Incarceration and Race: Realities and Reforms

KIMBERLY ROBINSON: On behalf of the Center for the Study of Race and the Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, it is my pleasure to welcome all of you today to our panel, Incarceration and Race, Realities, and Reforms. Our nation's history and present reality tells a story of the intertwined nature of race and incarceration, from who is charged with a crime, the crime alleged, and the length of sentence. These and countless other factors intersect with the race and lives of individuals, families, and communities.

We've gathered together national and international leaders to discuss these issues. I will introduce our moderator and he will introduce the speakers. Our moderator is an international leader on criminal justice reform and education, both inside and outside of prisons. Professor Gerard Robinson is a professor both at the School of Law and the Batten School of Public Policy.

Professor Robinson's many accomplishments include serving as the former Secretary of Education in Virginia, directing the Center for Advancing Opportunities at the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, as well as the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and serving as the chair of Resilience Education, a nonprofit here in Virginia dedicated to preparing individuals who are incarcerated for successful reentry into society. I am proud to say-- I realize I didn't say. My name is Kimberly Robinson, for those of you who don't me. I'm also proud to say he's a wonderful girl dad and husband. So it's my pleasure to introduce Gerard Robinson.

GERARD ROBINSON: It's interesting when your wife introduces you because you know it can go many different ways. So first of all, let me thank what I call the better Professor Robinson for not only introducing me, but for hosting this conversation today. I teach a course here at the law school and at Batten School called Education Inside US Prisons. And at some point in the semester, you're going to see this graph.

And when you see this graph, I think it's a great adage that a picture can speak a thousand words, but I'm in a law school, so I'm going to amend that adage. What I would say is a picture will speak a million words, and one word is incarceration, and it's for a million plus people in the United States. But what's so interesting about that picture is perception and time.

Now, when you think about it, Brookings Institute, two years ago, identified that Gen Z and Millennials now are the majority population in the United States. That's another way of saying over 50% of the people in the country are under the age of 40. Now, why does that matter? They were born 1981 moving forward. When they take a look at this map, they say, huh, look at this steep curve, almost a hockey stick moving in the air.

For that generation, this is almost normal. It's almost organic. It's almost as if it's inevitable when, in fact, that number and that rise is an invention of public policy. It's an invention of judicial decisions. It's an invention of politics. And I say, well, take a look at the tail. At least for 1950, fewer than 200,000 people were incarcerated in the United States. But that's not enough. I can take that tail and go to 1925 and I can take that tail all the way to the 1830s.

From the 1830s up until 1974, fewer than 200,000 people were incarcerated in federal and state prisons. Now, let me put that in perspective. In 1970, if prison was a city, it would be the 67th largest city in the United States, behind Syracuse, behind Grand Rapids, Michigan, in Des Moines, Iowa. In 2024, if Prison City was a city, it would be the fifth largest city in America behind New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, right above Philadelphia.

There is no natural way that number would rise without the invention and without the role of policy and politics. And of course, when you have this conversation, race will naturally come into it. When we had the rise, what we call the boom, which some authors call the prison boom, the complexion of who was in there, Black, white, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, other, began to change, and with it, conversations about crime and punishment.

Now, while we the invention of the penitentiary going back to the 1700s, late 1700s in particular, was a whole idea of rehabilitation, and there's been ebbs and flows of rehabilitation. Should we have it or not? Well, in 2024, there are reforms and there are realities. And we're here today to talk about what this looks like from four people who have walked very interesting lanes as it relates to imprisonment, as it relates to incarceration and to reforms and reality.

I'm going to introduce people in the order in which they're going to speak. So first of all, we have Jeffrey Abramson. Sorry about that. Jeffrey Abramowitz. Jeffrey is the CEO of the Petey Greene program. Proud to say that some of his staff have actually spoken to my law students virtually about the role of women and incarceration in prison. He's going to speak to you about his personal and professional role leading to becoming the CEO of Petey Greene.

Next, we're going to have Mark Howard, who is a professor at Georgetown University. He has a JD PhD. For over 15 years, not only has he been a professor, but he's also been what I would call an edupreneur, someone who's taken an entrepreneurial approach to solve problems through education. He's going to talk to you about the different type of nonprofits that he's created and worked with to address incarceration and opportunity.

Next, we're going to have Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Now, some of you may of her from her time with National Public Radio. We had dinner last night, and one of our guests said, wait a minute, I'm going to close my eyes. Hey, I've heard that voice before. And so that's one way. Some of you may of her through her work with The Atlantic and some great articles she's published in national mediums. And some of you may her because of her new book, Bringing Ben Home. And she's going to talk about this book and how it influences our national conversation about incarceration and race.

And our fourth speaker is Yusuf Dahl, of course, who is the CEO of the Century Promise. He's going to talk to you about his work as an entrepreneur, having once been the director of an Entrepreneurship Center at Lafayette College, his work leading nonprofits, but he's also going to talk to you about why public policy matters and what we have to do. I'm glad to see you here. This is an interesting time to have this conversation.

When you think about it, 40 years ago this year is when what we call the 1994 crime bill was signed into law, when many of you were coming to age, and how that changed the dynamic of what we talk about. So I'm going to bring up Jeff, who's going to start off our conversation.

JEFFREY ABRAMOWITZ: So I got up at 4 o'clock this morning to come down from Washington, DC to be here, and I did it with such vigor and energy that the three cups of coffee on the way down helped. But I'm really excited to be here. They say the two most important days of your life are the day you're born. And what's the second most? Anybody? People often say the day you die. I would argue with that. I would think that the second most important day of your life is the day you figure out why you were born.

