the reason why I brought up white folks a high second ago is because like slavery, you can't build an institution that doesn't harm everybody. There's a, there's an academic concept of a social institution. That's overused. I think in some ways that overuse it. In that it gets kicked around without people really talking about what it is, because, because a lot of people understand what it is obviously, but, but we don't, we don't spend time with it.

I don't, I don't think we take it seriously. You know, the idea that there's socialization, there's an appreciable segment of the population has done it, experienced a set of things like military service when there was a draft, like the labor market, like the law, like education. Um, marriage when that, when there was a premium on, on, on, on that, but now romantic partnership, maybe we might say you can expect most people, if not all people to experience this well, you can, you can expect half the country to have a loved one that goes to jail or prison.

You can expect half the country. So the thing that, that maybe we thought at one time defined, confined and controlled black people, Doesn't just do that for black people and actually never has it. Does it disproportionately for black people? But, but, but, but it does it to whoever the us is in the equation too, but the way racism works as it is, it links, it links blackness and criminality.

So tightly, exactly. That, that, that, that we ignore what we're doing now. We, um, I'm embodying a we, right. I'm embodying a, we, that doesn't include me. You know, but that we does it to our own kids with eating our young. So, so if the, if the, if the folks at APAC or whatever, the convention was day before yesterday, you know, who was celebrating white people like the, the, you know, the country with me, the country that white people you're arrested 38% of your kids, man.

Right, right. The rest in 38% of your kids, man. Okay. Okay. So, so like one thing, one thing the question was about. Freedom. I need to go back to our question. It was a question on the table.

Abbie Henson: [00:13:08] I think it was more a statement of sorts, but I think, well, first of all, let's go in. When we're talking about freedom, let's go in. So many of the individuals that you speak about in the book. So we should all know 95% of cases brought forth in the criminal justice system are resolved, resolved as a strange word, but are resolved through plea bargaining, which is essentially when the prosecutor comes forward with a quote-on-quote bargain that.

The individual would have to plead guilty to this crime in order to get often reduced time. So it's almost as if you are forcing an individual to choose their fate and. A story that I can recall from my research is there was a guy who was, and this is similar to a lot of the stories that you put forth.

There was a guy who I interviewed, who got arrested on felony gun charges. He was in jail for four years as they were building the case against him waiting trial, pretrial. He is not convicted. He is not. You know, I mean, obviously he is presumed guilty, but he's still under the guise of presumption of guilt or innocence until proven.

So he is sitting waiting four years. He has a kid four years finally come to him. They say, look, we'll give you time served. If you plead guilty, you get your freedom. He's like, well, shit. Yeah. I need to get outta here. He now has a felony on his record. He cannot get a job and he was innocent. And so these are the ways that we, when we think about incarceration as the shackling, as the limitation of freedom, it's not just, you commit a crime, you go to prison.

It's all of these systems that are in place that. That shackle people, you know, there's, there's the social perception of criminality, but then there's the actual shackling to the concreteness of criminality through a criminal record and how that's compounding the limitations that the criminal justice system.

Reuben Miller: [00:15:37] Creates 45,000 laws policies, administrative sanctions that target people with criminal records. So that's, what's waiting on your guy when he gets out, when he walks out, you know, a house is not waiting for him. A receiving committee is probably not waiting for him, you know, in the, in the documentaries, all the documentary show, you know, the folks waiting that, you know, after the jail with the signs and they take them to their first meal and buy him some underwear and it's all lovely.

And maybe some version of that happens sometimes. But, but I didn't see that once I saw an old lady or an old man, pardon me, you know, you know, probably shouldn't call people old, stuff like that, but I saw elders, you know what I mean? And, and you know, or, or a girlfriend or a brother or, or a friend or nobody when folks walked outside that door, it wasn't some warm welcome.

Give you here's your freedom? What, what, what do you mean by that? Now I've got this record that prevents me. Because of housing policy, not because of stigma necessarily, but that two housing policy prevents me 50 housing laws in the state of Illinois, you know, similar laws in almost every other state, 19,000 laws, policies and sanctions across the country that locked me out of whole categories of employment, entire hundreds of kinds of employment.

That say, if you've got a felony record, you need not apply. That's that's that's the world this person walks into and this presumption of guilt, this was something that, that, that, that I think you started, he knows I'm gonna blame you for this, but there's no presumption. There's a chapter in the book where I talk about black Guild specifically, and the production of black guilt, which I think starts at the moment of colonial encounter.

