Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowNowadays virtually everyone can agree the US Justice system has profound, serious issues -- the problem is people just don't agree on how to address them. In this special interview, Ben, Matt and Noel sit down with Jason Flom, the creator and host of Wrongful Conviction, to learn more about tragic and terrifying cases of the legal system gone awry. People imprisoned for decades, only to later be found innocent. People convicted of crimes they were physically incapable of committing. The list goes on. Perhaps most importantly, Jason shares his insight on what we as individuals can do to help drive positive change.
Fellow conspiracy realist. Quick disclaimer before we begin today's interview segment, we are having a frank and candid discussion with Jason Flum. As such, this conversation may contain strong language, as well as graphic depictions of crime and injustice that may not be suitable for all viewers. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our superproducer Alexis code named Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Recently, we had an incredibly powerful live podcast conversation with a cavalcade of top notch talent from our friends Lava for Good. And in this conversation, which folks you'll hear very soon hopefully, we discuss with policy experts a vast range of issues surrounding criminal justice, reform, the legal system, the war on drugs, much much more so much in fact that we weren't able to get to most of the stuff we wanted to get to, so we knew we had to have our guests back on and we're starting that today with none other than the creator of Wrongful Conviction, the one and only Jason Flam Jason, Welcome to the show Man. Thank you.
I'm so excited to be here. I've been counting the minutes. I'm not being facetious by the way. I was walking my dog this morning and thinking about how excited I was to do this, thinking about things we could talk about, because I'm still buzzing with positive energy from the event last week.
Yeah, saying we're excited as well.
That's awesome to hear. And thank you seriously for joining us here because we talk about a lot of things in our earlier conversation that may not occur to most people on a day to day basis. And let's start with some background about you. We're preparing your bio doing some research here, Jason. It's kind of tricky to put your experience in one one box. You know, people might not know that you're the founder of Lava Records. Before that, you were the chairman of Atlantic Records and Virgin Records, Slash Capital Music Group and god yeah, the accolades alone.
You can't hold the job. I guess.
Most people would have stopped at one if.
You need a couple of buckets for this.
And you know, we really did kind of build this career, you know, this life and music and beyond the parts we're going to talk about today, kind of from from the bottom.
You know, we understand that you were kind of part of I guess.
What you would call maybe like early iteration of street teams, kind of hanging up posters for promoting shows as part of yeah, exactly Atlantic's field merchandising team, which now would be more you know, commonly referred to as a street team or like a PR team.
Yeah, I mean that was you know, when I was eighteen, I was super lucky to get a job as a trainee field merchandiser, which meant I wandered around record stores in Manhattan. There used to be record stores all over the place. Right Now there's just vinyl stores, you know, in the hip or neighborhoods of town. Right. But so my job was to go and I'd climb around at ladders. Was a double sided tape and a staple gun, usually high on weed and hang up led Zeppelin posters and Sister Sledge and chic and rolling Stones, and it was just like I thought, it was the greatest job in the world. Four dollars an hour, free records. I was like, this is a dream. And so I fell in love with the music business. And then I remembered the words of my dad, who was my hero and my mentor, and he had said to my brother and I, do whatever you want to do, try to be the best at it. It just make the world a better place. And so I realized I was never going to be the best guitar player, but maybe I could be the best at helping other people become great at their musical crafts and make other help make other people rock stars and help them live out their dreams, and I could live vicars through them. So that's when I had this sort of my first shift, right.
And I like that, say it's your first shift there, because while you were pioneering sort of the bleeded edge of the music industry, you had another calling. And that's that's part of what we want to explore with you today. In the early nineties, in nineteen ninety three, you joined something that was newly formed at the time, an outfit called Families Against Mandatory Minimums. They had just been around, from what I understand, for a couple of years, formed in nineteen ninety one. And we're wondering, I guess me start there. What inspired this path, this advocacy and activism.
It all started in the most serendipitous way, which was that I just happened to pick up a newspaper one day and saw an article, and randomly it was a New York Post, which I never buy and no one should ever buy it. But the fact is The Times was sold out this particular day. I bought the Post, and I was meant to because it was an article about a kid named Stephen Lennon who was serving fifteenth to life for a non violent first offense cocaine possession charge in a maximum security prison in New York State. And yes, you heard me correctly, nonviolent first defense cocaine possession charge, fifteen to life, and his mother had been trying to get clemency from the governor, Governor Mario Cuomo, and had been turned down, even though she had gotten support from some unlikely sources. And that in a nutshell, is why I was in the newspaper. And so I read this and I was like, what in the actual fuck am I reading right now? Right? Because I didn't know anything about mandatory sensing or drug laws. I had had my own, you know, problems with substance abuse. I was a pothead, but then I got into cocaine and ended up in rehab when I was twenty six. So as it happened, he was thirty two, I was thirty two. He had been in prison for eight years. I'd been sober for about seven. There were just too many parallels, and I was like, I'm an atheist, but there before the grace of lowercase God, go I right, And I was like this, this is really bothering me. I have to try to do something about it. And I only knew one criminal defense layer at the time, but his name was Bob Clean. He represented two artiicided signs Stone Double Pilots and skid Row and you know, yeah fist in the airs, yeah, And so I had them on speed Dog because those guys were getting arrested like weekly. So I was like, Bob, what could be done? He goes, There's nothing you can do. It's the Rockefeller drug laws. You know, I said, look, do me a favorite. By now I had called the mother on the phone. Her name was in the newspaper article, Shirley Lennon in Rome, New York. And so you know, I'd trying to figureut what I could do to help, and Bob, as a favorite, offered to talk to her. He talked to her, he read the transcripts of the trial. He offered to take the case pro bono as a favorite to me and her and her son. And six months later we ended up in a courtroom in Malone, New York, up by the Canadian border, and there was this old judge with white hair, and I thought it looked like Ted Forsyth, if you guys remember him and the actor. And I was like, this guy's never going to rule in our favorite. I knew nothing. I had a mullet and purple Doc Martin's on. That's what the type of character I was, and you know, thirty years ago. But the judge, the arguments go back and forth, and the judge bangs that gabbled down. I probably just deafened your audience and said the motion is granted. And Bob comes sort of running over in a suit and I was like, bow, what just happened? And he goes, we won, And I was like whoa, whoa what? And he goes we won. I was like, fuck, that's amazing. And so at that moment everything changed for me. You know. I realized that I had this superpower and if I had it, I was damn sure going to use it. And that led to reading an article in Rolling Stone magazine, which was an article about the dea busts of dead Heads that was going on in those days, where they were posing as dead Heads and going to these concerts. And I've never been a grateful dead fan. It's not my kind of music. Who cares, doesn't matter, the fact is they were going to these concerts posing as dead Heads, buying a little bit of acid from these kids, and then busting them and putting them in prison for ten years or more. This organization, Families Against Mandatory Minims, was mentioned in the article. I called up the founder, Julie Stewart. I said, I'll, I want to help. I became the first board member there and I'm still on their board to this day and they still do great work to this day.
You mentioned the idea of the Rockefeller drug laws and mandatory minimums.
Can you just talk a little bit about that.
And kind of what that meant, you know, for the need for this kind of advocacy.