And for me, I could tell you down to the second when that happened. Because, you see, I was a trial lawyer in Philadelphia. I was born and bred in Philly, went to law school, and came back and practiced law, became a senior partner, spent most of my days in the federal and state courts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and practiced before the US Supreme Court in Washington. And on one particular day in March of 2012, I stood in front of a courtroom that was packed with media, friends, family, colleagues.

For the first time in my life, I stood there not as a lawyer, but stood there as a defendant. So I made some choices in life. I'm really intentional about that word choices. I think we all make choices. Einstein says we make 10 bad choices a day. You're just not trying hard enough, because that's how we learn. We do something. We don't do it so well. We go back and do it again. Made some bad choices that landed me in a federal prison. But on that particular day, a judge sentenced me to five years away.

And it was nine years ago last Tuesday that I walked out of a federal prison and began my life over. I was homeless. I lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for a year and a half, and my first job was teaching GED math in North Philadelphia. From there, I quickly became a director within months and began to navigate my way, my return back, but began to see the challenges of men and women that are Black and Brown, that live in one of the most challenging communities of our entire country.

They call it the Badlands of Philadelphia, North Philadelphia. Gun violence and drugs are pretty rampant. And began to navigate my way back into society, took a job teaching GED math, and then became a director at a workforce development agency in Philadelphia, a large agency, and then stand here today, nine years later, proud to be the CEO of one of the greatest educational support organizations in the entire country, the Petey Greene program.

And I'll tell you about that in a second. But my journey coming home has been fraught with challenges, and a lot of the work that I do across the country is not just as a CEO of the Petey Greene program, but I also serve as a subject matter expert for the US Department of Education and work on their portfolio on correctional and reentry education, helping people get smarter both inside and outside of the walls of our prisons and jails.

I'm thrilled to be here because you sit where I sat as I went through law school and tried to find that pathway to what really made me happy. I wish one thing for you before I talk to you about the Petey Greene program is that you find in your life the energy, excitement, and passion that I currently have every single morning when I get out of bed. Because as a lawyer, not that I wasn't happy in the skill sets that I got going to law school, being on law review, being in moot court, really driving successful law practice.

I didn't have the same energy and vigor as I have today because it's just filled with one thing, which is purpose. And when you go to law school and you work for a law firm, I think sometimes you lose the why. Like, why do you do things? And for me, it took me to go away, to lose absolutely everything that I owned, everything that was important to me, to understand what my passion was, to understand why I was here, what my purpose was that second day.

So, really excited to be here. The Petey Greene program-- we'll talk more, I'm sure, during the discussion. But Petey Greene program, our mission is to help people get smarter individuals that are incarcerated and as they come home and to really provide them with support educationally. So we use college students throughout the country, we bring them inside of our prisons and jails, and we work one-on-one to teach people math and reading, helping get a certification or whatever they need in order to find that pathway to success.

We are the largest multi-state provider in tutoring and academic support in the country. And for me, we have-- Gerard was right. We have 2.1 million people incarcerated in our country, and we spend $20 billion in our carceral system every year. But within five years, 2/3 find their way back inside. The key to solving that problem of mass incarceration is education.

It's helping people get smarter so that they have a career pathway when they come home, that they have something that can give them a sustainable wage, and something that they really want to do and love to do, not something that they just have to do. We're in a number of different states, mostly on the Eastern seaboard, but we're moving fast across the country and scaling. We work with people that are trying to get their high school equivalency, literacy, ESL, English as a second language, workforce certifications, and also a wonderful college bridge program which helps people navigate from a high school diploma or GED into college.

The consequences of mass incarceration are evident all around us, just in the system that we work in. But a lot of the work that I do is telling the story of the men and women that are Black and Brown that are so disparately impacted by our criminal legal systems. And it's something that we all have to work at and understand. And there's a great line by Walt Whitman. He said, we should all-- we need to be curious and not judgmental. We need to be asking the questions of those that go through the system, what is it that you need to be successful, and how can we help you navigate that going forward.

So I look forward to entertaining all of your questions. I do give you a quick apology up front, but I have to be in Washington DC to speak at the US Chamber of Commerce this afternoon. So I'm looking forward to your questions and I am thrilled to be with such a distinguished panel, including the person that hired me as CEO of the Petey Greene program, Yusuf Dahl. So thank you, Yusuf. Thank you.

MARK HOWARD: All right. Well, good morning. I want to thank Kimberly for putting on this event and her Institute for hosting us here. It's great to be here. Gerard, we first met in a prison, and that's something that's marked us. And since then, we've visited many prisons together, including around the world in Norway, Germany, Brazil, and most recently several in the United States. So always love being with you, always learn from you, and really honored to be a part of this.

For all of you, I just want to say, I've been to so many universities around the country, and I have zero affiliation with UVA, but I always tell people-- and I have someone here who is a witness to me, having said this before-- that the most beautiful campus that I've ever been to of any university in the country and probably the world is right here at UVA. So it's nice to have that background there. And I hope you can appreciate it for those of you who are here just for three years, just how gorgeous this place is.

So as Gerard said, my name is Mark Howard. I'm a professor of government law at Georgetown University. I like this term that you just coined, edupreneur. I hadn't think I'd heard that before. But it's true that up until eight years ago, I was kind of a normal academic, you might say, doing teaching and research. And then I had an opportunity, through Georgetown, to start what was initially a very small organization with a tiny amount of seed funding that just allowed me to hire undergraduate students.

