123: Leadership, Solitary Myths, And The BOP’s Legacy - Interview w/Judi Simon Garrett

What if your first real job at 20—walking onto a men’s medium-security yard—became the foundation for a lifetime of leadership, policy savvy, and humanitarian impact? That’s Judi Simon Garrett’s story, and it upends a lot of what people think they know about prisons, “solitary,” and the people who run complex systems under pressure.

Judi explains why training that centers presence, words, and posture mattered more than keys and cuffs, and how overtime on the toughest posts built credibility that no title could. 

Judi breaks down the myths around solitary confinement, reframing it as restrictive housing with services, checks, and human contact. The leap is from prison to a more controlled prison—not from a living room to a dark cell—and sometimes that move protects both staff and the individual. We talk about safety, suicide prevention, and the hard truth that a few people cannot safely live in groups. Then we pull back to language and policy: why lumping everyone in custody under one gentle label hides critical differences, how rehabilitation is a door people must choose to walk through, and why measuring systems only by recidivism misses the point.

We also honor the Bureau of Prisons legacy—from Sanford Bates to modern growth—highlighting professional culture, continuity of leadership, and a mission that kept programs alive even as populations surged. Judi shares candid leadership lessons: humility over ego, influence over authority, context over commands. Finally, we pivot to her current work leading aid for Jewish communities in Ukraine, where logistics, transparency, and storytelling now deliver food, medicine, and care to tens of thousands. It’s a full-circle look at service: macro policy that keeps people safe and micro moments where one family gets the help they need.

If this conversation challenged your assumptions or gave you a clearer view of corrections and leadership, share it with a friend, subscribe for more thoughtful episodes, and leave a review to help others find the show.

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/judi-simon-garrett-24a2b4157/

Jewish Relief Network Ukraine - https://www.jrnu.org/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:34

In more than 28 years of corrections, I have used or supervised Pepperball hundreds of times. Now, as a master instructor for Pepperball, I teach others about the versatility and effectiveness of the Pepperball system. From cell extractions to disturbances on the rec yard, Pepperball is the first option in my correctional toolbox. With the ability to transition quickly from area saturation to direct impact with the non-lethal Pava projectiles, Pepperball provides me with a range of non-lethal options for cell extractions involving noncompliant inmates, and

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SPEAKER_00 1:08

when the use of force is over, decontamination is easy with no oily residue on the walls or floors. To learn more about Pepperball, go to www.pepperball.com or click the show notes below. Pepperball is the safer option first. Hello, and welcome back to the Prison Officer Podcast. My name's Mike Cantrell. Today I've got a great guest I've been waiting a while to talk to and learn a little bit about, Judy Simon Garrett. She's been uh leading organizations that help people for more than 30 years. First as a senior executive in the federal government, and then as the chief operating officer, sorry, of Jewish Relief Network in Ukra of Ukraine. Judy spent 28 years working with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. She started as an honors attorney and worked her way up to Assistant Director of Information Policy and Public Affairs Division, where she was responsible

Meet Judy Simon Garrett

SPEAKER_00 2:00

for public and legislative affairs, research, security, technology, and information systems. Judy spent a year as the acting deputy director of the Bureau, which at that time had a staff of 35,000 employees, and a budget of 7 billion. Over the course of her career, Judy has had the privilege to work with the most senior government officials in this country and abroad on many complex and sensitive criminal justice issues, including the death penalty, Guantanamo Bay, solitary confinement, and treatment of sex offenders, substance abuse, treatment, female offenders, sentence reform, rehabilitation, re-entry planning. Judy's interest in correction started when she worked as a correctional officer in her first job out of college at a medium security men's prison outside of Detroit, Michigan. Judy's honored to serve in her current role where she makes use not only of her management skills, but also of her Hebrew language skills acquired as a child when she lived in Israel for several years. She has a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And she is most proud and grateful for her six children. Absolutely. Well, Judy, I've been waiting a long time to talk to you, and uh we we shook hands a few times when I was in DC, but I don't think we ever got to sit down and really truly meet each other. So welcome to the Prison Officer Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 3:21

Thank you. Such a pleasure. Truly, I I really feel honored. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Yeah, I love having you on here. Um, you know, uh anybody that's been in the Bureau of Prisons for very long. Uh you being in technology and everything and policy, you touched everybody at one time or another. Uh, so I knew who you were before I got there. I always start this to say could you take me back to where you came from and how you grew up and the path that took you here?

SPEAKER_03 3:47

Sure. Wow. Great question. Um, I had probably one of the best growings up anyone could ever ask for. Grew up in a small town in Illinois, college town. My parents were both professors. Very idyllic. We could walk anywhere we needed to go. We could be outside till the, you know, sun went down. Um, had two brothers, three boys next door, got to be the consummate tomboy. Just a great life. My parents went to Israel back and forth

Early Life And Education

SPEAKER_03 4:14

several times. They were trying to to decide whether to move there or not. It was very difficult then. We never ended up settling there, but I had the opportunity to go to school there and learn the language and get an understanding of a completely different culture and society, which was really fantastic. Um I graduated high school young. I was 16, and probably a young 16, I would say, not because I was any genius by any stretch of the imagination, but in Israel, children start kindergarten a little bit younger. So that got me started earlier. And then I went to the magnet high school in town, which skipped eighth grade. So you went seven, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. So excellent. And that was really important to me. I went there for that purpose. I was in a huge hurry. Where I was going, I don't know, but I was in a hurry to get there. So I graduated college early, graduated high school early. And at that time, there really wasn't a gap year. There wasn't much to do. So I went up to college, University of Michigan. Didn't do great, struggled a little bit, I will say, for a whole variety of reasons, ended up leaving for a semester, then transferring ultimately to University of Wisconsin, graduated from there with a wonderful degree in sociology that was worth not much, learned a lot, but didn't have much real world application. Wanted to go back to Michigan to my then boyfriend, later husband, who was still there, had played football there. So I took a job with the state. I thought I was going to be a probation officer. I had been interested in criminal justice, spent some time at the juvenile detention center in Madison, Wisconsin, which was a fascinating experience. Took the civil service exam state of Michigan, thinking they'd make me a probation officer. I was 20, I had a college degree. I was, you know, feeling like I was pretty qualified to be a probation officer. Um, they didn't weren't hiring probation officers. So they wrote me back a nice letter that said, we would love to have you. You could work at Huron Valley Women's Facility, Huron Valley Men's Facility, which is maximum security, or um a men's medium security facility. I was actually in Israel with my mom when the letter came and my dad read it to me. And I said, I didn't sign up for any of that.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Right.

SPEAKER_03 6:24

And he said, Do you need a job? I said, Yeah. He said, Well, which one are you taking? So um, because in my family, when you graduated high school, you found somewhere else to live. Right. You know, um so especially after college. So I took the job, medium security men's prison outside Detroit. It was the Western Wayne Correctional Facility. Best experience of my life in many, many ways, I would say. And I've got a rest of history.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

So you had an option of juvenile female or male. What made you pick the No?

