[Music]
[Applause]
incarceration hurts at a place that’s
hard to touch at a place that’s
difficult to reach those are not my
words but those of Susan Burton Susan
mom lost her five-year-old son due to an
accident in front of their home a truck
hit him that led to a spiraling
depression for her and that would be
understandable for any mother father
grandparents or siblings it resulted in
Susan self-medicating first with cocaine
and then with crack at no point in her
journey was she provided any kind of
psychological counseling any kind of
response to her grief through medicine
through psychology none of that but
instead she found herself in and out of
prison for possession not because she
was selling drugs but because she was
self-medicating trying to find a way to
deal with her pain her situations not
unusual 2/3 of the women who happened to
be incarcerated in the United States are
nonviolent offenders the overwhelming
majority of these women are in jail due
to drug-related crimes it brings to mind
a poem for me written by Paul Laurence
Dunbar that is often attributed to Maya
Angelou and a little bit of it goes like
this
I Know Why the Caged Bird beats his wing
until his blood is red on the cruel bars
because he must fly
to his perch and cling when fain he
would be on a bow a swing and a pain
still throbs in those old old scars and
it pulses with a keener sting I Know Why
the Caged Bird and we can use this beats
her wing the United States incarcerate
more people than any other country in
the world in fact you could say we
incarcerate off the map off the chart
much of what we know about mass
incarceration is dominated by this view
we think of it in the context of men
women and girls happen to be invisible
they are the collateral damage of our
failed drug war our war on crime and
even when the most compelling advocates
for criminal justice reform exercise
their voices in recent years to elevate
the discourse on mass incarceration and
I’m talking about former attorney
General Eric Holder and then President
Obama when both made compelling speeches
about mass incarceration Attorney
General Eric Holder before the American
Bar Association and then a couple years
later President Obama before the
n-double-a-cp both spoke in such
heartfelt ways about the mistakes that
we’ve made in mass incarceration the
racial implications the high costs but
in both speeches they referenced only
men they forgot about women but if you
look here you will see that we need to
be equally concerned about women and
mass incarceration in his lifetime an
African American male stands a chance of
1 in 3 of possible incarceration
criminal punishment for African American
women it’s 1 in 18 now let that sit with
us an even more compelling the United
States incarcerate smore women than any
other country in the world
more than Russia more than China India
Thailand Mexico combined the US has only
5% of the world’s population but
incarcerate
right 25 percent of those who happen to
be incarcerated globally are here in the
United States now what is it that we
need to do about this well part of this
is that we need to recognize what this
is and why it’s happened and the impacts
my colleague Kristen Turney who teaches
at UCI in the sociology department
reminds us she informs us that for
children of an incarcerated parents they
fare worse than a child who’s
experienced a parent’s death they fare
worse psychologically and they fare
worse physically this has become such a
problem that even Sesame Street has
tried to address it they have a Muppet
now named Alex and Alex is a Muppet that
has a parent incarcerated and why is
Sesame Street done this because they
realize the collateral consequences of
the way in which we’ve incarcerated in
the United States of the more than 67
million people who have some form of a
record a criminal record in the United
States they face about 45,000 collateral
consequences making it very difficult
for reentry but we make it very
difficult for their children now this
story has the impacts that directly tie
into women’s lives in the 1980s as we
were launching our war on drugs there
was specific attention targeted at black
women and at latina women and it was
this narrative of the crack mom and that
this crack mom would produce children
who would ravage society they would be
the worst students in our schools in
fact schools would not be able to
educate them it was said that they would
have brains that were born too small
that they would have organ
that wouldn’t function correctly that
they would have abnormal genitalia this
was the narrative but what dr. Hallam
hurt at the University of Pennsylvania
new and dr. Clare Cole’s at Emory new
because they had been doing longitudinal
studies in these areas and not just on
cocaine and crack but also alcohol
tobacco etc was that we were demonizing
whole classes of women and the data that
was being reported was not accurate the
New York Times came to this
understanding a few years ago and online
has a video now where they revisit the
crack mom epidemic that wasn’t as they
say but many lives were hurt along the
way between 1977 and 2007 the rate of
incarceration for women rose over 800
percent in the United States now a part
of this was also the way in which
economically we looked at poor women
women like Susan Burton women who did
not have health insurance these women
were considered the dregs of society at
the same time that the narrative about
the crack mom was all on the news so was
a narrative about the welfare queen that
is these women who somehow wrecked our
economy that they were responsible for
our economic woes and in fact they
weren’t but they were very convenient
scapegoats so much so that the
scapegoating and stereotyping suggested
that they would be the worst mothers
ever and this kind of narrative
continued with billboards placed around
the country and here one even recently
write the notion that the worst place in
the world for a black child happens to
be in her mother’s womb and this rate of
