Welcome to Rageous Convictions with Jason Plan, the podcast where I get to interview folks who see the wrong in the world and are driven to make it right. Today's guest is a British attorney who volunteered in an African hospice as a teenager, sending him on a hero's journey in service of others and the defense of justice. We see that there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work, and so we're asking what does it look like to raise up lawyers and are illegals from those communities, Those who know what prison feels like and smells like, those who are living it and breathing it. They understand what it's like to have hope taken away, and they want to bring agents of hope to go to the places that others don't want to go, to serve the people that others don't want to serve, and to say I'm here for you. His organization, Justice Defenders, provides legal education and defense to the defenseless. Alexander McClean right now on Rageous Convictions. Welcome back to Righteous Convictions. This is a podcast where I have the privilege of interviewing some of my heroes people who are doing just amazing, amazing stuff in the world for no reason other than that because they can. And today is no exception. Today I'm gonna be interviewing my friend and you know, just a guy who's an absolute beacon of light and hope, Alexander McLean. Alexander, Welcome to Righteous Convictions. Thanks Jason, it's great to be with you. Alexander is a senior Ted Fellow and a Showka Fellow. He's been named Young Philanthropist of the Year one of times thirty under thirty changing the World. I could go on and on, but the most important part is the work that you've done and how you got into with at such a young age. Yeah, the experiences I had as a child growing up in London, the son of a Jamaican immigrant. Poor but the British government used to pay for poor but bright children to go to expensive schools. I loved public speaking. I became interested in the law when I was very young, especially through learning about the death penalty in America. And I had incredible experiences in Britain and then later in East Africa which formed me and led to me being where I am today. And this started when you were eighteen. I think it was really your AHA moment, right you went to Uganda to volunteer at a hashpice. I've been involved in a hospice in London from when I was sixteen, and I realized very quickly I could learn a lot from those who are coming to the end of their lives. None of us know how much time we have, and I really wanted to make the most of each day. I read when I was sixteen about a hospice in Uganda, Hospice Africa Uganda, which cares for people dying in their homes around Kamparla, taking morphine and other pain relief and food to them. The work sounded incredible, so I wrote asking if I could go and volunteer with them my school holidays, but they said at sixteen I was too young, so I continued. I finished secondary school in the hospice said now I was eighteen, they'd have me. I got an incredible welcome by this hospice community and initially spent a month with them, following their doctors and nurses as they cared for their patients dying in their homes. But one day we went to Uganda's main government hospital. The hospital was taking morphine to a patient there. We went onto this ward. I saw a guy lying on the floor naked on a plastic sheet. I said to a nurse, what's up with him? He said, we think he's in a diabetic coma. The police found him unconscious in the market. You don't know his name. We don't know if he has any family. Because he doesn't have money, he doesn't get care. I saw he was lying in a pool of urine and the flesh and his bottom and back was rotten down to the bone. He was decomposing while he was still alive because he got no care. I went back to the hospice I was staying at. I spoke to Ann Merriman, the lady who founded it, a former nun doctor has been work in Africa since nineteen sixty, someone who shaped me deeply, and she's taught me that we're never too young or old to serve others. And she said, with someone like that guy, he might be dying, but he could die when he feels loved and cared about. So I went back the next day with the help of a nurse trained by the hospice, I bought a basin and some soap in a towel and we washed him together, and I got him some clothing. I tried to advocate for him with the doctors that although he didn't have family or money, they might care for him for a number of days. I'd washed him and try and advocate. I came one day and he died the night before. He was lying dead and filthy on the floor, and a porter came with the trolley with a dead lady and put the man on top of the lady and said they're going a mass grave with everyone else who had no one to bury them. And I called my mom that day, and I cried for that guy, because I had never really considered that there are people in our world whose lives were judged to have no value. So my life changed that day. And I went on to spend three months on that hospital ward, which was chiefly for patients with AIDS and tuberculosis who had been abandoned by their families. And it was there that I met prisoners as or that in hospital they could be rejected by the doctors and nurses, they could die of starvation or dehydration because of their prison uniform. And I'd wash them and feed them and try and advocate for them, and all sorts of people came by my side, security guards from the hospice, and gardeners and medical students and student nurses, and we created this little group of people who would go and tend to those that others had rejected. And it taught me a lot about community and serving together and when you're doing work that can feel overwhelming, or the rabbinical saying says we mustn't get tired of doing work that has no end, and that kind of work and justice work feels like that. I saw that as parents solidarity, and I think that when we get proximate to people, even proximate to those who are accused of crimes, or approximate to those whose lives look different from ours, we can't help but be shaped by them. And I was fascinated by prison conditions, and I ended up bulldozing my