SPEAKER_03 6:58

I had max men.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Max men, okay.

SPEAKER_03 7:01

Medium men or female.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Or female. What made you choose going to a male prison instead of a female prison?

SPEAKER_03 7:08

I was terrified of a female prison.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:11

I grew up kind of a tomboy, had brothers, boys

First Year As A CO In Michigan

SPEAKER_03 7:14

next door. Uh knew enough to be a little bit afraid of what a women's facility would involve in terms of the emotional dynamics, the relationships. I learned about it in college to some extent. Learned that for women going to prison is more traumatic in some ways because of all the social structures that are broken that they leave behind and that they try to recreate in prison. And so there are relationships there amongst the inmates that you don't know about. And so you step into what seems like a fairly mundane discussion argument about something not significant. And boy, you have just stirred up Hornets' Nest. And I thought, given who I was, where I was, I probably wasn't sophisticated enough to manage those situations. And I and I was definitely right.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

That's cool that you learned about that in college, that they actually talked about that. Uh corrections get glossed over normally in in college, it seems like. So cool.

SPEAKER_03 8:15

It was a great program at University of Wisconsin. They had um some really prominent criminology professors, and we did some great readings and spent some real time understanding the dynamics of the prison environment from the perspective of the inmates, of the staff, of the community. And so I was paying attention. I missed a lot in college, but I was paying attention to that.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

So you go to work at a men's facility, uh Medium. Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_03 8:39

Um, the way it was structured at Michigan Department Correction at the time, I think was phenomenal. So you did one month on-the-job training, then you went away for two months to Lansing for training, and then you went back for another month. So it was four months where you were really by yourself. You had the opportunity to shadow senior staff, learn from them, watch from them, do a little bit of things, but really get to observe. And I I thought that was just absolutely phenomenal. The state was going through a major overhaul. Um, I'm sure it was necessary. I don't actually know the history before that. They were trying to professionalize their staff. They were hiring a lot of college graduates. The facility that I went to had recently converted from the Detroit House of Corrections to a state facility. Um, it wasn't really designed to be a state facility. It was a lot of open dorms. You now had medium security inmates in there. There was a cell house as well, but it was a pretty rough place. It was very old. Um walked in the first day in my uniform, very appropriately to me, had my hair up in a ponytail with a ribbon on it. And um I walked in and the associate deputy warden pulled me aside as we were all passing through the Sally Port and said, Excuse me, who are you and why are you here? And I said, I'm an officer. This is my first day on the job. And he said, You look like a baby. Thanks, sir.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 10:12

Great. Boy, that really inspired some confidence going in those those dates, I can tell you that. Um I will say they put so we did rotations through all uh different housing units, yard, education, visiting, etc. Some I liked better than others, didn't particularly care for the visiting room. I was on morning shift, which was great. Showing up for work at 5 48 in the morning was not great, but being a little afraid of the dark, wandering around that place when it was dark was not not appealing to me at all. So I was glad to be on day shift. I don't actually remember too much about those first uh that first month. I remember a lot about the training and Lansing, which I thought was really excellent because it filled some really important voids for me. How do you talk to people? How do you stand in the chow hall? How do you respond to a challenge? Putting on handcuffs and locking cell doors with the big folder atom keys, all that stuff. Yeah, that was important. But I could have figured a lot of that out just by watching. What I really needed to be taught and to practice was all the interpersonal dynamics. I did not have a lot of experience dealing with middle-aged black men from Detroit. That was the inmate population predominantly. And I will say that was the staff members predominantly as well. There were a few women, not a lot. I was the only white officer in the place. Oh, wow. Um unfortunately for me, there had been a white staff member there at the time. She was an associate, what they called an assistant resident union resident unit manager, kind of a senior case manager. She had been badly, badly assaulted and was not actually working at the time. She shared the same last name as me.

unknown 11:59

Oh.

SPEAKER_03 12:00

Mine was Simon, hers was Simons. So from the first day I got there, everyone wanted to know if I was related to Randy Simons. I quickly found out the right answer was no, and I was glad because it's not that she was a bad person, but this terrible thing had happened to her. So um, but the training was great. Those two months were really, really great training because they emphasized to us what a different environment we were going into and how much we needed to understand and appreciate the impact of every word we said, every movement that we made, whether we

Training, Culture, And Control Center

SPEAKER_03 12:34

stood in the chow hall like this, or we stood in the chow hall with the hands behind the back, that all that stuff mattered. And we were communicating volumes about who we were, what we expected, what we wanted. And I took all that in because I was scared, you know, of what was going to happen when I went back. Um, not only did that help me know how to be a better officer, it helped me be a better boss, a better friend, a better peer, because it really impressed upon me how impactful our words and actions are all the time. All the time. Um I was, you know, spotlighted in that institution everywhere I went, all the time, because you could pick me out, you could see me. I stood out like a switch up. Right. Um, so I was hypersensitive about wanting to get this stuff right. And I also knew that there are no do-overs. You know, once you establish your reputation in that facility, it is sticking with you forever.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

Right.

SPEAKER_03 13:31

Um, you don't get to come back and say, you know what, I didn't like the version of me you saw yesterday. I'm gonna give you a new version today. No, no, no, you get one shot and one version and you're stuck with it. So that training was just invaluable. I can't say enough about it. Um when I went back for my last month of training, pretty quickly, I will say they put me in the control center. I don't know if they did that because they thought I couldn't handle it or if they thought I would be an asset. I don't know, it wasn't my choice. Um, but I can tell you that I only spent one shift a day in the control center. I usually spent on an average week at least three shifts working in the housing unit, working in the yard, working the kitchen, working visiting, because we did that much overtime. We got locked in over and over and over and over again. So I got plenty of experience working midnight shift, evening shift in all kinds of different places. And people were glad to see me get out of control center. I think they thought that, you know, why is she in control center? What a privileged place to be. It wasn't, it was an extremely difficult, pressure-filled environment. Like I cannot, I still honestly sometimes wake up like, oh my God, did I sign that guy out? Did I get the count right? Like it was that stressful and scary. Um, but people thought, you know, that I was protected in there. And so they were testing a lot of times when I got out and went to the unit or uh went to the kitchen, especially.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

I think to see how I would react to being in a real environment and having to really work.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:11

And that was hard. You know, it was um it was very hard.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Do you think a lot of the female officers go go do you think a lot of the female officers go through that where, you know, if they threw me in control, people wouldn't think twice about it. But if they throw you in control and all of a sudden, oh, it's an easy job or it's this or they're hiding or whatever. Uh do you think a lot of that that happens?

