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All right, introducing Brian Sonnenstein.
He's a writer for Shadowproof.com, which formerly was Firedog Lake.
It's now Shadowproof, Kevin Gotstola and other great writers over there.
This one is called, well, there's a couple here, quite a few, Resistance Continues as Historic Prison Strike Enters Fourth Week.
That's like a week old.
And then this one is How Some Prisons Swiftly Moved to Undermine National Prison Strike.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Brian?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
I'm very happy to have you here.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And I guess I'll go ahead and plead guilty.
I have not been keeping up with this story like I should have been at all.
So I'll ask you to tell us everything.
Go ahead.
All right.
Well, I'll do my best.
So basically, you know, over the past few years, especially, there have been, as you know, a lot of reports about abhorrent conditions related to mass incarceration.
You have a lot of overcrowding.
You have a lot of abuse of prisoners going on.
And relevant to that, there have been a lot of uprisings and riots going on around the country that people may or may not have heard about.
So just to put that out there first, the September 9th labor strike is not exactly something new, but it is sort of a coalescence of all of these actions together as one movement.
So basically, you had these prisoners who are calling attention to specifically their treatment as a labor force.
You know, they're paid next to nothing, if anything at all.
They work in slave conditions.
You know, they don't have the same protections as workers do on the outside for being injured or working in dangerous jobs.
And they manufacture all sorts of things that you and I probably use on a daily basis, from furniture, you know, clothing, anything like that.
They do call center work.
And so they put out a call to action, the Free Alabama Movement, which is a group of prisoners and their family members and their supporters in Alabama around Pullman Detention Center specifically, as well as Donaldson.
And they were also joined by prisoners in Texas who have been calling attention to their treatment, the farm labor that they have to deal with out there.
And starting on September 9th, you had prisoners, either entire units or just even individuals or small groups of prisoners, doing whatever they can to resist, resist their work assignments or go on hunger strike and begin to demand better treatment.
So that is sort of, you know, a 30,000 foot view of how we got here.
Cool.
And then you say it started second week of September?
That's right.
You know, the official sort of call to action was that for September 9th, which is the 45th anniversary of the rebellion at Attica.
Nelson Rockefeller slaughter there.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I want to go back to, well, first of all, the state.
So it's just in Alabama and Texas so far?
No, actually, it's been in, well, you know, part of the problem, and I'll preface this is that because prisons are very secretive places and because, you know, both officials don't like to give out information, but it's also hard for prisoners to maintain open communication with people on the outside.
It's hard to know exactly how many states and how many facilities and how many prisoners have gone on strike.
But it's actually spread, you know, some counts have put it around 11 or 12 states.
Some have put it up near the 20s, 25.
I've seen counts of about 40 to 50 facilities engaging in some kind of action, and it's happening all over the country.
It's happening in Washington, Virginia, California, Texas, in all different states.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as you may be aware, Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting has been really focusing on the dog that didn't bark here, specifically MSNBC, who runs basically prison porn all weekend long, you know, how bad we need them and that kind of thing.
And then when it comes to a major story like this, I don't know if now they've corrected it all, but they went for at least a few weeks there without even mentioning it.
Yeah.
And I think Adam is completely right.
I believe he said that MSNBC has a unique obligation to cover these strikes, given the way that they have, you know, as you said, sort of given this pornographic view of prison life in America.
And, you know, I think I totally agree with that.
And I think there's sort of this perception that people have about, you know, who's in prison, why they're there and how things are and who's responsible for the conditions there.
And I think MSNBC plays a big role in perpetuating that myth.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's not just them.
I mean, they're probably the most, as you're saying, quoting him there about, they're the most responsible.
They owe us coverage of this more than anyone else.
And really, every major media outlet in America ought to be covering this.
And it's really been buried.
And I wonder, especially, you know, as we're reading all these emails and some of this inside baseball stuff from these politicians, makes me really wonder, it's quite easy for me to imagine that emails have gone out from people in the federal government to friends in the media saying, hey, we want to play this down because this could get way out of hand here.
You know?
Well, you know, that's definitely the tactic that's been taking place in the facilities.