way into Uganda's maximum security prison to see where these guys came from. Right, And that prison, of course, is the zero prison, which I had the distinct owner of visiting with you. Now, there were different colored uniforms depending on whether they've been sentenced to death or life or something else, and they are wedged into these cells. While that you describe it, Alexander, because you know I've heard that. We've had Pete Buko on the show. He was, of course, um promptly convicted and sentenced to death in Kenya, and he talked about how they had thirteen other men in the cell with him and they had to sleep more or less like sardines in a cairn. Is that typical? Is that what you witnessed that La Zia. When I first went to Lazira prison, I started by going to death row. It was built to hold fifty and then it had five hundred condemned men. I was told that they got the death penalty for crimes including treason and cowardice and mutiny. I heard of a man called Edward and Paggy who've been sent to death for murder. After twelve years on death row, it turned out the person he'd killed was still alive. They still took about another six years for him to be released. I heard someone had stolen a mango from a neighbor's mango tree and they used standing knife to cut it off. They got the death penalty as an armed robber. Very often they were teenage boys, often in prison for having underage sex, which has a maximum penalty of death in Uganda, so I saw that there was massive overcrowding. I heard that many prisoners had never met a lawyer. In Uganda and Kenya and around Sub Saharan Africa, somewhere between eight prisoners will never meet a lawyer. At that time, two thirds of prisoners in Uganda were awaiting trial, sometimes in prison for many years, occasionally over a decade awaiting trial. So you've just said a lot of things that I could really benefit from some clarification on. So somewhere between eighty and ninety of prisoners in Uganda, Kenya and Sub Saharan Africa will never meet a lawyer, which just seems like a crime in and of itself. Two thirds of prisoners are just awaiting trial, so they haven't been convicted of anything, and without likely ever meeting a lawyer, the outcome of the trial is probably a foregone conclusion anyway. It I'm really struck by some of the charges you mentioned. They sound old timey, like treason, cowardice, mutiny, and the fact that underage sex between two consenting teenagers can mean the death sends. I mean, think about this for a second. Something like three quarters every ever said of human beings lose their virginity before they turn eighteen. Now you can't condemn three quarters of humanity to death, right, I mean, where the hell did these laws even come from? In Commonwealth Africa in form of British colonies, the laws largely haven't changed since colonial times when the law was around command and control. So people in prison for loitering, or being vagrants and vagabonds and debtors, or for being gay. I met women whose children have become very unwell. They take in the hospital, there's no medication for them, the child dies, and then the mom's arrested for are neglect and taken to prison with her other children. Or women whose husbands have beaten them and beat them for years, or the husbands have got aids and he tries and rapes the wife, and then the wife fights back and she finds herself imprisoned, And Sir, I think it's a consequence of having laws which haven't evolved, having countries whose populations have grown massively over the last decades, which have overwhelmed prison capacity. In Uganda, prisons are at about three of capacity, so where one person should be sleeping, there are three. I think for governments which don't have enough resources, very often prisons and criminal justice aren't their priority, and it's expensive to pay for lawyers, and so you find people in prison facing very long sentences or sometimes the death penalty, who don't understand the law, don't understand how they can engage with it. Very often we letter believe that the laws is highly complex thing that we need very qualified lawyers to help us to navigate. But we ask, what does it look like to recognize that the law affects us all from before we're born until after we die. What does it look like to understand that all of us have a right to know the basic concepts of the law. No one should go to court and not know how to address a judge or know that they have a right to ask questions of those who are making accusations against them, or if they're convicted, to appeal against that conviction. And so we're asking how do we take that knowledge into the communities which needed the most, into the communities of those who are poor, those who are minorities or refugees, or homeless people or sex workers, the kind of people who tend to be overrepresented in prison say, the laws here for you, the laws here to protect you, not just to hold you to account. YouTube can understand it, because it's going to be a long long time until most countries around the world will prioritize paying for lawyers for everyone who finds themselves in prison. Again and again, in my teens and in my twenties, I had experiences in prisons around Africa, seeing things which I couldn't unsee and which I felt I had to respond to. I went to Juba Women's Prison in South Sudan, and as the gate was opened, I saw a woman with chains on her arms and legs, and I said to the officer escorted me when she chained up? So well, we chain up our lunatics. That's about a third of the prison population. As far as I could understand, I could point to anyone say that I thought that they had a mental health problem there being in prison. They said, we also chained up those who are going to be executed. Although suth Sudan was a newly formed country, it was still hanging people. So well, what's going to happen to this woman? And the officer said, well, with her and a number of the other women here she's not done anything wrong. Her husband was accused of a capital crime, but because the police couldn't catch him, the wife was arrested and tried and sent to die in his place. And Australian prison officer