Dan Marshall:

Dan Marshall was my very first interview in this series. Having no idea what to expect, I was quite nervous. Part of the reason why I wanted to transcribe this entire interview series was so that I could avoid having myself and others listen to the hesitancy and uncertainty in my voice. In this interview, I asked questions in an extremely timid manner, unsure of what words to use and circumventing problematic language. I had a lot of, what I call, "loss of words," where I know that a certain word exists, but in that very moment, when I needed it the most, it just went poof! It also didn't help that I exhibited a lot of uptalk and vocal fry. All of these things definitely impacted the flow of how the interview went.

Questions wise, I definitely should have started differently. I began with a question about racial control—super heavy! I remember after asking that question, both of us kind of waited in silence for a bit and then chuckled because it's such a monumental question to be asking out of the blue. You're tying together notions of racism, punishment, brutality, and injustice into one. And that's just the beginning of the interview! I certainly noted this for the next time. Additionally, I prepared about 20 questions for this interview, probably only 6-7 actually having been asked. After my atomic bomb of a question in the beginning, I began tracing what he was saying and paralleling my questions with his responses. However, I was having trouble initially finding that sweet spot for what he wanted to discuss. I finally found it when we started talking about exploitation and litigation, but it was a journey! I also found that a lot of his answers tended to be vague, but that's also because a lot of my questions were broad as well. You can't just ask about medical systems in general or how to change things that have been wrong for centuries and expect a very specific and strategic answer, silly. It's easy in my head to conceptualize all prisons across the nation as this one brutal carceral system, but the reality is exactly what Dan Marshall repeatedly said—it varies place to place. In order to get more specific answers in the future, I need to ask more specific questions.

My interview with Dan Marshall affirmed my preconceptions of our carceral system and all of the injustices that take place within it. Everything that I saw in the documentary 13th, the docu-series of Kalief Browder, as well as some of the stories I read in articles online—people being starved to death in prisons, for example—was solidified in this interview. I don't think many things were surprising for me. Just like Dan Marshall said himself—it's almost like he's jaded! Nothing is a surprise anymore when you learn about all of the cruelty that is embedded and defined in the system. When I did this interview, I had only been learning about the topic for about a month or so, and even then, the same themes kept showing up again and again: exploitation, brutality, negligence. This interview acted as a talent show of the systems that the US fabricated through "tough on crime" policies and a largely skewed political system.

The one theme that I found myself pulling at in this interview was that of exploitation. Dan Marshall summed it up rather nicely by saying that essentially any area where money is involved is one that is exploited by for-profit companies and the jail system. This seems obvious—it logically checks out. In the U.S.'s hyper-capitalist society, it would be radical to not have profits be a main objective. I just didn't realize the extent to which it was applied in every single aspect of life in prisons. Commissary, phone calls, letter writing—I thought that there would be some threshold up to which humans respected one another, letting the essence of their shared humanity create a level of understanding between them. But I was wrong. No one cares if thousands of people die, as long as someone is profiting. What I'm realizing now is that the only time we consider mass murder and mass death a tragedy and an aberration is when its cause is seemingly "natural"—hurricanes, fires, earthquakes (but even this isn't true, alluding to structural violence)—and when no one profits off of the situation (again not really true; looking at you, disaster capitalism). Everyone knows that cruelty runs through the cracks of prison walls and jail cells, but no one is surprised anymore. How else can I say that?

Lastly, I wanted to note one line that Dan Marshall said: "[In the Stanford Prison Experiment], very quickly, the dynamic—even though they were all students and they knew each other—devolved into exactly what we see in prisons and jails. So, it seems like it’s almost like human nature in the way the system is set up." Upon rereading and relistening to this, I had an odd feeling. I think colloquially, people only refer to "human nature," in one of two ways: in a way that is innately good or in a way that is innately bad. When I'm reading this sentence, I'm also thinking: Isn't it also human nature for us to connect, to build relationships, and to love one another? Isn't it human nature to be social beings (something we've heard in the pandemic) and rely on one another in the face of adversity? I'm struggling to put these two ideas together. Yes, humans can be quite evil and greedy sometimes, but what's the underlying reason to that? Can it be solved with a little more attention, a little more care, a little more soul-searching? Everyone has at least an ounce of evil within them, but we all have the same framework of socialization, dignity, and respect. If these evil systems are created and promulgated by people, and we have the ability to connect with one another and change those people, what's the missing link there?