Yeah, I'm a good question, all because you know, the war on drugs has had so many terrible and probably predictable outcomes. Right, it never was a war on drugs. It was a war on people. Nixon wanted a war against hippies and black people, but he couldn't call it that, so he cleverly marketed it as a war on drugs. And the Rockefeller drug laws weren't you know, an offshoot of that or a you know, a part of that. The New York state law that was passed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller named after him, and these politicians were all rushing to make tougher and tougher laws in order to win elections because they found this to be an effective strategy and so tough on crime, right, which is really just tough on people, and so these in this rush, which was not based on any science or anything that would actually benefit public safety, but rather it was just pandering to get votes, which sadly it did. New York passed some of the toughest drug laws in the country. Seems counterintuitive. I think most people don't think of New York as a state like that. But these laws were as bad as any in the Deep South, I would say, and as a result, you had these terrible cases where people would be caught on a first defense like this kid, Stephen Lennon was, and possession of four ounces or more of cocaine or sale of two ounces or more was treated as an A one felony, which is the same as murder, which you know, I have to pause there for a second and go, yeah, So so he was caught up in that, and you know, he had had four point two ounces of coke and it's like, you know, the people don't know, they don't know these laws, and so literally like two grams put him over the edge. And you know, it's not an uncommon story. Sadly, like Bob said, like the attorney said to me, were thousands of people in prison serving time on cases similar to his, and a lot of them were people who were just set up by other people, right who like my friend Anthony Poppa, you know, who was a guy who was had never been in trouble but was struggling to pay his rent, had all sorts of problems, that car broke, all this other stuff, and some guy this bowling league was like, hey man, you know like you want to do a Joel. You got to do is take this get on a bus and you know, take it over there. You make fifteen whatever you told him, Right, So he didn't know anything, and there was a sting operation because the other guy had gotten busted and his only way out was to bust somebody else. And so a lot of it is like a lot of it is actually creating crime where there was none, right, and your crime we call him a crime. I mean, look, I don't I think drugs should be taxed and regulated and treated like other substances like alcohol and tobacco. But it was a crime, but it was a crime that was never intended to have happened in the first place. In Anthony's case, and he got fifteen to life as well.
Well, I've got a question there in Stephen Lennon's that's the first case we were talking about, right, the one that you got involved with. Okay, so Stephen was convicted of a crime and was in jail when you encountered him. That's when the story was.
Written exactly right. Yeah, he was had been in for eight years. He was at Dana Moor, the same prison where Son of Sam was being held. He told me he actually met Son of Sam the first day he was there.
He met Witz.
Yeah, he said he was with the guy who brought around the hot water for your you know, tea or coffee. And I was like, I wouldn't be giving that gun that.
But so when he's in jail, you encounter him, you're able to get in front of this judge to argue that he shouldn't be in prison right for that long? What is his status after that actions taken in the courtroom, Like he's a convict, and what's his status after whatever action is taken in that courtroom.
That's a good question, Matt. So what happened was the judge on this novel approach that this attorney had concocted right and basically in layman's terms. And I was certainly a layman and I still am. I'm not an attorney most people think I am. But so what happened was Stephen had been in a car and had a friend of his he had given a ride to and they stopped on the side of the road and one of them had gotten out to take a leak, and a cop saw them, turned them, you know, approach to search the car found four point two ounces of coke under one of the seats. Both of them said, it's not mine. Well, when you say it's not yours, that means it belongs to everyone in the car. There could have been fifteen people in the car. Each of them would have been charged with the full amount unless somebody takes ownership of it, which nobody does. So good to be aware of that, by the way, for people who are listening who might be thinking they'd take a ride, but don't do it. So anyway, both kids had been convicted, and since the fifteenth to life, Steven had written letters after he was convicted saying, look, it wasn't the other guy, It was me. You know, I just gave gave him a ride. It was too late by then, right if he had said that before the trial, But who's going to say that before the trial, then you're going to be basically meaning your own guilt. So at some point the other kid, as I recall, had been I don't remember his name, had been allowed to plee down to an A two felony, which is a possession of two to four ounces and had been released after eight years. So Bob's approach was to say, well, how could my client be guilty of a different crime than the other guy when they were both convicted of this? Just something along those lines, right, So he told me it wasn't gonna work, and that it was a you know, it's not a you know, it wasn't a perfect argument. But we found, you know, maybe the judge was in a good mood that day. Maybe you know who knows right. They're people too right, they're subjective to a certain degree, and in that little window, the judge found, you know, a reason to free Stephen. So he allowed him to plee down to an A two felony, which meant that he had already served effectively. I think it was three to eight. It was how much you could get for an A two. So he'd already served nine years by this point, and so he was freed. It took another few weeks for him to be processed out, but he came home shortly there after. He came down to New York. We went out for lunch, and he's done importantly by the way he's done really well in life. You know, he started a successful business, he's raised a family, and it's kind of great. I got a letter. I got to share this story. Five or six months after he came home. I got a letter in the mail from somebody in Cincinnati. I don't know anybody in Cincinnati. I've never been to Cincinnati. And the letter I open it up, it's from a woman named Joanne Paris. I don't know who Joanne Paris is. And it says, dear Jason, you don't know me, but you got me pregnant. I'm like, whoa exactly? I was like, WHOA, Hey, how do I return this letter? So I went on to say, for the last five years, my husband and I have been trying to conceive, and you know, the doctor told me the stress of my brother's incarceration was preventing me from being able to get pregnant. My brother, Stephen Lennon, I'm pregnant now and just want to let me know and thank you and whatever. I have the letter somewhere. It was really, you know, it was just another beautiful sort of outcome. So you know, these things are it doesn't just happen to one person right. It happens to the family, It happens to the loved ones when you when you wrongfully put somebody in prison. The ripple effect is it's felt, you know, by a large group of people in most cases.
And let's pick up there, because you said, you said the word wrongful. Unfortunately, as as amazing as as Stephen's story is, we have to admit that it is by and large anomalous in the overall the overall landscape of the American legal system. Your show Wrongful Conviction dives deep into multiple, multiple egregious instances of people who have who have been failed by the justice system. Could you, in your own words, tell us a little bit about wrongful conviction and maybe some of the notable cases that inspired you. I divinized you, I should say.
