It wasn’t that long ago that life in prison actually lead to early release, and it was considered part of the tradition. Reiko Hillyer is associate professor of history at Lewis & Clark College, and she joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the history of prison furloughs in this nation – where life on the outside was a way of integrating inmates back into their communities – and how tough-on-crime laws of the 1980s and ’90s changed the way we look at offenders today. Her book is “A Wall Is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd:
It’s not hard to imagine some progressive Scandinavian prison granting Christmas furloughs or taking inmates to watch high school basketball games. Just for fun, you can picture such a carceral system letting inmates spouses come for three-day weekend visits in private quarters. It wouldn’t surprise us to learn that offenders in one of these Nordic cultures were routinely granted. Clemency just 10 or 15 years into a life. But everything I just described was possible in American prisons in the early decades of the 20th century. Even in the Jim Crow South. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd.
To be clear, privileges and rewards and the ability to rescind them. They also work to squeeze more arduous labor out of inmates. But for a long time, it was widely understood that people in prison would eventually be back out in the world and criminal justice professionals believe that maintaining ties with that world would help with successful reintegration. In fact, it wasn’t wardens and guards who pushed to radically change prisons. It was politicians. Reiko Hillyer is associate professor of history at Lewis and Clark College and author of, “A Wall is just a Wall”. The permeability of the prison in the 20th century United States. Reiko, Welcome to think.
Reiko Hillyer:
Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to have such a beautiful summary of what I’m talking about in my book.
Krys Boyd:
Well, it was so interesting because everything here is counterintuitive and it’s my favorite kind of conversation. So, I’m glad that you were available. You teach this class… A history class in Oregon that has been set up in a really unique way. Will you tell us about the inside out prison exchange program?
Reiko Hillyer:
I would love to. Yes, the inside out prison exchange program actually started over 20 years ago at Temple University in Philadelphia, but it’s since expanded to other States and other countries, in fact. And the professors are trained in this pedagogy, which is to say, our method of teaching is that we bring undergraduate students into the prison. To study alongside incarcerated students, and we’re all together in the same class, learning alongside each other and from each other as peers and equal. And what this allows us to do, if we’re studying the prison system, is to braid together knowledge that might come from textbooks and academic study and long histories that offer scholarship about structure of the prison system. But then we also are hearing about the lived experience of incarceration. From the classmates in the class, and so integrating these two forms of knowledge, subjective experience and sort of scholarly understanding really produces something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Krys Boyd:
What do you hear from students? Those who are incarcerated and those who are coming in from the outside about what makes this class so rewarding for them?
Reiko Hillyer:
Well, for the students on the inside, it’s a chance for them to express themselves in ways that go beyond the rigid routines and confining identities of prison. Life. They get to think they get to be a student; they get to express their views. They’re incredibly empowered by the notion that college students want to hear what they have to say. And all of that is very fulfilling, I think, and transformative for them as human beings. But also, it’s the kind of political. Education because oftentimes they’re reflective folks and they’re remorseful and they understand some of the choices that they’ve made were poor choices, but they also come to understand a bigger context and historical context, and they can put themselves in that context and that sort of deepens their view of their place. The world and then for our outside students, the undergraduate students, a lot of them are predisposed to be sympathetic to those who are behind walls. But I think those who are skeptical as well come in with an open heart and right away there’s this incredible connection when they sit across from each other and talk about their favorite childhood memories or what. Superhero. They’d like to be. We immediately break the ice and we find that we have a lot in common and it becomes a very open and vulnerable space where people can learn from each other and sort of break down the stereotypes that we all have inherited.
Krys Boyd:
So this program is a 21st century invention, but the ideas behind it tie back to a surprisingly long tradition of thinking about criminal justice in this country.