It's once you accuse someone of a crime, Then, and then I can talk more about that, but, but I think, I think just staying with the current example, this is probably more important right now is once accused of a crime not come back in once, once criminal justice resources have been set to your neighborhood, the fact that police are there send a signal that police should be there.

These are the social science experiments that once people read statistics on mass incarceration, they're more likely. One is white people. I should, I should be clear, read statistics on mass incarceration. They're more likely to support the kinds of policies that lead to over-incarceration. So, so when they, when they read about racial disparities, when they, when they, when they heard about them, when they saw pictures of them, you know, this is, um, uh, Hettie and Eberhardt's work specifically when they saw pictures of.

Uh, uh, that represented the over-read, the, the, the deep over representation, black folks being five times more likely to in jails, much worse, seven to eight times more likely to be incarcerated, uh, than everywhere else. They favored even unconstitutional policies like stop and frisk after it was found to be unconstitutional.

They, they, they, they, they, they favored, you know, three strikes rules, despite how, how, how that sounds. If you get caught stealing a loaf of bread. And it's your third violation. You should go to prison for life. Like, they'll think about that for a hot second. The way that even sounds it's it's it, it doesn't sound like anything.

We say our American values. It doesn't sound like it on face value. It seems like, but because criminal justice resources justify criminal justice resources because of how we've like blackness the criminality. So that's black, that's criminality and race, but because we think that, uh, crime and behavior that criminality and behavior, that the way to get around all this criminality is to do behavioral modification.

That's the answer, stop what the person thinks, feels and does. And then you'll reduce the prison population somehow, because we think that there's a direct link between the number of people in the jail or prison and things that people have done. And this isn't saying that people don't do things. People do terrible things, but we don't recommend with the things that people actually do.

We don't really reckon with it. I think, I don't think, I don't think we actually reckon with the actual specter of violence, the actual acts of violence and violent acts that people do. I think we just lock them away and throw away the key. We lock them up and say, Yo go over there and get away from me.

I'm afraid of you. We, we don't, we don't really wrestle with the act. We don't think about what accountability is and what it could look like and how to achieve it. We don't really think about what victims need or want. We, we don't, we don't really think about what that person needs or wants to not engage in these kinds of patterns and practices and behavior that we're so afraid of.

So when we need to deal with. The behavior that we say we're trying to deal with. And we also start presuming that people who are in jail or prison deserve to be in jail or prison because of the things they've done, which is an indication who they are, who they are. 

Abbie Henson: [00:20:33] You do such a great job in your book.

Uh, contextualizing, there's obviously emotion involved because you are an individual and you are human, but you do a really good job of just stating the facts and under, and, and providing context, which I think is. What is so missing from our criminal justice system, right? Like we, because we, it functions in the ways that it does and we just accept that police need to be in this community.

We just accept that this individual needs to be incarcerated. We don't unpack why these things are happening. And without that unpacking, it just persists in these activities. 

Reuben Miller: [00:21:16] Yeah. Yeah, no, I appreciate that very much. I, I was trying my best to be honest. Right, honestly, to, to re to report, which is not a word that social scientists use journalists, mostly talking about reporting, but to, to relay the data, uh, as it, as it's shown up and to, and to try to understand how people got into the situations they were in, you know, and some people made some terrible decisions that, that, that comes with.

Crime happens is, is, is a real thing. Like, look, you know, you, violence happens and abuse happens and problems happen. Question is how do we respond to it? You know, and, and, and is it the right response, but, you know, but to mention one guy in the book, you know, there's, there's, there's a brother Martin who I follow Martin is, is in a situation where he's abused serially, you know, he's sexually abused.

It's interesting how often cases of sexual abuse come up in this country, whether you talk to men or women. If you talk to people long enough, if you form enough rapport with people, they'll tell you they'll express to you. If, if, if you spend enough time with them, it's not the kind of thing that comes up, you know, and after one cup of coffee, you know, but if, but if, but when people, when you gain people's trust, And I say this as someone who's done some therapeutic work, I say this to someone who's, who's been a chaplain for years to say this to someone who, who, who spent years spending time with people, criminal justice involved in not serial sexual abuse is a problem in our country.

I think some evidence of that, or the thousands of untested rape kits in every police station, every major city and, you know, Anyway, long story short, I, you know, Martin was the victim of serial abuse, including sexual abuse, multiple times over his childhood. You know, he takes the drugs and he's homeless.