working with the United Nations in prisons in South Sudan told me about a five year old child swimming a river with a three year old friend. The three year old round and the five year old was arrested and sense to death for murder. So again and again I saw things which I couldn't really understand, so so I just felt I had to to respond, and that's how I ended up starting the African Prisons Project, which has become Justice Defenders when I was twenty one. Around the world, according to the World Justice Project, there are five point one billion people who are affected by inadequate access to justice, two and fifty three billion people living in situations of extreme injustice, ten million in prison, three million of those waiting for trials. We see that there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work, and so we're going to be waiting a long time. If the solution is that every person in prison must have access to a lawyer, and so we're asking what does it look like to raise up lawyers and to raise up parallegals from those communities, those who know what prison feels like and smells like, those who are living it and breathing it, and those who want to respond and to do this work not because it's going to make them rich, not because it's going to make them powerful, but because they understand what it's like to have hope taken away and they want to breathe agents of hope. And we're asking, how can we equip this community of prisoner and ex prison and prison officer paralegals to go to the places that others don't want to go, to serve the people that others don't want to serve, and to say I'm here for you. You too deserve to have your voice heard. The law can protect you as well. And so far we've trained just under three hundred prisoner in prison officer paralegals. We've got thirty nine prisoners and ex prisoners and prison officers who have graduated with their University of London law degrees having studied in prison. In the first six months of one alone, we've served thirteen thousand, seven hundred and eight prisoners without adequate representation, resulting in two thousand and forty five of them having been released. And so we see that there are people who are willing to step forward, willing to do the work, willing to serve others who will be trained on the job, and as justice defenders, we ask, how do we equip them? How do we give them access to knowledge and skills. We used to do it in person with COVID, we've been taking this work online and offering paralegal courses online, training prisoners and prison officers with law degrees online, facilitating virtual court attendance, establishing online case management systems. Because we see that there's a justice crisis around the world, and we see that there are people who are willing to step forward and to respond. I sense that you have the same feeling that I get, which is that when I visit prisons and people were over in the prisons in the United States, I often come out feeling like there's more humanity in a certain sense inside those walls then outside. When I first started this work, I looked on prisons and those that I met as being filled with people who needed help, whose circumstances looks desperate, but Actually, as I gained understanding, I saw that prisons were filled with people who had gifts and talents and skills and gifts that they were offering others. People in prison have been my my teachers, and they've educated me about resilience and courage and compassion and perseverance and determination and so much more. Again and again I came across these examples of prisoners who were serving others, leading the prison football team or having little farming projects to grow extra food, or leading the prison church or mosque, or caring for their fellow prisoners when they were sick, and I saw the prison officers are doing the same. And so I saw that prisons were filled with people who have this incredible potential to offer their families, their communities, but also wider society. William, one of my colleagues, who was on death row in Kenya for many years, said, in prison there are brains that can move mountains. St Oscar Romero said, there are certain things that can only be seen with eyes that have cried. And we saw that someone who knows what it is to have their fingernails pulled out in the police station, or to be years in prison without a trial or to get sentenced to death but never to get a copy of their judgment. Has this desire for justice that comes from their first hand experience, and so our work started shifting about ten years ago towards equipping prisoners and prison officers with legal knowledge, training them as paralegals through a three week paralegal course in criminal law, but also giving them access to formal law degree studying with the University of London by correspondence, as Mandela did from his prison cell in in South Africa. And that's now our focus as justice defenders. We've wound up how other health and basic literacy worked just to focus on equipping those we've lived experience of confidt with the law with legal knowledge to serve their communities, so the defenseless become the defenders. I mean, the numbers are absolutely staggering, the number of people that you've been able to help, the people been able to free. And I was able to participate in it. I guess it was a zoom or some sort of a video conference where you sort of looped me in with people in different prisons, and I was struck first of all by the fact that that doesn't exist in America. Somehow you've been able to get Internet inside the prisons, and we can't do that here here we have this j K collect call phone systems, you know. But I was also struck, Alexander by the fact that the guards seemed to be, you know, not just willing participants, but active participants in this process of trying to help the people who they are in charge of overseeing or what do we want to call it? And was I wrong about that? That spot on we trained prisoners in prison officers side by side as paralegals, and in our law classes. We equipped prison officers to go to court and speak on behalf of prisoners who don't have