incarceration is not just in state-run
prisons or federal but also privately
run prisons and it’s worth noting too
as Susan Burton has done in a book that
she’s written about how it feels like
being a slave being incarcerated in the
United States what many people don’t
realize is how much work is done behind
prison bars and such little pay in
California our wildfires are often put
out by women who happen to be
incarcerated with very limited training
and very paltry wages but this is a
problem that we need to pay attention to
across the country and we’ve
incarcerated so much that we can no
longer afford to put more people in jail
because our prisons are overcrowded
Susan Burton whom I’ve referenced this
is a the cover of her book I want to
take us through this narrative in the
last 40 years we’ve spent 1.5 trillion
dollars on our failed drug war we’ve
spent four hundred and fifty billion
dollars jailing drug offenders 215
billion in an oven overburden judiciary
and then we have tens of millions of
dollars in other costs and here’s the
grand result have we won have we
resolved our drug war have we provided
the treatments for people that we need
or have we failed and I think many
realize now that in fact we have failed
but there are so many lives that have
been impacted by this it’s a public
health crisis now mass incarceration
medical neglect that occurs behind bars
is absolutely stunning you see in this
image a person named Sue Ellen Allen
and she started an organization called
Gina’s team now Sue Ellen was a
debutante in Texas she grew up in a very
wealthy family by the time she was three
she had traveled to Venezuela by the
time she was five she was at the Louvre
she’s been in Paris and Rome all around
the world but she ended up incarcerated
before she was incarcerated though she
was diagnosed with breast cancer and for
good reason for her life that she was
diagnosed before going in because once
she was in prison she realized the care
that she would not receive as she
describes in her memoir she was taken to
get as she described it her breasts
chopped off in shackles in Chains and
she was shackled during the process she
was left in a holding cell with roaches
and rats while waiting for this surgery
she founded this organization called
Gina’s team and you might think well she
would have started it sue Ellen’s team
but she didn’t Gina was her 25 year old
cellmate and when Gina was complaining
of having these incredibly painful
headaches and that when she chewed it
felt like she was chewing on ice
Sue Ellen begged that a thermometer
could be given to her because she said
had such a high fever but none came
other women begged for the same they
were threatened with solitary
confinement now they were incarcerated
in Arizona and in Arizona there’s a
special kind of way of punishing someone
with solitary confinement it can be
putting them out in the yard where the
temperatures are over a hundred degrees
there are women who have literally fried
in the middle of the fields by the time
a thermometer was given to Gina she
lapsed into a coma and she died three
days later
that’s why the organization is called
Gina’s team I was giving a talk just a
couple years ago and I got a call from
Sue Ellen in the middle of the night and
she said I’m so sorry Michelle
be calling you at 2:00 in the morning
but I just didn’t know what to do and I
said Sue Ellen what’s wrong and she said
michelle jeana’s oldest daughter just
shot herself in the head tonight these
are the collateral consequences that I’m
talking about it used to be a time in
which having a child behind bars
bringing the child into jail was seen as
a punishment but now we incarcerate so
many women that it is now a reward and
award for good behavior that their
children get to grow up in prison behind
bars the cost of this are extreme it
costs more in New Jersey to incarcerate
a person than it does to send them to
Princeton
we know that rehabilitation works but we
also know that prison doesn’t and what
does this mean for African American
children they are nine times more likely
than their white counterparts to have a
parent in jail and think about the
psychological tolls in that regard life
behind bars comes with enormous
collateral consequences and those
consequences impact children’s lives and
I want to turn to that before I close
with you today for parents who go behind
bars who are incarcerated their children
often end up in foster care and many
people think of foster care as a place
in which children may very likely get
adopted but we know in fact they don’t
and many of them do not actually live in
foster homes a number of children
thousands in the United States who have
parents that are incarcerated live in
group homes or they live in shelters and
for those who end up aging out of foster
care which is the overwhelming majority
of the kids who end up in foster care
of the young men 80% will have been
arrested 60% convicted for girls so many
75 percent age out pregnant of a quarter
of them who will be homeless and if you
want to think about whether any of this
has been successful in the lives of
those children realize that only 6% of
those who aged out of foster care have a
two or four-year degree
when Susan Burton says that
incarceration hurts at a place that is
difficult to touch a place that is
difficult to reach this is what she’s
talking about and let’s think about this
if you had a cell phone that failed 40
percent of the times in which you’ve
turned it on or a laptop that failed 40
percent of the time that you turned it
on or a very expensive car that wouldn’t
start at least four out of the ten times
in which you turn on this isn’t a
conservative statistic right the rate of
recidivism is somewhere between forty to
sixty percent but if it failed that
often those things that you use you
would say it’s broken right we need to
fix it and that’s true of mass
incarceration it’s a broken system and
it’s a system that’s well worth our
energy to fix thank you so much [Applause]
[Applause]