I had six undergraduate students, paying them $12 an hour, and I said, let's do something really big that no university has ever done before. Let's dream and create something that will help to fight mass incarceration. And now the Prisons and Justice Initiative is running programs inside prisons and jails, including a bachelor's degree program, has two reentry programs, one 6 months long, one 10 months long, where people are paid full time and then go into jobs.

We've had over a hundred graduates of those programs and only one is back in prison. We have a wrongful conviction reinvestigation program called Making an Exoneree-- there's a back story to that, but maybe we'll get to it later-- where we've actually-- there's a law component to it and a law class for the last two years, but it's been now seven years as an undergraduate class. And I have an alum of that class who's now at UVA Law.

So, by the way, I have two of my former students who are total superstars, who are Hoyas who are now here as Cavaliers, and I feel like should give me some kind of honorary affiliation here at UVA law. We'll talk about that later. But through this program, Making an Exoneree, we have now walked eight people out of prison who had been sent there for crimes they hadn't committed and who are free now, in large part thanks to the dedicated work of Georgetown undergraduate students.

And so Prisons and Justice Initiative, we have almost 25 full-time staff members now. 11 of them are formerly incarcerated, and we're running these programs that are really extraordinary, giving people opportunity. Separately from that, I have three other 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that I started and run, but I don't have time to get into them. I just will mention one, the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, which is a program that brings members of the outside community into prisons and jails all around the country.

We're now in 12 states and expanding rapidly and giving people an opportunity to connect with incarcerated people, to see their humanity, to feel that they are just like us and just as deserving of a successful future when they leave that awful place. And Gerard got to experience a little bit of that through our visit in Colorado this summer. And I encourage any of you who have the opportunity to visit a prison to reach out and learn about the Frederick Douglass Project.

But so since this is a panel on race, I did also want to address the theme directly and kind of crystallize what in my-- I teach right now a big undergraduate lecture course called Prisons and Punishment. And by the way, for the first time ever, I have discussion sections and they're taught by formerly incarcerated people, three men who served almost 80 years between the three of them are actually leading discussion sections with undergraduate students in them.

From the very get go, after a couple introductory sessions, we spent five sessions on race. And I tell people, you cannot understand the history, certainly, or the present of incarceration without understanding the depth of the problem of race in this country. So I only have, what, probably a minute or so left, but I just want to-- I just want to highlight what I think is the crux of the problem. Which is that up until 1964, Civil Rights Act-- and there were some key Supreme Court cases that led to that and were aligned with it.

You had in this country clear, delineated, racial segregation and discrimination that was sanctioned by every institution in this country, including the Supreme Court. And I know many of you who are law students, particularly if you're 1Ls, right now you're being taught to bow under the Supreme Court and read every case like it has biblical meaning. But also remember what that court sanctioned for so long. And I have a very hard time showing reverence to it, either historically or, frankly, in the present.

But after that important foundational moment of the Civil Rights Act, where it became no longer constitutional-- remember, Constitution is about interpretation. It's about new laws. It was constitutional for a long time to own other people based on race, to discriminate and completely dehumanize people based on race. And of course, still is with the exception to the 13th Amendment. But after 1964, when there could no longer be laws that explicitly mentioned race in any way or treated any racial groups differently, there was a new dimension to this problem that emerged, which was the use of discretion.

And so I want to make two points. There's two sides of the same coin that I think are tied to the current problem of race in the American criminal injustice system. And so one is the use of discretion. In other words, it's no longer possible to discriminate explicitly based on race, which is, of course, a good thing. Much needed. Came way too late. But there is tremendous room at every single stage of the criminal legal process for discretion.

Who police officers stop, who they search, who they arrest, who gets brought to court, who gets charged by the prosecutors, what crimes they get charged with, how they get sentenced. There's, in every single stage, room for discretion. Discretion characterizes each and every one of those institutions. And they often do it with full impunity because it's not something that can be looked back on and checked. And so with this discretion, we see the pattern that Gerard showed, where if you broke it down racially, you'd see a tremendous overrepresentation of people of color.

So point one is you have discretion that's rampant in the institutions where official legal discrimination is no longer allowed. And then point two is McCleskey versus Kemp. Critical Supreme Court case on the death penalty but has ramifications in every other area. Which says that you cannot, as an individual, as a defendant, as somebody who has been sentenced, claim discrimination based on a larger pattern unless you can prove it in your individual case.

In other words, you can have a police officer who-- you can be African-American or a police officer who, 99% of his arrests are African-Americans. It's an overwhelming pattern and there's a clear racial bias at play. Or McCleskey's own case was the death penalty, where there was a tremendous overrepresentation of African-American defendants with white victims who were being sentenced to death. It's an incredibly powerful statistical pattern that's undeniable. And yet the Supreme Court says, no, you can only benefit from it in your case, at trial or at appeal, if you can show that there was explicit racial discrimination in your case.

Well, how do you do that? The only way is if somehow you overheard something or there's a record of it. But remember, that's no longer legal. It's done through discretion. It's not talked about. It's almost impossible. And so we've created this conundrum through the progress that came from the '64 Civil Rights Act and associated cases where now suddenly we have rampant discretion, clear disproportionality. That's another way of saying discrimination. It's happening.