Rachel Gross:

I remember coming out of this interview feeling really fulfilled. This was an interview that was full of storytelling—no difficult jargon, just stories of humanity and care. I appreciated the fact that I was able to hear direct stories from Rachel, due to her personal interactions during visitation as well as from writing letters for several decades now! I'd love to give a shoutout to Heidi Gross, with whom I worked with over the summer for Engage Chicago, for connecting me with your mom. This interview series would have missed a crucial element of storytelling without her!

The questions I had prepared still seemed to be out of scope. Looking back, it seemed like I really wanted to know what the conditions were like in prison. I had questions about how the cells were organized, how often they could get meals, what they could buy at the Commissary—really specific things that honestly, would have wasted the time that I had with Rachel. My questions missed the reflection part of it. What were the people in prison's thoughts about their own situation? What was the personal journey that they went through while they were in prison? What support did they need and/or lack while they were separated from the community? I prepared the wrong questions, but as I was going through the interview, I found it quite easy to adjust and tailor my questions to what she was discussing.

The main theme that I pulled from this interview has to be that of individuality. Rachel shared so many stories about how each person went through something different while they were incarcerated. It's so easy to say that everybody who is in prison now did something wrong, that they are evil, that they are harmful to their own communities, but just within this 1.5 hour interview, we can see that that's not the case. They enjoy music, they love to write, they love to make jewelry out of beads. They can be cocky, they can be humble, and they can be funny. They're simply... people. And that's something that we have to understand in order to start humanizing them as they should always be, instead of, using Rachel's words, "demonizing" them. Every individual is unique and is facing their own issues—it's impossible to throw a singular institutionalized punishment on all of them and expect for them to change in one pre-set manner. Humanizing our reaction to infractions of the law also means recognizing that the solutions and resources for each person will be different. No one is disposable. We shouldn't be able to lump a group of people together, throw them on an island far far away, and erase them from our communities.

Rachel also centralized the discussion about relationship building and "learning to know people." It can be confusing to recognize that relationship building is a skill and something that needs to be learned, but it specifically applies to this context here in that... relationship building is for everyone. It shouldn't be a privilege. Relationships form the foundation and backbone of a harmonious and functioning society, and tearing those away will only continue to create holes of punishment and misunderstanding.

This interview honestly made me think about whether or not I wanted to start contributing to this project and writing letters to people on death row myself. It's a huge task, and it's definitely not a short-term thing. This goes back to what Rachel was saying about how everyone has their own place in this type of work—even if this won't my thing. I'll find my own place in storytelling and learning about the criminal justice system.

Jonathan Simon:

The night before I interviewed Jonathan Simon, I didn't feel well. That morning, I had a fever running over 100 degrees, and by the end of that week, I lost about 5 pounds. (No worries, not COVID. I recovered quickly and I've tested negative, yay!) It was not a good day. I was tired from constantly waking up in the middle of the night, but I knew that I really wanted to do this interview. I couldn't risk wanting to reschedule it and not having the chance to connect with him at all. So, I chugged on!

It was quite unfortunate that I felt sick that day—it took me listening to the audio recording and rereading through the interview transcript to realize the brilliance of what Jonathan Simon had shared with me. Firstly, it was so obvious that he was an experienced and excellent professor. The way that he shared information was extremely conversational. Even though he discussed so much of the history behind mass imprisonment and key cases that led to the development of his medical models and changes in the California prison system, upon rereading the transcript, there was very little I had to look up on my own or link external resources for. I greatly appreciated the length of his answers, not only because I was sick so I didn't need to contribute a lot, but also because it provided a window into his thoughts. The interview was almost like an extension of what was going on in his brain—thinking out loud in a sense.

This interview contributed much-needed context and history to the topic that was not yet provided for me in previous interviews. Throughout the entire conversation, I felt that there was a very comfortable pattern in the way that he discussed different issues. He introduced the topics, picked them apart into their distinct layers and pieces, and then scrutinized the layers and system as a whole. It was quite beautiful to see the ease in which he did this—discussing the police, separating it crudely into two types of policing, and then advocating for the zero-ing out of proactive policing. The same type of trajectory was followed when he discussed the history behind mass imprisonment and the medical models, which was an important conversation to be a part of; I had never realized this intrinsic connection between mental hospitals and prisons before. It's quite shocking to see how violence by institutions has been so normalized into invisibility.

