Robert Yates
Hello, good morning, good lunchtime, good evening, wherever you are in the world, and welcome to Chatham House, and my name is Robert Yates. I’m the Executive Director of the Centre for Universal Health at Chatham House. I’m delighted to invite you to this members’ event, looking at The Prison Pandemic Experience. It was just over a year ago that all the world’s leaders gathered at the United Nations and committed themselves to universal health coverage, meaning everyone on the planet gets the health services they need, without suffering financial hardship. And very important to recognise that those services are allocated according to need, that people who objectively need more healthcare should get more healthcare. But what we’re seeing in this pandemic is that certain population groups are patently being left behind, and we’re very conscious that many leaders are not fulfilling these promises, and we see groups, such as homeless people, migrant populations, being left behind in the pandemic. And one group that clearly is suffering disproportionately are people in prisons and jails, and we thought it very important to have this discussion today, to really identify how bad this problem is, and also, discuss what needs to be done to change this and how we’re going to bring about that change.
And I’ve got an absolutely fabulous panel that’s been put together to discuss this issue today, and they are DeAnna Hoskins, who is President and CEO of Just Leadership in the United States of America, Celia Ouellette, who is the Founder and Chief Executive of Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, and Ashish, or Ash Prashar, who’s Senior Director for Global Communications at Publicis. So, they’re going to be giving us some introductory remarks at the moment – in a moment or two on this issue. But I’m very keen that this is a participatory exercise and that you, the audience, participates and join in and ask questions of this very important topic.
I should emphasise that today’s meeting is on the record, it’s not following the famous Chatham House Rule. We are on the record today, and in fact we’re being recorded, but we hope this doesn’t discourage you from being – you know, asking your outspoken questions, and we invite you to do this through the ‘Q&A’ function. So, please don’t use the ‘Chat’ function, but if you use the ‘Q&A’ function in Zoom at the bottom, just click on that and ask your question there. And if you see somebody ask a question that you particularly like, if you upvote it, then that will, sort of, get pushed up the list and then, being democratic, we can be asking the most popular questions. So, do feel free to ask and even ask questions from the outset, if you like, ‘cause it’s always nice to see some questions rolling in, and then we’ll start asking the questions to the panellists in about a quarter of an hour, 20 minutes or so.
But first of all, I’d like to bring in our panellists and start with you, DeAnna, and I was, sort of, looking at your Justice Leadership website earlier on, and I think earlier on in the pandemic you were saying that eight out of ten of the hotspots for COVID-19 in the United States were actually in prisons and jails, which struck me as, you know, really quite astonishing. And I think that was in June, so I was wondering if you could maybe, sort of – is that still the situation in the United States? And this would indicate a major problem with preparedness, you know, sort of, you know, that prisons weren’t prepared for this, why has been – why has that been the case, and maybe why haven’t we learnt from history?
DeAnna Hoskins
So, one of the things – thank you guys for having me here – one of the things that we identified immediately is because of the congested living areas, the inability to social distance, the fact that hand sanitizer was a contraband that could not be allowed in prisons, created this atmosphere. And then when we talk about the inadequacy of healthcare, we started to see a huge amount of individuals testing positive once individuals started dying of COVID. Governors were on the TV across the country, talking about locking down their cities, their States, but they never mentioned the prison population. They never talked about the population of people. They talk about nursing homes, they closed down schools, and they didn’t even talk about the employees that are state employees who are an essential part of the community. They’re individuals who live in the community and prisons don’t close down.
So, here in Ohio, one of the top prisons has a capacity of 2,500, and by the time they got in there to test, 1,700 inmates tested positive. But there was no solution, there was no inability to social distance, they started utilising solitary confinement to try to house people differently, but it just became overwhelming. And we really feel, when we talk about the history of pandemics, the history of disasters, while this is pandemic across the country, across UK, USA, everywhere, we’ve had disasters. We have a history of disasters and we’ve had hurricanes. We had Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ike, and when you talk about – let’s just talk about Hurricane Katrina that devastated Louisiana. They had emergency preparedness plans for The Humane Society to get cats and dogs out, but the inmate population was taken to bridges in the hopes the water wouldn’t rise.