Whether it's intentional or not is another question. Sometimes it might be implicit bias that's taking place unconsciously. Other times it's explicitly intended but couched in race neutral language. But then you have people who cannot in any way make any claims based on it. They're trapped by this holding from McCleskey versus Kemp. So there's a lot more I can say. I give a lot of lectures on race. It's critical. But I just wanted to highlight those two points and maybe we can then spark more discussion from there. So thank you.

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: At NPR, we always have a script with us, unlike the others. I'm so glad to be here. It's really wonderful. And I want to actually reiterate something that Jeffrey said, which is about purpose, the importance of purpose in life and figuring out what that is. You will be so happy no matter what you're doing if it is what you are meant to do. That's how it was for me with this book, writing this book. I'd been a journalist for a long time, 40 years, and then I met Ben Spencer.

So let me first ask you, how many people are in their 20s in this room? OK. So imagine this. You're 22 years old. You just got married. This fellow, Ben Spencer, he's the main character of my story. You just got married a couple months earlier. Here he is with his groomsmen right after the wedding. You and your partner are expecting a little baby boy in a few months. You both have jobs. You're saving your money to buy your first home.

And for a couple of days, you've been struggling with a migraine headache. And so you go home, you take a nap, you're just hoping to get rid of it. And there's a knock on the door. And the next thing, you are arrested for murder, tried, and convicted. That's what happened to Ben Spencer on March 26, 1987. He was convicted of robbing and killing a wealthy white man in Dallas. Nothing connected him to the crime. They didn't find his fingerprints at the crime scene.

They didn't find any of the victims' possessions in his home. He had an alibi. Nothing connected him. But he was convicted and sentenced to life in a maximum security prison based on bogus evidence. His new wife, Deborah-- they had just been married a couple of months before he was taken away-- had to drive several hours each way to go see him. His son, BJ, was born after he was incarcerated, so he never saw BJ outside of the prison walls.

Not as a baby, not as a toddler, not as an adolescent, not as a teenager, not as a college student, not as a young man. Not until he was 34 years old. There are a lot of reasons why thousands of innocent people have gone to prison and probably tens of thousands of others are in prison-- innocent people are in prison but will never be exonerated. The criminal justice system is deeply flawed, especially for people of color. People like Ben Spencer.

So Ben's story does not include all of the flaws in the system, all the ways it goes off the rails, like coerced confessions or testilying, which we can talk about later, or flawed forensic evidence. Doesn't include those. But it includes a lot of boxes-- checks a lot of boxes. The first is eyewitness testimony. Now, often witnesses misidentify a suspect. In fact, in 70% of the wrongful convictions, those involved faulty eyewitness testimony. But sometimes witnesses don't just make mistakes, sometimes they are incentivized.

So in Ben's case, the residents of the poor neighborhood of West Dallas initially told police that they didn't see anything to do with the crime. And then a $25,000 reward was offered. And suddenly one day, within one day, three people said that they had seen Ben Spencer connected to the crime. They were lying. The second flaw is jailhouse informants. To quote Alexandra Natapoff, who is at Harvard Law School, jails are run like a negotiated market. OK?

A snitch's testimony about a suspect in exchange for benefits or perhaps a lighter sentence. Police need informants to close cases, and the worse the crime, the more likely they are to use these bogus informants. So snitches appear in less than 1% of the cases of wrongful convictions where the crime was not murder. So less violent crimes. But police used informants in 15% of murder cases and in 25% of death penalty cases.

That's how desperate they were to solve this crime. It was an urgent crime. They felt a certain urgency, and so they went to the snitches and they got a conviction. Now, remember, all of these people were innocent. We're talking about innocent people here. In Ben's case, a jailhouse informant told the police that Ben had confessed to him. This informant, Danny Edwards, had been facing 25 years in prison. He walked out of jail in 14 months. The third flaw, a third flaw is tunnel vision.

Police are really pressured to close cases and close them quickly. And once they focus on a suspect and once they arrest a suspect, they are often unwilling or psychologically unable to focus on anyone else. Criminologists say that every wrongful conviction somehow involves tunnel vision. In Ben's case, two people went to the police after Ben was arrested and said, you know what?

You have the wrong person here. We have a friend-- two people. We have a friend who told us all about the robbery and the murder, who told us details. They gave details that had not been released publicly. They said, you have the wrong person. The police ignored this. They had their man. And the fourth major flaw is prosecutorial misconduct, also known as usually Brady violations.

So a study in 2020 by the National Registry of Exonerations found that of the more than 2,000 wrongful convictions for murder, police and prosecutors, usually prosecutors, failed to turn over favorable evidence to the defense in 61% of the cases. So in Ben's case, prosecutors hid the fact that their star witness had lied about receiving money, reward money in exchange for her testimony. Given that this case was entirely circumstantial, nothing connected Ben Spencer to the crime, and she was the star witness.

That was pretty important information. The defense could have used that to impeach her credibility. And as the jury foreman told me, we wouldn't have convicted Ben if we had known that. If you're poor or a person of color, you could experience Ben's nightmare. If you're poor and Black, the chances are exponentially higher. The National Registry of Exonerations has been systematically cataloging cases where people have been convicted and then exonerated since 1989.

And they have nearly 3,600 cases that we actually about, there are probably many more. So Blacks are 13% of the population. Whites are 59%. A report in 2022 found that the state prosecuted nearly twice as many innocent Blacks as innocent whites. In other words, they were willing to prosecute eight times as many Blacks, innocent Blacks as they were innocent whites.

