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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Diane, welcome aboard to the show. So happy to have you today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Ari. I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1:So I I wanna start with a difficult question. Why doesn't our prison system work?
Speaker 2:It was born. It's very much been born the way it is today. So, I'm a firm believer that when we first decided to incarcerate people, including slavery, there never really was a modern model for it. So people to their defense with lack of opportunities or education, decided to house them. So to that end, it's been very much a system that has been designed from the beginning.
Speaker 2:I could go on and on for a long time about why it is still the way that it is today, but there are a lot of great grassroots organizations, as well as departments of corrections around The US. If we're talking about that, that really are trying to move forward and get themselves away from the model that's always been instilled in them from the beginning. But it is a big nut to try to change what an industry has been, what they call successful at for so long.
Speaker 1:Is there an issue here with incentive when we think about how prisons are measured? How they quote, unquote, money quote, quote, unquote, make money or how the prison wardens or anybody who's responsible for these prisons, are we measuring these organizations incorrectly?
Speaker 2:If I were to guess, I would say recidivism. How
Speaker 1:what's that mean?
Speaker 2:Meaning once you release somebody, what is the chance that they will commit that crime again and end up back in prison? Right now the statistics on that is about fifty percent. So fifty percent of the people that we release will then return back to prison. So what's sad is there's really not a system in place to help them rehabilitate while they're inside. So when they come back out society or the narrative that the media has given them or us makes us afraid of them.
Speaker 2:We think that our streets are not as safe. We've stamped them with that. So it's hard for them to get a job and then they're not given money. And then they've been taken out of the workforce. They've been, you know, their resume isn't built up.
Speaker 2:They haven't had pro social skills. You can imagine the detriment and the trauma that has happened within that cell and that prison and with them and without having any help to dismantle all the things that led them there. That's why it ends up about fifty percent.
Speaker 1:Do you know if that number is high or low compared to the rest of the world?
Speaker 2:So like I was recently down in Melbourne, Australia, guns are illegal down there. Yeah. So their average years of incarceration are about seven. You look at The US, least in California, we're closer to 25. So it's very indicative of the climate that you're in, but then I've also sat with women and men down in Mexico City and half the population down there.
Speaker 2:So if you walk in the prison, half are dressed in one color, half another color, literally for 50% of that population, which means the 50% in one color have never been sentenced. So they've never been charged of a crime. Some don't know why they're there.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? How is that even possible?
Speaker 2:Right. So you can get picked up off the street for whatever reason they think, and they have not had a court date or have been able to have a time to have their voice heard. So it depends on what part of the world you're in really.
Speaker 1:So it it it can be much worse I'm hearing from you, but it can be much better.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Who's the role model, which if if you know and gone down this path, what's the role model for, you know, a great incarceration experience that results in the lowest amount of, you know, going back to the crime and maybe the shortest spent time in prison? Like, who who do we look to to figure out how to do this right?
Speaker 2:Well, I have a perfect example. So I was in a prison in Oslo, Norway and it was a women's prison and I met with the, we call them wardens here in The US, but she was the governess there and they have a beautiful model in that. They're also average incarceration rates about seven years. So she will get a woman into a prison. And what she does is within the first two weeks, will spend as much time with them as she can and find out what they want to do when they're going to be released.
Speaker 2:And then they spend those seven years doing that. So for example, she had someone that wanted to be in construction and wanted to drive a tractor. So she made sure that they got enough schooling, whether they had to bring, the teachers into her or she was, out on work release. They even brought a tractor and took a few, barbed wire fences down so she could then learn her trade so that she knew that she would be successful. She would have a job.
Speaker 2:She'd be reintegrated back into society. That is a perfect model. They're also given work release. So I was at a conference there and often we are at a conference, you'll see tables of people selling things or working the tables. And there were people currently incarcerated working behind those tables.
Speaker 2:So you're in a conference where the doors are open, come and go as you please. So their model is very much to integrate them back into society, which is beautiful. We don't do that here, or you could then be seeing your family again. There was a woman that gave us a tour and when I was leaving, she was also leaving her parents were there to pick her and she was gone for the weekend. So if there is a chance to recidivize or to be triggered from whatever it is that sent you, you then have the man hold or the hold to bring you back into that prison to help you deal and cope.
Speaker 2:So when you do come out, you've been exposed to it. Here in The US, we don't do that. You are put in, you're given a parole date, you meet with them, you're either given a chance, they say yes or no. Usually about ninety days later, you're put out on the street, you're given $2.300. Sometimes you're giving housing, sometimes you're not.