Here we are, 15 years later, Louisiana still is a spot for hurricanes, now we have this pandemic, and no processes were even taken into considerations of what do we have when we have – what do we do when we have an emergency? So, Just Leadership, being an organisation that focuses on formerly incarcerated, we all were formerly incarcerated, we were founded by an individual who was formerly incarcerated, we started demanding emergency preparedness plans, like hospitals, nursing homes and schools have. Correctional facilities in the US do not have to have emergency preparedness plans that focus on preserving the lives of the individuals in there for accreditation and funding. So, we’re actually demanding that they have these and actually institute decarceration strategies that preserve the lives of individuals currently incarcerated.
Robert Yates
Thanks very much, DeAnna, and I was wondering that this does seem to be a huge problem right across the United States, and you have a very big prison population, don’t you, in the United States? I think one of the highest per capita in the OECD. Have there been any States that you think have done particularly well? I mean, you know, are there any State Governors maybe who have given a priority to addressing the health needs of people in prison?
DeAnna Hoskins
So, I think one of the things we have to realise is that while there’s 2.2 million people inside correctional facilities, there’s a difference between jails and prisons in the US. And, by that, jails are where people are pre-trial, meaning they haven’t been found guilty of anything. Prison is the sentence once you’ve been found guilty. Jails have more flexibility of a local share of making a decision to say, “I’m not going to hold you on cash bail, I’m not going to hold you.” Whereas Prison Officials actually are legislatively bound by either the Governor or the State Legislation, or the Judge who sentenced the person, so the Prison Officials themselves can’t make any decision. I call it a day-care centre. The parent drops the child off at the day-care centre, the day-care centre has no right to release that child until the parent comes back or the parent says so, right? So, in Go– with Governors, some Governors started to look at who’s 90 days to release? But nobody has been aggressive to say all technical violations, which means a person didn’t commit a new crime, they were on some type of community supervision and violated a condition, such as they didn’t report on time, they failed a drug test. So, when it comes to the correctional population, no Governor in the United States, has been willing to lose the political capital to make an outright decision to override the legislation. So, again, that population is just sitting there, which is why we’re talking about vaccines and that population isn’t even prioritised to start getting vaccines.
Robert Yates
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, this is something I want to, sort of, come onto discuss and in fact, I’ve already seen the first question was about this, and it’s just yeah, totally anticipating this, but we’ll perhaps come onto that in a moment. Well, thanks very much for the time being, DeAnna. Celia, if I can, sort of, turn to you now and really, sort of, ask, you know, what do you think, you know, have been the main causes for the high infection rates in prisons and jails, and what can be done practically to reduce the high incidence?
Celia Ouellette
Thanks, so much Rob, and thanks so much Chatham House for bringing me in to speak. I know we’re all going to be talking about this a lot, but, you know, outlining – going over some of the things that the amazing DeAnna Hoskins said, you know, high incarceration rates are a major cause of this. You know, prison – a system like California was at 130% capacity going into the pandemic. So, when we talk about, you know, prisons being places where there is zero ability to social distance, that is compounded exponentially by having too many people in a space that is designed for it already.
The Governor of Rikers Island Jail, at one point in the midst of the pandemic, described that the jail in New York, Rikers Island Jail in New York, as “like a cruise ship recklessly boarding more passengers,” without, you know, offloading any. And exactly as DeAnna said, you have to understand what impact that has on the surrounding counties and communities because there is this kind of churn of both inmates coming in and going out, especially of county jails where people are often in for a short period of time, staff and visitors. You know, of the worst infection sites in the State of Arkansas, the number one was a prison, number two and number three were the surrounding counties to that prison. So, you have high overcrowding, number two, the cost of incarceration generally across the US is very high, and some of that cost is outsourced to private contractors, whether that’s private companies running the prisons, or private healthcare providers who are financially incentivised to cut corners and spend as little money as possible, which results in inmates frequently being charged for basic necessities. You know, I’m sure DeAnna has multiple examples of inmates being charged – required to pay through a commissary, through a shopping system, for soap, and inmates are often required to pay for access to a Doctor.