Oh, hell yeah. So Wrongful Conviction is a show I started in twenty sixteen. I've been with the Innocence Project. I was the first board member there, so they called me the founding board member, not the founder. The founders are Barry Shek and Peter Nufelds. I want to make that clear. But I've been with the n this is project now for twenty seven years or something like that. And I'm so inspired by the work that we do and that the lawyers there due and that the incredible pro bono attorneys do around the country to help these wrongfully convicted and actually edison people. And I became really drawn to the people themselves right as I got to know a large number of exoneries. Often I would meet them as soon as they came home, and they're as a group, some of the most extraordinary people that you could ever meet. These are people who have been through literal hell, because our prison system is hell, and come out with optimism, with gratitude, even with grace, you could say, right, And none of them want to look backwards. They're not bitter, and they're like, you know, you just I draw so much inspiration from being around these magical beings who went through hell and came out carrying buckets of water to help other people, put other fires out for other people, right, And I'm like, who are you, dude? Like how is this possible? Or you know, many of them are women too. You know, of course women get wrongly convicted as well. And I thought, if we can tell these stories, or I can help these individuals to share their stories and create a platform where they can speak to, you know, one hundred thousand people a week, which is about the number of people that we reach with each episode, then we can help to change hearts and minds and ultimately shift policies and make the system a little fairer and better for everyone. Because ultimately, we can sit here and talk about statistics, and I can rattle off statistics for your audience all day long that are mind blowing, but they're statistics. But when you hear the story of Michelle Murphy right, who was seventeen years old, single mother of two kids in Oklahoma and woke up one morning with a big lump on her head and an ache in her leg, and her baby was gone, and she's stumbling around looking for her little one fifteen weeks he was fifteen weeks old at the time, and found him in the kitchen in a pool of blood and he had been effectively decapitated, and you know, calls the cops. Of course, they proceed to interrogate her for nine hours, without an attorney, without a parent. I don't think her parents would have been much good, because it was a pretty dysfunctional family, but I know there would have been much help. Then they claim she confessed, although it's dubious as to whether she ever said anything. I think that they got her to finally say because they told her if you don't, if you don't say something, we're never letting you out of here, and you're never going to see your other kid again. And so she said, well, maybe I you know, dropped the scissors or something like that, which of course was a ridiculous idea. Right, the kid was decapitated, the baby was. You know, it's sorry to share this disgusting detail, but it is what it is. And she never saw the light of day again. I mean, she was sentenced to life in prison. And you know, everyone knew from day one that it was the next door neighbor kid who did it. But the fact is the king self asphyxiated before the trial, so he was never able to be His testimony or his claim that she had done it was never able to be in peach because he was dead. But the fact is, when her conviction was overturned after twenty years, a judge said through tears that in his forty plus years on the bench, he had never seen a more you know, a worst case. I forgot his exact words, but he, you know, was it was so insane. And when you meet Michelle, and I did meet Michelle weeks after she came home, and she's so extraordinary. She's such a beacon of light, you know. And her case, sadly is not an outlier. I mean, there are tens of thousands of wrongfully convicted people in prison in America right now while we're having this conversation. Many of them are on death row. I had a call today with Billy Allen, a zoom with him, a strategy call with him and his team. He's on death row. He's on federal death row for a crime he couldn't possibly have committed. In fact, people, you know, people say to me, well, you know, but is he really innocent? And I'll go listen, Ben, you know, you're as guilty of this crime as he is. In fact, I can't even say that because I can prove that he didn't do it. But I don't know where you were that day, you know what I mean.
I.
Oh, might have just he might have just unsolved this mystery. No, But anyway, the fact is it's you know, we have to laugh to keep from crying. But Billy Allen you know, is another one, right, he's on death row for twenty six years. The guy's an incredibly brilliant artist. He's a painter, he's a poet, he's phenomenally evolved person. Wasn't a troubled guy, wasn't a trouble maker, you know, but was wrapped up in this ridiculous frame job in Ohio, oh sorry, in Missouri for our bank robbery he couldn't possibly have committed because he was at the mall and there were video that could have proved it, and there were receipts for clothes he had bought, and there were witnesses. And not only that, but the robbers had robbed this bank and killed a white car. There were two black guys and their genius plan was they loaded up and you have to hear this episode, I think it's number three oh three, but they loaded up a van with gasoline. These two geniuses. Their getaway plan was they had a van which they had coded with gasoline because they were going to jump into this van after they robbed the bank, speed away to another getaway car, set the van on fire to destroy whatever evidence there was, and get away that way. But the van caught on fire on the way to the vetaway car, because of course it did, because it was loaded with gasoline and coded with gasoline. Right, So one guy is on fire, he can't get away. He's rolling around in the grass. He gets arrested immediately. The other guy runs away, but he's singed, and he smells like gasoline. Did the people see him because he stops to ask people for directions, where's the train? He's trying to get away on the train now, right, And they reported they've described him. These were people who worked at the park service or something. And Billy, you know, when the guy who was caught, you know, is being forced to name his co conspirator. He first he said it was some other name John or something. Then he said, oh no, maybe it was Bill. And then the only guy that he knew named Bill was he barely knew was this guy Billy Allen. But Billy had all these alibis and evidence that he wasn't there, and he didn't smell like gasoline, and none of his clothes had gasoline on him, and he wasn't singed, and he didn't match the description, but none of it mattered. And he's been on death row now for twenty five, twenty six years and I strongly encourage people to look up the name Billy. It's b I L l I E A L L e N. Google that name, and you know we're going to be eventually well. Doctor Philip is going to release an episode coming up soon on this case, and we're going to really mount a big campaign because he needs to come home and the idea that he could be executed is just insane.
There's also a free Billy Allen on Instagram, right anybody.
Right ad free Billy Allen, and you can google you. Like I said, you can listen to the Wrongful Conviction podcast with Billy Allen. You can also look up the eight minute video that the kids at Georgetown to making an exandery class did. It's phenomenal, phenomenal video. So yeah, those are just a couple. I mean, we don't have time. We could go on, it would be dark and we'd be hungry and tired by the time I finished telling you these horrible stories.
Will pause here for a word from our sponsor and return with more from Jason Flapp.
And we've returned, let's talk a little bit more about the perspective you mentioned a little earlier, like from someone from an outsider perspective saying, how do they know that these people are actually innocent? What does the evaluation look like for a group like the Innocence Project, or for you when you're going to make a wrongful conviction episode? What does that evaluation look like for a CA? Is it like what you were just describing, really getting into the evidence, getting into that stuff and just evaluating it on your own or having attorneys do it.
Yeah, that's a great question, man, And the answer is that with innocence projects, and there's the Innocence Project in New York, and there are local innocence projects around the country as well. There's It's the Project, New Orleans, the California Innis's Project, Midwest inst the Project. Many of them do fantastic work, but the fact is that they The Innocence Project of New York, for instance, has an intake department, and we have people who are trained to read these letters that come in. You can imagine, we get hundreds of letters a month from people who want our help, and so these people are trained in the art of researching and reviewing and processing this information to determine not only the veracity of the claim of innocence, but also whether or not it's a case where we are able to effectively, you know, advocate for them, and that takes on different forms. But with the Wrongful Conviction Podcast, our process is different, of course, but the same in certain ways. You know, I get most of the cases that we cover from people from trusted sources, from people at instance, projects, from attorneys that I know. I also get, you know, relatives reaching out to me and people from all walks of life, you know, who've seen me on TV or you know, heard the podcast or whatever it might be, and they have a loved one or they're even writing to me from prison. And so then we have a team that researches those cases to try to figure out, you know, if it's a valid claim of innocence and whether we think that our advocacy could help to make a difference. And of course if we can, we want to, and sometimes you know, pressure can break pipes. Podcasts have become like the new jurys. In fact, today, Bone Valley, our podcast that you know, was part of the presentation we did together in Atlanta, Gilbert King King. Yeah, Bone Valley, which has been winning awards and been you know the top ten in every English speaking country in the world pretty much. Today Leo Schofield, the man who is wrongfully convicted, whose story is the story of the podcast in Florida, who's been in for almost thirty five years now. So he went before the parole board today and in no small part due to the exposure that we were able to bring through the podcast medium, which you guys basically freaking invented, the parole board ruled. Look, they didn't rule the way we really were hoping, which was that he was going to come home immediately, which is where it belongs. But they did rule that he's going to be sent to a program at a minimum security facility, which will take some more between nine months in a year, which to us would seem like an eternity, but to him probably seems like, you know, next week after thirty five years in prison, and there's an extremely strong likelihood that at the end of that period of time he will be freed and will go home to his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren. And so he's happy with the outcome. Obviously, again, it's not what we hoped for. And to those who haven't heard Bone Valley, please check it. Out because if you want a this is Gilbert King, the poolser Prize winning journalist who spent three and a half years researching this case. And on the podcast spoiler Alert, you're going to hear the actual killer confess in details that only he could know that weren't public. And you're going to learn that his fingerprints were found not by the state but by private investigators, well by interested people, right, not a private investigator. Seventeen years later, his fingerprints are found in the car that Michelle was murdered in. There's no question about these things, right, And then it gets worse from there. But every episode is like peeling back the layers of an onion. And you know, it's so outrageous, and I think that's why it's caught the public imagination. But again, it's outrageous, but it's not unusual.