Speaker 2:There's plenty of people that I've talked to who have nowhere to go. So they've chosen to stay in prison. There's some people, a guy that I know in San Quentin where I work and he does not wanna go to the parole board. He knows he's about 78. He would be homeless if he were to leave.
Speaker 2:So he'd rather stay there. As brutal as it is inside, that's the reality of the people that we're housing here in The US and in a lot of other places.
Speaker 1:Lord, I I I don't even I don't even know how to respond to that. What is the what is the sentiment difference between Norway and The US that is driving this? Is it to the best of your guess, right, there's maybe no right answers here, but is is there a cultural difference? Is there is it because of the level of kind of social care for the citizens? What is driving our hard line in America, which is, you know, to your point interfering with people's ability to recover?
Speaker 1:Why why are we in this situation? Why don't we look towards Norway and say, hold on, that would be a smarter approach.
Speaker 2:There's lots of factors that lead to that. So I can't speak exactly to the economy in Norway, but they very much take care of their people, right? You're able to go to preschool and it's paid for. The homeless rate is much lower. If you have any kind of mental illness, you're able to find some kind of help somewhere.
Speaker 2:Those factors right there are not available in America. So a lot of people that I've been talking to, there's trauma that happened to them early on in their life. There's trauma that happened to them in their classroom. There's trauma that happened because they were poor. So many will be first, second grade, not want to look poor.
Speaker 2:Don't have anybody checking in on them at home. They will then go out and join a gang or steal in order to be able to survive. So there's men that I've talked to in San Quentin, who are my age in their fifties and have never known someone in their household that worked or went to school. So, as an educator, we have what we often call a breaking year. So the average in the prisons that I can find that I've been in, it's right around between fourth and sixth grade.
Speaker 2:So you have this lack of education, right? So therefore you're able to, obviously you're not gonna necessarily be that successful. Your trauma is not gonna be dealt with. So how systematically, how we have decided to raise our youth and what we've decided to give families is a direct impact on our incarceration rate.
Speaker 1:So I wanna dive in a little bit to how you've been approaching the problem or more the solutions that you've been working on, which are directly linked to education, but not only for those incarcerated, you've been working with universities as well. So I want to talk about that. Not only universities, younger students, if I'm not mistaken. Tell us what you've been doing and does it work?
Speaker 2:It does. And it's great. I read some of our mail today. I've had a couple of guys call in our work phone today that are incarcerated and they say how we've changed their life. So I'll explain the arc of our business and the benefits that our society is gaining from that.
Speaker 2:So my story is I was on the board of education for the university of San Francisco, where I had gotten my teaching credential and my master's and found out that they had a presence inside San Quentin. Up until that point, I had taught second and fourth grade and had always wanted to teach or be inside prison. So that was my opportunity. So I first started out, I would go in in the morning and teach men inside to be teachers, but we can't call them teachers. So they were peer support.
Speaker 2:And then at night I would bring in a teacher from the outside, a free person and match them with the peer support inside. And we would teach men to get their GED or their high school diploma. And then through that, was just moved by their vulnerability and truth. So you have these men in your classroom that are not safe in their classroom. So all the prisons that I know of you very much hang out with your skin color that becomes your gang.
Speaker 2:If you were to go and be with someone in a different gang or with a different skin color, you're risking your life. So we're very much mixed in our classrooms. I also see them at night where they haven't had proper food. So it's 05:00 at night and they don't necessarily have the protein or purity of water that we get out here. And then they've also had trauma in and out of the classroom.
Speaker 2:And then they sit there with us and they answer any questions you have, they'll write, and they're very much vulnerable to anything you ask them as well as their crime. I remember meeting with a now friend of mine, Duane, he was in at the time and he tells me a story, which will make me tear up even talking about it, but he realizes the second that he pulled that trigger on that gun and that bullet left that he for the first time was gonna be seen. So until that point, he had lived with his younger sister down in LA and his parents weren't present. Mom wasn't there very often. There wasn't any food or heat in the house.
Speaker 2:And his sister was luckier than he was because she had relatives. Her grandparents lived nearby. So she would go there. So Dwayne was never seen. So not until he's actually, you know, arraigned and in a courtroom, did he, someone actually, actually talk to him and care where he was?
Speaker 2:So for me, it felt like an injustice not to share those voices. So at that time I was watching a, or following online a nonprofit called Humans of New York and make a long story short, Brandon Stanton started that back in 2010, he was unemployed, lived in New York City, dusted off a camera, would go downstairs, take pictures, extemporaneously interview the person and put them online. And instantly you would fall into what they're doing that day. To me, it felt like a wonderful model to share the humanity that I was witnessing, that was breaking glass ceilings for me to forever be an educator. Here I am wanting to share with the outside world, what it is and who we are housing and what that system is like.