You know, I think race has a big component of this, and I know Ash is going to talk about it but returning to Arkansas where prison infection rates were very high, you know, Arkansas has a Black American population of 15% in the state, but 45% of the prison population. And we’ve seen across the board that black and ethnic minority populations are disproportionately impacted by COVID. You know, we are an organisation that works with businesses. This is our piece of this. You know, we bring businesses to the table to support organisations like DeAnna’s in finding the solutions. DeAnna is talking about the problems and talking about the solutions, and these are problems that have solutions, right? So, business’ role in that, you know, is kind of they need to find their voice, they need to be stakeholders in finding these solutions. You know, what is the major solution to this? Again, kind of spoiler alert, it’s going to be reducing prison populations, and there are ways to make that happen, and whether you see it through a, sort of, human rights lens, or whether you think about it as returning people t0 the workforce, businesses have a really important role to play in calling governments to account, in being alternate leaders in communities where governments are failing, and for using their social capital to kind of create leverage that creates change.
Robert Yates
Hmmm hmm, and I mean, that just seems astonishing that prisoners are potentially being charged to buy soap, you know, sort of, given the importance of, you know, hand washing and basic sanitation, I mean, that’s just sort of mind-blowing that that’s – that’s very common, is it, in the United States?
Celia Ouellette
Yeah, that’s common and being required to pay a copay, somewhere in the region of eight to $12, to see a Doctor is really, really common, and you’ve got to remember that these are people – a large percentage of the population of prison inmates are very poor. Jail inmates especially, because, you know, of practices like cash bail where if you can’t pay bail you go to jail, which means you are literally creating a filter system that means that poor people end up in jail and wealthy people do not. And then, you know, like, even, sort of, anecdotally talking about how difficult it is to get money to inmates, you know, inmates often work and frequently aren’t paid to work, so their family have to support them, you know, if you put ten, $20 into a kiosk to put money onto an inmate’s books, a private company is operating that kiosk and will usually take a hefty percentage of that $20, you know, the inmate will frequently end up with probably $16 of that $20 and to many families $20, you know, to be put into a kiosk to support a family member, a loved one in prison and jail, is a huge amount of money that, especially in a global pandemic, they can’t afford.
Robert Yates
Sure, exactly, and we know, you know, right across the world, you know, co-payments are, you know, a massive barrier to people accessing healthcare. I mean, you know, there’s often a thought from wealthy people that, oh, you know, $10, that’s not much, everyone can afford that. But when you’ve got very little money, that’s – that is a lot of money and we know that discourages, you know, use. And in fact, it’s very interesting that the World Health Organization have explicitly said in this pandemic that countries should scrap healthcare user fees because you want to be maximising access to health services. So, you can see immediately that’s a, sort of, a fundamental flaw with any concept to universal healthcare, which when you have those barriers in place.
So, thanks very much indeed, Celia, and if I can turn to Ash now and we want to show – I’d like to, sort of, bring you in, Ash, is that we’re conscious that, you know, the restrictions have resulted in many people, particularly in the UK, being incarcerated in effect solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, what impact do you think this is having on the mental health of people in prisons, and also, the people working in prisons, and in fact the whole environment, you know, in prisons?
Ashish Prashar
I mean, we have to look at a couple of things. Firstly, thank you for having me. Everyone’s probably thinking what’s a Comms Director at Publicis doing here? For anyone who doesn’t know, I was formerly incarcerated at 17, and have been an activist ever since. But, you know, for me, especially in the West, ‘cause I know, again, in this event description, we talked about prisons all over the world, but especially in the West, the prison system, to me, is legalised racism towards non-white people. It’s how we treat people, you know. For me, it’s do we value Black and Brown lives? And our prison system shows we don’t. We, in the UK, like every – I think about people’s complaints in the UK and the US, how they had to be locked at home in this pandemic. Before I get onto my answer, I think this is really important, how frustrating people – how that felt for people. How people felt it was taking away their rights, their rights. Think about doing that in a six by ten cell, or a six by nine cell, 23 hours a day, 24 hours a day in the UK frankly, they just gave you food and let you out maybe for a walk.