SPEAKER_03 15:33

Yes. I think the perception. Yes. There's there's no question about it. And because a lot of the people who are making these assumptions haven't worked in control, they don't know what it's like, how difficult it is. And most of them would much prefer not to be in control. Um, it's a different level of stress. But I think in corrections and and many jobs, lots of assumptions are made about who gets what and why. And as the person who may be perceived to be getting a break or favorite behavior, it's on you as it was on me to try to prove to folks that I I am just like you, and I am trying to get through the day and doing the best job I can. And if this is where I am, I'm gonna be the best person I can here. And if I'm somewhere else, I'm gonna be the best person there. Any different from you, you you know, you just deal with it. Life's not fair. All the way around, it's not fair.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

That's probably the best thing you could have done, though, was work those overtime shifts and be seen on those housing units and get that respect because that's what you were doing. I mean, that they were giving you the respect when they saw you out there, not taking what you were given and doing extra.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:45

And I remember being grateful because at the time, you know, I was 20, I had no responsibilities at home other than two dogs. I remember looking at these poor women that were locked in at the end of their first shift, who had kids at home, who had spouses, who had parents, who had responsibilities they couldn't get to. And back then, you couldn't even tell anyone because we had about 12 minutes overlap and shift change to make a phone call using one of the very few staff phones outside the gates, because the staff phones inside the gates didn't work. And if you didn't get that phone call in that 12 minutes, you weren't calling. And so as much as I hated to stay, I remember thinking, better me than some of them, because no real big deal for me, but for them, it really sucks, you know?

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. I I love your perspective on that. That's it, that's amazing. So at that point, are you thinking this is gonna be a career? Or are you thinking I gotta get out of here and find something different?

SPEAKER_03 17:46

That's what was really interesting about it, Mike. So I knew um before I finished college that I wanted to go to law school. Okay. I don't know why. I didn't have any particular desire to be a lawyer, but I didn't know what else to do. And in my family, more education was better than less. And um I figured I'll go be a lawyer. It is a profession. I can do it after three years. Sounds good. My father said, Um, that's a great plan and I will help you, but go in the real world first. Uh huh. Get some real world experience. I don't want you just to go to on to college, onto law school. And I don't think it was because he thought it would help me know more about what kind of law I wanted to do or anything else. He just figured that it's a rite of passage, especially if you're gonna go into a profession like a lawyer, where people sometimes become a little bit entitled, that it was important to have a job that was just kind of a working man's

Overtime, Perception, And Earning Trust

SPEAKER_03 18:44

job. And that's all that I was gonna get after college. And he thought that was exactly what I needed to do, all of us, my my civics included. Um, so I went into this knowing it was for a year, and that helped me a lot because when it was really hard and I was really tired or I was really scared or I was really mad, I knew there was light at the end of the tunnel.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 19:04

I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut and not share that with anybody the entire year because I figured, you know, that just wouldn't be a good career move. So I never said anything. And after about 11 months, they said, Great, you're ready to study for a sergeant exam. I was like, No, actually, I won't be doing that. Um, and and I was very flattered that they asked me. They were promoting a lot of people quickly. I was flattered that they asked me. Um, I declined. But so I already had that exit strategy before I walked in the gates.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Okay, excellent. So at this point, you went ahead and you went ahead and resigned, go to law school. Tell me a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_03 19:41

Were you still thinking corrections in the back of your mind every time that you were not, you know, um what I took away from that year in corrections was invaluable for a whole variety of reasons. But one thing that stuck with me was that I thought it would be really interesting to go into prison and meet all these people who had all these interesting stories and whose backgrounds were so different from mine. And I had a perception of some glamour associated, I think, with prison that many, many people have, right? It's it's cool, it's interesting. These are some people who are like mysterious and we want to hear about them, learn about them. And I came away with sort of the opposite impression, which was a lot of the people that I met inside, whether or not they're good or bad people, they had done some bad things and they had hurt a lot of people. And they weren't glamorous at all. And I believed they were deserving of my respect and my humanity and all that, but they were not deserving of my awe, my respect, my interest really in them. They just weren't. Um, they were not the kinds of people who I wanted to spend a lot of energy on because they weren't particularly good people. And so I grew a lot that year as a person, as a professional, and I was very grateful. But I was not drawn to continue working in corrections because I felt as though I had learned what there was to learn. It's not a really complicated business. And spending a year and probably like 360 days of that year inside, often for 16 hours a day, I thought I kind of got what there was to get.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Right.

SPEAKER_03 21:23

And and I was done, you know. So I went to law school and for the first time in my whole life, I was good at it. Like I got really good grades. I was shocked. I was not a super strong student before that. Okay. Um, but I really applied myself and I got really good grades and I had really good job offers. And I got an interview with a job, uh, interview with a judge, a federal district court judge in Washington, DC, which I was surprised. I mean, I went to good law school, but I was still surprised because I wasn't anything really special, you know, um until I got my law school grades. I went to interview with him, and boy, I was prepared. You know, I I had really prepared myself for this interview. I had worked at a two big law firms over the summer, and I I felt like I had a fairly good grasp of what he was gonna ask me. But the only thing that man wanted to know about, what was it like to be a prison guard in a man's prison? And I was like, wait, what? I I kind of expected it because my law school um interviews with firms had kind of gone that way, but I thought these are just lost lawyers. Like, okay, they're not that sophisticated. The judge, I thought, would want to really ask me. More law-related questions, or I don't know what. Nope. I really wasn't there because I had great law school grades or because I had had these great jobs. I was

Choosing Law School And A New Path

SPEAKER_03 22:44

really there because he wanted to meet what kind of crazy woman would go work at a men's medium security prison at 20 years old. Wow. Okay, I'll take it. You know, you take what you can get. Great interview. He was a Reagan-appointed, very conservative judge. Actually, had before him pending a class action lawsuit from the Bureau of Prisons, women inmates suing the attorney general. And he had really kind of avoided the case because it just wasn't interesting to him. But he really wanted to talk to me about it. So, great interview, got the job, spent the year clerking for this judge who was fantastic. At a time when the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. was taken to federal court, every drug offender that had five grams or more of crack. It was crazy. The judges were furious. Um, we spent our days in criminal trials, not what federal district court judges are used to doing. He was not happy. He wasn't happy at all. Um, but he wanted to try to move some of the other cases. So he wanted me to handle this BOP case, since I should know something about it, having been a corruption officer. Um, so that was interesting. And I worked with him on a little bit, you know, or a lot, I guess. And as the clerkship was coming to an end, he asked me and my fellow clerk, what were we gonna do? You know? And I had spent all of my law school time working at big law firms, and I hated every one of them equally. It just was not something I wanted to do. And I was very concerned that to succeed at the big law firm, I would have had to work a huge number of hours, and it would get in the way of doing what I really wanted to do in my life, which was get married and have kids. And I wanted to be involved with my kids, and I didn't want to be at work till eight o'clock every night. So I was really kind of stuck for most of the year trying to figure out what to do. And my co-clerk who had graduated from Yale Law School was in the same boat a little bit. He didn't really want to go to big law firm either. So the judge said to both of us at some point, go work for the Department of Justice. At least start there. I think you guys will find it interesting and rewarding. And neither one of you have enormous student loans that you have to um pay. So give it a shot, you know? Right. So he, my co-croker and I are filling out the application for DOJ, and all of a sudden, like, oh, there's a Bureau of Prison slot here. That might be interesting. Maybe I should check that. Maybe I'll have a leg up there because it's a super competitive process, right? I thought, sure. Help me get the clerkship, maybe help me get a job. Sure enough, BOP calls and says, Do you want to come, you know, interview and work for us? Yeah. So I did.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

I wonder, you know, you were talking about that judge. I wonder how much different our judicial system would be if every judge did what you did and spent a year in corrections before they became a judge. I think it would change the landscape tremendously.