anyone to speak for them. The head of Uganda Prison Service said to me a few years ago, We've got the gallows, we've got the executioners, but we can't be sure if we're hanging anyone that's actually guilty of any crime, because we know that our criminal justice system is broken. Senior officers in the Kenya Prison Service, Ay, we estimate about half of our prisoners are here innocently. They've not had representation at trial. We want you to train our prison officers in law so they can work on appeals because our prisons are massively overcrowded and we can't actually cope, and so we see that there's this appetite for justice from prison services and prison officers as well as from prisoners. I don't think anyone finds joy going to work as a prison officer, being with people who you know haven't got justice and feeling that you're powerless to do anything about it. And so that's why we're really committed to equipping prison officers to play their role in working for justice. And I think now globally we're asking, in light of COVID, what does it look like to rebuild our societies on this foundation of access to justice, on the foundation of the rule of law. Since George Floyd's death and in light of Black Lives Matter, I think we're thinking about the idea that we can't have peace without justice on a micro or macro level in new ways. And we love to bring together prisoners and prison officers who are working with us as paralegals or as law students or graduates with prosecutor US and with judges, with the police and others involved in delivering justice in that community. Wherever possible, We do it over a meal, and we asked, how do we work together to create a community that's just No one gains when innocent people imprisoned, and if people are guilty, we want them to have due process. We think, if it's possible for that to happen with their throw inmates in Uganda, what would that look like with their throw inmates in Alabama? And coming together with guards and with judges and with prosecutors and with police officers, and dreaming about what justice looks like in that community. And so I'm excited by the changes which are happening in America. Over the last six months, We've been approached by prisoners in twenty two different U. S States asking for our supporter, asking for us to train them as paralegals. We've had approaches from another seventeen countries beyond that, and thirteen non governmental organizations, including the u N. There there's this growing group of formally incarcerated Americans who are using the law to serve their communities, who have this hunger for justice, and we're excited to stand in solidarity with them to understand how we can equip and support and learn. Yeah, and I've read that your goal is by to help a million people get fair hearings, and also to have expanded Justice Defenders work even further around the globe and developed as well as developing countries and prisons, refugee camps, home the shelters, and brothels. I can't think of a more noble goal than that. We're going to put all the information for people to donate to Justice Defenders and and of course the website is Justice dash Defenders dot org and you can go there to get involved, to volunteer, to learn to donate. I hope everyone will click on the link that will be as I said in our bio. So now we have two last things I promised. This is it and then I'll let you go back to work. So the my favorite question that I asked on the show of all of our wonderful guests is if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing, what would it be. Let me tell you a short story. When I was eight or nine, I went to my local library with my dad and I picked up a book and there was an African American guy being strapped into the electric chair by a group of white men in suits with these wide leather straps all over his body, and there wasn't a mask over his face yet, but the look in his eyes was expressionless. It was like he was dead before he had actually been executed. I realized that's the power that the law can have to strip hope or agency or life from us. As I looked at the future, I hope for an end to the death penalty. But I also hope that around the world there's no one whose eyes are lifeless like that. I hope that we can raise up a new generation of paralegals and laws with lived experience, who served those that others refused to serve, so everyone feels that the law is for them, that they have a chance to tell their side of the story before they're convicted or punished. Amen to that, and thank you how Axander McClain for the incredible work you do with Justice Defenders, and of course for sharing your story with us and to our audience. Please join us here next week where we will speak with a tremendous figure in education, civil rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement, Deray McKesson. And now we turned to the closing of the show. Something we call words of Wisdom, and it works like this, I turned my microphone off, kicked back in my chair and just listen to anything else you want to share. Thank you for sharing this conversation with me, Jason. Thank you for what you role model in terms of being an advocate for justice and your commitment and your perseverance. And to anyone who's listening to this show, which maybe you feel angry or challenged, or frustrated or confused by, or you've heard, my encouragement is that each of us can play a part in creating the community that we want to be part of, the community where no one innocent is imprisoned and where those who are guilty of crimes have a chance to tell their side of the story and to be punished in a way that allows for rehabilitation. So my invitation to each of you this to ask how we can each live lives where we're quick to listen and quick to love and slow to judge. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flamm. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne, and Kevin Wardis. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Twitter at wrong Conviction, and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction. Podcast Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one two

