PERSONAL STORIES
LISTEN AND LEARN
Take some time to listen to the perspectives of judges, professors, former convicts, lawyers, activists, and others, as they share their personal stories and explore the current issues regarding mass incarceration and the American criminal justice system.
Rahsaan D. Hall- ACLUM
Solitary Confinement
Mr. Hall, the director of the Racial Justice Program at ACLU Massachusetts (American Civil Liberties Union), addresses the current possible bill in the Massachusetts legislature and the system of solitary confinement in the United States.
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"We have to look at ways to change the culture of the institution."
For the net benefit to society, we have to have other ways of treating people who have done things that are violent or harmful...we can't rely on the status quo because the status quo creates a lot of opportunity for abuse,"
"people are locked in cages for 23 hours a day...severely limited exposure to other human contact"
Ariel Pliskin - Prison Mindfulness Institute
Path of Freedom curriculum
The Prison Mindfulness Institute is dedicated to providing prisoners, prison staff, and prison volunteers with rehabilitation and self-transformation. Their Path of Freedom curriculum uses mindfulness-based interventions to help prisoners transform their lives.
This interview is with Ariel Pliskin, the Path of Freedom program coordinator who facilitates this program at the
Franklin County Jail.
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"It's these quick, automatic, habitual, reactive patterns that might be coming out of anger, it might be connected to violence or substance use, or criminal activity.... it's often times these types of behaviors that land us in trouble, all of us, whether in prison or otherwise, and mindfulness has the ability to lead us to become aware of our emotional reactions"
"[The program] is influenced by specific buddhist principals... and one of the principals is that everybody has basic goodness"
"By the end there was just one [inmate] coming consistently... we ended up just having him share his attempts to integrate these practices into his personal life.... it was touching for me just to see how seriously he was taking it"
Scott Ruescher- B.U. Prison Ed Program
For the past 16 years, Scott Ruescher has been teaching an English class through the Boston University Prison Education Program at MCI Norfolk (a medium-security prison with around 1500 male inmates, many of whom are serving life terms) and MCI Framingham (the only women's prison in MA, with about 800 female inmates).
This program allows inmates to take college courses while in prison and ultimately accumulate enough credits to graduate and earn a general studies/interdisciplinary bachelor's degree. Alongside his full time job as an administrator at Harvard Grad School of Education, Mr. Ruescher teaches a class every week (usually 13 or 14 weeks at a time) in one of these two prisons.
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"A lot of people are caught in a sort of web, and all sorts of people are being damaged into or in that web all at the same time. Some are killing others, others are being killed, some are being ripped off, some are being raised by people who have been damaged and then they in turn become part of a web."
"enormous stigma against anybody in prison...they tend to be regarded as 100% evil"
"looking for something to work on and be proud of and...redeem themselves with...a lot of good camaraderie at MCI Norfolk...mix of people from various ethnic backgrounds"
"it's nice to have one more person from the outside in class...the more exposure they get to the outside the happier they seem to be"
Mark Rotondo - Attorney of Massachusetts
Solitary Confinement
Mass Incarceration
Mark Rotondo is vice president of innovation and strategic initiatives at Cambridge College, as well as an attorney in Commonwealth of Massachusetts with a general practice. He does 1/3 litigation (civil or criminal) as well as family and probate law. Mark speaks towards the history and future of prisons in America, as well as the change that needs to happen in and outside America's prisons.
Stacey Borden and Gretchen Shae Moore
Solitary Confinement
Their Motivation
Their Motivation
The Trump Era
"These private prison...they say the last thing they want is an empty bed in the private prison, so their trying to keep filling the bids its a big cycle and its a racist cycle, I don't know how you could call it anything but."
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- Gretchen Shae Moore
"the re-design of slave labor...we're really destroying lives for money."
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- Stacey Borden
A series of short videos from our interviews with Stacey Borden and Gretchen Shae Moore. Borden is the founder and president of New Beginnings Reentry Services, and a substance abuse counselor. Shae Moore is a professor of mass incarceration at Cambridge College and Berkeley College of Music. She is also a board member of New Beginnings and plays in a band. Borden and Moore speak to the truth about minorities and women in America's prison system, prisons in Europe, as well their motivation to make change. Below you will also find Stacey's powerful, personal story as she talks about her time incarcerated in the American Justice system.
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Stacey's Story
Arthur Bembury- Partakers College Behind Bars
The Partakers College Behind Bars mentoring program helps people in prison develop the necessary skills to complete a college degree and build personal relationships. The Partakers' programs show that education prevents criminal behavior and helps to reduce the recidivism rate. This program bridges the divide between those inside and outside the prison walls.
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This interview is with Arthur Bembury, the executive director of Partakers.
"We firmly believe that there is no way that somebody can successfully reach their best part of what is before them if you incarcerate them, and the only people they speak to are incarcerated people, or people who keep them incarcerated"
"The prison industrial complex.. is a business, and it's one of the highest trading commodities on the stock market... so you have to remember that people do make money off of it"
"This is the new civil rights movement, it's criminal justice reform, and giving people second chances"