[MUSIC]

Thanks so much for this conversation, I just have one last question.

It's that, is there anything you want people to know

about prison that they might not know?

>> I want people to know a whole bunch about prisons that they

probably don't know.

Because most stuff they see on TV, the information that they get,

is probably not true.

I think that, also too, some of the best and

brightest people In this country, you find them in prison.

I mean, some of the best people I know, I'm telling you, are in prison.

I'm talking about in terms of their values, their mores and

all these different things that we attribute to so-called good character and

whatever you want to say.

You'll find loyalty and the whole nine yards,

but I think that in society, I mean,

when I was kind of touching a little bit about,

I mean, this whole issue about mass incarceration.

I mean, a lot of that kind of took place because

you have this kind of more silence, and so

you just kind of have this whole proliferation in the system.

And the point of that is, everything that we're talking about, and so much more with

respect to how prison actuallys affect people and relationships and life.

But I think that in terms of, I mean, even on death row, for instance,

that most people in society believe that the worst of the worst

people are sitting on death row.

And the reality is, it's really not,

I mean, I got people that I consider family,

they're sitting on death row.

There's a guy over there, a good friend of mine, 18 years old, playing with a gun,

actually killed his girlfriend, because he didn't understand the process,

like you were saying, about being 18 years old.

He had just turned 18 years old, and because he didn't understand the process,

and chose to exercise his right to a trial, which is what he was entitled to.

But then the system felt like, okay,

since you want to do this we are going to seek the death penalty against you,

and actually got it, and he's still sitting on death row now.

But, I mean, the truth is that, and

I ain't saying you shouldn't have a death penalty period.

But hell, when I got off of death row, I was in the cell with a person that,

he was convicted of killing four people.

He was never subject to the death penalty,

because of the county he happened to come out of.

And like I said, I ain't saying that he should have been.

But this idea that people sitting there in prison,

some people that we should somehow just write off.

Then like I said, I think that people that's listening, I mean,

we have to understand that first off, most people,

over 90% of the people sitting in prison, coming home.

And we gotta decide as a society how we going to welcome them back,

because they coming home.

And so you can't sit somebody in the cell, you can't sit somebody in the cell for

23, sometimes 24, hours a day, like she said.

And come by, antagonize them, throw piss on them, just the same way in

the city are throwing it on them, and do all these different things.

And somehow think that when this person's time is up, you can let them out, and

they're going to come out and be productive people, and

do everything to their fullest potential in life that we hope that they could.

I mean,

you basically just sending a ticking time bomb back out wherever they came from.

And eventually, it's going to explode, and usually,

it's against the people that's right next door.

I mean, sometimes it goes down the street or off the block, or whatever the case is.

But a lot of the stuff that you see in terms of how this stuff plays out,

it's against the people that they're living in the house with.

You created this situation, and so

the thing that I would certainly want people to know is that,

like I said, we have to decide as a society how we want to treat people.

First off, they are sitting in prison, do we want to just warehouse people and

try to stay in this whole business of the industry?

I mean the reality is that,

with hundreds of billions of dollars involved in the prison industry,

that simply means somebody's going to jail, we already know that.

We know who's going, we know who's not going, but somebody's going.

But like I said, I think that as a society, we have to decide how we want to

treat people in prison and how we're going to welcome them back home.

Because the reality is that,

like I said, some of the best and brightest people are sitting in prison,

even though they may have done something stupid to get there.

But these are people that have a whole bunch of potential to come out and

be productive people in society and have something to offer to not only their

family, community, and society, but, yeah, that's the thing I would say.

We have to decide how we are going to deal with that,

because this is not sustainable, what's happening right now.

>> My response to that question, what I want people to know about prison,

is that prison is directly linked to the 13th amendment,

and that legalized slavery.

Because it created that exception that if you've been duly convicted of a crime,

that's in our federal constitution, it's in Tennessee's constitution.

And second, I will say that human beings exist in prison, who have goals,

who have dreams, who have aspirations, who have families, who want to do better.

But for whatever the reasons might be, 33% of those individuals are mentally ill.

The majority of the people in prison are non-violent offenders.

You only have one-third of 2.2 million or

more people in prison who are violent offenders.

What people don't know about prisons is that the most disciplined and

model prisoners are the most violent prisoners.

Those who have the most violent charges have the lowest recidivism rates.

People need to understand that just because people make a bad

choice that looks so bad, that it doesn't mean they'll be bad forever.

I’m living proof of it, and is living proof of it, I educated myself in prison.

I helped create programs in prison, started organizations in prison, and

acquired a scholarship at American Baptist College while I was in prison.

And I am pursuing my goals, my dreams, and my ambitions here, and

I have been here for a little over a year and six months.

And I'm here to say that society needs to know that people in

prison really do want to be better people.

>> Lemme add one other thing to what he just said, and real quick is,

that the whole time I was sitting in prison,

I never met nobody said that, I can't wait to get out and come back.

It's what he said, most people in prison certainly want to come out and

be productive people.

But like I said, because of the way the industry operates,

you got people sitting in some prisons around this country,

and certainly here in this state,

that's working for private companies and industries.

That once they come home, they can be sitting in prison for

ten years making whatever they're making for this company.