A few figures. Of the more than 3,000 convictions, innocent whites were convicted in a third of the cases, innocent Blacks in more than half. When you add in Hispanics, what you find is that 2/3 of all people who were wrongly convicted were people of color. Sexual assault. Innocent whites were convicted in 33% of the cases, innocent Blacks in 60%. For murder. Innocent whites were convicted in 31% of the cases, innocent Blacks in 55%.

One thing I learned in researching my book is this. If it's really easy to convict an innocent person, it's almost impossible to undo the mistake. Appellate courts do not like to second judge a jury verdict. They weren't there. They didn't assess the evidence. They didn't see the witnesses. They don't know. And so they generally don't. And that's legitimate. But also most state judges are elected. So reversing a murder conviction or a rape conviction is basically a gift to your political opponent who's often running on a tough on crime platform.

So all of Ben's appeals ultimately failed, and by the time I met him, he had been imprisoned for 30 years. In 2017, I traveled down to Dallas to meet Ben in prison and reinvestigate his case for The Atlantic and for National Public Radio. I'm a contributing writer to the Atlantic, and I had worked for NPR for nearly 20 years. This is so much fun. I had so much fun.

But a fearless private investigator named Darrell Parker and I went all over the sketchiest parts of Dallas, and we were trying to find old witnesses and new witnesses. And in fact, what we did, we found, of the four witnesses, three eyewitnesses and one jailhouse snitch, we found-- we found two of them. One was dead, the other wouldn't talk to us. But of those two, a witness and the jailhouse snitch, both of them recanted on tape. They did affidavits. No, no.

OK. Both of them recanted on tape. We had affidavits from them, polygraphs, and then we also found a new alibi witness. And the alibi witness had been with Ben Spencer at the exact time that this crime was being committed miles away. Then what happened is serendipity struck. In November of 2018, a new district attorney in Dallas was elected. Ben's attorneys had gone to four previous district attorneys, and they were uninterested in looking at Ben's case.

But in this one, Ben's legal team took the evidence that Darrell and I had unearthed and presented it to him, and he decided to reopen the case. And after an awful lot of really wonderful investigation by the Conviction Integrity Unit, a unit within the prosecutor's office that re-investigates dubious convictions-- Dallas was the first one to do it. Now it's all over the country. After this very, very deep dive into the investigation and his criminal conviction, he decided that Ben did not receive a fair trial.

Ben was provisionally released in March of 2021. See all of the masks? That was during the pandemic. Now, it was provisional because the High Court of Texas had to agree that Ben actually didn't get a fair trial. If they didn't agree with that, then Ben would go back to prison for the rest of his life and he would probably be there literally for the rest of his life. There was no more evidence to uncover. But eventually-- they took their time. They took three and a half years. But eventually, in May of this year, they decided that he did not get a fair trial.

On August 29, 2024, just three weeks ago, in the same courtroom that he was convicted and sentenced to life, Ben Spencer was exonerated. He had spent 34 years in prison. Now his name was cleared. He can leave the state without court permission. He can have beer at dinner now. He can apply for any job that he wants. He will be compensated. That's true. But that will not make up for the 34 years that he missed from ages 22 to 56. The best years of his life.

This brings me to an aha moment. In 2008, I wrote long features for The Atlantic and for National Public Radio. After my stories ran, nothing happened. I was convinced that Ben Spencer was innocent and that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. The media is important, but it's not dispositive. The justice system, not the readers of The Atlantic, not the listeners of NPR, the justice system needed to find him innocent. And that's where you guys come in.

You're the future district attorneys and federal prosecutors. You're the future judges on state and federal courts. You're the future legislators, defense attorneys, public defenders. The system is changing for the better, but it has got a long way to go. So you need to work to fix the system. You need to work to get rid of the flaws or at least ameliorate the flaws in the criminal justice system so that the Ben Spencer's-- that's Deborah. The Ben Spencer's of this world are the rare exception and not the norm. Just do it. Thank you.

YUSUF DAHL: Is it morning or afternoon yet at this point?

GERARD ROBINSON: Afternoon.

YUSUF DAHL: Good afternoon, everyone. Well, it's great to be here. And I would say if you have not had the opportunity to take a class with either of the Professor Robinsons, I would strongly encourage you to do that. I know Gerard very well and have just had the opportunity to meet Kimberly, but Gerard has assured me she's the better professor. So maybe if you only can meet with one, meet with her.

So as many of and many of the previous panelists have highlighted, the carceral system in the United States is a deeply intertwined and in many ways flawed system. It's one that spans from poverty to schools, policing the prosecution, imprisonment to supervision, and reentry to collateral consequences. Each of these areas contains its own set of injustices and opportunities for reform. So today I'm going to just briefly touch base on collateral consequences and the constrained opportunities that continue to limit people long after they have paid their debt to society.

But before I do that, let me just talk a little bit about my story. Incarceration, race, and place have been central themes throughout my life. I'll start with the obvious, and I think it's something we all know. Zip code matters. It determines the schools our children can attend, our proximity to job centers, and access to community resources. Your zip code, perhaps more than anything else, can tell us or allow us to predict the future outcomes, including incarceration.

And so where I'm from, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, over half of the Black men by the age of 30 have some level of justice involvement. And so it won't surprise you for me to tell you that my father was in prison, my older brother was in prison, and at 18 years old, I followed in their footsteps and received 10 years for the distribution of drugs. It's interesting because when I think back to that period of my life, it was almost as if prison was a foregone conclusion, almost like a fait accompli.