What really came through for me during this interview were the connections that were being made to the two previous interviews that I had already done. For example, both Rachel Gross and Jonathan Simon alluded to the idea that victims of crimes often didn't want whoever committed the act to be executed or to go to prison. Rachel Gross pointed to a circle of murder victims' families that were against the death penalty, and Jonathan Simon pointed to the fact that victims of violent crime may not necessarily want people to have long sentences. It just goes to show that these same ideas—victim-centered approaches in this case—stretch across many different spheres of criminal justice and prison work. We see the same themes being presented from someone who works with people on death row and a professor who studies our overreliance on punishment, and I think that's really powerful.

While this interview was enlightening for me in many different ways, there are two things that I will carry with me from this interview for a long, long time. The first is that of dignity and how our prison system and laws interact with this concept. There's very clearly this mismatch between our consensus that everybody's dignity should be respected and how we punish one another. Once again, it boils down to a very simplistic concept of care and humanization. Secondly, a big takeaway from this interview is the notion of our overrreliance on punishment—on real crime but also how it feeds into this mythological fear of crime. These are ideas that form an infinite loop, highly dangerous to those being targeted and powerful for those unaffected. I realized in this interview the framework of crime and punishment that the U.S. is built on, pushing everything into these categorized boxes of race, crime, punishment, and fear.

Orlando Mayorga:

I was incredibly grateful to have been able to connect with Orlando. (Shoutout to Mary Scott-Boria for connecting me with Father Kelly and Precious Blood!) It was really important for me to have voices in my interview series of people that were previously incarcerated—nothing screams privilege more than having people who are deemed "experts" on a topic talking about a subject that they have never experienced themselves.

Orlando is a wise man full of hope, humility, and peace. He discusses his background honestly, tells the story of Francisco, and doesn't leave any excuses for infractions of the law. The morning of our interview, he texted me saying, "Good morning, my sister." This alone speaks loads about how Orlando strives to create connections and center his work around relationship building. This motif acted as a centerpiece for our interview as well. From forming new relationships while incarcerated to building new ones during the re-entry process, Orlando spoke greatly of the importance of being connected within the community and having care for one another. It doesn't always have to be so formalized. When people walk into the Center, it seems like a place that you can just be yourself—that's the other thing! It's not just about building relationships, but it's about building those in which one can be their purest and best self. What I really appreciate about the way that Orlando shares his story is that he doesn't tell his story as if it's one in a million. He doesn't say that it's a miracle that he came out of prison intact or that it's an amazing story that everyone should learn from. Instead, he implies that this is how it should be for everyone. Everyone should be able to still maintain strong bonds with their loved ones inside and outside of prison. Everyone should have the chance to have the space in peace circles in order to reflect on their traumas, joys, and achievements. Everyone should be able to have someone walk with them by their side when navigating punitive institutions and barriers. He tells the story with lots of inclusivity, making it way bigger than just himself. It's not a story of rarity; it should be one of ubiquity.

Additionally, something that will stick with me for a while is the fact that the re-entry process is highly individualized. It is impossible to fit everyone into this one-size-fits-all blueprint for every single person that is re-entering society. Even more than it is unique, it is introspective. Orlando emphasizes over and over again that you can't force anyone to do something that they don't want to do. You can't tell someone to change this part of their thinking or to not think in this certain way at all. They themselves have to be the catalyst for their own change. It wasn't until Orlando was in that space with 13-15 other men that he finally felt like he was able to see a clear reflection in the mirror, and that's not something that others forced upon him. No one told him, "Hey! This is who you are!" It's a highly personal journey. And here, we can also point to how differently "introversion" can look. I personally don't like this term because I consider introversion to be a categorization of social energy, rather than exterior personality, but we can use introversion as a synonym for being reserved and quiet, in this situation. Someone can be introverted for multiple reasons; here are two. Someone may be introverted because of this inability to process their own emotions and trauma. Orlando mentioned that not many youth may know how to handle their pain; they shut down. They close off. They don't have any other options. On the other hand, someone may be introverted due to introspection. They are choosing to look within themselves, choosing to lose themselves within their own thoughts, choosing to minimize influences from the exterior. So, introversion doesn't always have to mean that something is wrong; but the restraint that someone may have can either be highly productive or highly destructive.