I mean, you know, part of the reason why we're only just learning, you know, now over a month out from the start of the strike about things that happened in the first few days is because prison officials reacted very quickly in a lot of cases, you know, putting prisoners in isolation, cutting off their communication with the outside world, transferring them to different facilities.
You know, you name it.
You know, there's been reports of prisoners getting beaten up and tear gassed.
So you know, it's not, you know, it's not that surprising, but at the same time, you know, I think there's there is a disconnect in the major media between what's happening on the ground in a lot of these communities and sort of what ends up in their news.
And I think this is a place where it becomes very obvious because you need to have contact with these communities and these people who are who are struggling.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, they put them out there in the country and very quickly, rural communities become very dependent on the jobs and everything's far removed from the voting populations of the states.
They don't have to look, look at it or think about it.
They don't know anybody who even works at a prison.
It's all miles and miles out in the country somewhere, you know, for the most part and far removed.
It's like the wars, you know, where millions of soldiers have have fought in the wars over the last 15 years, and yet it's still a very small percentage of the population.
A lot of us, a lot of people anyway, not us, but a lot of people anyway, can can go quite a long time without any association with anybody who who's been to the wars and knows anything about them at all.
It's just very far.
It's becoming a lot harder to do that, though, because, you know, at this point with our prison population reaching two million people behind bars, you know, both on the federal and state level, you know, something like one in three Americans has a criminal record.
I think it's getting to the point where, you know, somebody knows somebody or at least know somebody else who has a criminal record and had an experience with incarceration.
And to your point, just quickly about about the jobs in these communities that rely on it.
That's totally correct.
And I think something that is missing from these conversations a lot is that for the people who work in these jobs, this is not these are not great job opportunities.
These are, you know, especially in a place like Alabama, which I've written a little bit about, you have guards going on strike as well, you know, for different reasons than the prisoners.
But, you know, these jobs that they have are very underpaid.
They're extremely long hours, lots of pressure.
You're dealing with populations that have disproportionate numbers of people with mental illness compared to people on the outside, substance abuse.
And there is no programming or there is no support system on the inside for those people.
So you really are trying to keep the lid on a powder keg and you're getting no, you know, sort of support from, you know, your administrators or even politicians who are out there sort of taking advantage of this newfound interest in criminal justice reform.
So really nobody, you know, nobody is benefiting except for those who stand to gain from the bottom line.
Yep.
Well, and yeah, you're right, too, about, you know, when you said about MSNBC, how they help perpetuate the mythology of all, you know, very hardened criminals behind those bars when really it's a lot of regular people.
I just read a quote the other day of a lady who was in jail for helping arrange a crack sale, some low level, nothing that any and everybody would have forgotten about in two days if they'd just been left alone.
But anyway, she's doing hard time decades in federal prison.
And the quote was, I was really surprised by how many other people just like me are in here, meaning normal, regular, everyday people who aren't criminals at all, but who did a drug deal and got nailed by the feds to the wall on, you know, mandatory minimum time, this kind of thing.
And, of course, there are many more like that in the state prisons, but they're just regular people.
That's who they are.
And it is a big mythology.
Of course, the stories in The Post today about there are more pot busts in America for just low level possession, never mind trading in it, just low level possession than all violent crime arrests combined.
That's how far out of proportion this is.
So yeah, this is not, you know, the other.
We shouldn't let MSNBC convince us that these are enemy aliens on these islands within our country somewhere.
These really are.
As you're saying, these are friends and neighbors.
We know people in there who just got out, you know, all of us do.
But I think I think we take for granted how much we are still dealing with the lingering effects of the super predator error era, you know, where where we were told day in and day out by people in the media and in our government that people that were being locked up and put behind bars were these monsters.
And I think people really take for granted that it really could be it could be you.
It could be your brother or your sister.
It could be really anybody who gets ensnared in this system.
And most often than not, it's people who can't, you know, afford a good attorney or can't afford bail and, you know, accept plea bargains instead of taking their their cases to court.
You know, if everybody who had charges brought against them went to trial, the entire system would shut down.
Right.
So it really is.
It's just so it's just a vacuum into a warehouse is really what it is.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So now let's talk a little bit about what they're making.
And again, back to the imagination, I'm just picturing from Superman to where they're all in there making license plates and doing laundry or whatever.