So how do Okay, the first, let's assume the mindset of just the average person who has maybe never really tangled with law enforcement outside of a parking ticket, right or you know, they got a speeding ticket or a tailite ticket or something. One of the first questions those folks will have is, how do these clearly wrong, unjust convictions occur. What leads to a system that produces these with such consistency.
Well, the answer to that, the big answer is mass incarceration itself. Right, this failed social policy disaster that has turned us into the most incarcerated nation in the history of the world. And when I say that, that's not hyperbole. We have more people in prison in America than Russia and China combined. We have more people in jail awaiting trial who haven't been convicted of anything than everyone behind bars in India right now. Okay, and India has what four times as many people as we do, and it gets worse from there. We have twenty five percent of the world's prison population but only four point four percent of the world's population. And we have thirty three percent of the world's female prison population. What is That's crazy? Last statistic I'll throw at you is we lock up black people at a rate that is higher than South Africa during apartheid per capita. We I mean, I hear myself say that, and I go, flum, you sound right now, but it's true. And every time I say it, I go research and it's like, Yep, it's true. It's much higher. It's not a little higher, it's much higher. So so my point being that when you have two plus million people in jails and prisons right now in America, in steel and concrete cages, right suffering at this very moment, and that compares with two to three hundred thousand, forty years ago, right that we had in the same country with no benefit to public safety whatsoever. And the result of that we with eleven million people churning through jails and prisons each year. That's how many people go in and out of jails and prisons in the American chare. So why that's important in the context of your question, Bet is because when you have that many people cycling through, there's no time for the system to recognize and respect anyone's individual rights unless you're wealthy, in which case you have the ability to pay for an attorney who can really represent you. You have the ability to post bail and go home after you've been arrested, and you can probably avoid most of the worst outcomes that are reserved for the people who are most marginalized in our society, and those.
Feeling like you can slow time down with that money and attorney, in a way, slow the whole process down. A little bit, right, because that's one of the big problems.
Yeah, well that's the inverse, right or the converse. I mean, you know, you look at the guy who used to be in the White House, right, and how he's been able to, you know, avoid consequences for as long as he has, And that's an extreme example. But you know, we have so such a disproportionate reaction to the level of crime. And that's another subject, right, is how we have become the most overpoliced society in the free world by a mile, and how we're the most you know, spendthrift society in terms of the way we just freely dedicate resources to the things that we know don't work, which are police, prosecutors, in prisons, right, the three p's, and these things don't make us safer. In fact, they make us less safe. This has been proven by every serious social scientist who's ever studied these things. But we're like addicted to it, and it's it's part of my mission in life. I guess my overarching goal is to end mass incarceration. That's why I've worked on mandatory sensing, That's why I've worked on drug decriminalization. That's why I work on bail reform. That's why, you know, all of these are parts of the same giant monster that we have to you know, we have to we have to slay.
You say, we're addicted to it, like as a society, maybe as a government. I mean, you know, a lot of the stuff with the war on drugs is also wrapped up into kind of you know, slave labor by a different name. You know, can you talk a little bit about that, Like on the panel, we discussed the idea of like is the prison system broken or is it working exactly as intended?
Yeah? So, no, you're exactly right. I mean, slavery is not illegal in America and people are probably tuning out right now, going, who's this crack poty he's always talking about? It was dating fo Yeah. So when slavery was abolished as a sort of a you know, a give a concession to the Southern States, they allowed that slavery was only illegal if you're free. So predictably, what happened was the Southerners who needed slave labor to pick cotton and sugar and other things, went around and arrested black people for loitering, for not having idea on them, for not even having a job. They could arrest someone for being unemployed back then, and it hasn't changed that much. But you know, it was more out in the open then, and those people then were forced to work for free. It was even convict leasing and things like that. And that's how a lot of the cotton was picked and the sugar was harvested. And these were jobs that had I think sugar was the most dangerous crop because I think they had four percent fatalities annually among people who are working in those fields. But they didn't care because it was an endless supply, endless supply of free labor. So Colorado a couple of years ago became the first state to abolish slavery, truly abolish it when they in a referendum, the voters passed a referendum making it illy for people to be enslaved while they're being imprisoned. And so, you know, now we have to get the rest of the states, you know, one by one and if they have be done by referendums. Unfortunately, only about half of the states have referendums, and not all of them will vote this way. But you know, whatever we have to do, that should that should outrage everyone, you know, And in some of these states they get paid nineteen cents an hour or a dollar a day, or you know, in Louisiana the gola four cents. I think it's four cents an hour, but they take two cents as attacks, you know, So it's it's slave labor, no matter how you look at it, it's it's ridiculous. And a lot of products that we use are made in these prisons, not just license plates, right, but also key shirts, you know, coffee cups, underwear, all kinds of stuff is made in prisons by some really I don't want to name news because o't know which corporations may have stopped doing it. I can keep track of it. But some of the blue chip like Fortune five hundred companies, and you can look this up, use the labor from prisons, and you know, it's it's just one of the many terrible things about the way we operate right now.
I think some military supplies are made in prisons.
I wouldn't doubt it.
Over a decade ago, we made an episode on the privatization of prisons, and when we were hanging out at that live show, I brought that up in the room with Greg and Greg Laude, who's with the War on drugs, and a couple other people, and for us, when we made that episode again a long time ago, it felt like maybe that was one of the biggest issues leading to mass incarceration because there was a real profit motive attached to just getting a person in a bed as an individual inmate. Right, But Greg and I think you too, Jason had a different take on that. I just wondered how the view on the privatization of prisons has changed as a contributing fact.
A lot of people talk about private prisons as sort of the you know, the boogeyman, and they're terrible. It's it's I think if you go to another country, it's almost like an electoral college or like people won't be able to look at you. Like can imagine if you went to another country and you were like, who won the popular vote over here? Right, You're like in Belgium, They're like, what are you an idiot? There's no popular vote. There's a vote. One person winds, the other person loses. Whoever gets the most, let most goes home, and that's it. But America is a weird place, so private prisons, those are two words that should never go together. But approximately six percent of the people locked up in America are in private prisons. So it's a horrible, horrible thing because when you think about it, of course private prisons are buying large, more dangerous and more draconian even than the prisons that are operated by the states and the federal government, because they're only there to make money, so they're paying the least they can for everything, right guards, food, Not that there's good food in prisons in America in general, far from it, but it's all worse. And so there's more chaos, and there's more hardship, and there's more sickness, and there's more violence, and there's more of all the terrible things that we as a society, whether someone's guilty or innocent, we shouldn't want that inflicted on them. These are people, if they're guilty, they're people who made a mistake, but they're human beings. I believe what Brian Stevenson says is that no one should be judged by the worst thing they've ever done or no. He says, we're all better than the worst thing we've ever done. And I think that's an incredible statement. So you know, and we also have to start moving to an approach like they take in most of Western Europe, where they look at it and say, well, this person's eventually going to be released, and when they're released, they might be my neighbor. And I want them to come out whole. I want them to come out with the possibility of getting a good job, with healthcare, with you know, some job training, with some you know, treatment for whatever was wrong with them that made them want to commit a crime in the first place, so that they can be a good neighbor. They can they can contribute to society. But instead we you know, I always say we should build ramps, and instead we build walls outside of the walls right for people to have to climb over in order just to get back to a decent way of life because they made a mistake at some point, which I don't know about you guys, but I know I made a lot of mistakes when I was a kid that if I was a different colored skin, or it was from a different zip code, I probably would have ended up in jail and prison and life would have been very different. And I don't know who would have benefited from that, because as a result of me going to rehab instead of prison. You know, I ended up starting businesses, paying lots of taxes, employing lots of people, discovering some music that probably a lot of people that are listening may have enjoyed, you know, maybe even had some illicit fun too. I don't know, so I hope so. So. You know, nobody would have won had I gone to prison, except maybe somebody would have made it a few bucks. And at the end of the day, that's you touched on that. That's part of the problem. And by the way, I have to thank you guys. You know, I listened to your show about the police gangs, and as a result, I started watching that that TV series that you recommended, We Own This City on HBO.