Lastly, I think the connections between interviews are once again made clear, especially between that of Dan Marshall and Orlando Mayorga. The importance of Dan Marshall's work in the prison phone rates project is highly visible when Orlando discusses the financial burden he felt that he was putting on his own family. Due to expensive collect calls, Orlando was encouraged to stop talking to his family as often in order to still look after his brothers and sisters by making sure they had enough money to feed themselves. We can see, institutionally, what litigation and advocacy look like while also understanding at a very personal and intimate level how that changes one person's interaction with their family. That's a powerful thing.

Raphel Jackson:

Raphel Jackson is a man of heart, understanding, and warmth. I think that in a few of the previous interviews, I was able to develop a really nice rapport with the person I was speaking with, but none of them in a way that compared with Raphel. The interview began with the same feelings of respect and appreciation, but a lot of warmth was poured into the conversation, especially when he started talking about his his re-entry story: pants that were too big and the big box of books he was carrying. That moment changed the rest of the feel for the entire interview, and it was smiles from then on. It felt like we were old friends, and he was catching me up on what he was up to in his life the past six months. It was a really special place to share with him.

It was also in this interview that I realized that my interviews are either informational interviews or story-telling interviews. At first I was worried that my interviews would start getting repetitive, especially since Raphel and Orlando both work at Precious Blood. I wasn't sure if there was going to be significant overlap between the two conversations or not. Even between the two of them, there are really great differences in what they talked about and their own ideas. For all of my interviewees, I'm really appreciative that each person has something unique that they share, and this is highly visible in the Messages portion of this website, when each person discusses their key takeaway. It was also during Raphel's interview that I realized that I wanted the Messages portion of the website to even be a thing! (Thanks, Raphel!) I started asking this same last question with Orlando I believe, and then it seemed natural from there, so I made sure to email Dan and Rachel to offer me their last takeaways as well.

I also remember thinking that every interview would be an informational interview. I thought that I would be able to dive into some key cases and uncover the injustices behind the prison wall. I thought that it would just shocking story after shocking story, hopefully piquing my audience's interests through the horrors against humanity that are not visible to us daily. Instead, the conversations were broadened. Through several interviews, we talked about community care. We talked about restorative and transformative justice. We talked about people, children, and relationships. There were so many conversations of hope that were embedded into this broader conversation of power and punishment that were just so unexpected.

My biggest takeaway from Raphel is his urge to have us all consider that people are people, children are children, and that trauma affects every single person in an individual way. He touched on this idea with many different anecdotes and thoughts, like when he talked about how crashing a car into a mailbox is different for people in different neighborhoods. Or how people are not anti-society. Or how faces at the Center can turn from mean mugs to warm smiles with just some food and care. It brings us back to the central point that carceral institutions isolate people from our communities and make them into "disappearing people." To counter that, we need to do the exact opposite. Create strong community ties. Offer programming, resources, education. Recreate and build one another up again.

I think something new that Raphel brought into this conversation as well is the tool that young people have of violence. Fights felt good. Shooting guns felt good. Why? Well, they didn't have any other option! What do you expect them to do? It's completely backwards for a state to punish children for finding their own means of survival in a world where they are being denied and deprived. What he shares with Rachel Caidor's interview is this notion of survivorship, people doing their best, people being treated unfairly and abusively. Young people and survivors of domestic violence have one common goal of surviving the situation, yet they are covered by layers of regulations, suffocated by isolation, and garnished with being the "perfect survivor." In the end, what we need to realize is that people are people, and "othering" only serves useful in the creation of a backwards society.

Paul Wright:

Paul Wright, along with Dan Marshall, were the two people that I contacted first when I started this interview series, and to my luck, they replied almost instantly. Based on just this, I already could tell that they were dedicated to informing people about criminal justice issues and First Amendment Rights. I just didn't know how much valuable information I would be getting when I interviewed them both.

Paul Wright is the most straight-forward and direct speaker that I have had on this interview series, and although I typically prefer when people stretch out their ideas and pull in a lot of tangential stories, I appreciated his bluntness. It only served to punctuate his points. The following question and answer thread says it best:

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A: You’re telling a lot of stories that are going to stick with me for a while. I was also wondering, what are some stories that you remember from your work that have stayed with you until today?

P: I don’t know, to me, it’s just the ongoing daily slaughter on our streets and in prisons and jails—people being starved to death, people being beaten to death, people being raped on a daily basis, all funded with taxpayer dollars with no accountability and almost total impunity.