Right.
And I think that's what people, you know, mostly imagine is, well, somebody's got to make the license plates, right.
A state provided good, quote unquote, something.
It's just a big metal tax stamp, really.
But anyway, somebody's got to make those right.
And so maybe if they're doing farm work, OK, these are vegetables for the government school lunches, something like that.
That's at least probably what people imagine is the labor being done in there.
And yet you describe a reality that's quite different.
Only you didn't you were just, again, kind of given the thumbnail sketch there.
I'd like for you to elaborate about that, if you could, about what kind of work these people do, especially you mentioned they're being put in in dangerous situations that free laborers on the outside would not be put in and that kind of thing, too.
Right.
So there's basically two kinds of labor, I guess.
There's labor that is related to the function of the prison.
So you're talking about laundry, kitchen work, you know, working in the legal library, things like that.
And then you have sort of these private prison industries, which are companies who are essentially leasing out prisoners for their labor for pennies on the dollar.
And again, if anything at all, because a lot of these prisoners are forced to work, you know, if they don't work, they'll be thrown in the hole, which is solitary confinement, or they'll be punished some other way.
You know, if they if they don't work, then they lose out on getting something called good time credit, which is having days removed from your sentence so you can get a slightly earlier release.
So there's all this sort of coercion.
But in terms of the actual labor, labor itself, you know, it's especially insidious because the products that you buy that are made by prisoners are not labeled made by prisoners.
They're made they're labeled made in America.
And for people, especially after the financial crisis, who are wary of supporting companies that manufacture goods in other countries, they might go and buy something that's labeled made in America, thinking that they're doing a good thing, when really they're they're basically buying something that was made with slave labor.
You have products, again, like American flags, furniture, clothing for, you know, a lot of these companies.
And in terms of the farm labor, you know, for instance, in one of my articles, I spoke to somebody who was talking about how they have, you know, people working around, you know, operating heavy machinery with standing water on the ground, and nobody's coming to fix that.
You can't you can't sue your employer over that.
There's no workers' compensation.
You know, if you get hurt, you get hurt.
And let me tell you, the medical care in prison is almost non-existent.
And that is not going to stop them from telling you to report to work again.
So, you know, it really is sort of the next iteration of convict leasing, the next iteration of slavery.
It's just sort of continued to snowball in this direction.
And that's where we are today.
These things are not disconnected.
Right.
Well, and, you know, people it's funny.
I think people actually did sort of mean well in the 19 maybe in the 80s and in the 90s when economist types were recommending that, yeah, you should privatize these prisons.
But of course, that doesn't really mean, well, there's kind of two kinds of privatized, right?
There's having the government stop, do something and just having the market do it or businesses do it.
And then there's a government contract to a private business to carry out a state function.
And in this case, state power that no other private corporation is allowed to kidnap and imprison people.
Right.
They have a very special license from these states to do this.
And it probably makes sense if what you're interested in is the state budget in the short term that, yeah, we're going to save 10 percent over, you know, government good enough for government work or whatever.
But then it complete it was.
And I really, you know, I actually know somebody who wrote a thing like this back in the 90s about how this just makes good sense.
And they completely ignored and admit now ignored the fact that you're now giving these companies an interest in lobbying to pass more and more and more laws and create more and more excuses for people to be jailed just to keep their prisons full.
And it sounds like the kind of thing that you might warn, but then it's actually true.
You can find it in the news where the private prison corporations lobby for drug laws.
And you can see the same thing with them loosening.
And I don't know what the restrictions ever were.
I mean, you mentioned this is the reiteration of old convict leasing from Jim Crow eras and whatever.
I don't know how good it ever got.
Maybe my imagination that all they ever were making was were license plates for a while.
There was, you know, kind of always, you know, not the case.
But at this point, you have more and more companies, including major corporations.
Right.
You mentioned call centers and stuff like that.
You have major corporations who are saving maybe millions or even billions of dollars on labor that they'd be happy to invest a small percentage of that in lobbying to keep pot illegal, to keep sentences high, to to do anything they can to keep more people in prison so that their golden goose doesn't get slaughtered and at the expense of the rest of us.