And he had a friend who was murdered too, which is also something that tracks closely along with things like homelessness in this country. So this is interesting, all kinds of dangers that track with things like housing and security. And general precarity meaning the, the inability to sort of provide for one's basic human needs.

The fact that the jobs that you can get are the worst kinds of jobs that go away today. If you're able tomorrow, if you're able to get them, if you're able to get them the facts. So these 19,000 laws that target employment, the thousands and thousands of laws that regulate housing, the thousands of thousands of laws that regulate civic participation produce precarity.

And we know that with procarity comes an exceptional amount of danger. Vulnerability to sexual violation, vulnerability to murder vulnerability, to all kinds of hard tracks with the kind of precarity that our laws make in response to people responding to their precarity is this crazy wild cycle. Okay.

But so with Martin, Martin turns to drug use. After this life of trauma, after his friend dies, his friend dies, his friend is murdered. It doesn't die. Fred is murdered. Martin is 13. Martin starts drinking from drinking. He starts using harder drugs and he walks me through this story. And some of this is not in the book at all.

Actually, this isn't a book, but some of this there's some stuff that's, you know, you know, you spend lots of time people and there was no social service there for him. The the, the police, the police weren't like, yo Martin, what do you need? In fact, he was assaulted. The police did not hold the person who assaulted him.

His friend retaliated against the guy who sexually assaulted Martin and the police arrested the man who protected Miami. So now my, this is Martin. As a child, Martin Martin becomes an adult. Martin turns to drugs and alcohol and Martin is homeless for a decade, which makes sense. If you follow this life and they arrest them for trespassing, misdemeanor crimes seems like no big deal until he gets arrested for having three crack rocks in his pocket.

And then they say, look at your arrest record. You need a felony conviction now. And he has Martin who has a child, was violated many times, many ways. Where were the police? Then nowhere to be found. Here's Martin who gets arrested multiple times for coping with, with, with, with the problems in the best way that he knows how and the response to him.

It's the label, him a Fallon, and then to continue to exclude him. Now, the fact that Martin's able to pull his life back together, he becomes this homeless active, like an activist who works with form like homeless people that goes back to the encampments where he used to sleep. When he passes out, foodie starts a ministry.

He's a he's, he's just a powerful, remarkable, beautiful brother. Like. But everybody's not powerful, remarkable, beautiful. He's remarkable. This is the point that he's alive, that he didn't jump off a bridge that he did, that he did, that he didn't harm himself further than it. It's remarkable that, that he made it, that he saw in that we, we presume that the right way to go is to find the exception.

It's the silliest thing in the world. We wouldn't expect that of anyone else, but we expected of. 

Abbie Henson: [00:26:31] Yeah. And I think that's where I kind of want this conversation to go into is the idea of accountability and rejection. So what does it say about our country that our, the ultimate punishment is the removal of freedom, right?

It's it's not holding someone accountable, it's just removing freedom. And, and what does that mean and why. In this country in particular, does freedom have such strong implications and such such value and who it's pretty amazing, but there are just a select few people who get to decide. Whether someone is free or not.

Reuben Miller: [00:27:24] Yeah. Yeah. It's such a, it's such a powerful point. I don't know that I have a clear answer for why freedom and the restriction of freedom is, is, is, is, is sort of the go-to. I will say that, you know, if we think about the history of corrections or something like that, we see we're in a place where we've given up.

On the population and we give up on, but by that, I mean, um, the end of, of what people might have called the rehabilitative ideal were things like work and, and moral suasion or teachings and education. What kind of the bedrock of rhetorically? And I say this because it, it didn't really happen in practice, but, but at least rhetorically how we thought about corrections.

We thought corrections from about 1870 to about 1970. Was about rehabilitation. And then in the years, when the population changed, you go from a prisoners, two thirds, white to two thirds, none, the modus operandi that criminal justice system changes. It goes from rehabilitation to, uh, warehousing. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a deterrence rehabilitation as deterrence to individuals from engaging in punishment because we believe that they can.

Psychologically changed so that they can emotionally and morally transform if they can become better people. I'm not saying that this was the right answer. I'm saying it was, it was a decision us policy decision that we made. We go from that framework to a belief that it doesn't work. That we can't the advent of this whole, what works movement, where we try to scientifically figure out what's the best way to prevent people from engaging in behaviors that we've criminalized.