Welcome to Rageous Convictions with Jason Plan, the podcast where I get to interview folks who see the wrong in the world and are driven to make it right. Today's guest is a British attorney who volunteered in an African hospice as a teenager, sending him on a hero's journey in service of others and the defense of justice. We see that there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work, and so we're asking what does it look like to raise up lawyers and are illegals from those communities, Those who know what prison feels like and smells like, those who are living it and breathing it. They understand what it's like to have hope taken away, and they want to bring agents of hope to go to the places that others don't want to go, to serve the people that others don't want to serve, and to say I'm here for you. His organization, Justice Defenders, provides legal education and defense to the defenseless. Alexander McClean right now on Rageous Convictions. Welcome back to Righteous Convictions. This is a podcast where I have the privilege of interviewing some of my heroes people who are doing just amazing, amazing stuff in the world for no reason other than that because they can. And today is no exception. Today I'm gonna be interviewing my friend and you know, just a guy who's an absolute beacon of light and hope, Alexander McLean. Alexander, Welcome to Righteous Convictions. Thanks Jason, it's great to be with you. Alexander is a senior Ted Fellow and a Showka Fellow. He's been named Young Philanthropist of the Year one of times thirty under thirty changing the World. I could go on and on, but the most important part is the work that you've done and how you got into with at such a young age. Yeah, the experiences I had as a child growing up in London, the son of a Jamaican immigrant. Poor but the British government used to pay for poor but bright children to go to expensive schools. I loved public speaking. I became interested in the law when I was very young, especially through learning about the death penalty in America. And I had incredible experiences in Britain and then later in East Africa which formed me and led to me being where I am today. And this started when you were eighteen. I think it was really your AHA moment, right you went to Uganda to volunteer at a hashpice. I've been involved in a hospice in London from when I was sixteen, and I realized very quickly I could learn a lot from those who are coming to the end of their lives. None of us know how much time we have, and I really wanted to make the most of each day. I read when I was sixteen about a hospice in Uganda, Hospice Africa Uganda, which cares for people dying in their homes around Kamparla, taking morphine and other pain relief and food to them. The work sounded incredible, so I wrote asking if I could go and volunteer with them my school holidays, but they said at sixteen I was too young, so I continued. I finished secondary school in the hospice said now I was eighteen, they'd have me. I got an incredible welcome by this hospice community and initially spent a month with them, following their doctors and nurses as they cared for their patients dying in their homes. But one day we went to Uganda's main government hospital. The hospital was taking morphine to a patient there. We went onto this ward. I saw a guy lying on the floor naked on a plastic sheet. I said to a nurse, what's up with him? He said, we think he's in a diabetic coma. The police found him unconscious in the market. You don't know his name. We don't know if he has any family. Because he doesn't have money, he doesn't get care. I saw he was lying in a pool of urine and the flesh and his bottom and back was rotten down to the bone. He was decomposing while he was still alive because he got no care. I went back to the hospice I was staying at. I spoke to Ann Merriman, the lady who founded it, a former nun doctor has been work in Africa since nineteen sixty, someone who shaped me deeply, and she's taught me that we're never too young or old to serve others. And she said, with someone like that guy, he might be dying, but he could die when he feels loved and cared about. So I went back the next day with the help of a nurse trained by the hospice, I bought a basin and some soap in a towel and we washed him together, and I got him some clothing. I tried to advocate for him with the doctors that although he didn't have family or money, they might care for him for a number of days. I'd washed him and try and advocate. I came one day and he died the night before. He was lying dead and filthy on the floor, and a porter came with the trolley with a dead lady and put the man on top of the lady and said they're going a mass grave with everyone else who had no one to bury them. And I called my mom that day, and I cried for that guy, because I had never really considered that there are people in our world whose lives were judged to have no value. So my life changed that day. And I went on to spend three months on that hospital ward, which was chiefly for patients with AIDS and tuberculosis who had been abandoned by their families. And it was there that I met prisoners as or that in hospital they could be rejected by the doctors and nurses, they could die of starvation or dehydration because of their prison uniform. And I'd wash them and feed them and try and advocate for them, and all sorts of people came by my side, security guards from the hospice, and gardeners and medical students and student nurses, and we created this little group of people who would go and tend to those that others had rejected. And it taught me a lot about community and serving together and when you're doing work that can feel overwhelming, or the rabbinical saying says we mustn't get tired of doing work that has no end, and that kind of work and justice work feels like that. I saw that as parents solidarity, and I think that when we get proximate to people, even proximate to those who are accused of crimes, or approximate to those whose lives look different from ours, we can't help but be shaped by them. And I was fascinated by prison conditions, and I ended up bulldozing my