And it's the kind of thing where just a little bit of imagination could have predicted that this could be a real problem, you know.
And here we are, as you said, this is where we've ended up now that we live here in the future in the 20 teens.
This is where we are.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, and I think that is an incredibly important point, especially in this moment where we have sort of this historic interest in criminal justice reform at the federal and state level.
Traditionally, I mean, the history of justice reform, and this includes going back to slavery and emancipation, is sort of a tinkering reform.
I mean, these things, the changes that have been made may address whatever the most pressing issue is of that moment.
But nobody seems to really be thinking two steps ahead.
And the fact of the matter is these companies whose bottom lines depend on it have already thought three or four steps ahead.
So with regards to prison privatization and mass incarceration, a lot of these companies have already, they see the writing on the wall.
You know, they see that facility management, companies like CCA and GeoGroup, they know where the wind is blowing and they know that millennials, for instance, are probably not going to tolerate having private prisons in government when they come to power.
However, that is why they have begun to spend all their money acquiring post-release services, you know, drug treatment, rehabilitation, and, you know, like the ankle monitoring, things like that.
And it's not because of the kindness of their heart.
It's because it's still a captive market.
You know, what is the difference if you have, if you're making a buck off of somebody who's, you know, behind bars or if they're, you know, stuck in their house with an ankle monitor and you're getting paid, you know, some rental fee for the monitor, some thousands of dollars that the prisoner has to pay to stay in so-called community corrections.
So you know, I guess I would encourage people, you know, when they're thinking about criminal justice reform and prison reform, you know, the tinkering and the just sort of blunting the hard edges of incarceration that we have done for decades in this country is exactly how we got here.
And without some more imagination, like you say, you know, we're never going to break the cycle and it will just be some other iteration of the same horrors.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm glad, I'm really glad that you brought up the oppression of probation and parole.
I've been very lucky.
I will be the first to say lucky compared to so many of my friends who've been caught up in at least that, you know, I guess a lot of my friends have been to jail from time to time or whatever, but the oppression of probation, I mean, the whole thing is just set up to fail, to make you fail, to make you late, to make you in trouble, to get you revoked and all the fines and fees, especially if you're talking about poor people and they got to come up with hundreds of dollars a month, as you say, to pay the lease on their own ankle bracelet or whatever the latest racket is, you know, that is electronic monitor, this kind of thing.
You know, I've known people who got busted with drugs, who could have gone, one guy specifically I'm thinking of, who could have gone to jail for two years and he ended up going to jail for probably a total of five years plus years worth of probation because he kept getting revoked over and over, let out and revoked and whatever, all this time over a little bit of drugs, because the whole thing is just made to trap you.
And there are millions when people say two million people in prison, they leave out and another five million on parole or probation, which is the same damn thing basically.
It's horrible.
It's a system of totalitarianism.
It's like living in East Germany or something, if it's happening to you, that's how bad it is, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, we need to remember that, you know, the way that we can look at this is that, you know, we can let more people out on parole and probation, but if we're setting them up to fail, then they're really, then, you know, you have to question the value of what you're doing.
You know, a lot of these people, again, people who are incarcerated disproportionately in the lower income brackets, they suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, they're victims of trauma themselves.
I mean, people who commit murder or sexual assault, you know, a lot of times those people have been victims of violence and childhood abuse themselves and, you know, what we typically do in this country is we see the crime that they did or were alleged to commit and our goal is to punish them for that for some reason, because we think that that will turn them around.
You know, I think if you gave people the support that they need or maybe even if you had provided the services in the community that led them, the absence of which led them to commit crimes for survival, you know, you probably wouldn't have most of these people in these situations anyway.
If there was really job training, access to food, education, you know, healthcare is a huge one.
I mean, we have just completely dismantled public health care on the outside and we are currently and especially and again, it's part of this prison reform movement.
We are building public health inside of prisons or in punitive environments where it's not, you know, where your patient doesn't have a trusting relationship with the person treating them.
It's a relationship of force and you cannot, you know, you can ask any mental health professional, you cannot have progress with a patient who cannot trust their doctor, whose doctor gets to go home at the end of the night and, you know, lock the door behind them.
It just, it doesn't make sense and it's completely outdated.
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Yeah.