In the US, as Celia pointed out, 130% over in California, that population, that means two or three people sometimes in cells together. What mental health toll is that taking on people? If people are suffering mental health issues outside, right now, during this pandemic, think about the mental health toll that is doing – that is taking on people in prison. I only had to be in solitary confinement for a week, but I’ve lost brothers and sisters who have been in there for three, six months, who took their lives, because, you know, solitary – prison in itself wasn’t built to reform. It was built to punish, but solitary is defined as torture by the Geneva Convention, by the UN, and we put people in it willingly. And in this pandemic, instead of doing the morally right thing of releasing people, like DeAnna said, we have people inside who are not guilty of a crime by the way or any reason. Like right now, there’s people in jails who have literally – are there ‘cause of cash bail, ‘cause they can’t afford to be released, are being convic – are being sentenced to death by our system, by our society, for things they haven’t even done yet or been charged for yet.
That toll, both the lack of care that society is showing you, and being locked in isolation, I don’t think we even know what that true cost is yet. We don’t know what the burden that those individuals are going to take until they get released, ‘til we decide we have morals and do something about this. You know, our system is repugnant and repulsive at the best of times, and now we’ve got a virus going round our prisons, killing people, and our Governors’ answers are, in this pandemic, use the prison population to help us who feel oppressed on the outside by making hand sanitisers in New York, by fighting wildfires in California and, guess what? To help the food supply chain in Texas by picking cotton and all sorts of other things, that reminds you of slavery by the way, that’s what we’ve done to our prison population in this pandemic, instead of releasing people.
Robert Yates
And, well, thanks very much, Ash, you know, and I think that, you know, you bring up some extremely important points and, you know, and particularly around I think people who haven’t been incarcerated, you know. But in this current crisis, being in their homes, you know, sort of, their mental health being impacted, and I think people may be getting a little bit of an understanding of what it must be like, but, you know, obviously, it’s a completely different order of magnitude because, you know, we can walk out of our front doors, you know, no problem at all and walk around the park and it’s completely different, but yet you hear, you know, the talk about mental health, you know, increasing. Do you think that the climate is politically changing and people are potentially getting more sympathetic? I mean, how do you think, looking at the UK press, for example, do you think people are going to be more sympathetic, or less?
Ashish Prashar
I think it’s interesting. Look, I think it’s what you read, right? So, let’s just take from the UK press perspective, headlines sell, right? Everybody is a mass murderer, when they talk about one case of murder, you know, everyone is a rapist, is a serial rapist. We don’t – we’ve never addressed the language that we use to describe people who have been incarcerated. We’ve never addressed the sensationalism around it, right? So, people – I think people at their core would be sympathetic if they knew the truth, but they’re always communicated by liberal and conservative press, that this is what people in prison are, right? So, it sells newspapers, it’s clickbait, it’s exciting, it’s horror, it’s the TV shows you consume. You know, and there’s a good friend of mine out here, Rashad Robinson, who runs the Color of Change, that DeAnna knows really well, as well, you know, and he’s always talking about, like, how Cops are like the most heroic people on our TV shows. You know, and how we framed the criminal or the person who’s been incarcerated, how we – we don’t address the life that they have lived to get them there, or the oppression our society has put on them to put them there.
I think about the Black experience in America, and I’ve said this in other panels, it is maddening to me, it’s contradictory, right? On one hand, we have celebrated Black men and women from Michael Jordan to James Baldwin to Beyonce, but at the same time, the vast majority of Black and Brown men and women are disproportionately incarcerated, over-policed. Every day, from the day they’re born, over-policed, over-supervised, pushed out of employment, pushed out of school and pushed into prisons. It’s a maddening experience because after all of that society, and going back to your point about media, says it doesn’t exist. It’s on them. They’ve got to pull them up, pull themselves up by their socks, that’s a very unique English expression on this, but – and all of this has to do with all the systems, how we engage with Black men and women and Brown men and women in America, in Britain, in education, in the workplace, in economic opportunity, and see how much racism is in all of those levels of society, then look how Black and Brown people are treated by our court and police system. We need to look at this whole thing holistically, going back to your point about healthcare, Black people and Brown people have been failed, nothing short of being failed, and we need to look holistically at the society we live in and the racist structures that underpin all of it, if we’re going to address this.