And, uh, we go away from that. We go away from the, from, from, from rehabilitation and we go into this, this, this warehousing machinery that we've erected. We go into prison building as John Easton. Beautiful work. On, uh, on, on the prison building, boom, you know, he makes the argument that, that we basically built ourself into this thing.

Like, you know, we, we, we built the prisons and then we filled the prisons. It's wild that, that this happens when the prison black ends in the words of Louis Vercon, but maybe not so well, maybe, maybe kind of predictable that we don't believe that people that we think. Are dark, don't have the same kind of moral capacities, uh, as people that we presume are white.

And then we get rid of, we get rid of labor as a way out work release programs diminished by something like 60% in most States. Well, workforce training goes away in favor of training people to prepare for the workforce. So work placement rather goes away in preparation for repair. And then we started enacting all these laws, thousands and thousands of laws that do things like lock you out like Mike.

So our response to what we presume is a rash of black criminality is to lock you out, to get rid of you and to, and to push you to, to amputate you from a social body and to push you as far away from me as I can get. I'm going to throw you out. I'm gonna throw your throw away people. In the words of Susan Burton, he says, ain't no throwaway people.

She says, ain't no throwaway people. That's Susan Burton is this beautiful activist who does this incredible work in LA working with formerly incarcerated women. 84% of whom were victims of sexual trauma. Half of whom are victims of trauma in their childhood. This, this is incarcerated women in this country of all kinds, black and white, by the way.

But, but, but she'll, she works with everybody. Deportees black folks, wearables. She says ain't no throw people. And what we've done is we've decided that we're going to throw away people who've been traumatized. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna throw away people who've been hurt. You have been hurt.

You're weak. Get away from me. It's when women need the opposite. What people need is the, is the, so you got me amped up now, but, but, but it is what it is. Like we need the opposite. You need the opposite. You need, you need to be embraced. You need to be made to feel as if you belong. It started from a place.

Every single person. I talked to every one of them, I follow 250 people over 10 years to, to pull this the dataset. If that's the right word, it feels so sterile. Let's talk about it in that way. This is the dataset that I pulled from feminist book, 250 people who I followed for years. Some of whom I'm the longest of whom I followed literally for 13 years, probably Martin, 250 people.

I follow many, many, many years interview, many, many, many times. Please folks ethnographic work for years at a time, three and a half years and halfway houses in Chicago, two years following people home in Detroit, then following people on campaigns. In, in New York and other cities across the country and every single person I talked to can tell me a story of abuse can tell me a story of trauma.

Can tell me a story, a violation, every single one. And it's not just them. They're the ones we incarcerate. People who weren't incarcerated can also tell me this story is a trauma, but we buried those two. We're so afraid of pain. We, we divorce ourselves from it. We're so afraid of paying. We can't sit with it.

This is also why I wrote the book in the way that I did. I don't want you to turn away from the pain. I want you to get in touch with your pain so you can walk alongside somebody who's in pain. And so that you can understand not from your perspective or not, not from their perspective, rather, but from your own.

I know what it's like to be in pain. I don't know your pain, but, but, but I know mine and I know I don't want it and I want to do, and I, and I'm hoping that it pushes us to a place where we make an ethical commitment to help people in pain be in less pain. This isn't to say that there's some super victims, you know, there's this, the language that gets tossed around, especially in some quarters, Oh, you know, you're making them affect them and they've done these things.

This is true. People have done plenty things. People have done plenty things that people have had plenty things done to them. The question is, what response do we want? To take, we just paid attention to what people do when they're released. If we pay attention to the fact that this group is more civically engaged in almost every other group, if we pay attention to some of the people who were the movers and shakers, trying to address poverty, criminal justice issues, human rights, social rights, when they get out, look among the exonerated.

Look among the lifers who went down for a long time, who got out of prison. Eventually look at my man, Ronald from the book, Ronald Simpson Bay did 27 years on a wrongful conviction is one of the business movers and shakers in the country when it comes to reforming the system, but not just the criminal justice system, when it comes to making sure that our, our babies have good education.

This is when it comes to making sure that. That poverty policy happens in such a way that's not destructive. In other words, the people who are, who have so much to offer with me lock away. People have so much to offer so much so that we can't even count how much, how much we've lost in our efforts to do so.