I'm going to come at this from the entire other point of view.
I don't want any government services at all.
I think these same victims would just be a hell of a lot better off if the government would just leave them alone.
Here to help is usually not much better than here to simply kidnap and extort you, you know, in reality and that's really, isn't that a big part of why we're stuck with these cops is because this is the enforcement arm of the state.
This is how they get business done.
This is how they pay for all those services.
This is how they fine and fee and tax and harass the poor and the working classes out of all their money.
The people with money can afford a lawyer and fight back a little bit, you know.
This is how they raise their revenue.
But anyway, the point really being is, you know, where we come together and agree is that people are, it's a war basically.
The people of this country, huge segments of them of all different races and really different classes too, are being absolutely exploited and really in many cases outright enslaved as you're writing about in here.
They don't have a choice.
Or you go to solitary confinement, well geez, that's torture according to all the human rights groups.
I mean, except when Amnesty International is trying to lie us into a war, the rest of the time they're saying it's torture to put somebody in solitary confinement.
And so that's no choice at all.
It is outright slavery and it's something that just doesn't get talked about or it hasn't been.
So, but this is the final question then, the most important one is, so what level of success has been gained here?
Because the interview about it on my show is hardly a thing at all.
Has anybody important taken note?
Is there some kind of momentum or change or anything that can be pointed to so far with this most recent strike against prison labor, by prison labor?
You know, it's hard to say.
You know, again, getting back to the question of what exactly is a real valuable response.
I mean, to give you an example, you know, sort of an illustrative example, in Kinross Correctional Facility up in Michigan, you had about 100 prisoners, I believe, went on a peaceful march in their yard.
That's part of the day after the strike began.
And the deputy wardens came out and they spoke to them and the prisoners, you know, told them all their grievances.
The deputies listened.
They even allegedly told the prisoners that they would take their concerns to the legislators.
They were going to work with them.
They understood their problems.
The deputies left the yard and in came the troopers firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the prisoners, beating them, macing them, and putting them into solitary confinement.
And I think that that is sort of, you know, you can extrapolate that to a larger degree about whether or not people in power are really listening.
And I think at the end of the day, at least at this moment, it's almost more important that we in the public are waking up to these realities, because, you know, politicians are not leaders, they're followers.
You know, it is the public that needs to learn about this, they need to bring these issues to the forefront, and then force politicians to act, because we cannot just sit idly by and hope that the politicians come to their senses and say, this is morally abhorrent and I'm going to do something about it.
No, they really need to be forced to act, and the question is, how far are we going to push them?
Are we going to push them just to put band-aids on the situation, or to sort of rethink the system that we're in?
So in terms of, you know, whether people are waking up to it, it's hard to say.
It's still too early.
You know, I'm sure that there have been politicians and people in power who have acknowledged the strike, but, you know, as far as I see, I don't see any real tangible reform taking place yet.
But, again, this is a movement.
It takes time.
And, you know, I've been writing about prisons for years, and this is, you know, one of the few instances where I really feel like there are a lot of people who are like, you know, I'm never...
I had no idea this was going on, you know?
And I had no idea, and it sparked an interest, I think, and especially, you know, I don't know if you've seen Ava DuVernay's documentary that just came out, Thirteenth, it's also very popular right now.
What's it called?
It's called Thirteenth, referring to the Thirteenth Amendment.
Oh, okay.
I highly recommend it.
It's very succinct and sort of ties all these issues together.
That's the amendment that outlawed private chattel slavery, but legalized government prison slavery, and then, as we've been discussing, government-licensed private slavery of convicts.
Right, and that's in the Constitution.
And so, I mean, that is a huge challenge.
That is not going to be easy to fix, and I think that is something that we need to remember.
Like, these small reforms, these criminal justice, bipartisan, mandatory minimum reform bills, which, by the way, you know, the— And which, by the way, actually, I really said that wrong, though.
It doesn't expressly legalize that.
It allows it, but it's not—it doesn't make it—the Thirteenth Amendment doesn't make it federal law that labor is allowed, whatever, whatever.
It just doesn't strike down and prevent the federal government or the state governments from doing such things.
It creates the space for it.
Right, yeah, exactly.