Reiko Hillyer:
That’s right. And I think I really appreciate you making that connection because it was my experience in this class and sort of the preciousness and the rareness of the the nature of our encounter. That made me question because I am a historian. I ask questions like well, has it always been this way? I try not to take for granted the current world as something that’s static or natural or inevitable. And so, I began to do some research. I happened to be at the time researching. Prison strike in Virginia in 1968 and I had come across the governors. I guess you’d call them executive orders at that time, releasing incarcerated people to play chess tournaments in local high school. Polls and right around that time I was in Mississippi doing some research, and Republican Governor Haley Barbour had just commuted the sentences of of a couple of 100 people, including people who had been convicted of murder and were working in his mansion. And there was a huge outcry, both from the left and the right, and he defended his choice. And he said, I’m just following Mississippi tradition. And so I sort of scratched my head and said, well, what is this Mississippi tradition? I feel I must know more about. With this, is there a longer history here where more fluidity between the inside of prison and the outside world was more desirable, more tolerated, and for what reasons? Right? Our ideas about crime and punishment and the purpose prison should serve have changed over time. And so I’m just trying to excavate. That part.
Krys Boyd:
The state of California based its own conjugal visits program on Mississippi tradition.
Reiko Hillyer:
I love that you picked that up. Yes. So, this is one of the themes in my book, which I refer to as strange bedfellows, which is to say that. Oftentimes, practices that began in the Jim Crow South. That might be for pretty nefarious, or at least self-serving or exploitative purposes might be readapted in other contexts later on and perceived as progressive. So, the conjugal visits are a great example. So Parchman Farm or Mississippi State Penitentiary was basically a gulag. It’s a plantation. Prison, whose purpose was to exploit the labor of incarcerated people. And there was no pretense towards rehabilitation or moral rectitude. The idea was how are we going to run an efficient agricultural operation? And so the reward of bringing women onto the prison farm. Sometimes wives and spouses, families to appease. Essentially, a labor force was something that began in the early 20th century in order to allow workers to sort of blow off some steam and keep their morale high. And it was a a reward and also something that could be taken away if they didn’t work hard. But by the 1960s, again, as you said earlier, somewhat counterintuitively, there’s all this prison unrest and a lot of the problems of prison conditions and the concerns of prisoners are reaching the public eye, and people are really trying to grapple with. The solutions and the almost everything is on the table and one of the concerns is violence within prisons and rape within prisons and and another concern of course, is is the unrest. Himself. And so Governor Ronald Reagan decided to listen to the advice of some researchers who told him that it would be very useful as, again, a kind of safety valve. But in this case, to soothe the prisoners who are inside, to give the people who are. Well, behaved. The reward of conjugal visits. And this would have the benefit of both appeasing and a restive population, but also could shore up heterosexuality and sort of the the normal normative nuclear. Family at a time when you know during the Cold War, during this moral tumult that’s happening in the late 60s, Reagan is very interested in kind of ensuring that prisoner prisons are not hotbeds of deviant behavior. So, here’s this conservative guy who institutes conjugal visits in the 1960s in. And most if not all, of California’s. Prisons and interestingly kind of off the cuff to his advisor, he says, you know, because I have conservative bona fides, I can do this kind of progressive policy and no one’s going to complain. And he was he was wise, I think, to institute it. And eventually it came to include domestic partners. But just to conclude. One of the things that’s so remarkable about these visits is that they really were family visits. You would have a spouse or family member come to the prison and you would have relative privacy for maybe even up to 48 hours, sometimes 72 hours in a cabin or a motel room. Kind of. Thing, and it may sound sorted, and people make jokes about conjugal visits, but imagine a father who wants to do homework with his child, or wants to change his baby’s diaper, or wants to wash the dishes after his wife has cooked and dinner. Right? These are the kinds of experiences that allowed incarcerated people to adjust to the possibility of. Of getting free, which they had more likelihood to do in that era.
