Roundtable: “There Are No Small Steps”

Community and College Fellowship’s Reverend Vivian Nixon and Melanie Steinhardt join Reverend Jo-An Owings to discuss the importance of communication in bringing about comprehensive criminal justice reform

As a formerly incarcerated woman, Reverend Vivian Nixon, the Executive Director of College and Community Fellowship (CCF)—of which she was a prior participant—is inarguably well positioned when it comes to analyzing the challenges facing criminal justice reform, of which there are many, far too many to count.

So when we joined Nixon,CCF Director of Development and Communications Melanie Steinhardt, Mt. Zion AME Church Reverend Jo-An Owings and Assemblymember Dan Quart at the CCF offices in The Interchurch Center, they touched on a number of topics. Steinhardt explained how CCF helps women with criminal convictions earn college degrees, and provides policymakers and agencies with transition resources. Nixon emphasized the need to empower those receiving services to engage politically, by giving them the resources and compensation to participate in community events and lobbying, and most of all by valuing advocacy as work. Owings shared a personal experience that stressed the importance of always looking at the humanity of those caught up in our broken justice system.

But despite the broad range of topics, they all agreed on one thing in particular: There are no small steps in advancing comprehensive criminal justice reform.

NEW YORKERS FOR JUSTICE: Let’s start by talking about the College and Community Fellowship, specifically initiatives.

MELANIE STEINHARDT, DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT & COMMUNICATIONS, COLLEGE AND COMMUNITY FELLOWSHIP: We were founded by a woman who’d been teaching sociology courses inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, and she realized her students did not really have the resources to complete their degrees once they were released, so it started just as a mentoring program to help a handful of women who had been incarcerated get their college degrees. That was in 2000. Vivian became executive director in 2006 and the organization looked mostly similar at that time, helping maybe 10 or 20 women a year getting their college degree. But since then we have grown a lot and that’s where the policy work comes in.

Today what the organization looks like is three main buckets of work. There’s the direct services, so we still help women in NYC who have criminal convictions earn their college degrees and that’s through a combination of individual academic counseling and community support.

Then we have two national programs. One of them is a technical assistance program, so taking the approach that we use for our work and the evidence based practices, and turning that into a customizable curriculum for anybody from colleges and universities to HR departments and hiring managers, to parole and probation offices and other reentry agencies understand how to work better with people who have criminal justice involvement. That means a training track to the types of organizations and institutions that are serving CJ-affected folks, and a separate training track for HR departments and hiring managers to really learn why it’s important and beneficial to tap into this underutilized labor force.

And then there’s the policy work that we do which has been around since 2008. In the past it has focused exclusively on the intersection of criminal justice reform and higher education. On the state level, that takes the form of campaigns to reinstate tuition assistance program eligibility to incarcerated students and to ban the box on college applications. We actually got the SUNY board of trustees to vote on banning the box, so that wasn’t a legislative issue, that was really just their board of trustees. And then on the federal level, that means working to restore Pell Grant eligibility to incarcerated students which was revoked back in ’94 in New York state alone — the number of college in-prison programs dropped from 70 to 4 when that eligibility was revoked.

What we’re doing now with our policy is connecting to other types of campaign and policy work. One trend that we really see in criminal justice reform is that there isn’t a lot of communication between the types of campaigns that are related to criminal justice reform, so not just things like bail reform and sentencing, which are pretty clearly related, but also things like domestic violence policies and affordable housing policies, and LGBTQ rights and minimum wage policies — those types of thing. And so what we’re doing now is creating an advocacy training program for our students to really make sure that we can sort of increase the communication between these different type of campaigns that are really related and to make sure there’s adequate representation of directly impacted women in those campaigns, and that’s a little of how we’re connecting to the other policy work.

Where are the major disconnects you see working with CJ-affected people? What are the major obstacles that organizations need to either just be aware of…and what sort of roadmap are you offering in address it?

STEINHARDT: That’s a great question — so, to be clear, the advocacy training program is set to launch this summer. It’s not currently happening; however, I can still tell you about its mission.

The advocacy training program will connect our women to campaigns that mean something to them, so as of now, the funding that we have is for NYC based campaigns, but we are expecting to broaden that to state and national based campaigns as well. We have partners all over the country. There’s Vote Nola. And there’s All of Us Are None, and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, so we’re really hoping to build this out to a pretty large scale.