Speaker 2:So I'm a firm believer that when people would read our stories and we're on all our platforms, we've got a podcast, that's victim offender dialogues. And I think when people really sit down and listen to those stories, and if you're really open, you'll find that when you hear someone's story, there's more that binds us together than tears us apart. So the success of ours has skyrocketed only because at the time when we first launched this was during the pandemic. And this is where I can bring in how we're helping the youth as well. So we, I have a friend inside Juan Hines who is the, or as the time was the senior editor of the San Quentin news, which is a newspaper strictly run by people incarcerated.
Speaker 2:He loved the idea. We then pitched it to our public information officer, Sam Robinson at the time he loved it. He went to Sacramento and we were cleared a month before the pandemic hit. So February 2020 and Ari with every cell in my body, I want to share these stories of people that are incarcerated. So here we are that summer, I've got four kids, they're teenagers.
Speaker 2:They're at home. Fortunately at my children's high school, they have a newspaper and a lot of the kids had just been in on tour in San Quentin and heard what I wanted to do. So it's literally a kitchen table story. We got out our Google Docs and our computers. One and I over the telephone made an introductory packet and I had my roster and instantly we started hearing from people.
Speaker 2:And we decided to launch on our website, built that that summer and our social media channels and it took off like a wildfire. So here we are about four years creeping up on about five years later, and we're in over 195 prisons in The U S you heard me talk about being in Mexico. I've been in the MS thirteen prison that's owned by that gang in Guatemala City. I've been to Medellin and met with people in The UK. We've got a lot of traction in New York.
Speaker 2:So we're able to walk into those prisons with cameras. So our workforce has always been the youth. So our high school interns right now, we have about 35 that were just with us this last spring. And then during the summer, we have about 10 that come into our office, which is right outside of San Quentin state prison here in the Bay Area. So about 10 of college students come in during the summer.
Speaker 2:So yeah, we're really much hitting, very much hitting the youth and it, I mean, you've talked a little bit Ari about doing things for your children. I'm in the same boat that you are and we have had hundreds of kids that have interned with us and has changed their perspective on life, on humanity, and justice.
Speaker 1:This is this was my next question. What is the describe the young boy girl that comes in to your call it internship or program? What do they look like before? What do they look like after? What changed?
Speaker 2:First, I have to give credit to the parents because they're working with a population that we deem as not safe. So they will be in our office. They will be with people that have been recently released, previously incarcerated and for heinous crimes. So the person, the child that we see in the beginning really doesn't have a clue as to what they're walking into. They haven't been stamped like you and I have with a lot of indoctrination from our media.
Speaker 2:What's beautiful about the children we're seeing now is wellness is a word that wellness was not a word that I was really brought up with. And they're very much open to it. So they didn't live through the Clinton era of three strikes, you're out, lock them up. So they see the people that are incarcerated very much for who they are when they write to us, when they're sitting there. So they don't already don't have a bias.
Speaker 2:So for them, the justice comes to them that much quicker. So with them, they see the brokenness, they see the humanity and a lot of them, change their major or go into a field that maybe wasn't open to them before they may not have ever seen in their lifetime. So yeah, does that answer your question?
Speaker 1:I think it does. What did the kids say themselves about the experience?
Speaker 2:Gosh. I hate to speak for people without quoting them exactly, but I don't have them here. On the tip of my tongue.
Speaker 1:You with a a close approximation.
Speaker 2:I think it forever changes them because they're at an age in high school, right? They're 14, 15, 16, 17, where you've always been very much a narcissist, right? In order to survive. So they are given a world of volunteering and what you can do to give back. And it very much parallels what I see with people that are in prison.
Speaker 2:And the second they come to our organization and they realize that by writing, they are giving back to a nonprofit, they are looking at their redemption, they are able to give back, that for me is when the true rehabilitation really hits.
Speaker 1:I wanna change the lens here, and we're both parents. An issue that a lot of parents have, especially if they're middle class, is that the children live a very protected life. They don't really know what hardship is. How is this, experience changing the kids from your perspective as a parent?
Speaker 2:I think it brings a greater lens of justice. So for them, they, they see what they've done and they see how in our country they're being punished, but they're not given rehabilitation. So for them, they, it's a righteous cause for them. Right? They have the passion that I do to be able to share with other people.
Speaker 2:They may decide to go into law to help.