Krys Boyd:
So, at the height of these programs there were. 17 states allowing these kinds of visits in one form or another. Now we have I think 3, two or three. Some people Reiko might object to these kinds of privileges for people who broke the law, even if they’re behaving themselves behind bars. But of course, it’s a reminder that inmates are not the only ones who suffer when they are taken away from their communities and their families as punishment.
Reiko Hillyer:
I think that’s right, and it may seem. Like a privilege. Or a reward. And that’s surely one way of looking at it if you think that the purpose of prison is to offer the meanest possible conditions so that you know the austerity and the suffering of the time inside will somehow reform. Person, but frankly, I don’t think that’s so. And if if we want to really improve upon public safety, I think the best way to do it is acknowledged that when people are incarcerated, they are taken away from their families and communities, they their disappearance just destabilizes. A lot of lives, and oftentimes this means family separation, parent separation from their child. In and that’s destabilizes the communities that they’ve, they’ve left. And so, if those folks who are inside are eventually going to come back and be contributing members to their communities, they have to remember what it’s like to be a member of that community. Incarceration becomes its own world. It’s its own ecosystem, with its own rules and its own logic. Illogic. And the ways in which people are are sort of have to behave in order to survive, to survive is not necessarily pro social and adaptive. In the outside world. And I think that by nourishing people and making sure that they know that they are still part of a broader community, that they have a that they belong to us is something that can actually enhance. Public safety in the long run.
Krys Boyd:
I mean, did those programs really work to help incarcerated people maintain ties with loved ones on the outside? It’s a little bit hard to measure, I would imagine.
Reiko Hillyer:
It is absolutely hard to measure and I suppose there are different ways you could measure recidivism rates. Is one way of of measuring. But there are also lots of other ways that people maintained connections with the outside world. You mentioned in your introduction, the practice of furlough, which was very, very liberal in this country. For several decades, again, something that began in the Jim Crow South as a way for allowing workers to go. Home during Krys tmas or to visit sick relatives or to to to even participate in boxing matches or charity concerts. But in the 60s and 70s again, it was understood that if people are going to be reintegrated into the community, they have to maintain those networks, those ties that socialization. That they are part of the body politic. They’re part of the tissue of the world behind the walls and. They have to rehearse freedom. Right. And so people were allowed to go to basketball games and civilian clothes accompanied by the warden, also in civilian clothes. There was there was a there was a practice in Washington state for lifers called take a lifer to dinner, where community sponsors would take a lifer. Out to dinner in town because they lifers in Washington weren’t eligible. For furloughs. But all of these practices of being able to go home tend a garden, do volunteer work, speak to church groups, speak to school children, maybe attend school or job training programs. This is something that it really increased the likelihood. That people could reintegrate back into society and those statistics do exist.
Krys Boyd:
Reiko , this is so interesting. You looked at some records left at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which is not now and never has been like some Country Club prison for white collar offenders. What sort of activity did you find there when you looked at the calendar of events for a single month back in 1968?
Reiko Hillyer:
Wow, that was just incredible. I mean, I I was struggling to write my introduction, which is often the hardest part of the book to write, and something that one saves until the end. And at that time I stumbled on this incredible story. I believe it was July of 1968 and the cover. Of the angle light, which is the newspaper that was put out by incarcerated journalists at Louisiana State Penitentiary, featured a story on what they call the traveling ambassador. And the travelling ambassadors were a group of incarcerated men, some of whom were convicted of first degree murder or armed robbery, or maybe even kidnapping. They were out in the world trying to contribute to their communities in various ways, whether it be speaking at. Events or participating in musical performance or contributing to their communities in some kind of way. And what was so incredibly striking to me, among other things, was that 1968 was the same year that there was tremendous unrest throughout the country, not least in the South, right after the assassination of Reverend King. And into this climate, these incarcerated. People emerged to be spokespeople to try to give advice to teenagers who might go wayward, and I just found this to be such an extraordinary event that was also covered in local papers within Louisiana with great fanfare. There was not. A single piece of journalistic writing that I could find suggested that people should go into a panic because these criminals were among the public. It was really an amazing story.