And these are things that we don't consider when we, when we, when we call the police. When we, when we, when we charge people, when they're locked up. Well, 

Abbie Henson: [00:34:38] I think this is where. That work comes in to change hearts and minds where you're talking about and the end of the book, because I bet a lot of people maybe listening, or those prosecutors and judges, when they're thinking about these things, it's on you, you decided to have a kid and then you decided to do this crime.

You're a bad parent. I don't care about the impact. You decided to do these things, right. It's always on you. And I think. Of course there's agency, of course, people should be held accountable for creating harm, but just the simple removal of freedom doesn't necessarily reflect it. Doesn't reflect a crime.

It's just some weird blanket thing that we've decided to impose on every single person who's done a breath. The fact that we create, we put the same person who. Did some little, whatever, non violent there was, uh, uh, quote unquote victimless crime. The fact that someone who's in possession of drugs would be.

A lot of the same punishment or what we would consider punishment of someone who is a serial killer. Like it doesn't actually reflect any kind of accountability. It's just what we've considered somehow to be punishment in your book, you talk about the importance of policy and I've spoken about this with past guests.

I think you're, I forget who. It was one of your Ronald Ronald, Ronald, who's saying, you know, you can change policy, but if you're not changing hearts and minds, then the next person that comes into office can change it with the brush of a pen. And I think that that's that's the important thing is we want our policies to exactly what you said, reflect our moral standings and where our moral standings, when we are signing into.

Ink laws and policies that in parently harm, not only people other, right. It's it. Maybe I'm okay with it. Cause I'm, you know, I'm distant from it, but that harm that you're causing someone can ultimately come back to you. Right? You're not, you're not, uh, free from this. 

Reuben Miller: [00:37:11] I mean, take housing law, you know, for example, and not as a harm that comes back to you.

I mean, all of it ultimately comes back to us in one way or another. I think the argument that some people have made, um, you know, kind of crafting liberals have made the argument about fiscal, the fiscal costs of it, which I think is a reasonable argument to make. I've heard people say. Um, you know, nobody cares about that.

They care about stories and it's really a connection, kind of a heart to heart connection. You know, people make different arguments for reform. I, I can appreciate it all, but my question is like, what are you looking for? Okay. So take the housing housing law, for example, a thousand regulations, housing regulations, barring people with criminal records from so much as visiting somebody who lives.

And for example, public housing, 1988, there's a housing act that gets passed that says that, that anybody under the control of the tenant who has committed a crime, the tenant can be evicted in response to this. And so overnight, we started grandmothers being a victim for letting their grandchildren sleep on the couch.

That's not the world that we want to live in. I don't know anybody who will tell me that that's the world that they want to live in lovers cousins. Brothers, they're getting evicted too. Does this that's one example, thousands, literally thousands, literally tens of thousands of examples of these kinds of things that that might not touch you.

But what might touch you is the fact that if you're looking for safety, you don't get it in our current system. If you're looking for crime reduction, you don't get it in our current system. If you're looking for victims to have closure, you certainly don't get it. According to every survey of victims who are asked what they wanted, when someone went to jail or prison.

And none of them said 50 years for the crime, they committed very few. Some of them said, I want them to do Barry never come home. Again. Some of them said I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to know why. And they never get that opportunity. They get to give a victim's rights statement. The apparatus takes over.

And so the family navigates closure, the, the person who committed the crime never comes to any real accountability. Cause all he sees is time. That's not accountability. That's just time. And your point about. The dude's getting tired time. Look with the, you know, serial killers and, and folks who, who, uh, who, who stole candy bars out of, out of stolen up, you know, we're caught with enough shot and stuff in that grocery cart, shoplifting to get a grand larceny case or something like that.

Yeah, it's absolutely true. That the idea is our response is time is to, is to take your freedom and it's by degrees, but it's still the only response. There's no, there's no other response that we, that we choose to, to, to use, but there are other responses. So what's required. I think. This question about hearts and minds.

I'll say this quick, very quickly about Ronald Simpson Bay, Ronald Simpson Bay was wrongfully convicted at 27 years on the crime of shooting a police officer. He was not at the scene of the crime. He w he did not shoot the police off the person who shot the police officer police officer's hand was grazed.

Got a less, got less time than Ronald because he plead, he took a plea deal. And, and, and turn state's evidence against Rono saying that Ronald was involved in the crime when he wasn't a police report saying, Ronald wasn't fair, just on and on and on. Anyway, this the sentence gets, the sentence gets reversed after 27 years.