SPEAKER_03 25:36

Well, it's interesting you raised that because um that whole year I said to the judge, don't you think you need to learn a little bit more before ruling on this case? Because he had it before him, a motion for summary judgment. He was basically going to decide, had the potential of deciding the case on paper. And I said, There's a lot you don't know about this judge. I said, There's a lot I don't know because this is about female inmates, and I don't know that much about female inmates. But maybe I should learn more about it. Maybe we should go to a prison. After all, we had a deer hunting case that was super interesting in Fairfax County. And we took a field trip to go to see where they were gonna hunt deer, because he wanted to understand all the different angles, people were gonna be shooting, who might get hurt. We spent a whole day, right, traiping around this park where they were gonna shoot deer. I said, let's go traipse around a prison, judge, because I think it will help you. No, absolutely not. I said, why not? I don't want to go. I don't have the time. I he said it's far. I said, Judge, come on. There's prisons not that far. I think it would be important. Nope, nope, nope, nope, no interest. Now, this is during a time when he was sentencing people to prison on a weekly basis. Highly unusual. So

Clerkship Lessons And BOP Entry

SPEAKER_03 26:54

much so, he was so affected by it that in one case, he suppressed the evidence. Now, this is a Reagan appointee, conservative. He suppressed the evidence and came back to chambers and said, I couldn't do it. I said, I know. He said, but for the grace of God, that was my daughter in that courtroom. She had taken a bag of drugs in New York on the bus down here with the DC to hand it to somebody. She couldn't get us, she couldn't get a a um, she couldn't get out from the mandatory minimums because she couldn't give substantial assistance because she didn't know anything. And the prosecutor would not back off, no matter what. So the judge pressed the evidence. He said, I can't do it. It was shocking. But that told me that he was really affected by what was happening to him in these cases. He did not want to go to prison because he didn't want to see where people were going. He was afraid. He was afraid, Mike, that he would see something that would be so disturbing, especially because he'd read these pleadings, right? He'd read the pleadings in the case. He was so concerned that he would be so affected that it would make it difficult for him to sentence, even more difficult. So he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it. And I think that's not unique. I think many judges feel the same way. They know it's a necessary part of the criminal justice system for people to go to prison. They don't necessarily want to see it.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

I think it's the public as a whole. The public, you know, the way I talk about it, the public gives up some of their treasure to have other people go do this, right? You know, the sheep and the wolf and the sheepdog. As long as they don't see the wolf, that's all they care about. But somebody's got to go take care of the wolf, you know.

SPEAKER_03 28:35

Um well, there's there's two things about that. One, I got him to go. So once I was at the BOP, I convinced him. And he came away feeling so good. And that was a huge credit to the Bureau of Prisons, right? He came away and said, Prison is difficult. It is. And he said, but it's punishment. I said, It is. He said, but I don't think people are being punished when they're there, aside from the fact that they are being imprisoned. And you know, in the Bureau of Prisons, we say people are there as punishment, not for punishment. And the judge came away and said, I see that. I see staff who are treating people like human beings. I see staff who understand these people will one day return to the community. I see people who are professional. Um, and I see that prison is a rough place to go. And so I want to be very thoughtful about that and not send people for way longer than they need to be, however, that might be defined. But I feel much better. It's not um like sending people off to some abusive, horrific place. Now, he went to women's prison, he didn't see every prison at BOP, but I think he got a good sense. And it was it was really gratifying as a BOP employee by that time for him to see that. But the flip side to your point about people going into prison, when I was chief of congressional affairs and probably later also, every so often we'd have a group of congressional members who wanted to go to prison. And they wanted to go spend the night so that they could understand what prison was like, and then have that inform their decision making, policy making. And I said, Absolutely not. And I said, We would love to take in a tour anytime, anywhere, you tell me, we'll be there. And and we can spend all day touring, and we would love to do it. You cannot come spend the night in prison.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Right.

SPEAKER_03 30:47

Because they would come away then and say, I lived in prison for a day. I know what prison is like.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:54

And that would have been the most problematic, frustrating, dishonest. Yeah, just because they would never have experienced what prison is like, right? So people come away from a tour, they can't say, I know what it's like. But if they spent the night, they would say, I know what it's like. And you and I both know very well that having a member of Congress come spend the night in prison in the completely artificial situation that we would create to keep them safe is nothing like what it's like to really be in prison. 24 hours can't give you much, anyways. But even still, it would have been so fanciful and so artificial that I said no. And I said no, and I said no, and I said no. And I was lucky that the director and the deputy general and everybody else backed me up once they heard the explanation. Members were mad, you know, they were very mad, even with the explanation. But the reality is it would have really harmed us and harmed inmates for them to come away

Taking Judges Inside Prisons

SPEAKER_03 31:54

and felt as though they knew what prison was like based on that ridiculous experience.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Yeah. Not only the BOP, but all agencies. Do you think we could do a better job in America um letting America see what we do? We're so closed up, and we've always been to where, you know, we just don't we don't release cameras, we don't release anything. So nobody gets to seal the the real prison. They get to see, you know, all the TV stuff, Shawshack Redemption. And do you think we could do better at that? And how could we do better at that, do you think?

SPEAKER_03 32:28

That's the issue.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 32:30

Much better.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 32:31

Much better. The question is, how do you do it? And it's something that we struggled with in the Bureau of Prisons for a very long time. Um, the Bureau was probably the most conservative agency, one of the most conservative agencies in terms of allowing cameras in and allowing media in. Because we were very afraid about people getting a distorted impression. It's not that we were afraid of what they would see, but it was the interpretation because they would lack the context. Um, I think it's hard. We tried to do some filming. We did allow some different outlets to come in and do some filming. Some was better than others. But prisons are very complicated places. I don't have to tell you. And there's a lot more than what you just see, you know. Um, when I worked for the state, anytime I walked in that yard, there'd be about 400 people screaming. It wasn't anything special about me. That's just how a lot of state facilities are. And it's just somebody different, somebody novel, you know, whatever it is. Um, you walk into a federal prison, you can hear a pin drop, right? People don't believe me. They think I'm making it up. And I'm like, go try it. You can hear a pin drop. If you can't when I walked into Leavenworth, I was more afraid than any place I'd been because it was quiet and it looked peaceful. I had just finished reading The Hot House. I knew that wasn't the case. I knew there was a lot of stuff going on and some really dangerous people, but you don't see it. And unless you really know it, you don't even feel it. Like you just know something is off. So when you bring someone into a prison to film, what do you show them? How do you figure out, without staging stuff, how to really give them a complete picture of what's going on? You know, Pete Early spent a whole year. Now, don't ask me what director Mike Fullen was thinking about when he let him in there. It is the craziest thing ever, honestly. But but Pete Early, after a year, really got an understanding because he would hang out with the inmates, he'd hang out with the staff, he would talk to people in the community and the family. Like he invested a year understanding and then writing about it. He got some stuff wrong. There were people upset on all sides, which tells me it's probably about the right amount of mistakes all the way around. But it took him a long time, a really long time to understand it and be able to put it together and tell a story. So if you let someone in with a camera for a day or two days, how do you make sure that they really explain it accurately and completely so that people come away with an understanding of what really is involved, not just one instant here or there that then creates this narrative that's not true?