Krys Boyd:
There were a fair number of inmates at Angola serving out life sentences in the mid 20th century. How, though, was the meaning of life sentence functionally different in the state of Louisiana until the late 1970s?
Reiko Hillyer:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, Louisiana had a very interesting custom. It was known as 10-6 and for most of the 20th century, it was written into law that a life sentence, a person serving a life sentence, which usually would be for, murder. Would have his sentence revisited after 10 years and six months, and if he had behaved well in prison and shown that he could be trusted that he had redeemed himself, made amends and had a good disciplinary record, the warden would recommend a pardon. Or rather a commutation and the governor would grant it basically with a rubber stamp. And this was practice in Louisiana for about 70 years at least. It was it was customary and. Selected and so most people who pled guilty to life sentences did so with the understanding that they had hope for release. If they did everything right. And I should mention that Louisiana was not an outlier in this regard, it may have been an outlier in having such a customary practice, but. In general, life sentences throughout most of the 20th century were not life sentences. The average around the country was about 15-16 years, so life did not mean life for most people until the so-called truth and sentencing laws of the 1990s.
Krys Boyd:
What did Harry Connick senior, not the easygoing jazz artist but his hardline prosecutor father, have to do with the demise of these kinds of programs and sentence commutations, at least in Louisiana?
Reiko Hillyer:
Yes, well, he was someone who really seemed to benefit from fear mongering and he. Governors of the past, of being soft on crime, of coddling criminals, that people were not staying in prison for for long enough. It was easier to to. Well, I don’t remember the expression. There was some expression that I can’t remember, but he was saying it was too easy to get out. The people were not. Serving long enough sentences and that there are too many pathways to freedom, and so he decided to really push for harsher sentences. And I’m encouraging governors to use their clemency powers much less frequently.
Krys Boyd:
So now in Louisiana and presumably most other states, we have this interesting addition to a lot of prison facilities. They’ve added Hospice rooms, thousands of people who might once have received clemency as not quite a matter of course, but a possibility can’t even be considered right because their sentences proscribe. Earl.
Reiko Hillyer:
That is right. And so there is a growing Hospice program at Louisiana State Penitentiary as you mentioned, but one kind of I find striking detail is that the support group, the club at the prison that raises money to help. Actualized Hospice. Is a prison club that used to spend its money helping people put clemency petitions in the newspaper the possibility of clemency has shrunken so much that the money that went to support clemency petitions is now literally going to support people’s comfort as they die. It’s like a kind of a A1 to 1. Shift and this again is a relatively new condition and one of the things that I think it’s important to point out as an historian is to just recognize that what we now think is sort of familiar and normal is actually quite radical and and new. When incarcerated, journalists at the angle light in the 1970s began noticing, thanks to Harry Connick junior and others policies that life sentences were turning more and more into true life sentences. They developed this category, called long term, hers which for them they defined as people. Serving of sentences of of 10 years. Or more, and by the year 2000 they had adapted the term to people serving 20 years or more, and then the next day it would next decade. It was 2025 years and more. And so now there are thousands of elderly people serving life without parole sentences. And Angola, who many of whom thought they had the chance of release when they were originally sentenced in in, in earlier decades.
Krys Boyd:
It would seem as if prison conditions would have always been far harsher in the Jim Crow South, and I want to be clear that you are in no way endorsing a return to laws that support racial hierarchies. However counterintuitively, how did those laws allow for a more merciful treatment? Of convicted felons in the South.