In terms of the challenges and the disconnect of working with CJ-affected folks, what I hear most from our program staff are two main things:

One, service delivery has to be trauma informed. The experience of being in prison for however long is incredibly traumatizing, and most women who go to prison have experienced some kind of abuse before they even go, whether that be in emotional, physical or sexual. That’s something that really needs to be addressed. People need to be equipped. What we use here is a strengths-based framework, so when we’re working with our students, we use asset-based community development and motivational interviewing as a way to sort of build up confidence and restore the sense of self that can be lost when you’re in a really dehumanizing environment. Even if it’s only a couple of weeks, it’s not pretty.

And the second thing that is really important, particularly when it comes to advocacy, is that people aren’t so gung-ho to be publicly displaying their criminal justice history because there are so many barriers that can come after that.

We had a student who first came to us years ago because she had been fired from a job, even after getting many promotions, because they found out about her criminal justice history. So she eventually went to get a JD and she became an employment lawyer. She’s one of our star alumnae and earlier this year I asked if we could feature her in our newsletter. And she said, “Actually, no — I’m moving to permanently seal my record. I just got fired from another job even though I never lied about my permanent record, because one of our clients was angry that they had hired somebody with a history.”

I think we do a pretty good job of encouraging people to advocate for kind of the greater good. I think Vivian is a really great example of someone who’s been able to do that without much professional trouble because that is your job, that’s the work you dedicated your life to, but it can be dangerous for people to disclose that publicly. It can ruin their chances of getting jobs. It can affect their chances of finding housing. Even if Google can connect them to a criminal justice history and they’re public about it, it doesn’t always feel safe.

REVEREND VIVIAN NIXON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, COLLEGE AND COMMUNITY FELLOWSHIP: One thing many marginalized communities need support with is — not everybody can afford to take time off from work or from childcare or elder care to do the very hard work required to shift public dialogue by creating opportunities for conversations or having conversations with policymakers and decision makers. Not everyone can say, “Oh, well, I’m not going to work on Tuesday — I’m going on a bus to Albany and spend all day making our rounds, talking to the people who make decisions.”

And so there needs to be a little bit of leeway in the structure of direct service programs so that the people who are receiving services, who also want to be advocates on behalf of the needs they have, can get some kind of compensation for the time they use to make their communities better, some type of incentive for people to be politically and engaged in their communities. We complain a lot that people aren’t engaged…that they don’t vote — and especially in midterm elections or special elections — they don’t vote for district attorney or school board.

But perhaps there’s some incentive needed, some connection to not just the political and the power based reward of participating in civic society in that way, but that we’re going to make it easier for you. We’re going to make it easier so that it’s not going to cost you any money. Or if we ask you to come and sit for a four-hour meeting and listen to us, we’ll at least make sure you get a slice of pizza. I mean it’s little things like that can either make or break a campaign.

Is there a more formal structure that you propose in providing people with the resources to be involved as advocates, even if they are receiving service as well?

NIXON: So our advocacy program is changing in the nature that we’re broadening the topics that we will be educating our women about and organizations we will be engaged with. But we’ve always provided food at every meeting — that’s just a no-brainer. We’ve always paid for transportation. And provided childcare. These are the little strategic things that you do to keep a community engaged.

STEINHARDT: I’d say one thing we’re exploring now is the feasibility of providing some kind of compensation, however modest, for students who are participating in media opportunities. I understand how that could get tricky in terms of not wanting somebody to be able to say, “You’re paying these people to advocate.”

The other thing we hear from our students a lot that when they’re involved with other reentry programs, that those reentry programs treat them kind of as, for lack of a better word, a show pony. Like here, trot out your sexual abuse story so that way people can see how much we help you and we can raise more money.

And so I think what’s really important when you’re encouraging people to advocate is really finding, creating some kind of structure to really make it clear that it’s voluntary and giving people the tools to be able to say, “No,” when they’re not comfortable…and to be able to tell their story in a really empowering way so it doesn’t feel like they’re just trotting out a sob story that is reinforcing the stigma of what it means to be living with a criminal conviction.

NIXON: There’s a couple of ways that can be done. Our Theater for Social Change is a group that has been together for several years and they spend a lot of time writing and rehearsing their stories, and working with professional acting trainers and directors and other artists to put together theatrical pieces that incorporate their stories­ — and the way the stories are actually played out on stage, you really are never sure whose story is whose, or when a story is a combination of stories, because it’s meant to be art.

But we pay them for their rehearsal time. After all, they’re using their story and their experience to educate the public about an issue that’s very important to this organization. We don’t assume that everyone can afford to volunteer their time, so they get a very small stipend.