Awesome. It's it's underrated, didn't get the accolades.
That's why I'm glad we're here talking about it again now. I mean, I encourage people to watch this show because it's you.
Know, forfeiture, I mean not forfeiture, seizure of you know, basically theft.
You know, we talked about the idea of.
Like one of the punitive measures that law enforcement can and act on people who are not actually convicted. They are just accused is taking their stuff, taking their money, you know, or even like is you know shown in that show, maybe even stealing drugs and you know, moving them illicitly and you know, kind of all the books black ops type operations. That's something that I wish you would have touched on a little more on the panel, just the idea of kind of undo forfeiture or seizure of assets.
Yeah, I'm glad we're talking about it now. That's actually something I was looking forward to talking with you guys about because I thought you did a great job on that episode, which is an episode of people haven't listened yet, go back and listen to that episode. What what episode? Maybe you guys can put it in the link and the bio or yeah, do the police have gangs? Yeah, yeah, it's it's uh, it's terrifying. I mean, you know, people that work in criminal justice reform won't be surprised by it, but it's still it's it's madness. And the show which talks about the Baltimore Guntrays task Force and is you know, horrifying in every way because it's a true story and you know, this is the task force that was you know, if you google Baltimore toy gun scandal, you'll find the information about this group of cops, eight of whom are in prison right now, you know, who were planting toy guns on people that they shot. But that wasn't all they were doing. They were also you know, selling drugs, robbing drug dealers, robbing civilians, framing people for all sorts of crimes, and on beating the beating the hell out of people, murdering people. And you know, it points to something that we talked about on the panel, which I have to say, it feels to me like we as a society have developed a cognitive dissonance when it comes to any rational discussion about new approaches to solving to making our society safer. Right, And I say it again and again. What causes crime by and large is desperation. That could be mental illness, by the way, but mostly it's poverty, and it's you know, it's it's lack of hope, right. And when people become desperate enough, they're likely to try to do something because they have nothing. And if that's something, if there's no way out for them except to see, you know, to do something that's illegal, maybe even that's hurtful to other people, then that's what they They may well do, but if you provide them with hope, and we know programs that work. There are lots of programs that work, that are proven to work, you know, like in New York City, the Avenues for Justice is an organization that takes kids on their first serious interaction with the criminal justice system when they meet with that kid and the family if that kid is lucky enough to interact with them, where they find out about this kid, and then if they believe they can help, they go to meet with the judge and the prosecutor and say, let us have a shot at this. Okay, give us two or three years to work with this kid, and we'll send them to college and you'll never hear their name again. Their success rate is ninety one percent, by the way, and it costs fifty seven hundred dollars a year. Now, let's talk about that in the context of what it costs to keep a kid locked up in Rikers Island, which is only a few miles from where I'm sitting right now. Rikers Island, it costs five hundred and sixty five thousand dollars a year to keep a kid locked up there almost exactly one hundred times as much as it does to help that kid and turn them into a productive, tax paying citizen. But what exactly are we doing? If you just look at the overtime we played the police in New York City, a fraction of what we pay overtime would solve our homeless problem in New York City a fraction of it, just the overtime. Right. But the difficulty is people can't wrap themselves around the idea that those people don't make us safer. Right, they don't prevent crimes because it's virtually possible to prevent crimes. It can't be everywhere, and if they were, it wouldn't prevent crimes anyway. You know, someone says, well, if they're standing outside of a bodega and somebody goes to rob the bodega, well then they'll go rob a different bodega, right, I mean if they're desperate enough to do it in the first place. And they don't really solve crimes either, right, they solve two percent of crimes, They investigate ten percent of serious crimes. Even murders they solve less much less than fifty percent. Other than many of those they solve wrong. And so then you get to what you mentioned, I think, Noel, right, which is that they're committing crimes in numbers that we don't. We can't, we can't really even we can, and we see it again and again, almost like scandals in the Catholic Church, right, But yet we still allow the church to operate tax free, even though every city has had these major scandals where there's been priests abusing and abusing is too gentle of a word, you know, doing the worst things imaginable to children. But they still are allowed to operate tax free. And at the same time, there's an interesting you know, parallel to these scandals that have happened in police departments all over the country, every city, right, and where you have police who are you know, over indexing in every conceivable category of crime, whether it's domestic violence right where reported numbers are four times higher in families that haven't a police officer than in the general population, whether it's murder, whether it's you know, other types of crimes. And then to go back to your point, Noel, and no I'll get off this soapbox. The Washington Post reported starting in twenty fourteen that police stole more money and property from civilians than all the robberies combined, all the burglars and robberies combined. But we don't talk about that, right because civil asset forfeiture allows that they can just take your stuff. Right if you're going through an airport and this happens all the time, or you're driving in your car, you're on a train, and they search you and they find a bunch of money on you, no drugs, no weapons, no evidence you've done anything. They go, well, we think you must be a drug dealer because you got all this money on you. So we're taking it, and your only recourse is to you know, you have to prove the negative. You have to prove that you weren't committing any crimes and that that money didn't come from any illegal activity that you were involved in. So let's say they take five thousand bucks off right now, you're going to go hire a lawyer for five thousand bucks to go try to get your five thousand bucks back. No, you're doomed. Right. Maybe it's in a city you don't even live in. It's somewhere you're driving through, and these things happen in clusters. But so you know, Florida recently banned civil asset for it's your families against mandatory miniums led that fight. Actually, but it's crazy that this stuff is allowed to go on. So not only nol are not only are you not convicted of crime, you're not even charged with a crime. They just have to go. We think maybe you might have you know, or we think this car might have been involved in some illegal activity, so we're taking your car.
Here's your smart grift. Unfortunately.
Yeah, it's it's an awful, awful grift, and it's it's it happens in the shadows and people don't talk about it. We don't know about it, so we need.
It happens at the lat airport, right, And we just learned from Clean English. Yeah, a co host of the War on Drugs. It just happened to him. He's a prominent comedian, actor, writer, like big name, and he just took his money.