Reiko Hillyer:
Yes, I really appreciate how you’re framing my argument or my observation here, because again, yes, I’m in no way trying to romanticize the practices of white supremacy. But what was so fascinating to me is that the sort of paternalism and personalism required of white supremacy, the idea that an executive and a governor. Master, a landowner actually that there that his rule was benevolent and kind. You know, this sort of myth, this ideology, was bolstered by occasional acts of. Place this idea you know if if you behave, I will give you your life back and I have that power. Right. You don’t have an entitlement to mercy. But I have the power to grant it. And given your proper behavior, you know, in the context of of white supremacy, it would might, might make sense for a mercy to be given. As a reward. And so this was a possible way for governors to sort of puff up their own public image as as benevolence dictate. There’s, but also there were structures to keep people in their place outside of the walls of prison, right? So in a system where Jim Crow essentially is a regime, A carceral regime that extends beyond the walls of the prison, there are other mechanisms to keep people disfranchised and terrorized. Docile and and in their play. And it’s when those architectures were dismantled in the 60s and 70s that the prison became a more reliable site of exile. And I argue that it’s in large part in response to the freedom struggles of the 60s and 70s that sentences become harsher and prison conditions. Become meaner.
Krys Boyd:
So, I want to make sure I understand this. Did the dismantling of Jim Crow laws connect, perhaps unintentionally, to the idea that many people hold now that large numbers of inmates are irredeemable and therefore need to remain in permanent isolation?
Reiko Hillyer:
Yeah, I think that’s a really insightful connection. That is one that I am. I am trying to make, although it’s not necessarily a straight line. So just, you know, an aberration that I should should mention is that in the 1980s, which one might consider a conservative era and a height of sort of tough on crime. Rhetoric and policy. The then Governor of Mississippi, William Winter, faced a prison overcrowding crisis and was also facing a fiscal crisis, and so the logical thing to do, in his mind, was to engage in mass clemencies and mass commutations to alleviate prison overcrowding. And he considered it to be common sense, and correctional officials agreed with him, and he held conferences in the South in that era where corrections administrators as well as criminologists, said that prison needs to be treated as a finite resource and people who are don’t need to be in there, shouldn’t. In there and he faced a bit, a bit of backlash, but he stood firm nonetheless. But if you take the longer view from the 60s, I suppose the through the 90s, we do have this hardening rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving, a sort of if you want to call it a colorblind rhetoric that. Cast certain people is is irredeemable and permanently different and permanently dangerous. And even if overt racist language can’t be used anymore, we have the language of the welfare queen and all kinds of dog whistles and coded language to equate certain poor people, people of color with crime. Mentality and I think even though this idea that criminality is essential and unchangeable is, is certainly not entirely new, right, it’s it’s at least 100 years old and the context of eugenics. But I do think that it sort of gets updated in the 1990s. And this notion that people cannot change over time. And they are forever fixed in their most monstrous act has sort of become common sense.
Krys Boyd:
So it wasn’t just low level nonviolent offenders who could be considered for. Those occasionally people convicted of violent crimes sometimes qualified to go home for a funeral or a holiday or something else, and then came the case of Willie Horton for younger listeners. Can you remind us who Willie Horton is and what he did?
Reiko Hillyer:
Yes, William Horton was someone who was incarcerated in Massachusetts prisons for his participation in a murder in the late 1970s. He was a working class person who grew up in the South and was doing. Sort of blue collar work in Massachusetts, and he ended up incarcerated with a life sentence due to that crime in the 1970s. And after having spent almost a decade in prison, like many other folks with life sentences for murder, he was allowed to do some work in the community under supervision at a local mental health hospital, where he changed bed pans and changed people’s clothes and attended to people who needed. Care. But that was not the same thing as a furlough. A furlough meant going home rather than being transferred just from one state institution to another. And he, like many other people, was applied to have furlough and because of his good behavior and his good. Record he was able to leave unsupervised and go about his business for several weekends. I think maybe 9 or 10 furloughs he had spread throughout a particular year, but eventually he absconded and while he was. Fugitive. I suppose you could say while he was off out of bounds, he committed a violent crime or was convicted of committing a violent crime and a sexual assault. And so it was about 1980, seven, 1988. This was right on the cusp of the presidential election of 1988, and the Governor Dukakis was skewered in the press for allowing quote UN quote murderers weekend passes to run run amok, and rape and pillage, when in fact this was an exceptional case. Furloughs were allowed in in all states. And were successful 99.9% of the time and just to be clear and unsuccessful furlough often meant simply that a person did not come back to the prison in time, not that they went out and committed a violent act. So this exceptional case was was turned into. A sensationalized warning suggesting that all people in prison were potential Willie Hortons and the public should always be vigilantly on guard and was always in the threat of of danger. And this fear mongering rhetoric helped to win George Bush the election in. 1080.