Once they come home, they go try to get a job from that same company and say,

listen, I can do this stuff with my eyes closed, because I done did it for

ten years straight, ain't missed a day.

Because like he said earlier, if you refuse to go work, then you're going to

probably lose your job, because you're going to end up in the hole.

So you getting up, and people that have jobs in prison got good work ethics,

because they get up everyday, like I said, ain't no sick days.

So they getting up, they working, and

these are people that would be able to do the same thing out here.

But when they come out here, and go to Wilson Leather, or

whoever stuff that they actually making, and say, can I get this job?

They saying, no, we don't hire ex-felons, or we don't hire felons.

And so it’s good, I'm sitting in prison, you're working me for

$0.50 an hour or whatever you're working me for.

But when I come out here, then I'm not good

enough to actually have that same job that I was doing in prison.

Important that is, because like I said, it’s an industry.

What he said about, I mean, when you talk about the recidivism rate, it's no

accident that 7 out or 10 people who get out of prison, they end up back in prison.

I mean, if you take somebody coming out of here with every intention,

just like he said, to be a productive person.

But here, when you say that you can't get a job,

you can't this apartment, all these different ways.

And even some cases where you can't even do what he doing there in college,

pursuing his degree, just like he said, that you being denied these opportunities.

I mean, hell, it's like us sitting around this table,

anybody on this university campus that, if you were subjected to a certain condition,

you will probably end up doing some stuff that you can sit up and say,

point at somebody else and say, I would never do that.

But if you were subjected to a certain condition when you're trying to eat or

feed yourself, most people going to go back to probably what took them in

prison in the first place.

And end up back in prison because of the conditions, I should say,

roadblocks that's put up against people that's coming out of prison.

Like I said, I ain't never met nobody in prison here, talking about,

I can't wait to get out and come back.

>> Thank you, Kay, is there anything you'd want us to know that we might not know?

>> I think that people get a very romanticized

version of prison from TV shows.

And then when you see prisons on the news,

it's always from the Department of Correction's standpoint.

No one ever actually bothers to talk to a prisoner and ask them,

like the situation in Delaware.

No one bothered to go, the only way the media

had any access to the prisoner is that they themselves contacted the media.

The media didn't go for them, go after them, go to talk to them.

They talked to the department of correction, and

got their version of events.

And I think I agree most people in prison are good people that have made mistakes.

When you put addiction and mental illness, and

you put those together, people make mistakes.

And if we were all judged by the worst thing we've ever done,

we would all be in prison.

And, you can't judge someone by their worst action, because

we all do things that are sometimes incomprehensible to other people.

And to warehouse human beings in a system that perpetuates the cycles of violence,

that perpetuates that they're always going to be a bad person.

To warehouse them, and block them out from society and say, you're no good.

And even if you come home, we're going to put so

many obstacles in your way to make sure you go back there.

When you sell people on the stock market, which is basically what has happened in

our country, we sell people on the stock market.

>> Literally, not basically, literally what's happening.

>> We sell them on the stock market, and that is an incentive to keep people

incarcerated, keep them caged for as long as you possibly can.

And to make sure that they're not going to be successful when they come home.

[CROSSTALK] >> True that.

>> Make sure that they're going to come back.

because you have a profit margin and you have shareholders that are counting on

you, making sure that they come back to prison.

And until the private prison industry is completely obliterated,

nothing is going to change, and that's the reality of the situation.

There are a ton, I mean the safest I've ever felt in my life has been in

a prison visitation gallery.

And I knew in that space that there is not a person in there that would let anything

happen to me.

That those were my brothers, those were my sisters, and

it’s the safest place I've ever been.

>> Thank you.

>> You're welcome.

>> Molly, anything that you want us to?

>> Well, I probably can't say it any better than the other folks at the table.

I guess I would just add that, I mean,

every person in a prison is a full human person living a full human life.

And I think where we get into trouble is when we start to generalize about

the prison population, as if they're all living a collective experience.

And that they're not sort of unique souls or unique individuals.

I mean, everyone in prison is not a monster,

everyone in prison is not a misunderstood angel.

Each person is living his or her own I think, unique life,

and so there are people in prison who are innocent,

there are people in prison who aren't innocent.

There are people on the outside who are innocent,

there are people on the outside who aren't innocent.

So the marker of prison does not mean anything about your character,

because there are an equal number of people on the outside of prison

who are just at guilty, if you want to use that term.

So I think for me, the biggest sort of learning

through doing this work has just been that every person in prison is so

much more than just their particular choice or

act, or crime or charge.

And I am the victim of a violent crime, so I sometimes think

about this as being like deep forgiveness work when I'm there.

But I have gained so much from listening and

learning with folks who are on the inside.

And I think have just really come to appreciate

the profound problems that we have with the system.

And the ways that we sort of categorize people based on a choice, or

based on a context, or based on the condition under which we were raised.

Yeah, that's what I'd say.

>> I want to thank all of you for taking the time to talk with me and

with each other, thank you.

>> Thanks.

>> You're welcome.

>> Thank you for having us.

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Roundtable Discussion: Painful Truths About Prison in America

Justice, Mercy and Mass Incarceration

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