incarceration hurts at a place that’s
hard to touch at a place that’s
difficult to reach those are not my
words but those of Susan Burton Susan
mom lost her five-year-old son due to an
accident in front of their home a truck
hit him that led to a spiraling
depression for her and that would be
understandable for any mother father
grandparents or siblings it resulted in
Susan self-medicating first with cocaine
and then with crack at no point in her
journey was she provided any kind of
psychological counseling any kind of
response to her grief through medicine
through psychology none of that but
instead she found herself in and out of
prison for possession not because she
was selling drugs but because she was
self-medicating trying to find a way to
deal with her pain her situations not
unusual 2/3 of the women who happened to
be incarcerated in the United States are
nonviolent offenders the overwhelming
majority of these women are in jail due
to drug-related crimes it brings to mind
a poem for me written by Paul Laurence
Dunbar that is often attributed to Maya
Angelou and a little bit of it goes like
this
I Know Why the Caged Bird beats his wing
until his blood is red on the cruel bars
because he must fly
to his perch and cling when fain he
would be on a bow a swing and a pain
still throbs in those old old scars and
it pulses with a keener sting I Know Why
the Caged Bird and we can use this beats
her wing the United States incarcerate
more people than any other country in
the world in fact you could say we
incarcerate off the map off the chart
much of what we know about mass
incarceration is dominated by this view
we think of it in the context of men
women and girls happen to be invisible
they are the collateral damage of our
failed drug war our war on crime and
even when the most compelling advocates
for criminal justice reform exercise
their voices in recent years to elevate
the discourse on mass incarceration and
I’m talking about former attorney
General Eric Holder and then President
Obama when both made compelling speeches
about mass incarceration Attorney
General Eric Holder before the American
Bar Association and then a couple years
later President Obama before the
n-double-a-cp both spoke in such
heartfelt ways about the mistakes that
we’ve made in mass incarceration the
racial implications the high costs but
in both speeches they referenced only
men they forgot about women but if you
look here you will see that we need to
be equally concerned about women and
mass incarceration in his lifetime an
African American male stands a chance of
1 in 3 of possible incarceration
criminal punishment for African American
women it’s 1 in 18 now let that sit with
us an even more compelling the United
States incarcerate smore women than any
other country in the world
more than Russia more than China India
Thailand Mexico combined the US has only
5% of the world’s population but
incarcerate
right 25 percent of those who happen to
be incarcerated globally are here in the
United States now what is it that we
need to do about this well part of this
is that we need to recognize what this
is and why it’s happened and the impacts
my colleague Kristen Turney who teaches
at UCI in the sociology department
reminds us she informs us that for
children of an incarcerated parents they
fare worse than a child who’s
experienced a parent’s death they fare
worse psychologically and they fare
worse physically this has become such a
problem that even Sesame Street has
tried to address it they have a Muppet
now named Alex and Alex is a Muppet that
has a parent incarcerated and why is
Sesame Street done this because they
realize the collateral consequences of
the way in which we’ve incarcerated in
the United States of the more than 67
million people who have some form of a
record a criminal record in the United
States they face about 45,000 collateral
consequences making it very difficult
for reentry but we make it very
difficult for their children now this
story has the impacts that directly tie
into women’s lives in the 1980s as we
were launching our war on drugs there
was specific attention targeted at black
women and at latina women and it was
this narrative of the crack mom and that
this crack mom would produce children
who would ravage society they would be
the worst students in our schools in
fact schools would not be able to
educate them it was said that they would
have brains that were born too small
that they would have organ
that wouldn’t function correctly that
they would have abnormal genitalia this
was the narrative but what dr. Hallam
hurt at the University of Pennsylvania
new and dr. Clare Cole’s at Emory new
because they had been doing longitudinal
studies in these areas and not just on
cocaine and crack but also alcohol
tobacco etc was that we were demonizing
whole classes of women and the data that
was being reported was not accurate the
New York Times came to this
understanding a few years ago and online
has a video now where they revisit the
crack mom epidemic that wasn’t as they
say but many lives were hurt along the
way between 1977 and 2007 the rate of
incarceration for women rose over 800
percent in the United States now a part
of this was also the way in which
economically we looked at poor women
women like Susan Burton women who did
not have health insurance these women
were considered the dregs of society at
the same time that the narrative about
the crack mom was all on the news so was
a narrative about the welfare queen that
is these women who somehow wrecked our
economy that they were responsible for
our economic woes and in fact they
weren’t but they were very convenient
scapegoats so much so that the
scapegoating and stereotyping suggested
that they would be the worst mothers
ever and this kind of narrative
continued with billboards placed around
the country and here one even recently
write the notion that the worst place in
the world for a black child happens to
be in her mother’s womb and this rate of
incarceration is not just in state-run