In America, I think we use this language in a very oppositional way, like, “We don’t need the government to pay for everything!” You know, there’s not enough volunteerism in the world to solve all the problems we have. And some people don’t have the same capacity to volunteer as others do and it’s just a fact.

Aside from stigma and the like, are you being confronted by any other obstacles with regard to providing them the resources?

NIXON: No, there are just some ideologies, depending on the funding source, that don’t believe in incentives at all; and others understand it and embrace it, and even write into the structure for their request for proposals.

It is a touchy subject with a certain segment of society, but if we think about all of the work that we all do, we don’t do it without some type of incentive, whether it’s taking care of our kids…whatever is motivating you at that moment, that’s where you’re going to put your time and energy.

Now, learning to self-motivate is a process, especially if you haven’t self-motivated all your life, or haven’t felt that you had anything to contribute, or that your addition to the process wasn’t even desired.

We expect everybody to have the same cultural response to a situation when they have not been raised in that culture where you just do things because you’re motivated. Motivation is a complicated intellectual process. It’s not just about knowing what’s right and doing what’s right, it’s about understanding the consequences of doing something different.

It’s about the state of mental health, your emotional health, your financial capacity, your intellectual capacity — all of these things matter.

So if you’re talking about people in the lowest performing school districts, for instance, are they really learning to integrate the education they’re receiving in those school districts into what it means to be a citizen? Are we really teaching citizenry in that regard or are we going find other ways to have to motivate these kids once they’re no longer under the supervision of the New York City public school system? Do we need to find other ways to motivate them to do the right thing because we’re not teaching in the way that they’re getting taught at school?

Well, speaking of that, you talk about ideology, and how it’s kind of the main thing pushing back on this. Is there a responsibility to educate people who aren’t necessarily immediately or directly affected by these sorts of shortcomings, such as people going to elite schools to encourage them to open their eyes and lift that stigma, and how do we go about doing that if there is?

NIXON: Most of the colleges that are doing this voluntary work inside of prisons — because the Pell Grant is not available to students — has to be voluntary.

For example, the Bard Prison Initiative is teaching inside of prisons; NYU, Columbia, Cornell — they’re all teaching inside prisons. And what they’re seeing is this shift from not just the students they’re working with, but a culture in that institution of learning, using that knowledge not just to improve your own life, but to push out what you know to improve your community.

STEINHARDT: I think something that’s really important to recognize about our school system in NYC is how segregated it is. I think that is a big part of why there are communities that have no idea what’s going on. I went to Bard High School Early College on the lower east side — It has one of the highest levels of diversity of NYC high schools, even so, I wasn’t aware of mass incarceration.

I think there’s the issue of segregation, of people not ever meeting others outside of their community and never being exposed to the types of experiences that their neighbors may be having, and I also think there’s issues with school curricula. I don’t really know what is possible to do about that, but if you think about the way that you’re taught history, it’s very whitewashed — last year there was that whole thing that went viral about a textbook that literally called enslaved people, “workers”—like millions of workers came over on these ships.

That’s one part of a national story: Who’s writing these textbooks. Where’s the curricula coming from?

Reverend Owings, how you are bringing about change or education within your own congregation?

REVEREND JO-AN OWINGS, MT. ZION AME CHURCH: This situation has been going on for eons among congregants. And although it’s been going on for eons, really my congregation and the members of the congregation have not known what to do about it. And so the major questions are: What can we do? How can we help? What steps can we take on the level where we are to talk about this more effectively? That’s where we are right now.

We have a church anniversary coming up in June, and it dawned on me: I’ve asked my young adults to be in charge of it and maybe we can get this topic and bring the players to dramatize this situation and get folk to say, “You know what, we need to do something about it instead of just saying, ‘Yeah, it happens. It’s bad. We don’t like it.’ Then move on to the next thing.

Would you three mind talking about what you three see as immediate needs for repair in the most immediate sense? I know almost everything needs repair, but are there things that really stand out that could be a small step in addition to education and talking at these schools?

NIXON: The question you asked really can’t be answered. The many parts of the system that are broken need to all be repaired separately and there’s not enough time in the world to talk about every part of the system that’s broken — from bail, to collateral consequences, to prosecutorial discretion, to…I mean it’s such a big problem, you have to pick a topic.

There are no small steps.

OWINGS: The problem is so vast that you can’t just say, “Okay, well how do we do this?” There are various facets — it is in education, it is for those who are locked up, trying to change mindsets, you know, and so forth. And from where I sit, leading a faith community, much of it focuses on the fact that this is going on all the time. If I would ask my congregation how many of you have had children or grandchildren or yourself been involved in the criminal justice system, I would put my paychecks that mostly everybody would raise their hand.