way into Uganda's maximum security prison to see where these guys came from. Right, And that prison, of course, is the zero prison, which I had the distinct owner of visiting with you. Now, there were different colored uniforms depending on whether they've been sentenced to death or life or something else, and they are wedged into these cells. While that you describe it, Alexander, because you know I've heard that. We've had Pete Buko on the show. He was, of course, um promptly convicted and sentenced to death in Kenya, and he talked about how they had thirteen other men in the cell with him and they had to sleep more or less like sardines in a cairn. Is that typical? Is that what you witnessed that La Zia. When I first went to Lazira prison, I started by going to death row. It was built to hold fifty and then it had five hundred condemned men. I was told that they got the death penalty for crimes including treason and cowardice and mutiny. I heard of a man called Edward and Paggy who've been sent to death for murder. After twelve years on death row, it turned out the person he'd killed was still alive. They still took about another six years for him to be released. I heard someone had stolen a mango from a neighbor's mango tree and they used standing knife to cut it off. They got the death penalty as an armed robber. Very often they were teenage boys, often in prison for having underage sex, which has a maximum penalty of death in Uganda, so I saw that there was massive overcrowding. I heard that many prisoners had never met a lawyer. In Uganda and Kenya and around Sub Saharan Africa, somewhere between eight prisoners will never meet a lawyer. At that time, two thirds of prisoners in Uganda were awaiting trial, sometimes in prison for many years, occasionally over a decade awaiting trial. So you've just said a lot of things that I could really benefit from some clarification on. So somewhere between eighty and ninety of prisoners in Uganda, Kenya and Sub Saharan Africa will never meet a lawyer, which just seems like a crime in and of itself. Two thirds of prisoners are just awaiting trial, so they haven't been convicted of anything, and without likely ever meeting a lawyer, the outcome of the trial is probably a foregone conclusion anyway. It I'm really struck by some of the charges you mentioned. They sound old timey, like treason, cowardice, mutiny, and the fact that underage sex between two consenting teenagers can mean the death sends. I mean, think about this for a second. Something like three quarters every ever said of human beings lose their virginity before they turn eighteen. Now you can't condemn three quarters of humanity to death, right, I mean, where the hell did these laws even come from? In Commonwealth Africa in form of British colonies, the laws largely haven't changed since colonial times when the law was around command and control. So people in prison for loitering, or being vagrants and vagabonds and debtors, or for being gay. I met women whose children have become very unwell. They take in the hospital, there's no medication for them, the child dies, and then the mom's arrested for are neglect and taken to prison with her other children. Or women whose husbands have beaten them and beat them for years, or the husbands have got aids and he tries and rapes the wife, and then the wife fights back and she finds herself imprisoned, And Sir, I think it's a consequence of having laws which haven't evolved, having countries whose populations have grown massively over the last decades, which have overwhelmed prison capacity. In Uganda, prisons are at about three of capacity, so where one person should be sleeping, there are three. I think for governments which don't have enough resources, very often prisons and criminal justice aren't their priority, and it's expensive to pay for lawyers, and so you find people in prison facing very long sentences or sometimes the death penalty, who don't understand the law, don't understand how they can engage with it. Very often we letter believe that the laws is highly complex thing that we need very qualified lawyers to help us to navigate. But we ask, what does it look like to recognize that the law affects us all from before we're born until after we die. What does it look like to understand that all of us have a right to know the basic concepts of the law. No one should go to court and not know how to address a judge or know that they have a right to ask questions of those who are making accusations against them, or if they're convicted, to appeal against that conviction. And so we're asking how do we take that knowledge into the communities which needed the most, into the communities of those who are poor, those who are minorities or refugees, or homeless people or sex workers, the kind of people who tend to be overrepresented in prison say, the laws here for you, the laws here to protect you, not just to hold you to account. YouTube can understand it, because it's going to be a long long time until most countries around the world will prioritize paying for lawyers for everyone who finds themselves in prison. Again and again, in my teens and in my twenties, I had experiences in prisons around Africa, seeing things which I couldn't unsee and which I felt I had to respond to. I went to Juba Women's Prison in South Sudan, and as the gate was opened, I saw a woman with chains on her arms and legs, and I said to the officer escorted me when she chained up? So well, we chain up our lunatics. That's about a third of the prison population. As far as I could understand, I could point to anyone say that I thought that they had a mental health problem there being in prison. They said, we also chained up those who are going to be executed. Although suth Sudan was a newly formed country, it was still hanging people. So well, what's going to happen to this woman? And the officer said, well, with her and a number of the other women here she's not done anything wrong. Her husband was accused of a capital crime, but because the police couldn't catch him, the wife was arrested and tried and sent to die in his place. And Australian prison officer