SPEAKER_00 35:22

Right, right. Well, you had, I mean, in your career, you had several times that you dealt with public perception with Guantanamo, solitary confinement. Tell me about some of your challenges with those things.

SPEAKER_03 35:36

You know, I think solitary, the bad word, is probably the most challenging and still is to this day. Where many, many people believe that if you take somebody out of the general prison population and put them in a restricted housing environment, solitary confinement, that you are sentencing them to death, that you are punishing them, that you are harming them, creating long-term psychological damage, and that you are doing that without regard to that person's needs and health. In my experience, that is very far from the truth. Very far from the truth. First of all, there is no solitary, right? Maybe sometime in the history of this country, we would open a door and throw someone down a chute and close the door and never see them again. But that doesn't happen in any Bureau prison facility. And I would challenge that, it doesn't happen in any state facility either. It restrictive housing is a prison within a prison. It's not pleasant, it's challenging. You can talk about the ADX as a permanent

Media, Access, And Public Perception

SPEAKER_03 36:45

solitary confinement where people are confined 23 hours a day in their own cell. It's still not solitary confinement. They're seeing staff all day, right? They might be talking to them through a glass window, but there's no solitary. The more we isolate somebody from the general population, the more staff time and resources we devote to that person. We have to we have to cater to them and come see them and check them and feed them and medical checkups and psychological checkups and all that. So there's no isolation. There's no solitary. But there are lots of times where you have to take someone out of a general population and put them into another more restrictive environment. Very often it's for their safety as much as anyone else's safety. Believe it or not, as you know, there are lots of times when inmates want to get out of that general population and go to a more restrictive environment.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 37:38

Particularly in a high screen institution, it is extremely stressful to be in general population. You got another person in your room, sometimes two, but usually one, almost always one. We we try to put people together so that, you know, if there's any idea of suicide or anything else, there's someone else there. So you're going from living in this little bitty place with another person where you are never by yourself, never, ever, ever by yourself. Even as a staff member, you're never by yourself. That's stressful. That's this low grade stress. So a whole lot of times there are inmates who want to get some peace and quiet by themselves and want to go in restrictive housing. They want to get away from the, you know, being around people all the time in the stressful environment of a general population. So that's one thing. It's not always a negative to get pulled out of general population and put in restrictive housing. Most of the time, in restrictive housing, you still have a cellmate. We work really hard to give you a cellmate. Again, don't want you committing suicide. It's a lot harder to do if someone else is in there. Don't want you to, you know, have crazy ideas. Don't have the space. So very often you've got another person in there. Sometimes you're by yourself, depending on who you are. But it is a even if there's another person in that cell, the restrictive housing unit is much more quiet, much more orderly, because everyone is in their space. You're not mixing and mingling around. It's less stressful in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

Less violence.

SPEAKER_03 39:08

Less violence. It is a much less stressful environment in a lot of ways. Um and you get medical and you get psychology and you get religious and you get law library. You get what you need, you just don't get it in the same kind of way. All that just took me a really long time to explain to you, and you know, Chris. So when we're trying to explain this to people on the Hill and in the media, you don't get all that time, right? You get like little sound bites. So the challenge is trying to put all that into a few coherent sentences that will cause people to pause and maybe want to learn more.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Right.

SPEAKER_03 39:44

It's hard. It's hard. They don't have the context. They want to point up psychological studies. The biggest problem with that study is they want to compare what it's like for someone to go from the street to isolation, as they call it, solitary. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about going from a prison environment to a more restrictive prison environment. That the delta there is much, much smaller than going from a community to special housing. So people who are looking at this stuff, imagine what they would feel like going from their house or their apartment to restrictive housing.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

Right.

SPEAKER_03 40:22

But that's not realistic. That's not what we're talking about here. So it was really hard to try to get people to understand this stuff. And people want to ascribe lots of negative motivations to prison staff. We all know that. Guards are bad people, they're out to hurt people, they don't care, they're jaded, they're this and that. They're

Solitary Confinement: Myths And Nuance

SPEAKER_03 40:44

skeptical. So trying to get people to listen long enough to consider some of these points is difficult. You know, the other reality is there are some people who are really dangerous bad people. And for the good of everyone else, they just can't function in group environments. And so it is just necessary for them to be restricted. And as harmful as it may be, I don't know, but it could be if you're in there for a really long time and you're already not exactly thinking like everyone else, that's a cost that we have to accept because it's much more important to protect the safety of those people who have done no wrong, those staff members who are responsible for caring for the rest of the inmate population. We have to protect them. And so there are times when we've got to just pull someone out and put them over here and it's a timeout. I I will never forget when I was an officer, we had an inmate. We had several, but one in particular who was doing natural life. He was a scary person based on his criminal history. And I was very conscious of the fact that he had absolutely nothing to lose. There was no death penalty in the state of Michigan. If he were to seriously assault me or anyone else, what's gonna happen? He's gonna get another natural life sentence. What happens? So there are people and they don't have much to lose. And so having that ability to restrict people at times is absolutely essential. And we've seen around the country what happens when you take it away. You can look at New York State, you could look at other places that have removed that tool. It's a huge mistake. But it is a difficult subject for people to understand. There's no question about it.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

Yeah. I think we're doing a disservice these days. I don't think we've talked about this. I've mentioned it on here a couple of times. But language matters so much. And so many of these uh agencies are trying to talk about justice-impacted individuals and residents and all this stuff, and I don't have a problem with the name, but we're lumping everything from that guy you're talking about to a camper into one name. And inmates aren't all made the same. There's inmates that never want to draw Social Security. They don't care about retirement, they don't care about people. Those are a whole separate conversation than the camper that's going to go back out in a day or two. And I don't know how we change that language because it's it's getting so infiltrated in the media right now.