But during the time Ronald spending these 27, long years in prison, Ronald's son is murdered by a 14 year old boy. And there was a, it was a misunderstanding, whatever, but the son is murdered. Rono they're about to charge this child as an adult, before a ten-year-old and Ronald makes a decision to advocate for the child, not as an adult, as a child, so that he can have a chance at life.

So the juvenile courts and the criminal courts is just different things. Once you know, this doesn't mean that it doesn't what happens at juvenile court. Doesn't follow you, but it follows you in a very different way. And so, so Ronald Ronald advocates for this child, I just want to a white advocating for the child.

The child killed his son. Did he love him? No, he didn't love this boy. Are they friends now? And they tighten out, they like doing tours, you know, and, and, and giving motivational talks about how they came to some deep level of forgiveness. No, if I was Ronald, I would hate that child, Ronald does not hate the child because, because Ronald is remarkable.

But Ronald said, I advocated for the child because it was the right thing to do. He was a child. He deserved a place in the world. He said, sending that boy to prison for life, wasn't gonna do anything for my family. And this child needed a place in the world. Like every other child who's growing up in this country, he did it from a place of ethical commitment.

This is my point. He didn't do it from a place of feeling. I'm sure he felt differently every day about this kid. Sometimes when he tells the story about his son's murder, he chokes up still. It's almost killed in 2001. He still chokes up. It's 20 years later. He's still, he's still, he's still trying when we're sitting in the living room, drinking Hennessy and cracking jokes and spending time together.

Cause we're different. You know, we've been together now for years with dear friends at this point, when the sun comes up, he still hasn't taken a minute. What is her? I'm his friend like we're friends. We're not like that's my brother, right? Like, like when his brother, he still needs to take a minute. He never got over it fully.

You don't get over that. You don't, you don't, you don't fully get over that, but he made an ethical commitment. He did it because it was the right thing to do. He, it hurt I'm sure on some days to do it, but he did it. And this is the place that. That I think we need to be. And I don't think that we'll each have the strength that someone like Ronald Simpson Bay has.

I think he's a remarkable brother, but I think he raises a set of questions for us. Meaning what kind of world do we want? Do, what do we do about harm and what's the right thing to do about it. This is something we haven't even reckoned with. We have a one size fits all, answer the prison for every kind of harm that's caused to us.

Property harm drugs. You're harming yourself, uh, financial, you stole from me, assault and battery murder, rape. Child, uh, uh, abduction and assault of children, every single one of those things, whether you've shot a dog or you've, you've, you've, you've molested a child, our response to you, depending on the money you have in your pocket and the lawyers you can hire.

But our response to you is incarceration and the incarceration that we enact doesn't stop. When you walk out of that prison gate, because of all these laws and policies that follow you literally for the rest of your life, it's our only response to you. And so what I'm asking us to do is to ask ourselves the tough question of what is an appropriate response to these things.

What's the right thing to do right now. What's going to bring me the thing that I'm looking for. Am I looking for closure? If I'm a victim, am I looking for healing? Am I looking for, am I looking for safety? Safety is a problem because safety is a place of fear and I don't think you get safety by legislating from a place of fear.

I think the, the, the thing we need to, the, the place we need to legislate from is from a place of human brother. If I asked what is the person who caused the harm need to not cause the harm again? What do they need to thrive? And if I asked what is the person they've harmed, even the most egregious of hearts need so that they can live more fully so they can perhaps even thrive after the harm is caused.

I'll get safety and I'll get thriving. 

Abbie Henson: [00:45:06] Right. I really appreciate you speaking with me today. I think we unpacked a lot. I think it was that we challenged narratives and gave context and I think. You know, in thinking about the future. I think many times people get frustrated because they hear these questions and then it's like, okay, well let's actually do something about it.

Like what's the next step? The next step is just continuing to have these conversations. And I know that that's frustrating and that doesn't necessarily. Implement change in the way that we think about it tangibly. But when we have these conversations and when you take what you heard today, and you talk to your aunt or your friend or your cousin, and we continue to spread the change on a human level, that's when we'll see long sustaining change on a policy level that.

Is morally driven. That is for human thriving, because I think when we go to these quick responses in terms of legislation, that's often where we see legislation, that's actually incredibly problematic, even if it has the best of intentions. Usually the fallout from it is even more problematic than more conservative legislation.

