[gentle music]
- We continue our reporting on race
and the criminal justice system in Wisconsin.
We are here at Short Stack Eatery in Madison,
and we are joined by the owner of Short Stack Eatery,
Alex Lindenmeyer, and we've also got Dr. Alex Gee
of Nehemiah's "Justified Anger" project,
and Carl Fields, who is with EXPO,
which stands for EX- incarcerated People Organizing,
and he's also representing Wisdom, a faith-based group
that operates out of the state of Wisconsin.
Alex, I wanna start with you.
You mentioned, during our pre-interview,
that you felt like Wisconsin business owners
could do more to help impact the disparity
that we see in the criminal justice system.
What do you think they can learn
from some of the things that you're doing here?
And I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about it, too.
- People that are justice-involved
have so many things that they're dealing with.
So employers need to internally
start having the conversation about
what the criminal justice system even looks like now.
If you're not justice-involved,
or you don't have a family member,
or you don't have an employee that's justice-involved,
it's designed on purpose for you to not care,
for you to not know.
And so employers really need to get educated internally
about what's going on
and what these barriers are that people are up against,
and then figure out how they can set up support systems
within their culture and within their organization
to make sure people get what they need.
- Yeah, we know that you purposefully hire folks
that do have barriers.
Carl, how does that help folks that are transitioning?
- To know that there are companies
that are sticking to what society intended
for criminal justice to be is huge,
and that is tangible to say, "Yeah,
"oh, you paid your dues, come on.
"We, not only will we like to work with you,
"but we'd be honored to
"because you got something you wanna show,
you got something you wanna prove."
And we're also creating opportunities
that that's a real job, you know, opportunity
to give to somebody who is really in need of that.
- And Doctor, your organization runs a re-entry program?
- Dr. Alex Gee: It does; it does.
- And how do you see businesses being able to impact things?
- If we want to attract large businesses to this community,
where again, there's low unemployment,
we have to help people who are in this community,
wanting to work, willing to work, to become employed.
So one of the things that we do through our re-entry program
is we help to find jobs for men and women,
particularly men, with our programming,
to find jobs, you know.
My vice president for re-entry,
a gentleman named Anthony Cooper,
has placed over 1,000 men over the past eight or nine years.
That's significant because when you come out of prison,
and you have stable employment, you can have stable housing,
which means you can live a stable life in the community,
and it drastically reduces the temptation to recidivize.
So we have a responsibility to our own state's economy
and to the well-being of good people.
We need them in order for our economy to be stronger
in this community.
- I would love to hear what you folks think
are some of the biggest challenges
facing our criminal justice system.
- You know, when we talk about, you know,
alternatives to whether it be a deferment program
through the court on pretrial,
or during incarceration, or post-incarceration,
those programs, those options that come up
are always met with a zero margin of error.
And that is so problematic to me
because the current system and what it produces
is not held to any sort of standard on that level,
but in fact, does have a low effectiveness rate.
But we can't seem to take some chances to try something else
because it's not politically advantageous always.
It's not classy; it's not sexy.
- What role do you think our federal government
and our state government, what role do you think they play
in affecting the criminal justice system
here in the state?
- I think that these governmental agencies
need to really own up
to the fact that this criminal system
is really producing what it was designed to produce,
this ugly, ugly cycle.
It needs to be called out and dismantled
so we can build something that's equitable
and that really does rehabilitate.
- The history of how systems were built
and what they were built for,
that plays out, continues to play out even to this day,
a hundred-plus years later,
and that is a weight on any person who enters the system.
As an ex-knucklehead myself, turned professional,
I messed up in life, I made some poor choices,
but no one anywhere in the criminal justice system
told me that felonies were gonna be forever.
I've seen that the barriers just continue,
seen that no matter what I do
or how much of a great effort I put forward,
society's still allowed to socially acceptably mistreat me.
- You could buy someone a house and send them to college
for what it costs, you know,
at least put a down payment on a house,
for what it costs to incarcerate.
So what are we really trying to do?
We have the money; why are we locking people up
when we could use resources or redirect them
to really help people out of a hole?
- I learned in my reporting the term 'crimeless revocations.'
I'd love to get you to, you know,
let our viewers know what it exactly means
and how it leads and feeds the pipeline to prison.
- The working definition of a crimeless revocation
is placing a person into prison
or placing a person back into incarceration
for not having committed a new crime,
but for a technical violation or rules violation of some kind.
- The way that plays out specifically is perhaps
you bought a car and didn't get it cleared with your agent.
- Alex: Yeah, you used a computer.
- You used a computer.
You got married and didn't ask for permission.
I know that those are some extreme things,
but I know folks who have feared for their lives
or their freedom for doing things just like that.
But just think about this,
the crazy numbers, to Alex's point,
of people in prison are folks who have returned
on technicalities.
- We look at states like Oregon,
we look at states like Washington,
that are putting huge dollars into programs
of figuring out how to get parents things they need
while they're locked up,
figuring out how to get families reunited
while folks are locked up,
figuring how to get families that have somebody locked up
the resources they need.
And our state has a lot of catching up to do, for sure.
- Minnesota has a comparable demographic to Wisconsin,
but they don't incarcerate nearly as much as we do.
It really is big business.
That's not just cliché; it's really big business.
- Another learning process I went through in this reporting
is I learned about language, and I learned that
I'm guilty of saying some things that, you know,
aren't humanizing people.
How important is the language of incarceration?
- When we're talking about felons or convicts or inmates,
you know, last I checked, I was a person,
and I continue to be that.
And so person-first language
is something that we've been driving on
in this work that we do for quite some time.
- It's the language that helps us to reinforce barriers.
"This person can't be trusted,
"I don't want you around my family,
you can't come to my church, you can't work at my job,"
so it begins with even the language.
And again, what it conjures in our minds
about what this person is capable of,
but when you use those terminologies,
you don't really think that they're really ex or former.
It's just you did some time,
but you're still in that same place,
and that's why we keep that same title.
We just put ex in front of it.
- I have employees that go to UW who are 19 and white,
and I have employees who are 45 on paper,
and we have some disparities, some differences,
and if we actually wanna figure out
how to make this a safe place for everybody to work,
it's a lot of internal conversation about things like,
"Hey, you can't say convict,
you can't say felon, here's why."
We gotta figure out how we got here.
I can preach at you all this stuff
about the lingo and the language,
and why it's ineffective or what have you,
but until people have a basis
or an understanding of how we ended up here,
it's a moot point.
- And Dr. Gee, how do we get all Wisconsinites
to get vested on this?
- I don't even know if that's my expectation,
but if I can have an impact on employers
and their new employees,
or individuals who want to make a difference.
When you invest in people who wanna make a difference,
you trust in a ripple effect.
But I've learned that if I want
to live a healthier and longer life,
I can't keep beating my head against the wall
for people who wanna argue these points.
I need to take the time to invest in people
who wanna be allies, who wanna speak out,
and who want to make sure that everyone
has judicial justice in their lives.
And so I try to invest in the people
who want to be a part of the change
and hope that, at some point,
we will have an impact on Wisconsin,
but I don't go after the whole state.
I just try to really work with the people
who want to get it.
- We're gonna have to leave it there.
Thank you all for being here; Dr. Gee.
- My pleasure.
- Mr. Fields. - Sir.
- Alex Lindenmeyer,
on behalf of PBS Wisconsin and our crew,
we appreciate you for providing a space for us
to have this important conversation.
- My pleasure.
- And we thank you folks for joining us, too.