SPEAKER_03 43:10

Well, and the funny thing is that guy, he'll tell you. He won't hide the fact who he is, what he is. I used to process inmates out when I was in control center. And and there are people who would come in and out a good 10 times because Michigan had a parole system. And they would tell you, Miss Simon, I'll see you again. And I was like, Why? You don't live where I live. I'll be back. Why are you coming back? I I will. I just know I that's just who I am, what I am. And I'm like, and there are people who will fault the prison system for that. Why aren't you fixing him? A story that I was told when I was an officer state of Michigan has stuck with me to this day. It was the most powerful discussion I've had on the topic of inmates, rehabilitation. It was my associate deputy warden, his name was Lou Myers. He had been an inmate Jackson State prison. He was a bank robber from Detroit. He came from a long line of bank robbers. His father, his uncles, his grandfather, all bank robbers. He went to prison at about maybe 19 or so, young man caught with bankrupt caught bank rob robbing a bank. And um he said, you know, after not being in prison too too long, he looked around and said, I I don't think I want to do this for the rest of my life. I think I want to break out of this mold. So he learned to read. He'd never read before. That really started to open his eyes. And he quickly realized that he needed to cut contact with his family entirely because they fully expected he was going to come back out and join the family business and continue to help them rob banks. And he did not want to do that. So he educated himself, he cut himself off from his family. He was fortunate enough to be in a situation where he helped out a staff member. Now, you know, those special paroles were always a little questionable because it was sort of creating an incentive for a staff member to get hurt and then someone come to their rescue. So most places don't do it anymore, but that's what happened. And I don't know the details except that he helped a staff member out from a very dangerous situation. The state told him we will give you an early parole, a special parole on the condition that you come back and work for us. Crazy, right? This is this was the late 70s, I think, because I was there in 86 and he had already risen to an associate deputy warden. So this is the 70s. Interesting. Terrifying for him, right? But he's like, okay, they're like, you don't have to come back to Jackson, we're gonna put you somewhere else, but you got to come back and work for us. So he did. And he worked his way up to be an associate deputy warden. And he said to me, Nobody changed me. Nobody told me. I figured out that I wanted to do something different. And those staff helped me break out of those molds. And when my family was trying to visit and call and everything, they helped me separate, right? He changed completely and then came out and had this great life. I mean, he retired from the Michigan Department of Corrections, et cetera. It was phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01 46:08

Nice.

SPEAKER_03 46:08

But it really emphasized to me the value of the Bureau's philosophy and mission for decades, which was it's our job to give people opportunities to change. It's our job to expose them to programs to help them understand that they can change, that they can gain skills and education and come out and take a different path. But ultimately, it's their decision whether or not they want to change or not. So, to your point about different types of inmates, there are some who want to take advantage of those opportunities. And there are some who do not, who know very well they're gonna go back out and make fast money. And that's what a lot of the inmates in Michigan told me. I'm going back out to make fast money. I'm not going to work at McDonald's, and I'm not going to do this or that, and I'm not going to school. I'm going back to the drug trade or I'm going back to fencing problem, whatever it might have been. And as staff members, we kind of learn who those people are, right? And we know who to be wary of and who not to be so wary of because of what their long-term goals are. But as a system, we have to treat those people differently. Why would we waste taxpayer dollars on the person who has no interest? So a lot of that is lost today, where there's so much emphasis on holding the prisons accountable and punishing them, criticizing them for not fixing people. So if your recidivism rate doesn't go down across the board, you're failing. And I would say that is not reasonable, that's not fair, and that's not productive if what we're really trying to do is create a prison system that follows the mission of the BOP, which was keep people safe while they're inside, keep the staff safe,

Safety, Risk, And Necessary Restrictions

SPEAKER_03 47:54

keep the community safe, and help introduce them to opportunities to come out and be a productive law-abiding citizen. That's what's expected of prison systems, not fix people.

SPEAKER_00 48:06

Right, right. I I know that you're a uh a big fan, like I am, of the BOP history. Um don't you think the BOP was kind of um started a little bit different with that idea back then?

SPEAKER_03 48:22

Oh, started. The Bureau of Prisons created a lot of these ideas, and there's some phenomenal articles, yes, and books written about Stanford Bates. Exactly. And it was founded upon the notion that we were gonna do things differently, right, in the Bureau of Prisons. And throughout most of its history, that's exactly what happened because unlike other parts of the federal government, that agency was led by a career civil servant. And the decisions and policies that were that were put into place were based on sound professional correctional judgment, not whatever was the flavor of the day politically. Now, that's not to say that there weren't different emphases at different points in time. But, you know, when Martinson came out with his work in 1974 that said nothing works, programs don't work, inmates can't be changed, et cetera, BOP didn't stop doing programs. We just started calling it something else. When rehabilitation was no longer in vogue, we just called it re-entry or we called it programs. The BOP kept marching along the same path the entire time, which was really based upon research and experience that show that if you can create a safe and orderly environment and have professional staff providing these programming opportunities, you're going to have institutions that look and feel differently, and you're going to reduce the recidivism of people coming out the door. And it worked. It worked, it worked, it worked. It did. You can look at the rates of recidivism, you can look at the level of assault, you can look at the number of escapes, any measure you want. BOP knocked it out of the park for decades. And early on, they said, you're better funded, you're more well staffed, you have a different caliber of inmates. None of that was true. By the time we hit the war on drugs in the late 80s, early 90s, we had far surpassed any correctional department in the country in terms of our crowding, in terms of our staffing, in terms of our funding. You name it. We were looking at increases in population of 11 and 12,000 per year, net increases. That's like eight prisons a year. There was double and triple the size of entire departments of corrections around the country. And you know what? We did it. We hired the staff, we trained the staff, we built the facilities. All the while, Congress is like, do it with less, do it with less, do it with less. You guys are taking up too much money. Your budget's growing too much. And we're saying, we aren't going out there and rounding up these inmates. Y'all are sending them to us. We have no choice but to keep them. So what did we do? We created triple bugs in a cell that had a double bunk. Whoever heard of a triple bunk bed? We did. We built them, right? I mean, we just did it. But it all went back to that foundation that we knew we were a professional organization. We demanded it of our staff. We expected our facilities to run a certain way. And we never backed off that, no matter what society threw at us, you know? And I'm so proud of it. I am so proud of what that agency did all those years. And those staff that put their life on the line, and some staff lost their lives on the line because of what we were asked to do by the American public, by the taxpayers, by the politicians. And we did it day in and day out. And not too many agencies can say that. At no time did anybody throw up their hands and say, we give up, we can't do this anymore. I mean, it it was pretty remarkable.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

I go through that book, and this was written back when the Bureau started. You know, Sanford Bates is the one that wrote it. And uh and his early uh push for uh staff training, you know, he was he was thinking so far ahead back then that a lot of agencies didn't catch up for decades on on some of the stuff that he has in that book and why we needed it and why if you didn't start there, everything else failed. And so, yeah, I've always been a fan of going back and seeing how we how we became who we were. And uh, you know, over and maybe you know this specifically, but the there was only like seven directors over the course of sixty years, am I right? Something like that.

SPEAKER_03 52:39

Yeah, it was really remarkable.

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Yeah, it was again government.