So. The, the questions that Ruben you just asked, I think are questions we have to sit with. Don't just listen to this and then go about your day, you know, maybe circle back and spend some time thinking about these things. What kind of society do you want for yourself, for your children? And when you think that if you're a listener who feels so distant, who is lucky and fortunate enough, or privileged enough to not be in that.

Half of the country that has a loved one in prison. If you feel distant from it, understand that it all still circles back. It all has prison. Has the proudest reach as far and distant as it is from many people's lives. The reach it has his right to your home is right to your street corner is to your alley is to anywhere that a crime may be committed.

Because of limited opportunities in many cases because of the legislation that we have. So I would just take a more global perspective when thinking about change and take a more human perspective. Do you have any final Mike drop

Reuben Miller: [00:47:51] I just, I think, I think that, you know, that mass incarceration is a problem with citizenship. And citizenship at the end of the day is about belonging. It's about belonging to a political community, but also belonging being a fully human participant in a human community. You know, my hope is that we start to think about ways that we, that we can make a world in which people belong.

Even people who've caused us harm. And I think there's some places to start. For example, we can look at the laws, policies and sanctions 45,000. I don't think we need that many. I think we can look at our elected officials, like what's their platform, how they go about things. But I think this point that you raised is very important point about, you know, really sitting with it and wrestling with it and dealing with it and looking at things that we haven't.

Taking time to look at it, really like we it's a machine, it just operates. It just, it just, it just, it just operates. It doesn't operate on its own act is involved, but, but it's, but the rules have been set and the question are, is this reasonable? And I don't, I don't, I don't think that it is. Um, and so. The work for us is the work of imagining a new world and the work for us.

Isn't imagining a world, which we can figure out how to live together a world in which we belong. 

Abbie Henson: [00:49:05] Well, thank you again, and I look forward to our next talk. 

Reuben Miller: [00:49:11] Fantastic. Fantastic. Next time.

Abbie Henson: [00:49:17] Thank you so much for participating in my critical conversation with Dr. Rubin Jonathan Miller. One of the most standout points to me of this conversation was in thinking about the fact that if you remove every black person from the American prison system, it would still be one of the largest prison systems in the entire world.

We deeply equate prisons and the criminal justice system with blackness. And while it is absolutely important to point out the disproportionate impact that the criminal justice system has on black folks, there are over a million white folks locked up. And yet we don't equate criminality with whiteness.

Why the focus of studies and stories on the disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on blackness while an absolutely necessary critique can also unintentionally and problematically serve to reinforce stigmas and stereotypes and make non-black. And specifically white people feel disconnected from a system that seemingly doesn't affect them, but it does.

Regardless of race or ethnicity as Rubin brings up, half of all Americans have a loved one in prison. The charge for systemic transformation should be led by all. And as he said, if you don't feel connected to the cause of equity and justice on moral standing, just simply realize that the criminal justice system does not make us safe.

Ruben describes how crime stems from trauma and feelings of alienation. Our criminal justice system does exactly that it inflicts trauma and isolates those already marginalized, a criminal record. Acts as a revolving door of harm where those victimized harm others and then are harmed for their heart.

And then because of the compounded harm they've experienced, they harm again, either themselves or others or both. There is no justice for the public in our criminal justice system. As it actually puts us in more danger, Ruben discussed how we need to embrace those who have caused harm and create a sense of belonging for all, and to bring stories of pain and trauma into the narrative in order to humanize and contextualize those who have engaged in harmful behavior.

Again, this is not to romanticize those who have hurt others and there needs to be accountability, of course, but there are ways to do that without furthering violence through restorative justice and community-based accountability plans. When we think about a future without police, as we know it, without prisons, as we know it, there's an assumption that our society will become overwhelmingly chaotic.

But we have to realize the limited deterrent effect criminal justice agents have on criminal engagement. Of course, there are people who may need to be removed from society for a period of time in order to pull themselves or others out of risks. But there can be ways of doing that without dehumanizing and caging.

We just need to think outside of the box we've been presented. I'd be curious to hear some of your ideas on how to do so. Next episode, I'll be speaking with Carl Williams, a man who spent 26 years in prison. For a wrongful conviction and was released into the COVID pandemic last summer. I hope you'll tune in, expect new episodes every other Monday.

And don't forget to subscribe rate, and please leave a review. If you've been liking these episodes, I really look forward to reading it. I'm Abbie Henson, and this was critical conversations.