But so, if we could pass a state law in Georgia that forbid this thing, it's not like the government's appeal, you know, to the court against it would be that, well, the Thirteenth Amendment says we have to have this, or something like that.
That's an entirely different thing.
I just didn't want to overstate it, because I think I did.
No, it's for sure, and, you know, I do think, just quickly, I think, you know, some of the reforms that have been happening at the federal level are—they're good, they're good steps in the right direction, and they're not enough, but I think people, you know, the majority of people who are incarcerated are on the state level.
But the federal government, in a lot of cases, especially around corrections and public safety and law enforcement, sets the tone for what happens around the rest of the country.
So I think it equally is important that people are paying attention to what's going on in their state government, as well as their county and local governments, because I'll tell you, county jails, not prisons—these are people who, you know, haven't been convicted of crimes yet and are locked in county jails for years—you know, those are some of the most dangerous and inhumane places that you can imagine.
You know, people, you know, the majority of deaths that happen behind bars are in county jails and within the first seven days of incarceration.
So I think, you know, it's equally important to know what's going on at your local level, know what's going on in your state, and to apply pressure there, but to remember that the federal government is going to play an important role in setting the tone for what happens in the rest of the country.
And where they fall short are going to be places where states and governments take advantage of these spaces to continue doing what they're doing.
Well, let me ask you to follow up a little bit about what you just said about people dying in local jail.
That's regular people being thrown in the cage with murderers, basically, over a traffic offense or something?
Yeah, I mean, you know, you have a broken taillight, you—I mean, anything.
You're going to get arrested, and you're going to go down to the precinct, and they're going to put you in county jail.
You're going to wait for your court appearance, you know, you get your public defender.
This is all pretrial.
These are people—you know, Rikers Island is a jail.
I know people think it's like a prison, but in New York City, Rikers Island is a jail.
Most people who are there have not been convicted of a crime.
And these are people who are waiting to go to trial against, you know, super backlogs, court cases.
And again, the vast majority of these people have serious medical needs.
They have mental illness.
They have, you know, all sorts of needs.
And these jails are incredibly overcrowded.
They have no services, mostly because the inmate population turns over so quickly.
It's not like a prison where you're going to be there for 10 years.
They just can't support this number of people with this amount of need.
And so people die.
I mean, I write about this all the time.
People die of gangrene.
They die from not getting their insulin.
They die from having asthma attacks.
You know, it's like absolutely preventable and treatable things.
But there just is not that service or that interest in providing care in a jail because it's costly and, you know, just without jumping all over the place too much, get back to this general posture of punishment.
You know, even in a jail setting where you haven't been convicted of a crime, if you're in there complaining about a medical issue, you might have there, you know, they're going to, their first reaction is going to be to treat it with skepticism, you know, because you're an offender, you're in the jail.
Are you making up these claims and illnesses that you have to get preferable treatment?
This is known as malingering.
And this is how people die.
Yeah.
And I'll just add, to tie into the prison privatization, you know, not to take our eyes off the ball, because again, while private prisons are moving, are becoming less popular, the actual facility management there, especially on a county level, you have facilities that are privatizing services like medical care, like phone, visitation, email.
And that stuff is just as pernicious and it's harder to see because it's not a private company operating an entire facility.
So there's, you know, there's money being made there off of the lives of prisoners.
Right.
Yeah.
Very effective rent sinking.
And yeah.
And, you know, I don't want to make, I wouldn't want any of this to sound like the problem is just in the private prisons or just in the public ones, because they both have deals all across the country with these corporations, outside corporations to provide this labor.
Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Man.
Well, listen, I can't remember what my last awesome question.
Oh, yeah, I can.
All right.
So now here's something that's really important, too.
And it's the subject of your piece here, actually, at Shadowproof.com, how some prisons swiftly move to undermine the national prison strike.
And this is the part that I think is really important that people understand that, you know, in order to bring this to our attention, people had to make real sacrifices.
And of course, the prison officials, they don't take too kindly to stuff like this at all, huh?
No, not at all.
I mean, I think, you know, as I was saying at the very at the top of this conversation, the reaction was to swiftly break up prisoners, to throw them in solitary confinement to and especially to limit their access to communication with the outside world.