SPEAKER_03 52:43

Yes, because it was

Language, Rehabilitation, And Reality

SPEAKER_03 52:44

the career silver service appointee, and it was people who came up through the ranks who understand what it was like. True, J. Michael Clinton was a lawyer, so he hadn't been an officer, but he had worked at various facilities. He had he had spent enough time to really understand the culture of the agency so that by the time he worked in the director's office and then ultimately became the director, he understood prisons as well as anybody that had been an officer or anything else. He understood the agency. And a really smart person told me once, the BOP, we don't know exactly what it is that makes us so good. We know there's a lot of different things, but there's like a special, there's a magic to the BOP. And most people that go to our facilities understand that. He said, but we should be really careful about changing too many things too fast because we might break that one piece that is really the key to the magic. And I think, you know, you you ask different people over the years, what makes a BOP so special? And they'd sort of dance around and come up with different ideas. But I never heard someone say, this is the magic that makes us so special. But I'll tell you what, whatever it is, it's it's eroding. It's eroding fast. And I think it goes back to your point of having that continuity of directors and letting one director have a lot of influence over who their successor is gonna be. And that was always, always the case until Charles Stan was retired. And for the first time, they brought in an outsider. And it was a game changer. It was absolutely a game changer. There are people who liked and didn't like different directors over time, but I think throughout our history, you could stop just about any staff member of the BOP and say, hey, what's the mission of the BOP? And they'd give you a pretty good description. Now, there were some years when programs really struggled, when we were growing so fast and we had no money. And programs had to kind of take a back seat because you know you can't program in a facility that's not safe and orderly. So there were some years in there that you would have heard a lot less about the second part of our mission, but they knew it and they could recite it to you, and they believed it. And and that's the hallmark of a great organization in my mind, is that everybody's working towards the same goal. We all understand what we're supposed to be doing, and we buy into it. I don't know if that's the case today.

SPEAKER_00 55:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 55:04

I don't I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 55:07

So let me switch gears here just a little bit. You have you have worked in this this profession from correctional officer all the way up. You were assistant director for a long time, right? I I love talking about leadership on here. That's one of the main things that I brought this podcast so that we can share leadership across agencies and and officers can start off with it. What is your leadership um tip, trick, uh thing that you learned from that? I mean, from the beginning to the end, you had a a career all the way from the bottom to the top.

SPEAKER_03 55:42

Um, I learned so much about myself early on in my career, for which I am so grateful, because I think people are born with certain traits that may make them a better leader, but I think they need to learn, and it takes time, about other people in order for them to be an effective leader. So I was fortunate enough to be able to sit in the back row and watch some great leaders for quite a while to try to put myself in their shoes and imagine how I might behave and see what's good and see what's bad. And I'm so grateful for that because if I had gotten a promotion earlier on, I would have been hell on wheels. It would have been a disaster. No question about it. So the combination of watching some really, really good leaders and becoming a parent were critical for me. I have six children who are all very different from one another, all of whom require a little bit different approach. And, you know, some stuff works, some doesn't work. Um, it taught me the importance of understanding the people that you're trying to lead before figuring out how you're gonna lead them. Okay, because different situations require a little bit different, but you got to understand who they are, what they are, before you can build a connection, before you can lead them. People tend to follow leaders because they want to be connected to them in one way or another. They don't have to like them necessarily, but they have to see qualities in their leader that make them want to to follow you. Because it it's very rare that you can get people to follow just because you tell them to follow. I mean, they might do what you say because they have to, but it doesn't mean they're really following and buying in. And who wants to be that kind of leader? So I wanted to be the type of leader that people wanted to do what I wanted them to do because they wanted to, they believed in it. So for me, it was really simple. Be of them, which is a long-winded way of saying be humble. Like you you're just like them in a whole lot of ways. You're more the same than you are different. So connect with them. Be humble, you're not all that. Communicate effectively, frequently,

The BOP’s Philosophy And Results

SPEAKER_03 58:16

honestly, so that they know what we're trying to do, so that they will buy in. Don't just give them their little piece that they need to know to do their job. Give them the whole picture and get their buy-in to where you ultimately want to go so they're happy to do their little piece because it's moving everything forward.

SPEAKER_01 58:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:33

That was very, very important to me so that people felt included. Now, I'm not saying that it's um a democracy and we're gonna have a vote and a discussion and and all that, but I at least want to give you the opportunity to understand what we're trying to do and to say you want to be a part of it and hope that you will join me and follow me. If you don't, you still gotta do it. But but I would rather it be the other way. So I think, and I I never set out to be a leader, but I kind of liked it once I had the chance to do it. I'm not gonna lie, it's it's fun.

SPEAKER_01 59:12

Right.

SPEAKER_03 59:13

But but it also can be intoxicating in a dangerous kind of way. And I see so often that people become more enamored with being a leader than actually actually accomplishing what it is they're supposed to be doing. So that's the other aspect of humility, constantly checking yourself.

SPEAKER_00 59:32

I would almost push back because I think those people that it's not the people that have influence like you were talking about that get high on that. It's when it starts coming from authority. And then that's when I see those people grab onto it and I can make things happen whether they want to or not. Because when we've got influence, like you were talking about, it is almost a team. Now it's not a democracy, but it's it's almost a team. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:58

It doesn't work if it's not a team. I mean, you can try it and you might get a little ways, but not for very long, and it doesn't feel very good. And um I had a really rough moment early on in my career. I will never forget. I was, you know, lawyers aren't great teammates and aren't great leaders and aren't great managers. Took lawyers a long time to realize that, but now all big law firms hire people to manage them who aren't lawyers.

unknown 1:00:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:24

So I had a lot of bad things I had to unlearn. But fairly early on in my career, um, I was really lucky to be given lots of authority and opportunities to do cool stuff. And so I was convening a meeting and the director was there, right? And a lot of senior people, more senior than I was. And I was pretty excited to be able to show the director that she had done the right thing in putting me in that role. So I was chairing this meeting, and I'm gonna tell you what, Mike, if you went longer than I thought you needed to go and you were going down a direction that I didn't think you needed to be, well, I was just gonna cut you off because I was gonna manage that meeting and make sure we stuck to our time and show the director that I was a good leader and I could. Let me tell you what, I don't think I was back in my office before I got a phone call. That basically was like, if you ever do that again, your career's over. I honestly was so far gone, I didn't even know what they were talking about. I had no idea. That's how much I didn't know about being a leader. And I don't think I was unique. I was young, I had never led anything before. And I and I really thought it was just about being in charge and telling people what to do and asserting authority. And boy, was I wrong. But but I'm I'm grateful it got corrected within like five minutes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:49

I mean, it was good.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:50

That's cool. One thing I didn't know about you, and I want to make sure we uh uh touch on this, is what you're doing now. So tell me about uh uh what you're doing in the Ukraine.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:01

It's pretty crazy, actually. Um, I gotta thank BOP once again. Um I was retired minding my own business, and I got a call from a rabbi that I had worked with when I was at BOP. Early on, I became the Jewish inmate expert because I'm Jewish and I was in the part of Office General Council where we were handling a lot of legal issues. We had um at least at that time one fairly renowned, very orthodox Jew who was demanding a lot. And so they were always asking me, is this legit? Is it not legit? Half the time I had to go read because I didn't know. But um from then on, I became kind of the Jewish inmate representative. And and then as I moved up in my career, it really was in my wheelhouse. So I developed a lot of relationship with these rabbis, minding my own business. One of these rabbis gets a hold of me, how's it going? Fine, fine. Um, what are you doing? I'm you know, working. And he said, you know, this war in Ukraine is really terrible. It had only been going on for I don't know, a few weeks at that time. I said, Yeah. I'm thinking, what do you want? Because I know you want something.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:09