--

I can still hear the intonation in his voice when he gave this answer. It was really calm—perfunctory almost. I'm sure that he does countless interviews, but this commentary showed how unafraid and unfiltered he was when talking about these issues. He very clearly and directly lays it all out in the open with no sugarcoating for misinterpretation. He's also extremely intentional in the way that he talks about certain things. For example, in almost every instance of imprisonment that we discussed, he always made sure to include the word "cage" or "caging" or "being caged" into the sentence. He's saying it as it is. "Imprisonment" hides the acts of brutality behind institutions and characterizes is as necessary retribution. "Caging" is the strongest language I know that uncovers the dehumanization of prisons.

The new piece that Paul Wright brought to this interview series was this emphasis on the police-state and how that ties in with politics. Other conversations seemed to be apolitical or human-centered at best, which was something that I should have realized a long time ago. The first couple of minutes of our interview started with a deep criticism of broader media, which is a blatant reflection of not only the political interests of our people but also what topics and ideas are being funded. As he said, no one is going to be paid to closely examine criminal injustices that preserve our current political and economic regime. No one is out there publicly opposing the death penalty. He really brought to light how inextricably linked the police state and our political system are. My favorite quote from Paul Wright that I will never forget is this: "The police state reflects the political system that employs it. Not vice versa."

What a powerful statement. This captures the two-tier system of justice that he discussed as well as points to how skewed power and privilege is in our society. We've chosen to opt for policing and imprisonment as our method of social control. The reason why it isn't working isn't because it hasn't been scaled enough. Stop making it bigger! We've simply chosen the wrong method. I've titled this interview series "Power & Punishment" for a multitude of reasons, but Paul Wright's interview embodies these ideas more than any other.

David Stephens:

This interview epitomizes why I wanted to start this interview series project in the first place. Find out more in The Idea page, but I specifically wanted to examine medical systems and mental health within prison. I originally hoped to find out more about medical services that were offered, find statements from people who were previously or are currently incarcerated, and do a deep analysis and critique of correctional health care. However, as I kept contacting people, I realized more and more how difficult of a feat that would be, especially with the pandemic. I loved the past seven interviews, but this last interview brought me back to my home field of science and healthcare, and back to the crux of what I wanted to research this summer.

Clocking in at around 2 hours and 5 minutes, my interview with Dr. Stephens was the longest in the series. I had a bit of trouble finding what that sweet spot of our conversation would be in the beginning; I was bouncing between ideas of mental health programs and for-profit correctional healthcare companies, but I noticed that either that wasn't his area of interest or that there was some tension around the topic. My perceptions coming into the project were labeling healthcare in prisons as inadequate and grotesquely inhumane—pretty much what Dan Marshall, Rachel Gross, Jonathan Simon, and Paul Wright had solidified for me in their interviews. However, I had to remind myself to keep an open mind during this interview. There would be no purpose to this project if I wanted to leave with the same ideas that I came into the project with. And so, I now understand that healthcare systems greatly depend on the healthcare service administrator and that being a for-profit healthcare company does not make the quality of services automatically suffer. That was a big myth-buster for me.

The thing I found most interesting in this interview was how he approaches trauma. Other interviewees also discussed trauma-informed care, and both of these conversations have an intersection of: "I can recover. It's not me." But the path to get to this thought is pretty different. Other conversations, such as with Raphel Jackson or Orlando Mayorga, centered the approach on having safe spaces. It was with a restorative justice approach, in which community and relationships were a necessary support system for the introspective journey. On the other hand with Dr. Stephens, it was very much a personal process against yourself. It's not like you're lost; you really have to fight against your own thoughts and tell yourself, "No! I'm not crazy; I'm injured." What's also interesting is that Orlando Mayorga beautifully rephrased "Hurt people hurt people" into "Healed people heal people" whereas Dr. Stephens centers his work around the premise that one is injured. These undoubtedly have different contexts, but I find it intriguing that in one case, the removal of harm is empowering, and in another, the acknowledgment and centering of harm is the cure.

Overall, Dr. Stephens makes me question what I know about how science and society interact with one another. I'm not really sure how I feel about the argument that the brain's fuel deficiency acts as a basis for racism. I can agree that people who have experienced trauma themselves are likely to project their own hurt onto others. But I don't think that every person who experiences racist thoughts has undergone some form of traumatic brain injury or trauma. I don't think that racism would have had the opportunity to be as institutionalized as it is now if not for a large societal influence. It's an interesting proposition, though, and the stories that he shares about the patients whose lives he's saved speak volumes about how effective glucose treatment and a shift in perception about oneself can really be.