Yeah, And you know, there's so many brilliant people that are that are out there talking about this. Alex Fatali has his book The End of Policing, which is brilliant, which argues for making our society safer. And you know, when you think about it, why in the world have we And this is actually something that I think most police and police families or organizations would agree with. Right, why is it? Why have we decided it's their job to respond to mental illness crises, right or drug overdoses. Why do we have them doing traffic stops? That makes no sense whatsoever. You don't need a police officer to do a traffic stop. First of all, you could have a civilian doing it. And second of all, well, there's cameras literally everywhere. You could just if somebody really runs the stop sign right, or really you know, is driving in the wrong way or whatever they're doing right, or has a broken freaking tail light, you can take a picture with one of the millions of cameras in all over the streets and send a bill to the person's house that corresponds with the license plate, and then they pay it, and you're saving all godly amounts of money on godly amounts of money, and also preventing the worst outcomes that we see so often from these traffic stops. And you know, we need to reduce our aliance on police, and there are a number of cities that are doing this with profoundly positive results. Denver, Albuquerque, Berkeley is the first city. Now I think that's that's decided they're not going to use law enforcement in traffic stops anymore, right, But other cities have experimented with, like Denver, diverting over ninety percent of nine one one calls to people who are trained in whatever that is. If it's domestic violence, they're trained in crisis intervention, right. If it's drugs, there's people who are trained drug you know, you know experts, you know, an ambulance things, so the work, you know, people that know how to do exactly what that is. But instead we take police who are actually just violence workers. Right, that's what they're trained in. They're trained in trying to analyze a threat and then neutralizing that threat. But they're not trained how to recognize where someone's if somebody's mentally ill, if somebody might be deaf and can't understand what their instructions are, et cetera, et cetera. And so the worst outcomes that we see day in and day out were police and America murder between three and four people daily, right daily. And this is the last thing I got. I gotta throw this out, because nobody talks about this, right, But I'm just sort of obsessed with this notion that Americans have been taught by the media largely and by pro police forces to be scared. Right, We're all scared of crime, crime, crime, crime, somebody committed a crime. It's terrible, it's traut it's terrible, it's dangerous. As soon as you leave your house, in your house, you need a gun. You're danger. Danger, danger everywhere, danger, danger nature. I live in Manhattan. New York City is currently the ninth safest big city in the world. It's one of the safest places in the world. I walk everywhere. I wear a nice watch. Sometimes the rolex. You know, I'm fine. There's no crime, there's no you can't. I can't find any crime. There's crime in certain neighborhoods if you really go look for it. But you know this, by large, it's extremely safer. But everybody's worried that they're going to get killed. And by the way, the one statistic I was going to add before, which you can use or not, but which I think is really wild, is that the stranger danger murders that everyone worries about, right that they're going to they're going to walk down the Sasas Street and somebody gonna jump out of an alley and you know, steal their stuff and kill them or whatever it is. Right, the FBI says that nine point nine percent of murders in America are those type of murders, stranger danger murders. Right. Almost overwhelmingly it's people who know each other, right, they're in some sort of a dispute. It's a could be able lover's quarrel, could be a business dispute, could be a you know whatever. Right people know each other, they get in arguments and sometimes it ends badly. So that means about fourteen hundred people are murdered in America in a year by a stranger. So the odds of you being murdered by a stranger are infinitestabal in America higher than other Western countries be cause of guns, but still infinitesimal. Now, let's talk about police murders of civilians. Right. Last year, police, according to their own reporting, murdered eleven hundred and seventy four civilians. But we know that they're not always truthful about these things, right. They originally said that George Floyd died of a medical problem until the video came out, they said the Tyree Nichols died of a medical problem until the video came out. They said the same thing about Ronald Green, who's every bit as terrifying as Tyree Nichols, but for some reason it hasn't caught the public imagination the same way. So let's say that fifteen percent of the time they I'm the same miscategorize, right, that's probably too kind of a word, but whatever. That means that police are murdering close to fourteen hundred people in America per year, which is the same number as people who are murdered by strangers. So if you're murdered by a stranger in the United States, it's about a fifty to fifty chance that the stranger who killed you is wearing a gun and a badge. And so it's really, you know, when you put it in those terms, it's really you got to scratch your head and go, what are we doing? You know, what in the world are we doing? It doesn't make any freaking sense. So I think, you know that's why that's that show We Own the City is an important show for people to watch.
We're going to pause for just a moment here, a word from our sponsor and then we'll be right back, and we're back.
Let's go to uh, let's go to the courtroom here, because there's something we were talking about Jason in the panel when we're talking to Noel, Matt and I and I knew we were really cooking with gas when are the tone of our conversation was accelerating right as we knew we were running out of time. We're trying to get to these really important things. And I had this to your point about media, right, We had this question about copaganda as it's sometimes called, and how this gives us this skewed normalized view of what truly is a fiction. And you, when we ask what people as individuals need to know about the court system, the court piece of this in wrongful convictions, war on drugs, and so on, you hit on something a lot of people don't talk about just one prosecutorial misconduct. And then second, just the whole idea of bail, of the bail system. Do you remember we were You were like, hang on, we have to talk about bail reform, and most people don't. I will admit before that conversation, I wasn't walking around on my day to day with bail reform as one of the top ten to does in my head.
Yeah, well, I'm happy to talk about that, and I'm glad you raised it. And copaganda is an important word. It's a word that was on the tip of my tongue when you said it. And I encourage people to follow the work of Alec Car Katsanas That's al e c. And his last name is a little bit of a tongue twister, but it's kar ak at s a ni s Alec Carr Katsanis and he is one of the most brilliant people I know and afoundly important figure in the world of criminal justice reform, and he's done transformative work on bail. He has a newsletter that you can sign up for right now called Alex Copaganda Newsletter, which I think could really changed your views on how the media reports these things and why we are led to believe the things that were led to believe. And you know, his work on bail has centered on the fact that money bail is in fact unconstitutional. It's a violation of the fourteenth Amendment and I think the sixth or the eighth I can't remember now, because it's not equal detection or due process. When two different people are arrested for exactly the same crime, but one of them has money and the other one doesn't. So one of them goes home and goes to the movies or does whatever they do, or goes fix up their kids for school, and the other one goes to jail and his thing is you know, he's out there winning case after case from some very conservative judges too, in front of some very conservative judges who agree that this is an unconstitutional practice. Judges are required to set bail In the Eighth Amendment. It says that it is unconstitutional to set bail that is unaffordable. But it happens every day, thousands of times a day, in every city in the country. And yet we think somehow this is making us safer, when in fact, all the research has shown that bail reform makes us safer. Why is that true? Because people are picked up for a crime, usually it's a misdemeanor, right, The overwhelming number of arrests are for misdemeanors. People think cops, They think the law and order version of cops is what cops are doing. But their jobs are generally mundane, right, Only I think one percent of nine one one calls are for enviolment, crime and progress right, So mostly they're giving out traffic tickets and doing all that other stuff. But when people are arrested, they're presumed innocent, but yet they're taken to jail if they can't pay bail. Now, when they're arrested, if they're held in jail for whether it's three days or three years, whatever their problems were, are going to be a whole lot worse when they get out right. The outcomes that no one really thinks about of being in jail for like I said, a week whatever it is, a month is. If you had a job, it's gone right. You may have lost your housing, if you have some sort of temporary housing situation or or anything. Your kids may have been taken away by child protective services. Because if you're a single parent where they're going right, or maybe they're who knows right, maybe medications, you don't have things, everything is worse. And now you're in a desperate situation where you may be forced to make a terrible this is and and have to commit a crime in order to feed yourself or have place to live or whatever it is. And so studies that have been done by University of Pennsylvania, the Quadronan Center there, the Arnold Foundation, others have shown that people who don't go to jail before trial are much less likely to commit a crime or be arrested for a crime in the ensuing time after they've been freed, after their case was adjudicated, right, and they were freed. So it's demonstrably true that freeing people, except for people who are accused of the most terrible things, right, is a policy that saves us huge amounts of money, hundreds of millions of dollars. And they even studied in Texas the first five hundred thousand people that were freed because of Ala Carqatzanus's work where and by the way, the California Supreme Court usually recently just ruled unanimously that he's right again and that they can't set money bail that people can't afford. So but in Texas they found that there were no negative outcomes from these five hundred thousand people who are freed. Of course, somebody's going to do something, and that's going to be the story in the newspapers because it's clickbait and because it's an easy story it's lazy journalism, right. Someone goes, oh, this guy was freed on bail and the next thing you know, he hit this old lady over the head in an ATM and stole her thing, and now she's in the hospital and everybody's upset, and it's like and now there's a crime wave. And that goes back to that same narrative. So that's the copaganda thing. But in fact, if we're really interested in making our community safer, then we take that money that we're wasting on jails for these people who are presumed innocent and spend it on things that actually make us safer, which is job training, social services, treatment for people who have mental illness, people for treatment who may need it, for substance abuse, you know, fixing street lights, putting green spaces, like it sounds airy fairy and like, you know whatever, but it actually works, Like putting green spaces in neighborhoods that really need them provides hope and makes people less prone to do things that are violent or even just illegal.