You know, you know, especially if you're somebody who's interested in supporting these prisoners, the most important thing that we can do in the public is to to put our eyes on these prisons, because the reason one of the reasons why they've been allowed to get away with all this stuff and one of the reasons why we don't really know the full extent of the labor strike is because of the secrecy.
You know, it's just this information is very hard to come by.
And let me tell you, as a journalist, it is very frustrating to try to cover this beat because, you know, it's just not like anything else where you're able to place a phone call or get an email.
You know, you're just jumping through hoops.
And so it's just very hard to get this information out to the public.
But if the public is paying attention, if they're making phone calls, if they're talking to their legislators about this, if prison officials know that they are being watched, they have a disincentive to be to continue to retaliate and clamp down on these prisoners.
It is when they know nobody is watching that they are comfortable to do whatever it is they want.
Yep.
Well, and that sort of goes back to what I was saying about my libertarianism here is I sort of have a fantasy that if maybe government's only job was the court system, then maybe the democracy would be able to handle it.
And actually the people would be that final check and balance on their state government and how it works.
Because I think, I mean, I certainly, and this is, I think part of the reason why I'm always hellbent on this subject, Brian, is because I was raised on Matlock.
I love Matlock.
And on Matlock, the trial is fair.
If you did it, man, you're going to the pen.
But if you didn't do it, then the prosecutor is more than happy to fess up and say, oh, geez, I guess we got this one wrong.
Judge, we want to dismiss the charges and set this man free.
And we all read the Bill of Rights and we learn in fourth grade about how you get to cross-examine your witnesses and this kind of thing.
It all sounds very fair and people take it all very for granted that it's all a very self-correcting system.
And part of my argument is government is doing so many things that the people can't keep control of it at all.
And it's all, as you've been describing this whole time, it's all rent-seeking by special interests.
You know, some guy comes up with a company, a way to charge prisoners to send emails every once in a while or whatever the racket is, and everything's a political football instead of the high-minded citizens of Athens doing the right thing because of how important it is.
Yeah.
So few people behind bars have that opportunity to go and have sort of the fair trial that you saw on Matlock.
Again, almost nobody goes to trial.
And the judge isn't the most powerful person in the courtroom, it is the prosecutor.
The system is so lopsided and so geared towards punishment that, again, you know, a lot of formerly incarcerated people that I talk to, they remind me that the system is not broken.
It is working very efficiently.
This is what it is designed to do.
Yeah.
Oh, see, that's the scary part, right?
It took them forever to finally refine it, but this is, in essence, you know, the thing finally boiled to perfection there.
They finally got it right.
How to lock up the entire population.
And of course, this morning, was it this morning or last night, it's on Twitter about the jury in Albuquerque where the cops murdered the homeless guy on video who was camping out on that hillside there, where it was a hung jury, and where, you know, one in a million cases where the prosecutor would actually bring a case against a killer cop or two, and you can't get it by the citizens of the county to hold them responsible for it.
Yeah, it's really something.
Anyway.
There's a lot of work to be done.
I mean, there is no one bill, there is no one piece of legislation, not a speech, not even a change in our attitude.
It's going to take a lot of work, because this system, you know, as you said, it's not just the two million people behind bars, but it's also the five million people under supervision.
This system has spread its tentacles out in so many directions, and, you know, even bringing in the loss of the disenfranchisement, your inability to vote, your inability to get a job, to get, you know, access to affordable housing after you're left out of, after you're released from prison, you know, we need to question what it is that we want to happen to people who run afoul of the law, you know, is our goal to dispose of them completely and just hope that society takes care of itself?
Because that doesn't seem to be working.
Right.
Yeah, that's the thing, is the assumption that everything is working to protect the innocent and only get the guilty and all that, it just takes a little bit of study and a little bit of critical thinking to see that some major changes need to be made.
So yeah, like you say, you know, you mentioned the attitude.
That's really step one.
It's for everybody, you know, and this has nothing to do with being soft on real criminals, by the way.
Right.
You know, I think, you know, you're the news consumer on the same level I am.
There's some horrible true crime stuff happening in your town and mine that people absolutely deserve to be punished severely for, maybe too severely for you to let me on their jury, man.