prisons or federal but also privately
run prisons and it’s worth noting too
as Susan Burton has done in a book that
she’s written about how it feels like
being a slave being incarcerated in the
United States what many people don’t
realize is how much work is done behind
prison bars and such little pay in
California our wildfires are often put
out by women who happen to be
incarcerated with very limited training
and very paltry wages but this is a
problem that we need to pay attention to
across the country and we’ve
incarcerated so much that we can no
longer afford to put more people in jail
because our prisons are overcrowded
Susan Burton whom I’ve referenced this
is a the cover of her book I want to
take us through this narrative in the
last 40 years we’ve spent 1.5 trillion
dollars on our failed drug war we’ve
spent four hundred and fifty billion
dollars jailing drug offenders 215
billion in an oven overburden judiciary
and then we have tens of millions of
dollars in other costs and here’s the
grand result have we won have we
resolved our drug war have we provided
the treatments for people that we need
or have we failed and I think many
realize now that in fact we have failed
but there are so many lives that have
been impacted by this it’s a public
health crisis now mass incarceration
medical neglect that occurs behind bars
is absolutely stunning you see in this
image a person named Sue Ellen Allen
and she started an organization called
Gina’s team now Sue Ellen was a
debutante in Texas she grew up in a very
wealthy family by the time she was three
she had traveled to Venezuela by the
time she was five she was at the Louvre
she’s been in Paris and Rome all around
the world but she ended up incarcerated
before she was incarcerated though she
was diagnosed with breast cancer and for
good reason for her life that she was
diagnosed before going in because once
she was in prison she realized the care
that she would not receive as she
describes in her memoir she was taken to
get as she described it her breasts
chopped off in shackles in Chains and
she was shackled during the process she
was left in a holding cell with roaches
and rats while waiting for this surgery
she founded this organization called
Gina’s team and you might think well she
would have started it sue Ellen’s team
but she didn’t Gina was her 25 year old
cellmate and when Gina was complaining
of having these incredibly painful
headaches and that when she chewed it
felt like she was chewing on ice
Sue Ellen begged that a thermometer
could be given to her because she said
had such a high fever but none came
other women begged for the same they
were threatened with solitary
confinement now they were incarcerated
in Arizona and in Arizona there’s a
special kind of way of punishing someone
with solitary confinement it can be
putting them out in the yard where the
temperatures are over a hundred degrees
there are women who have literally fried
in the middle of the fields by the time
a thermometer was given to Gina she
lapsed into a coma and she died three
days later
that’s why the organization is called
Gina’s team I was giving a talk just a
couple years ago and I got a call from
Sue Ellen in the middle of the night and
she said I’m so sorry Michelle
be calling you at 2:00 in the morning
but I just didn’t know what to do and I
said Sue Ellen what’s wrong and she said
michelle jeana’s oldest daughter just
shot herself in the head tonight these
are the collateral consequences that I’m
talking about it used to be a time in
which having a child behind bars
bringing the child into jail was seen as
a punishment but now we incarcerate so
many women that it is now a reward and
award for good behavior that their
children get to grow up in prison behind
bars the cost of this are extreme it
costs more in New Jersey to incarcerate
a person than it does to send them to
Princeton
we know that rehabilitation works but we
also know that prison doesn’t and what
does this mean for African American
children they are nine times more likely
than their white counterparts to have a
parent in jail and think about the
psychological tolls in that regard life
behind bars comes with enormous
collateral consequences and those
consequences impact children’s lives and
I want to turn to that before I close
with you today for parents who go behind
bars who are incarcerated their children
often end up in foster care and many
people think of foster care as a place
in which children may very likely get
adopted but we know in fact they don’t
and many of them do not actually live in
foster homes a number of children
thousands in the United States who have
parents that are incarcerated live in
group homes or they live in shelters and
for those who end up aging out of foster
care which is the overwhelming majority
of the kids who end up in foster care
of the young men 80% will have been
arrested 60% convicted for girls so many
75 percent age out pregnant of a quarter
of them who will be homeless and if you
want to think about whether any of this
has been successful in the lives of
those children realize that only 6% of
those who aged out of foster care have a
two or four-year degree
when Susan Burton says that
incarceration hurts at a place that is
difficult to touch a place that is
difficult to reach this is what she’s
talking about and let’s think about this
if you had a cell phone that failed 40
percent of the times in which you’ve
turned it on or a laptop that failed 40
percent of the time that you turned it
on or a very expensive car that wouldn’t
start at least four out of the ten times
in which you turn on this isn’t a
conservative statistic right the rate of
recidivism is somewhere between forty to
sixty percent but if it failed that
often those things that you use you
would say it’s broken right we need to
fix it and that’s true of mass
incarceration it’s a broken system and
it’s a system that’s well worth our
energy to fix thank you so much [Applause]
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