Krys Boyd:
So there was a direct political event effect of that event, but the case also created a new way that politicians could discredit their opponents as soft on crime. I guess created a need for leaders to demonstrate they were tough on crime, right? And and passed laws that showed that.
Reiko Hillyer:
I would say so. I think that this is one of those inflection points. That changed the window of political possibility more and more to the center or to the right. I don’t know how. You know what kind of label you want to use, but it it became more and more sort of common, more and more understood that it would be political suicide to suggest anything else that sort of the being tough on crime. Becomes a litmus test for politicians of of any state. Type and I would argue that the maybe the more progressive leading, the more likely one might need to be to prove one is is tough on crime. That was no longer negotiable, or malleable, or debatable as it had been in decades before.
Krys Boyd:
And governors, with or without presidential ambitions of their own, I guess, realized there were major ramifications to granting clemency.
Reiko Hillyer:
It depends though on which moment and which governor and what kind of political or media support a particular act has there. There were cases in Pennsylvania, for example, which now has one of the largest populations of people serving life without parole in the 30 years between the 1930s. And the 1960s Pennsylvania governors commuted the life sentences of people serving life without parole of over 600 people. And during the course of those 30. Years between 1994 and and 2015. So, so about 20 years. Governors of sorry of Pennsylvania have have only commuted the sentences of six people. So it’s completely dried up. It’s not even a consideration. It’s like it’s a third rail.
Krys Boyd:
Reiko did prison wardens and other criminal justice professionals put up much of a fight in defense of things like family visits and furloughs and clemency.
Reiko Hillyer:
And I suppose it’s hard for me to to measure how how much of a fight they put up, but it’s. But I definitely have noted in my research that when policies like furlough and clemency were being and and even conjugal visits were being taken away, wardens and corrections professionals decried those changes. There were people who were wardens in Angola, wardens and in Massachusetts who knew that keeping a relatively stable prison population that was healthy and functioning, and not about to burst out of despair needed to have some privileges needed to have. Some. Hope people understood that a hopeless prison population was a dangerous prison population and those who have day-to-day contact and get to know people over many years are in a position to say so. And so there were people in particularly in Angola, when the. Furloughs started to disappear. Lots of folks who were higher up than the prison administration considered it to be a true loss, but also impractical and even dangerous.
Krys Boyd:
I don’t want to neglect the perspective of people affected by crime, especially violent crime. Tell us what you’ve learned about the influence of the victims rights movement on the relative permeability of prison.