Speaker 1:You see it affecting them in other ways that they kind of get a new perspective to life beyond kind of excluding the topic of incarceration. Does this kind of change who they are as people?
Speaker 2:Oh, a 100%. Right. So just someone volunteering, right? They hear you are working for an organization that is not for profit,
Speaker 1:right.
Speaker 2:And a spot in the world. And, I've started a group called the humans of San Quentin league, and it it's a culmination of other groups that go in. And right now, I think we're up to 150 different programs like ours that go in and help with rehabilitation. So the kids are given that whole breadth of different organizations you can be involved with. And as you know, to be able to have community service, it really gives them a different lens on how big our world really is.
Speaker 2:And if you find that passion or what you want to do, it is out there for you.
Speaker 1:I think the problem that you and I both have is that we don't appreciate that there is a lot of parents that, or kids that don't appreciate or don't understand what you just said. So I wanna dive into it a little bit. I think there's a really big problem with lack of perspective, both in adults and kids. And I think the, I would argue that your experience or any volunteer experience, whether it's, you know, I took my daughter to food banks, anything, it gives you a perspective. That perspective will change who you are as a person.
Speaker 1:Doesn't matter what kind of volunteer experience you do. So, you know, that that's really a to to many ways in a very selfish way, it's it's a way to help your child get to that next level of perception. Mhmm. Even if you're a selfish bastard and all you want is for your child to to to do better in life, that perspective will help them do better in life. Right?
Speaker 1:To understand that there is a big, big world outside of their small bubble. And you know what, if they can do good as well as doing well, even better, why not?
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. There's, there's, you know, you look at Maslow's hierarchy, hierarchy, right? There's nothing better than to be able to give of yourself to make someone else better. And it's the biggest gift I think you can give to anybody at any age.
Speaker 2:Right? A lot of us have to wait until you're retired, until you're able to actually do that kind of work. But I think our kids now are special in that they know what a human body, what certain things you've got to do in a day to keep yourself healthy. So it really brings a different flavor to nonprofits and giving back.
Speaker 1:If you had to speak directly to one of the youths that are maybe tuning into our show, what would you tell them?
Speaker 2:I would tell them to give things a try and to maybe listen to their parents. That's not always the easiest,
Speaker 1:You but lost them there. Right.
Speaker 2:There are kids that are naturally set up to want to do something different or willing to take that chance. And fortunately we've been lucky whereas all the kids that have come to us have been a 100% in. And I think even if you turn up once to that volunteer job for a couple hours, there's a lot other things they're learning, right? Pro social, they're learning, do they wanna be in an office environment? Are they wanna do something a little more physical?
Speaker 2:Are they good on a computer? What are their strengths? And if you're in with the right nonprofit, they'll find out what your strength is and expound on that. That's one thing that we have the flexibility of doing. And I think with all the years that I spent with kids, I'm really able to sit down and take them through our array of different things to be able to find out what they're good at and give them that success.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's a gift for sure.
Speaker 1:So Diane, thank you so much for carrying on the show today. This has been an absolute delight. You and I will talk talk later maybe about some other collaborations that we could do because I'm I'm really excited. There's only one scripted question on this show, but it's a difficult one. If you had to go back to when you were 20, or perhaps the most difficult moments in your life, what would you advise yourself?
Speaker 1:What would you tell your younger self?
Speaker 2:This is something that I wish I had done earlier. So I wanna say it was the late eighties and that movie comes out Silence of the Lambs. And Jodi Foster walks down into that basement and there she is face to face with Hannibal Lecter. And Ari, that lit something to me. I knew from that moment that I want, not that I want to be afraid, but I want to get into prison reform.
Speaker 2:I want to get into psychology. And at that point, I think I was just newly getting married. So maybe it was the, I don't know what time in my life it was, but I became an elementary school teacher in a private school where my children were going to do well. I thought I did a stellar job, but they were gonna do well. Now for me to be able to stand next to someone who's getting their diploma and they're in their fifties and they wanted that diploma because they wanted their grandkids to see it.
Speaker 2:And the ripple effect that they have of holding that diploma and the hundreds of people they hit has a greater impact than I could have had on, you know, the class of say 20 or 30 kids I was teaching. So God, do I wish I could go back to in that time and you know, I'd been a much, I'd probably still be in prison reform, but I'd be in a much different situation. That's it.
Speaker 1:Diane, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Sure. Thank you for having me. I love talking about people. And I like to say that I might be sitting here and talking in front of you, but I'm really talking for thousands of people that are incarcerated around the world. So I appreciate you Ari for wanting to hear their voice.
Speaker 1:Our pleasure.