Robert Yates
Well, I think that, you know, the COVID crisis has undoubtedly exposed, you know, massive inequalities. I mean, you know, we recognise that we do live in very unequal societies, both in the UK and the US, and I’m sure we have other participants from around the world feeling the same in their country, and access to healthcare is extremely unequal. I suppose one, sort of, acid test for our recognition about needing to be equal and equitable is going to be in the allocation of vaccines, and I’ve already seen that our first question, I think, has come up on that. So, if I can maybe, sort of, turn over to the audience now and very much encourage audience members to ask questions, reminding you to go to the ‘Q&A’ function. The first question is actually from Sam Meredith, and I’m not sure if we can bring Sam online, because – and if you’d like to come online and ask your question directly, we’d be absolutely delighted. But don’t feel intimidated and you have to, and I’m more than happy to ask your question, on your behalf, but Sam, would you like to pose your question?
Sam Meredith
Hi, yeah, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Yeah, I was curious to know – so, given what we know and what has been spoken about already about how the coronavirus pandemic has played out in prisons, I was hoping to ask whether inmates should be among the first to receive shots of COVID vaccines?
DeAnna Hoskins
So, one of the things, and I’ll start there, when you think about the populations, so the priority list from the CDC says that essential workers in healthcare and individuals in nursing home congested care are going to be in what we’re calling Group 1A. Group 1B is going to other individuals, and they’re breaking this priority down, but what they failed to add is the fact that prison workers are essential workers, prisons don’t close down like hospitals don’t, those are members of the community and that also individuals who are imprisoned are in congested living areas, with the inability to actually social distance. So, some people will even pushback and say, “Well, older adults are more vulnerable,” but we have older adults in prisons as well. We have individuals with co-morbidities and other underlying issues in prisons as well, so how do we stop this cycle?
Well, one of it is people are actually – our first set of vaccines, we know we have to have two shots and the first set is only enough for about 35 million people. 70 million vaccines coming in, and if you have to have two shots, the first round is for 35 million people. So how do you start prioritising that, and we’re facing a real big dilemma here. But then, also, we’re still in vaccine trials. You have five companies trying to come up towards a vaccine to be FDA approved. But there’s still some clinical trials, and the fear is that they’re trying to use individuals in correctional facilities for the clinical trials, but not the access to the vaccine, once it’s determined. So, there again is the dehumanisation of the individuals and the lack of the willingness to even compensate them, like we do the general public, when they do clinical trials. So, it kind of goes back to, yes, they should be prioritised for access, but also, it goes back to the racial disparities and the fact that our criminal justice system, in the US, was built on historical – that aspect of slavery and that those individuals are still considered less than human, again in this aspect and we’re responding in that way as well when we start talking about access to vaccines and who should be utilised, as trial participants in that process.
Ashish Prashar
Can I also follow-up on DeAnna on that point, which is if we are really concerned about even the general population, if the biggest hotspots for COVID are prisons, doesn’t it make sense to inoculate everyone, from the guards to the prisoners, incarcerated individuals? If we actually care, ‘cause, think about it, right? Some – you pointed out, I think, 2.3 million people are incarcerated, right? So, by the way that’s the biggest prison, peacetime prison population times two, which is a human rights disaster in and of itself, but if that many people are getting – if our biggest hotspots, I think it’s like ten now, eight to ten, are there, that means all the guards, all the healthcare workers, all the individuals who go in and out of prison are spreading it in society. When you start at the hotspots and stop that and take care of those individuals first, like the science makes no sense to DeAnna. It’s oppression ‘cause they don’t care about Black and Brown lives, that’s what it really is, because if they actually cared about the science, they would tackle the hotspots. Not the privileged few that are sitting in their apartment like me right now in New York, and like, allowed to work from home, and they don’t have to take the risk that all those other individuals do.
Celia Ouellette
May I jump in and add one further thing? This is something that’s going to fire us all up, you know, one of the things that happened with the efforts to reduce prison populations, the, sort of, test that happened in America where some Governors did make efforts to reduce prison populations, with no subsequent huge spike in criminal behaviour, you know, it goes exactly to what Ash is saying, which is, like, if you can try and turn off the pump, then you actually impact the spread of the virus in surrounding communities. But the second thing that happened with that decarceration effort was I think that the public looked under the lid of who actually is in particularly jails in America, pre-trial detention in America, you know, half a million people have not been convicted of a crime. But we’ve deprived them of their liberty, so there is a moral obligation to treat those people the same as the surrounding community or potentially better because they don’t have the access to choices that the surrounding community do.