Reiko Hillyer:
Yes. Well, I do want to say first, if we’re speaking about victims, I just wanna be totally transparent that I myself have never lost a loved one to violence. I’ve never had that experience. I can’t pretend to know what kind of bottomless anguish that must be. And I can’t. That, you know, tells someone how to to grieve. But what I do know from my experience with incarcerated people and through my research is that the statements of victims have often been deployed and kind of weaponized and even exaggerated for the benefit of tough on crime. Politicians, and there is some research that sort of tracks how that. Happens, but there were statements of of people during the Massachusetts case. For example, when the Willie Horton scandal emerged, there were a set of hearings in the Massachusetts State legislature questioning the practice of furlough, and victims were asked to speak and to express their views. On furlough. And some of the victims said things like, well, I lost my loved one and I wish I could have a furlough from that pain for even an hour. How does this person continue to live his life and even get, let’s say, a college degree, one of my. Loved one was not able to live past 22 or what have you. That kind of position was definitely amplified in service of certain prison practices that may not help produce public safety. So I guess what I’d say here. There is, when we think about victims. Often, I believe we make a little bit of a mistake between thinking about public safety on the one hand, and sort of risk on the other as to kind of incompatible things. But I feel we need to disaggregate the issue slightly differently. What is the purpose of prison if the idea is to satisfy a victim’s need for retribution? Well, that’s one thing then surely we can’t offer privileges or even human treatment because retribution requires pain and suffering. That is one way of looking at the criminal justice system. But if we are thinking actually about public safety and preventing future harm. How we treat incarcerated people turns out to matter in a different kind of way that if we treat people humanely and help to maintain their connections with the outside world. And allow them the possibility of growth and transformation. Then they can come back into the world and engage in some sort of repair, right? It’s not going to take away the loss that has that has occurred or erased the tragedies that they may have caused, but it helps to add healing to the world rather than. Multiply suffering.
Krys Boyd:
Has our tolerance for risk in dealing with people convicted of felonies. Over. Time.
Reiko Hillyer:
I think so. I think that’s absolutely right. And I’d love to give one just kind of concrete example to prove the point. The state of Arizona had furloughs for its incarcerated prisoners throughout the 70s and 80s, and in 1988, the state of Arizona. Change the furlough eligibility requirements from. Behavior in prison as being the basis for eligibility to your original offense as being the basis for eligibility. What that does quite literally is fix a person at their original offense, and it suggests that that persons transformation, growth, remorse. Maturity means absolutely nothing. That person has been frozen in time and place. That, to me, is terribly unfair. And it also doesn’t stand up to to reason, because if the argument is not retributive, but rather a risk assessment, it turns out that people who have been convicted of murder and who have served two or three decades in prison and who are over a certain age are far, far less likely to cause future harm. Once they’re released, they have this. Lowest rate of recidivism or committing any sort of crime after release of any category, and so the numbers just seem to support the idea. That people who have even convicted of the most violent things can also transform and can come out into the world as safe and productive members of our community. But ideologically and politically, I think in part because we have exiled people to the point where we have no chance to interact with them. We have come to believe that you are only as good or as bad as your very, very worst act, and that that determines your risk of danger in the future and the data shows that that’s simply not the. Please.
Krys Boyd:
I mean, you’ve mentioned Reiko , there are these two different orientations, you know, guiding us to how we think about prison, it’s either retribution for bad acts that people have been convicted of or the purpose is to be broadly rehabilitative. And people might land on either side of that. Can you identify anything that both sides have in common that might be a, you know, a place from which to start different conversations.
Reiko Hillyer:
That is a really difficult question. That is a really difficult question. I would just have to think about public safety as something that everybody wants. I think we all want to live in a safer world, but the fact is that hyper policing and hyper incarceration and hyper surveillance made our country safer. We would be the safest country in the world because we lock more people up than anywhere in the. World so while I can’t speak to the emotion or the logic or the principle behind retribution and vengeance, I think on a practical basis both sides might be able to agree that we all want to live in a safer world and I just happen to think that lifting everyone up makes the world. Safer for everybody where life is precious. Just life is precious, and if people who have committed harms are more likely to be contributing members of our community, if we treat them humanely, then I think that’s what we should do, just from a practical standpoint, that doesn’t even require forgiveness. It doesn’t require erasing the harm that’s been done. But it requires a more restorative kind of life affirming approach to tragedy, rather than heaping suffering upon sue.
Krys Boyd:
We have seen crime levels in this country broadly drop in recent decades to people who say that’s a reasonable argument in favor of keeping prison walls impenetrable and prison sentences long. What what’s your response?
Reiko Hillyer:
Well, if people look more carefully at the literature, it’s been shown that the relationship between incarceration and crime is actually not at all obvious. It’s often inconsistent and quite volatile, and there isn’t really a causal link between rates of incarceration. And and and crime. One has to look more on the Community level and think about individual classes of people and how likely they are or not to be contributed to members of society.