You wouldn't be calling me otherwise.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:11

And he says, Um, you still speak Hebrew? I said, Yeah, not often, but you know, when you learn a language as a child, it's still with you. And he said, Well, would you do me a favor and help me out for like just a couple weeks? And I said, Yeah, what do you want me to do? Well, we're getting all this information, we're trying to set things up. Could you translate document? Can you help me manage the information flow? I I don't know exactly, but I I just I know you're pretty good at organizing stuff. So can you can you help? And I said, Okay. And he said, Well, how many hours a week can you give me? I said, I don't know, maybe 20. I mean, I got a 40-hour week job, but happy to help. Okay. I kid you not. In the next 24 hours, I probably had 200 voicemails

Growth, Crowding, And Professionalism

SPEAKER_03 1:03:54

and emails and WhatsApp messages. And I was like, wait, hang on, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's going on? And um, he said, Well, you said you'd help. I said, I will, but I have no idea what's going on here, who these people are, what they want. And he said, Well, you'll figure it out. Just kind of work your way through. I was like, okay. So after about um a week, I started kind of getting to understand what's going on. And and he said, We're setting up this new organization. We need to hire staff. I said, Yes, you do. He said, Can you hire staff? And then you can step away. And I said, Okay, but is there someone that can really give me the whole background? Well, no, not really. They they live in other parts of the world and um they're really busy, you know, there's war going on, and they don't really have time to spend a lot of time with you. But this is basically what we're trying to do. So can you just, you know, do something? Okay. So I start trying to hire people. Now, it was a little difficult because I'm trying to hire people for positions I can't really describe for an organization that doesn't really quite exist. But I'm making making it up as I go. So I'm doing Zoom calls, interviewing people. Pretty impressive people that are gonna get paid like a quarter of a million dollars. And you know, it's kind of a big deal. And I'm thinking, okay. So I'm interviewing, interviewing, and I'm sending all of the Zoom interviews to the people that are handling this in other parts of the world. Because the rabbi that called me was here in the US, but he was just the go-between. And each time they're like, not exactly. So I'm like, okay, if you can share a little bit more with me about what we're trying to do, I might be able to hone in a little bit more. No, no, no. That went on for like a month. And in the meantime, I'm still working, like trying to help raise money and trying to write letters and trying to produce movies and doing all stuff to help them. After like a month, they're like, you know what, we don't like anybody, but we really like you. We really like you the way you're interviewing them. And I said, Oh, that's great. And I said, Well, okay, like, so can you come work for us? I said, Well, yeah, but which job? Because I'm looking for an executive director, I'm looking for a head of communications, I'm looking for a fundraiser. So, which job do you think about? Oh, all of them.

unknown 1:05:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:58

I said, Wait, hang on. I said, and by the way, I've never done fundraising. I I and I don't know anything about philanthropy. I I don't really know much about the Jewish community, honestly. Like, oh, you figured out. Long story short, here I am. Now, I I do have a couple people that work with me for me, contractors and full-time, not a lot, and I don't make a quarter of a million dollars. But it's been um a phenomenal, phenomenal experience. Support 50,000 people on a regular basis in Ukraine with food, with medicine, with medical care. And it's so real and close. So I have a database with all the names of the different people that we serve. It's not like I'm just sending over, you know, here's $20,000, do something with it. Like I can see who's getting what with that money.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:46

Nice.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:46

So I'm not actually connecting them with the doctor because I'm here in the US. We have a group in Ukraine that does that. But it feels very close and impactful because I can see the money that we're bringing in, the work that we're doing. It's been and it and it's a really tragic situation, you know, in Ukraine for a long, long time. It's personal to me because my grandparents and great grandparents come from that part of the world, some of it Ukraine, Belarus, it's all borders used to move. And I'm proud to be able to tell my kids that I'm doing work that really helps people very directly. Honestly, I used to feel like that at the end of my day at the BOP, you know, and that was one of the things that was so cool about my job was that I could be on the hill negotiating some legislation or defending a policy. But then at the end of the day, I was usually the last one there on the sixth floor, and I would answer the phone. And it would be a lawyer or a family member or someone else that would tell me about something that was going on. Sometimes it was real, sometimes it wasn't. But almost always I would follow that trail and see what it was. And there were more times than not that I was able to actually get someone the halfway house place that they needed or get someone the medicine that they needed because something had just, you know, slipped and they were trying to get a hold of someone. And it was so gratifying at the end of each day to say, wow, like I might have just done something that helps 150,000 inmates or 200,000 inmates or the family members. But I also touched this particular family member and actually helped them. Um, that was cool. That doesn't happen very often in Washington when you work for an agency of that size, you know?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:23

And so when I left the bureau, I really wanted to do something where I felt like I could still have, you know, a real impact on people on both the macro level and the micro level. So who knew? Answering that phone call from the lawyer really allowed me to continue to do that kind of work. And it's been it's been really cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:41

Wonderful. Well, I'm not only happy for you that you get to do that, but uh what a wonderful thing to be a part of. And yeah, to pe help people like that. So um is there some way that people can give to that organization?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:56

All day, any day.

unknown 1:08:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:59

All they have to do is go to our website, which is www.jrnu.org.

Continuity Of Leadership And The “Magic”

SPEAKER_03 1:09:08

There's donate buttons, but before they get to that, hopefully they will see we post stories three times a week about what we're doing because we want to show people all the time that they're making a difference when they donate to us, that we are doing real things, and we try to share with them what's going on in the country also, so that while it might not be in the headline news every day, we can at least remind them that people are really suffering. It's really, really terrible. Um, and and again, I learned that from VOP the importance of communicating to folks. And so we use that website religiously. And boy, is it paid off? Because now if you search like help Jews in Ukraine, aid for Jews in Ukraine, we pop right up because we are constantly putting out stories. And so um, it's been really beneficial.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:52

Well, we'll put that in the show notes so that they can find that link there.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:56

Oh, I would love that.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:57

If someone wanted to get a contact with you, do you have an email or a LinkedIn or where would you like to do it?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:01

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn for sure. Um, that's probably the easiest way. I'm pretty good about checking my um messages, and I'd love to hear from people, and I'm really good about responding. So anybody should feel free to reach out anytime on whatever it is. I'm pretty um curious person, so I like to talk about whatever it is. And you know, I hate to talk as you can tell.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:21

So well, perfect. I'll put your LinkedIn uh uh link down there in the show notes also. I've waited a long time to have this conversation, and it was a great conversation. I thank you for coming on here.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:33

Thank you. It was really fun. I really, really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it, and it's always nice to talk to somebody who shares my love for the BOP because um there's a lot of haters out there, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:44

And um we'll stand against them.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:47

There you go. There you go. Thank you, thank you. Such a pleasure. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:51

Absolutely. We'll see you later. Have a great day.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:54

All right.