Just to stay on money, gosh, I'm gonna throw a couple of statistics out and then ask you a question on prompts. So, according to the National Registry of Exonerations exonerations. As of September twenty twenty two, there have been three two hundred and forty eight exonerations inside the United States since nineteen eighty nine, which is simultaneously feels like a huge number and a tenC tiny, itty bitty little number when you think about the overall number of people who have been incarcerated. Okay, so if you happen to be exonerated and you're one of those lucky few people, the thought is, well, this person was wrong for convicted and exonerated after spending twenty thirty eight years in prison. Isn't that person entitled to some kind of compensation from the state in which they were incarcerated because they were wrongfully convicted, spent a bunch of time in prison, lost their life right, their family got set back. As we've been talking about in this episode, we recently learned that in inside DC, so the District of Columbia, and thirty eight out of the fifty states, there are state statutes that exist to help someone who's been exonerated get compensation. But it's only those thirty eight states, right, What have you learned in making wrongful conviction about the ability of someone who's been exonerated to get some money or some kind of compensation from the state or the federal government.
The two questions I get asked most frequently by people who are new to this world. Right, someone I just meet at some random event or whatever. Maybe they see my T shirt This is Wrongful Conviction podcast on whatever, let's see it sparks of conversation. They always want to know and they hear these stories and they say, please tell me, like, what happened to the prosecutor. Was the prosecutor ever did they get in trouble for framing this person? And the answer to that is ninety nine point nine percent of the time, absolutely not. There was no because they have absolute immunity. Only two prosecutors have ever gone to jail for framing someone in America, one guy in Texas Anderson who went to jail for three days and the other guy in the Duke Lacrosse case who went to jail for one night. That's it, so that has to change. But to answer your question, the other question that people ask me is exactly when you just asked to tell me this guy, this woman who just did Michelle Murviy twenty years, she got compensated. And the answer to that is sometimes, and even when they do, it takes years. Even in the states that do have those statutes, they put you through hoop after hoop after hoop to try to get paid, and it can take years. And in between what are you supposed to do? And don't forget that there are a huge number of people who are freed on because they've had their convictions overturned, but the state ain't done with them. So they'll go to them and say, Lorenzo Johnson, for instance, right, it did twenty two years wrongfully convicted twice in Pennsylvania. It proved his innocence twice. It's conviction overturned twice. And then they said, we're going to try you a third time unless you take a play. Take a play. You can go home right now, and it said Sophie's choice. Right. And these pleas happen in courtrooms before like upon arrest, right before a trial. They happen all the time right where and they're called sometimes they're called exploding Please where you have they go? Matt, Look, you got half an hour to decide fifteen minutes. Here's a play. You can go home now. But this is gonna be on your record, or you're gonna go to jail for a week or whatever it is. But if you go to trial, we're to throw the book at you. And it can be much worse than that. I could say it could be winning off of you two years. But if you go to trial, you can get forty. Right. That's a real thing. And people take please all the time because it's the rational thing to do, even if they didn't commit the crime. But the fact is that so many people are freed on these Alfred pleas or other pleas where they're not admitting guilt, but they have no chance to sue for compensation and they're just left on their own. You know. I have to tell the story of Vincent Simmons, who came home last year after forty four years and nine months in prison in Louisiana. We covered his story on Ronfuel Conviction. I think we're the first national outlet to do it. It led to CBS and eventually the accusers admitted that they made up the story and he did forty four years and nine months for a crime that never happened. But still he was freed but not exonerated. And I asked him. Vincent came home. He's seventy years old. You're freed. What did they give you? They give you anything? He goes, yeah, they gave me ten dollars. I go ten dollars? Was that cash? He goes, no, it was a debit card. I'm like, how's about that, right? But the answer is we need to fix compensation statutes. These people should be given a check made out to you know their name and directions how to get to the bank, and you know a name of someone who can help them. They should. But ironically, when you're freed on actual innocence, you get nothing. You know, you're just out to defend for yourself. People who come home that are guilty they're on parole, actually get a probation officer who, in theory at least can help them with different things they have to navigate, whether that's how to write a resume or how to do basic things that they've lost track of, how to work a phone, write anything. But people who are innocent are basically left defend for themselves. And if they're in one of those thirty eighth stay maybe entitled the compensation, but it might be woefully low. You know, Michelle Murphy who we talked about, got two hundred thousand dollars for her twenty years in prison, and you know thirty or forty percent of that went to her lawyers, right, So you know, we need to fix these compensation statutes. It's one of the things that the Innocence Project is leading to charge on and many others are working on it, and we need to. We need to, at a minimum, give these people who are innocent a chance to rebuild their lives and to live out their days in at least relative comfort.
And one of the most powerful questions for us to include here is the question about activism, right, about participation, about no longer passively accepting these egregious things as a normal state. Given your experience with this, Jason, if someone came up to you and they said, okay, I know nothing other than there are some serious problems. What can I do? What do you tell them?