Krys Boyd:
How accurately can we predict which inmates might pose serious risk to their communities upon release? I mean, I I know there’s lots of of ongoing science trying to do that.
Reiko Hillyer:
Well, I’m not a scientist and I’m not a criminologist, and I’m I’m not sure that I have faith in in criminology or risk assessment. As a science, I suppose my argument is that that kind of scientific accuracy of prediction is, is, is, is sort of a a false thing to be hoping for. I think we have to allow for more. Error. I think we have to allow for more risk. I think we have to allow for more mercy and I don’t believe that we can accurately predict these things. I think we are expecting scientists and criminologists to produce a kind of actuarial infallibility that is going to engineer a perfectly safe society. And I think that’s impossible. I think we are duped and fooled if we’re led to expect it. And I think there are other ways of measuring success and harm reduction.
Krys Boyd:
Efforts to change the way we do the carceral system and to reduce overall prison populations have proponents on both sides of the aisle. Has there been a lot of progress in recent years?
Reiko Hillyer:
Yeah, I do think there has been progress in recent years, but but again, as with a lot of what we’re talking about, it’s very uneven and it’s very contingent. But one thing that I think is is really excellent is that people are beginning to understand that our hyper incarceration. Cannot just be addressed by targeting the front end, that is reducing the potential for people to enter prison in the 1st place, I believe. Believes that both sides are beginning to understand that it’s excessively expensive and impractical, if not inhumane, to have so many people who are currently incarcerated serving such extreme sentences. Currently, there are more people serving. Life or virtual life sentences in the United States than there were in the entire prison system in 1970 and 2/3 of those people are people of color. And so I think what people are beginning to understand is that in order to kind of shrink the prison population, we can actually do so rather efficiently and safely and smartly by returning to the policies of the 1950s and do something that sounds counterintuitive but used to be understood as common sense, which is. Release people, even those convicted of violent crimes, after 15 or 20 years in prison because they pose almost no threat. And there are places that are beginning to encourage this, and this is not just like, let’s open the gates and let people run rampant. The idea is to use legislation, for example, to to, to produce the possibilities for second looks, which is to say, it is not a radical left and wing idea to reconsider the sentences. Of people who are serving for a very long time, there are DA initiated resentencing through sentence integrity units such as. DA Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, or George Gascon in Los Angeles? They’re promoting second chances by reviewing sentences periodically to see if they serve justice, and state legislatures can create more of these mechanisms and governors and clemency boards and parole boards can use these mechanisms to simply reduce the number of people serving. Excessive, excessive, counterproductive sentences right now.
Krys Boyd:
This class that you teach, if everybody were in street clothes, would you automatically be able to tell the difference between students who come from the campus of the nearby university and students who are incarcerated?
Reiko Hillyer:
In in one major way, yes, and that is because of age. Our incarcerated students range in age from, you know, 18 to 65. So in that sense, you might say this is a non traditional student because they are older. But other than that, I would say. No, and I and I also will remind listeners that even college students may have family members who are in. Lacerated one of the most beautiful things that happened in the class this last year was that one of our undergraduate students who had had a a family member incarcerated and who had grown up very conflicted at best, if not angry and betrayed for most of his childhood through his interactions with the. People on the inside and understanding their stories and understanding all of the twists and turns that brought them inside prison. This college student was able to come to deeper forgiveness of their. Parent and it was that interaction helped to make this college student heal. So sometimes we have more in common than one might think on the surface.
Krys Boyd:
Reiko Hillier is associate professor of history at Lewis and Clark College and author of a Wall is just a wall, the permeability of the prison in the 20th century. United States Reiko, thank you very much for the conversation.
Reiko Hillyer:
Thank you so much for your time.
Krys Boyd:
Again, I’m Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