It was something that was not going to be avoided. And at the time, Wisconsin, which is where I'm from, was sending so many people to prison that they didn't even have the capacity to house everyone. And so after two years, I was sentenced or I was sent to the state of Oklahoma to finish out my sentence. And a couple of things I'll note about that experience and as I reflect on my experience in the criminal justice system is there's two things I'd like for you to take away.

One is we think about the criminal justice system, it's as much about politics as it is policy. And Gerard had noted that. And it's very, very true. And an example when I was in Oklahoma is when I was first sent there, one of the most contentious issues had to do with the cost of phone calls. It was three times more expensive to call from Oklahoma than it was Wisconsin.

And so after a lot of agitation and protesting by us inside Wisconsin got CoreCivic, which is the company that owned the prison, to make the phone calls at parity in terms of what it would cost to call if you were from Wisconsin. And so you would think with this large customer, the state of Wisconsin saying you need to make these changes, that would be the end of it. But we ended up, all of us, being shipped to another facility in Oklahoma because the facility refused to lower the price of phone calls.

And so you're saying, like, how is that possible? Well, as it turns out, the city of Sayre had negotiated a revenue split on the phone calls. And so they were to receive 42% of the revenue of all calls made. And so if you reduced the cost of those phone calls, the city was moving out-- or the city was losing out on key revenue. And so it's really hard to blame the folks from Sayre because the system was unfortunately designed for them to benefit from our misfortune.

And we were really both exploited. The other truth that I've come to appreciate about the system is that we know how to break the cycle of recidivism and incarceration. And in fact, Gerard has a great book, Education for Liberation. If you get a chance, take a look at that. But we know that education is the most effective tool at our disposal. And so when I was in prison, I didn't have access to the Petey Greene program.

And let me shout that program out. I was fortunate enough to be board chair when we hired Jeff, and he's done a tremendous job for our organization. And I didn't have access to these college programs where folks are earning credits. But I did have the good fortune of befriending a white collar criminal who taught me how to program computers, how to repair computers, and probably most importantly, he opened my eyes to the pathway of professional opportunities through certifications, which were much more accessible to me than a college degree, because it would take me four years to get a degree and I need to provide for my family right now.

And so with his tutelage, I worked really hard, saved all of my earnings from prison. So that $0.30 an hour. But you're there for a long time. $0.30 an hour adds up. And I had enough to pay for my Microsoft certification when I was released. Now, of course, when I get home, the parole officer wanted to take all of that money and put it towards restitution, but that's a story for another day. Fast forward 25 years, and I have been incredibly fortunate.

I've had a successful career as a software developer, a housing developer. I served as president of Wisconsin's largest apartment association, graduated from Princeton, most recently built the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Lafayette College. I mean, by pretty much any objective measure, I've been incredibly fortunate and privileged, and so you might forgive me for thinking I had transcended my past.

At the start of this conversation, I said I was going to talk about collateral consequences, so I better do that before Gerard cuts me off here. But let me get to that. So the fact is, despite all the achievements that I talked about, my family still faces the consequences from the decision I made when I was 18 years old. In 2022, we relocated to Pennsylvania for a professional opportunity, and I soon learned that there were certain neighborhoods we were not allowed to live in because of my criminal conviction.

And so we ended up securing housing in a school district that the Commonwealth had designated as failing. This school was so underresourced that it didn't even have a tennis program, a sport that my daughter has played since she was five years old. It's really hard, standing here now, to convey the sense of shame and anger that I felt watching my family have to deal with the consequences of something that literally happened a lifetime ago.

And this is possible because of a piece of legislation known as the Thurmond Amendment. It was introduced in 1988 by then-senator Strom Thurmond, and it removes fair housing protections as a collateral consequence of a drug distribution conviction, and it moves that discretion that Mark talked about to landlords to decide whether or not you're a qualified tenant.

And so as landlords have increasingly relied on algorithms and computers to make decisions, income didn't matter, credit history didn't matter. All that mattered was this conviction from decades ago, and they had the discretion to keep us out of certain neighborhoods. The Thurmond Amendment remains the law today, and I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit about that.

So let's end where we started. Incarceration, race, and place are deeply intertwined, and we really do face a daunting challenge to redesign the incentives in our carceral system to create the outcomes that I think we all agree we would like to see. But I want us all to remember that as daunting as this challenge is, it's a challenge to our collective will and our convictions, not to our capabilities. Thank you.

GERARD ROBINSON: In a different setting, the last thing you said, my response would have been, that'll preach. That's pretty good. So we're going to go to the moderated Q&A. I'm going to start with Jeff. So, Jeff, you and I are big believers in education. We know that it works. Within the academy, there's been a debate for over 40 years.

At one point in the 1970s, we said nothing works, and then we found research and we said some things worked. And now we're at a point that some things work well if instituted correctly. Tell us about a couple of stories you've seen with the people you've worked with at Petey Greene, where you've seen education fundamentally change someone's life in ways we wouldn't have thought.

JEFFREY ABRAMOWITZ: Can you hear me? There you go. So let's start with the reality, that if you take one class, just one class inside the carceral setting, you're at a 43% better chance of not going back. Just one class. That's all it takes. I work within the walls of prisons and jails across the country, and what I can tell you is that the men and women that I see over and over again have been told all of their lives, you can't do it.