Myself, I have two grown sons and one of them was involved in drugs — the other one, who loved his brother so much, was sucked into protecting him. My youngest son teaches in school, but he was coerced by his older brother to, say, pick up a burner phone and answer it for me — then he got swept into this. And the DA at that time was grilling him and trying to get him to turn on his brother. He wouldn’t. They locked him up, put a person with no criminal history in behind bars, and gave him $350,000 bail. There was somebody who killed somebody and got less bail than he got. So he took a plea because he felt I couldn’t afford the legal expenses past what we had already spent, and he couldn’t afford to stay in jail trying to wait for and hoping that things would go his way.

He ended up losing his teaching license, losing his job and so forth, couldn’t get a job. To his credit, he persevered, and he got his teaching license back with a felony conviction because he wrote letters and he had people behind it that knew who he really was.

When the DA called me, he said, “You know your son is a felon.” No! That’s not…

NIXON: He’s a human being.

OWINGS: He’s a human being.

And there so many stories like that. I think from a pastor’s point of view, I say, “Okay, how can I engage the congregation in doing more to advocate to speak up, to teach, to train, to get involved to the point of knowing that these are human beings, not “felons,” and these sorts of situations happen all the time.

STEINHARDT: This is actually bringing up something I heard ADA Lucy Lang say, which was to her staff, “You don’t need to send people to prison to be a good prosecutor.” And if we’re talking about small steps, she set up a program where prosecutors literally have to sit in a classroom with incarcerated men who are getting a college education, and literally sit next to them.

NIXON: They’re getting the same education, not just sitting there watching. They’re also getting the same education.

STEINHARDT: Yes, sorry — they’re in classes together, but the requirement is that they’re literally sitting next to each other. She’s talked about how much of an impact that has made on these prosecutors.

OWINGS: When I said told a lawyer to read beyond the files, to get to actually know who this person, he responded, “I don’t want to know him because then I would not be able to do my job.” That’s crazy to me.

NIXON: In any world that we find that there’s a population of people that we can legitimately dehumanize, we’re headed down the wrong path. Because if it can happen to one person, it can happen to anybody. And so the bail thing is a huge issue. It’s pretrial detention. No one’s been found guilty of anything, so it almost shatters our foundational understanding that you’re innocent until proven guilty.

And if you’re poor, you’re always guilty before proven innocent because you’re going to get locked up and you’re not going to be able to afford bail. People with money, they just bail themselves out so they don’t have to spend one night in jail where they don’t report to their job the next day, or spend a month in jail where they can’t pay their rent that month, or spend a week in jail where, if they’re, say, a college student, they can’t do their assignments, so their life is not drastically shifted by an arrest for marijuana if they live on 96th and Park.

But that same arrest can ruin a kid’s life if they live in the South Bronx because if they have a job, they’re going to lose it because they’re not going to show up for work because they’re waiting to get bailed out and they can’t get bailed out because their family doesn’t have the money.

ASSEMBLYMEMBER DAN QUART: When you’re talking about marijuana, you’re right. It’s one of the worst abuses because even when people are offered an ACD, their records are not sealed 99 out of 100 times, so their employer will learn of their arrest. If they’re in the military, they’ll be dishonorably discharged. If they have Section 8 housing, they could lose their status. There are all sorts of people that say it’s just marijuana, but there are people in Manhattan with B misdemeanor and have been fired from their employment for just that.

NIXON: And there are 44,000 collateral consequences in United States law, which means the aside from whatever a judge dictates as your sentence, if a judge says you get six months’ probation, or you do a year in jail, or you go into prison for three years, and you do that, there are still 44,000 additional laws that will continue to impact you for the rest of your life after you’ve done what the judge asked you to do…44,000.

STEINHARDT: Loss of voting rights, loss of ability to get public assistance, bars from certain types of employment. Not every state has a fair chance article like NY does, protecting people with criminal convictions.

NIXON: These collateral consequences don’t help any of us. It damages the workforce. You’re seeing more and more large employers — like the Koch Brothers, Walmart, Target — come out and say we need good workers, and we find that when we hire these folks and treat them right, they are some of the best workers because they have so much to prove.

QUART: They thrive. They want to integrate back into society like nobody does.

NIXON: So Bruce Western did a study about 10 years ago proving that people who hire people already assume that a black male has a criminal record without even looking, having any proof whatsoever. It’s a given assumption. (It’s called the Devah Pager and Bruce Western study.)

Sometimes it’s not a second chance — it’s a first chance.

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