working with the United Nations in prisons in South Sudan told me about a five year old child swimming a river with a three year old friend. The three year old round and the five year old was arrested and sense to death for murder. So again and again I saw things which I couldn't really understand, so so I just felt I had to to respond, and that's how I ended up starting the African Prisons Project, which has become Justice Defenders when I was twenty one. Around the world, according to the World Justice Project, there are five point one billion people who are affected by inadequate access to justice, two and fifty three billion people living in situations of extreme injustice, ten million in prison, three million of those waiting for trials. We see that there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work, and so we're going to be waiting a long time. If the solution is that every person in prison must have access to a lawyer, and so we're asking what does it look like to raise up lawyers and to raise up parallegals from those communities, those who know what prison feels like and smells like, those who are living it and breathing it, and those who want to respond and to do this work not because it's going to make them rich, not because it's going to make them powerful, but because they understand what it's like to have hope taken away and they want to breathe agents of hope. And we're asking, how can we equip this community of prisoner and ex prison and prison officer paralegals to go to the places that others don't want to go, to serve the people that others don't want to serve, and to say I'm here for you. You too deserve to have your voice heard. The law can protect you as well. And so far we've trained just under three hundred prisoner in prison officer paralegals. We've got thirty nine prisoners and ex prisoners and prison officers who have graduated with their University of London law degrees having studied in prison. In the first six months of one alone, we've served thirteen thousand, seven hundred and eight prisoners without adequate representation, resulting in two thousand and forty five of them having been released. And so we see that there are people who are willing to step forward, willing to do the work, willing to serve others who will be trained on the job, and as justice defenders, we ask, how do we equip them? How do we give them access to knowledge and skills. We used to do it in person with COVID, we've been taking this work online and offering paralegal courses online, training prisoners and prison officers with law degrees online, facilitating virtual court attendance, establishing online case management systems. Because we see that there's a justice crisis around the world, and we see that there are people who are willing to step forward and to respond. I sense that you have the same feeling that I get, which is that when I visit prisons and people were over in the prisons in the United States, I often come out feeling like there's more humanity in a certain sense inside those walls then outside. When I first started this work, I looked on prisons and those that I met as being filled with people who needed help, whose circumstances looks desperate, but Actually, as I gained understanding, I saw that prisons were filled with people who had gifts and talents and skills and gifts that they were offering others. People in prison have been my my teachers, and they've educated me about resilience and courage and compassion and perseverance and determination and so much more. Again and again I came across these examples of prisoners who were serving others, leading the prison football team or having little farming projects to grow extra food, or leading the prison church or mosque, or caring for their fellow prisoners when they were sick, and I saw the prison officers are doing the same. And so I saw that prisons were filled with people who have this incredible potential to offer their families, their communities, but also wider society. William, one of my colleagues, who was on death row in Kenya for many years, said, in prison there are brains that can move mountains. St Oscar Romero said, there are certain things that can only be seen with eyes that have cried. And we saw that someone who knows what it is to have their fingernails pulled out in the police station, or to be years in prison without a trial or to get sentenced to death but never to get a copy of their judgment. Has this desire for justice that comes from their first hand experience, and so our work started shifting about ten years ago towards equipping prisoners and prison officers with legal knowledge, training them as paralegals through a three week paralegal course in criminal law, but also giving them access to formal law degree studying with the University of London by correspondence, as Mandela did from his prison cell in in South Africa. And that's now our focus as justice defenders. We've wound up how other health and basic literacy worked just to focus on equipping those we've lived experience of confidt with the law with legal knowledge to serve their communities, so the defenseless become the defenders. I mean, the numbers are absolutely staggering, the number of people that you've been able to help, the people been able to free. And I was able to participate in it. I guess it was a zoom or some sort of a video conference where you sort of looped me in with people in different prisons, and I was struck first of all by the fact that that doesn't exist in America. Somehow you've been able to get Internet inside the prisons, and we can't do that here here we have this j K collect call phone systems, you know. But I was also struck, Alexander by the fact that the guards seemed to be, you know, not just willing participants, but active participants in this process of trying to help the people who they are in charge of overseeing or what do we want to call it? And was I wrong about that? That spot on we trained prisoners in prison officers side by side as paralegals, and in our law classes. We equipped prison officers to go to court and speak on behalf of prisoners who don't have