You're stupid. You'll never succeed. You'll never get it. Stay on the streets, sell drugs. You're better off there. You'll make a living that way. They've been raised often in a culture where math and reading were just not ingrained in them as a priority. Survival was. Getting housing, food insecurity. Those were all things that their family was embedded in them. Education is the one determinant-- there was a datum up in Washington, and I mentioned this to a Senator yesterday.

The number one determinant for a child's educational attainment in their lifetime, in their lifetime, is the educational attainment of the parent. Incredible. We need to do a better job educating the men and women that are better incarcerated so that when they come home they have a fighting chance of finding that career pathway. And that career pathway to me is not just about math and reading. It's about really understanding digital literacy skills.

The first thing we tell people when they come home, you've got to get a job. The parole officers, you've got to get a job. By the way, you should know that a large, large portion, almost 44% of our population that's incarcerated, are there on technical violations. They're there because they're on parole or probation and they've done something in that system that's put them back inside. But we have to understand that helping people find a career that is sustainable with a living wage.

And that's not just putting somebody in a fast food restaurant and say, here, go ahead, go make a living now, because time and time again, I work with people that come to me and say, Mr. A, I can't fry another fry. I can't flip another burger. It's never what I wanted to do. So understanding that education to me is about helping people find what they really love to do, and knowing that education is more than math and reading, it's about digital literacy so they can operate a computer when they come home, a cell phone when they come home.

It's about financial literacy, understanding how to deal with money so that they can manage their money, understanding that the classrooms of our adult education world go beyond the four walls of those classrooms, because people don't-- they don't fail or drop out of education programs on the outside because they can't do math and reading. They drop out because they need diapers for their kids. They need a house over a roof over their head. They have food insecurity. They need to find a way to survive. And education just hasn't been a priority for anyone as they travel through the carceral system. And we have to change that. We have to do a better job helping people find those career pathways.

GERARD ROBINSON: That's a great point, reminding us that some people were told you're stupid their entire life. And when I talk to people who are going through an educational process in jail or prison, some of them said, for the first time in my life, I realize I'm not stupid and that I can learn while incarcerated. Very interesting.

Also worth noting that the education of the parent is the number one determinant, and I'll put an asterisk to say it's particularly for the mother. My wife reminds me of that all the time. So Mark, you've got other businesses or other nonprofits you're running. There's a personal story, a personal history that drives some of the things you do. I'd be interested if you want to share that with us.

MARK HOWARD: Sure, I'd be glad to. Let me also say that as someone who spends half his time in the realm of prison education or also post-prison education, that I agree with everything Jeff has said, and I also want to applaud you on your personal journey. It's really inspiring. And also the other half is spent in the wrongful conviction space. And Barbara, the story you told about Ben and the work that you've done that really contributed to his freedom is so important, and I share everything that you said as well.

As for the personal story, this could take forever, but I'll give a brief version. I was hired at Georgetown University as a professor of political science. I had a PhD, and I focused on European politics. I wrote two books, many articles. I got promoted, got tenured, promoted to full professor. I don't even know if the word United States is in my first two books and all the articles that I wrote. I don't think the criminal legal system appears in it anywhere. It literally was another life, another career.

But I had a personal back story that came up and took over my life, to the point where, you talk about purpose, I found mine in a prison visiting room and it completely changed everything that I do ever since. The backstory is that when I was 17 years old, first day of my senior year of high school, my childhood friend named Marty Tankleff, who I've known since we were three years old-- we were born nine days apart. We grew up in the same towns in Suffolk County Long Island, New York.

And Marty woke up and found his parents murdered in their own house. Not only was he orphaned on that day, but he was in handcuffs by the end of the day, accused, charged, and the next summer, convicted and then sentenced to 50 years to life in a maximum security prison for the murder of his parents. I believed he was innocent. I advocated for him. I wrote about it in our little high school newspaper called The Purple Parrot, which no one listened to, sadly, and he was railroaded.

And our lives went in very different directions. Marty always likes to joke, Mark went to Yale, I went to jail. So we lost touch for a number of years. I moved on with my education and so on and started teaching at Georgetown. But I would always tell people, I have a friend in prison who's innocent. And that would lead to regaling with stories-- the story is absolutely insane. If you want to learn more about it, stay tuned because it'll come to a streaming service near you, hopefully in the near future.

But Marty eventually-- one thing is I started visiting Marty. We reconnected. We became very close. We talked on the phone and I would go to prison. We would write letters. I have shoeboxes full of his letters. But one day in the prison visiting room, something took over me. And I said, Marty, I'm going to do everything I can to get you out of prison. And I decided I'm going to go to law school. And I was a tenured full professor and I became a 1L at the same time. Very humbling experience.

I literally had some of my former students who were classmates of mine. I had friends who became my professors. And just as I started, Marty was exonerated. Now, some people thought, OK, mission accomplished. Marty's out. You can go back to your work writing books and articles about European politics. But my eyes have been opened to injustice through Marty's case, and I just couldn't close them again.

I couldn't go back, and I kept going. And then I started teaching in prisons. And that led to a whole new set of people and experiences and started transforming all of my teaching and research and eventually edupreneurship in the space of just getting people out of prison and helping them on a pathway to success in life. So I look back on my first career. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm proud of the books and articles I wrote.

But they're no longer me, and everything I do with every waking minute and every fiber of my being is to break down this evil monstrosity of a system that has been set up in this country, again, with the full support of all of its revered institutions that we're supposed to genuflect in front of. But we need to break those down, and there's no one better to do it than this generation. I'll agree with that. That's my story in a nutshell.