Well, it starts with everybody has a voice. Knowledge is power, right, So listen to the podcast Wrongful Conviction, Bone Valley. There's so many other good ones out there that you can hear as well. Read right, So read like I said, Alex Copaganda Newsletter it's free. You can subscribe to it right now. Read as much as you can on the subject. I can give you, guys some other links to put in the bio. There's a great book out right now called Junk Science by Chris Fabricant that really shows you how the junk science is used in our courtrooms. We didn't get chance to touch on that, but it's super powerful. Justin Brooks has a book out right now called You Might Go to Prison Even Though You're Innocent. I recommend that and the things you can do. Number one, serve on jury's right. Listen to this stuff, read this stuff already. If you've listened to our show today, your show today, then you're already more knowledgeable than most people you know about this subject. And we need you to serve on juris because you know one person can make the difference. The life you save could be somebody. That's somebody's loved ones. Right, And remember when you do serve on jury's that those those are not just words. When you hear the words innocent until proven guilty, that's not the way it works right now, but we need to fix that. Right people believe you're guilty until proven is and because they've seen too many TV shows and they think, if you're in the defendant's box, must because there must be a good reason for it in this ornate courtroom. And whatever it is right and reasonable doubt, we have to return to the standard of reasonable doubt. It's like, if there's a reasonable doubt, you got to quit. And there's that fantastic saying by the famous English jurist Blackstone, who said it is called Blackstone's theorem, who said that it's better that ten guilty men go free than that one instance should suffer. And that's why the death penalty needs to be abolished, among other reasons as well. But serve on jury's vote. I know you're tired of hearing people telling you to vote, but I'm saying vote local right, voting your local DA race, voting your local judge race right. So few people do that your vote literally could be the difference, right. I think you should vote in all campaigns, but you know your vote in the presidential race is extremely unlikely to tip the scales, right, but you should do it anyway. But the DA's races have such an important you know the results of those races. The difference is profound you know, I recently was involved with the race in Memphis with Steve Mulroy, who you know, not too long after he won, in a big upset, he replaced a woman who had sworn I'd never prosecute a cop. Well, her office did. She didn't say those words, but her office had effectively said that, and they didn't say exactly those words. So let me take that back. They said unless there was one hundred witnesses in a video, they wouldn't, and they didn't. And the fact is, four months after he won, Tyree Nichols was murdered by those cops in the Scorpion unit who beat him to death. And Steve did the right thing, and he had all those cops arrested and charged with murder. And you know, it couldn't be more obvious. It's on video, but that doesn't mean. You know, we've all seen these things before. And I think he probably prevented riots from happening and everything else. So we have to get better people in those positions, and you can do that. So and then you know, remember that your voice matters. Right. It's easy to feel helpless, but if you know somebody who's suffering in prison, you can you know, just by talking about it. You never know who's listening, right, just tell your friends. Somebody knows somebody. The connections are amazing, how these things have happened, and how they snowball, and how people advocate hate and becomes a movement, and you know, writing a letter to your local politician. Those letters actually matter, right, They become annoying enough that people change their you know, change their position on certain things because they get these messages. You know. So those type of actions, while they may seem like drops in the ocean, they really are significant. And so I think those are some of the steps that anyone can take. And uh, and I hope, you know, I hope people will will take those and and do other things and just get involved because this is, i would say, the civil rights issue of our time, and and we can fix it, and we can make our system fairer and better for everyone while also making ourselves safer. And you know, and that's really you know, that's that's what I think. That's something that we can all get behind and we can and we can really reduce this scourge of wrongful convictions. And so, like I said, you know, follow me on Instagram, you know, I'd posted about this stuff all the time. It's it's Jason Flahm. I t s Jason flam And and yeah, look, I appreciate anyone who's who's hung in there with us is somebody who's interested and hopefully a new devotee to the cause.
And we certainly appreciate you being here and giving us your time and for all of your efforts and passion in this, you know, in this realm.
Well, I appreciate you guys having me, and I'm a fan of your show, so this is really fun for me, you know, And I'm looking forward to doing more stuff together. And I'd love to have some of the other people, you know, I would love to have to see if you guys could have Alec on your show. I think you would probably really enjoy him as a guest. He's a brilliant speaker. He sounds fascinating. Definitely. I'll tell you this. I took my son to a a he had a book release party when he released this book called Usual Cruelty, and yeah it's good and uh, wait, what's your son's name. My son's name is Michael, and uh and as it happened, it was it at someone's apartment and there was you know, a bunch of people around. Was it like Novagratz's apartment whatever, And there was you know, probably a hundred people there and were milling around, and then all of a sudden events sort of started and he and I were on opposite sides of the room, and so we just had to stay there instead of like, you know, yeah, I just got a little awkward you walk through the middle of the day. And anyway, so Alex starts talking in about ten minutes into his talk. Seven minutes into his talk, my son, Mikey text me and he goes, Dad, this is the coldest motherfucker alive. And now Mike he's going to go to law school because of him. My son's going to law school. So you know, it's like, yeah, that's that's the guy. Man, that's the guy. And and you know, actually, if we have one more minute, I'll read you something. Do we have one more minute? We can we can go of course, Yeah, all right, let's do this. I'm going to read this. I actually read this same passage when I was on Joe Rogan and it really had a profound impact. And I'll read this to anybody that will ever listen. This is This is from Alex's essay that formed the basis of the book Usual Cruelty, and it was in the Yale Law Review. And it starts like this. It's called the Punishment, The Punishment Bureaucracy. How to think about Criminal justice Reform. On January twenty sixth, twenty fourteen, Charnell Mitchell was sitting on her couch with her one year old daughter on her lap and her four year old son to her side. Armed government agents entered her home, put her in metal restraints, took her from her children, and brought her to the Montgomery City Jail. Jail staff told Charnell that she owed the city money for old traffic tickets. The city had privatized a collection of her debts to a for profit probation company, which had sought a warrant for her arrest. I happened to be sitting in the courtroom on the morning that Charnelle was brought to court, along with dozens of other people who had been jailed because they owed the city money. The judge demanded that Charnelle pay or stay in jail. If she could not pay, she would be kept in a cage until she quotes sat out her debts at fifty dollars per day or at seventy five dollars per day if she agreed to clean the courthouse bathrooms and the feces, blood and mucus from the jail walls. An hour later, in a windowless cell, Charnelle told me that a jail guard had given her a pencil, and she showed me the crumpled court document on the back of which she had calculated how many more weeks of forced labor separated her from her children. That day. She became my first client as a civil rights lawyer. So yeah, start with that. And that's what our that's hited. In a nutshell, that's what our criminal legal system really does. Cops are not out catching bad guys. They're going and arresting Charnelle Mitchell in front of her kids because she owed the city money for traffic tickets. And that's it in a nutshell, And that's the stuff we got to stop. Cops. If there's violent crime, and this, this horrible shooting in Atlanta today is we're recording, of course not when people are hearing this, but you know, yeah, we do. We need cops to go do that, yes, but by having them do all these other things, all we're doing is distracting and you know, and creating these horrible interactions that lead to these terribly unfair and unjust outcomes. So look, let's let's join forces, you know, join me, follow me, listen, read, learn, and get involved, because together we can fix this. And that's that's what I got to say about that.
This was some heavy, heavy stuff, but I'm really glad we were able to, uh, we're able to pull Jason on here after that panel. You know, this might actually come out before the panel.
Yeah, I think it will, And I'm really glad we drilled down into some of these topics that whole. The concept that you could be kept in prison wrongfully for that long and then not be compensated by the people that put you in prison wrongfully blows my mind, Like, I.
Really, you can send people to prison wrongfully with no consequence.
Yeah, probably that's probably the most important thing that it can happen in the first place, but just that there's almost no consequence to the state for doing it.
Not to mention the whole you know, basically unlawful seizure of property, you know, I mean and it's just wild. And I really like that Jason reference that we own the city. It really is kind of an eye opening look at how that aspect can really even go further and deeper and even more, you know, disturbing crooked directions.
Agreed, agreed, And look, you don't have to take our word for folks. You can check out Wrongful Convictions, as we said earlier in the show, check out the Innocence Project too. Because whether or not there's something Jason said earlier, it's whether or not you believe this affects you, spoiler, it does in some way, and we want to hear your stories. We want to hear your first hand experience. We want to hear your thoughts on what we can do as individuals or as a system to address these issues. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right.
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