anyone to speak for them. The head of Uganda Prison Service said to me a few years ago, We've got the gallows, we've got the executioners, but we can't be sure if we're hanging anyone that's actually guilty of any crime, because we know that our criminal justice system is broken. Senior officers in the Kenya Prison Service, Ay, we estimate about half of our prisoners are here innocently. They've not had representation at trial. We want you to train our prison officers in law so they can work on appeals because our prisons are massively overcrowded and we can't actually cope, and so we see that there's this appetite for justice from prison services and prison officers as well as from prisoners. I don't think anyone finds joy going to work as a prison officer, being with people who you know haven't got justice and feeling that you're powerless to do anything about it. And so that's why we're really committed to equipping prison officers to play their role in working for justice. And I think now globally we're asking, in light of COVID, what does it look like to rebuild our societies on this foundation of access to justice, on the foundation of the rule of law. Since George Floyd's death and in light of Black Lives Matter, I think we're thinking about the idea that we can't have peace without justice on a micro or macro level in new ways. And we love to bring together prisoners and prison officers who are working with us as paralegals or as law students or graduates with prosecutor US and with judges, with the police and others involved in delivering justice in that community. Wherever possible, We do it over a meal, and we asked, how do we work together to create a community that's just No one gains when innocent people imprisoned, and if people are guilty, we want them to have due process. We think, if it's possible for that to happen with their throw inmates in Uganda, what would that look like with their throw inmates in Alabama? And coming together with guards and with judges and with prosecutors and with police officers, and dreaming about what justice looks like in that community. And so I'm excited by the changes which are happening in America. Over the last six months, We've been approached by prisoners in twenty two different U. S States asking for our supporter, asking for us to train them as paralegals. We've had approaches from another seventeen countries beyond that, and thirteen non governmental organizations, including the u N. There there's this growing group of formally incarcerated Americans who are using the law to serve their communities, who have this hunger for justice, and we're excited to stand in solidarity with them to understand how we can equip and support and learn. Yeah, and I've read that your goal is by to help a million people get fair hearings, and also to have expanded Justice Defenders work even further around the globe and developed as well as developing countries and prisons, refugee camps, home the shelters, and brothels. I can't think of a more noble goal than that. We're going to put all the information for people to donate to Justice Defenders and and of course the website is Justice dash Defenders dot org and you can go there to get involved, to volunteer, to learn to donate. I hope everyone will click on the link that will be as I said in our bio. So now we have two last things I promised. This is it and then I'll let you go back to work. So the my favorite question that I asked on the show of all of our wonderful guests is if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing, what would it be. Let me tell you a short story. When I was eight or nine, I went to my local library with my dad and I picked up a book and there was an African American guy being strapped into the electric chair by a group of white men in suits with these wide leather straps all over his body, and there wasn't a mask over his face yet, but the look in his eyes was expressionless. It was like he was dead before he had actually been executed. I realized that's the power that the law can have to strip hope or agency or life from us. As I looked at the future, I hope for an end to the death penalty. But I also hope that around the world there's no one whose eyes are lifeless like that. I hope that we can raise up a new generation of paralegals and laws with lived experience, who served those that others refused to serve, so everyone feels that the law is for them, that they have a chance to tell their side of the story before they're convicted or punished. Amen to that, and thank you how Axander McClain for the incredible work you do with Justice Defenders, and of course for sharing your story with us and to our audience. Please join us here next week where we will speak with a tremendous figure in education, civil rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement, Deray McKesson. And now we turned to the closing of the show. Something we call words of Wisdom, and it works like this, I turned my microphone off, kicked back in my chair and just listen to anything else you want to share. Thank you for sharing this conversation with me, Jason. Thank you for what you role model in terms of being an advocate for justice and your commitment and your perseverance. And to anyone who's listening to this show, which maybe you feel angry or challenged, or frustrated or confused by, or you've heard, my encouragement is that each of us can play a part in creating the community that we want to be part of, the community where no one innocent is imprisoned and where those who are guilty of crimes have a chance to tell their side of the story and to be punished in a way that allows for rehabilitation. So my invitation to each of you this to ask how we can each live lives where we're quick to listen and quick to love and slow to judge. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flamm. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne, and Kevin Wardis. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Twitter at wrong Conviction, and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction. Podcast Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one two