GERARD ROBINSON: No, I appreciate you sharing a personal story like that. That's real stuff. And you should also know that I'm writing a chapter for the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Education, and I already referenced one of your books. So there's a life shelf coming forward. Barbara, let me go to you. You spent a year at Yale Law School on a fellowship. You had an opportunity to take a journalism hat, a writer's hat, and go to law. Knowing what you know now, particularly for this fabulous book and the work of young people who are lawyers, also professors, how can we better interact and support people like you and how can we better utilize you to do this work?

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: Answer your phone. Seriously. The-- oh, sorry. The short answer is answer your phone. Journalists love people who respond to them right away. This is an interesting question. I never expected to be asked this. OK. Let me tell you a little bit about the journalist mindset. We are human, too. We are human beings as well. We are not mean, nasty people. We are not the people you see yelling at sources as they try to get into a car.

I mean, some of us are, but most people are not. What journalists want is to find the truth. OK? We're not advocates on one side or another. I wasn't an advocate for Ben Spencer. I followed truth. If there had been any evidence that Ben Spencer was guilty, I wouldn't have wasted six years of my life. What we want is truth. And so anything you can do to help us achieve that, find that, print that, put that on the radio, is great.

So, for example, very brief story. The way I got into this story, into Ben's story. I had left NPR and was writing for The Atlantic, and I was looking for a story for The Atlantic magazine. And so I called up one of my favorite sources from NPR. His name is Jim McCluskey. Jim McCluskey is probably the most important man you've never heard of. He is the father of the modern innocence movement.

10 years before the Innocence Project started getting people out of prison, he was getting people out of prison, reinvestigating their cases and getting them out of prison, and taking non-DNA cases, the hardest cases, and getting them out. He's so far gotten out about 71 people either off death row or off life sentences. So I called up Jim and I said, Jim, what's the case that haunts you? What's the case that keeps you up at night? He said, well, that one's easy.

I've gotten everyone out of prison that I thought was innocent, except for Ben Spencer. And he began to tell me Ben's story. In fact, I left this out because we only had 10 minutes, but Jim had actually re-investigated Ben's case beginning in 2001, presented a lot of evidence to a judge in 2007 in Dallas. The judge actually ruled, found that Ben should be released based on actual innocence, that another person was more likely the suspect, all the witnesses were lying.

Three years later, the high court in Texas, Court of Criminal Appeals, said, eh, you know what? There's no DNA in this case. Sorry, Ben, you're in prison for life. So they rejected that finding. This is a guy who had been declared innocent by a judge and still he couldn't get out. And so that's what haunted Jim McCluskey. And because I was interested, he just opened the doors for me.

He sent me thousands of pages. He and his lawyer, the lawyer he worked with, sent me thousands and thousands of pages of documents, also source material, like all his interviews with previous witnesses and things like that. I mean, I was buried in a mountain of documents, and I was happy as a pig in mud. It was great. He made it possible for me to do this story. I often conferred with him. I asked the lawyers a lot of questions.

They often opened doors for me. But ultimately, it took someone who could write an article or write a book to help put it out there for all the world to see. So what you could do for a journalist? Just work with us. We're not the devil. We're actually pretty great people. Or we're curious people, and we will not burn you. We won't burn you. And so that's what I would suggest is just be open and help us.

GERARD ROBINSON: Thank you. And in an era where we consider the people in the media the devil, it's good to hear an angel of light say something good about the media and the work. Yusuf, let's go to you before we turn it over to audience Q&A. You talked about having lived race, zip code, and housing. Talk to us about what happened to you not too long ago and what you decided to do about it.

YUSUF DAHL: So when I was denied housing and I found out this was legal, the first person I called was Gerard, actually. And I said there's this law in place called the Thurmond Amendment, and this is what it does, and these are the opportunities that it constrains for people. And if you've ever had the opportunity to connect with Gerard, I mean, he's incredibly insightful, but he's also very positive. Like he starts to-- like a solutions oriented guy.

Before you know it, he's giving you, like, six people you should talk to. And I left that conversation, perhaps naively, believing, like, oh, we're going to get-- we're going to do this. We're going to change this. Well, Gerard was right. It just took a lot longer than I thought. And so two and a half years later, I'm happy to share with all of you that tomorrow, the Fair Future Act will be introduced, and the Fair Future Act will repeal the Thurmond Amendment.

[APPLAUSE]

What I would say for all of you who have an interest in leaving the world a better place than you found it-- and I have to imagine that animates for a large part why you're here. A door was slammed in my face two and a half years ago. We're now going to open that door for over 9 million people in this country.

[APPLAUSE]

And when I listen to Barbara, Mark, Jeff, just their stories right now, some type of door was slammed in their face or a door of someone they cared about or were interested in was slammed in their face. And maybe it was a jail cage in some of these instances. But each of these individuals decided to do something about that. And so I just want you all to know how impressed and inspired I am by the work that you do, and I certainly know Gerard, and he's opened many, many doors for people. So that's what I would say on that.

GERARD ROBINSON: An entrepreneur, a bureaucrat sees a problem and says-- no. What is it? Bureaucrat who sees an opportunity and calls it a problem. Because it means I have to change. An entrepreneur sees a problem and calls it an opportunity. If you're not at the table, you're on the menu. He's on the table. Now let's change the menu.