Some of these things that that happen.
So that's not really, you know, we're not talking about that.
We're just talking about making sure you get the right guy and making sure that the guy who, as you said, you know, just has a broken taillight or something doesn't end up having to lose his life waiting for a trial over some meaningless thing or a joint in his pocket or whatever it is where, you know, where the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
Right.
You know, I also think, though, that, you know, and maybe this is just my own personal opinion creeping in here, but I do think that on top of this, Americans really need to have a deep, introspective moment on what accountability means and what we're going to do about violent crime, because it is real.
And, you know, there are people who have done horrible things, horrible, horrible crime.
But I think we have enough evidence from decades and decades of incarceration that simply locking them in a cell or putting them into prison does nothing to make us safer.
It doesn't prevent people from committing these crimes.
And you know, most people who commit crimes are released.
And we're not making ourselves any better if they've spent, you know, a decade in solitary confinement and then are let out on the street, you know, where they haven't made eye contact with a human being in that much time.
So I just think we need to sort of dispel or just for a moment put down what we know and how we react to crime and violence sort of reflexively and think about if it actually works, because I think that that is a big stumbling block in a lot of these conversations.
You know, personally, I don't think incarceration makes us safer, and I don't think even for the most violent crimes, it is a viable solution.
And it does, you know, especially, you know, in cases of violence or sexual assault, we wait for these crimes to happen, and then we punish people for them, and we don't even give the victims an opportunity to play a role in their own prosecution trial, you know.
So I think we need to reassess what accountability means and reassess our approach to violent crime, because we've been trying this, you know, we've had incarceration in this country since the revolution in the Civil War, and it hasn't provided the results that we hoped it would.
Right.
Well, and especially, you know, when the I don't know exactly what the proportions are, Brian, you may have a lot better idea than me, but it's clear that a great proportion of violent crime is fighting over turf in drug black markets, whether it's meth or cocaine or whatever is illegal, where you can't, where drug businessmen can't just go into business and trade with each other, then instead of a, you know, a free market competition, it's a violent battle for monopoly cartel control over territory, and people die.
And then people say, wow, these drugs really make people violent, we ought to stiffen the sentencing again, and drive up the prices even higher.
The other question is, on top of that, though, that I really don't think people ask is why are people selling drugs in these communities?
And why are people buying drugs in these communities?
Think about what these people's lives must be like to drive you to a violent and dangerous and illegal lifestyle like that.
I don't think anybody just wakes up and decides to be a criminal, you are born into an environment that either tells you you are a criminal, or that sets you up to be one in order to survive.
And I think that, you know, again, this is not to say that people who commit violent crimes should be absolved, and should not be held accountable, and should be let off the hook.
But I think by continuing to look at the act instead of the life that a person lives, we will just fall into this trap over and over again.
Right.
Yeah, Donald Trump keeps talking about, oh, the inner city this, the inner city that, anytime any black person asks him anything, he starts talking about the inner city.
And the thing is, it doesn't matter if they're like a millionaire, you know, asking about buying stock in his company or what, oh, inner city.
But the thing is, we already know what's wrong with the inner city.
They're living inside a red line, where poor people are not allowed to go into debt to own property.
That's it.
They're not allowed to own their own property.
They're not allowed to save up capital and reinvest in improving their own property and saving their wealth.
So that's why we call it a ghetto.
That's what it is.
Right.
It's where the government imprisons the poorest people and won't ever let them do any better.
It's no different than an Indian reservation.
Absolutely right.
Anyway.
Hey, listen, you do great work, man.
And this was a really great interview.
I really liked talking with you, and I really appreciate your time.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's been great.
All right, Sheldon.
That is Brian Sonnenstein.
I should ask you, is it Steen or Stein?
Steen.
No.
Depending on who you ask in my family.
Oh, OK.
Well, I don't want to start an argument between them, but OK.
All right.
Thanks again, Brian.
Thank you so much.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
Brian Sonnenstein.
He is at Shadowproof.com.
How some prisons swiftly move to undermine the national prison strike and resistance continues at historic prison strike as historic prison strike enters fourth week.
Those are just two of the many great articles that he has at Shadowproof if you want to catch up and learn all about this great activism.
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