You know, the second thing we saw was how many children are in the American justice system, and children on very, very long sentences? And how many old people are in the American justice system, primarily serving time in prisons? 20% of the US prison population is over 50, and that is largely a phenomenon of very long sentences, life without possibility of parole, or what we call in America stacking sentences. So, you can get ten plus, 20 plus, 50, and they’re all served consecutively, effectively life without possibility of parole, things like truth in sentencing, where you serve the entirety of your sentence, mandatory minimums, three strikes, and then finally, there’s the sort of third category, or third group of people who are serving technical parole violations. So, they’ve been – they’ve – or probation violations, so they’ve been released and they’ve served the minimum – they’ve served the punishment that they were required to serve, they’ve been released back into the community, and they have not committed another crime, but they have failed on a technical aspect of their parole or probation, which might be failing to show up for a urine test, or missing a phone call, or failing to make a payment to a private prison or parole service, and as a result of that they get sent back to a jail. And so, for those people, you know, hands up anyone in this audience who hasn’t missed an appointment, you know, during the pandemic?
You know, I’m not going to put my hand up, and so, if you miss an appointment, the stakes are going into a jail and if a jail looks like Rikers Island, the stakes are technical violation of parole and probation sends you into a COVID hotspot, one of the highest hotspots in the entire nation. So, I think, you know, when we think about the vaccine, we need to not just – I think exactly what Ash said at the beginning, we have this sense of like prisons are men in jumpsuits who have done dreadful things. But I think when we actually looked at who was being released under the early release programme, we were horrified at how many young people, how many pregnant women, how many very old people, how many people with underlying health conditions are actually in our prison and jail system. And we need to stop thinking about inmate populations as a category of people and start thinking of them as people, in the same way that we do in the communities around prisons and jails.
Robert Yates
Absolutely, and for so many reasons that you’ve all articulated, I mean, they should clearly be a high need group. I mean, they’re vulnerable, you know, very high need groups, you know, elderly people, people with chronic health conditions, and also that, as you’re describing, the public health aspect as well. You know, the – you want to, sort of, shut down, sort of, the hotspots and make sure that, you know, everyone’s protected. But we know that we live in a, sort of, a world where unfortunately, often, sort of, politics and, you know, the views of, you know, sort of, what people have done and the deserving or the undeserving, you know, sort of, you know, rise to the fore, how do you see the media debate going on this at the moment? I mean, it’s something I haven’t seen mentioned yet, but we’re – you know, it’s only this week that the vaccines have been approved in the UK, and the debate is starting about who’s first, will it be health workers, will it be elderly people? Have we seen any signs of, you know, sort of, maybe, you know, sort of, right-wing media saying, “Oh, these people have committed a crime, they don’t deserve it, they should be at the back of the queue”? I mean, are we to anticipate that?
Ashish Prashar
I mean, if we’re talking about media, I mean, as someone who used to write at The Sun and wrote headlines that horrified people, I’m going to say the media is not going to be supportive obviously of people in – who are incarcerated getting this virus. I mean, frankly, the media is still debating whether we’re being oppressed on the right-wing side, like, just living in our apartments. So, I don’t even know if we’re going to get there yet, in any reasonable time. But I’m just appealing to President-Elect Biden. I’m appealing to Boris Johnson, you know, these people are people, Celia and DeAnna both pointed out, like, we are not less deserving. No-one is less deserving, who decides who’s less deserving?
I feel like some – this feels like religious almost, like, it’s like we’re reading out of the Bible, who’s less deserving? Who decides that? Like, why should someone be less deserving? I mean, Parliament is full of coke addicts, or – you know, I think our Prime Minister did cocaine, you know, like, we – but he’s a Prime Minister, like, is he less deserving? Like, is, you know – are world leaders who’ve assaulted people less deserving? You know, are people who are our cops, who’ve abused people on the street, have been caught on video who still have their job, less deserving? You know, I – these individuals are people and, you know, look, if we’re going by what’s already happened and, you know, we had an administration here, local governments here, refusing to act and it’s just morally unconscionable to me and I’m ashamed frankly of them. You know, they have the political capital, given, you know, they have all the power right now, I think of Governor Cuomo specifically in New York, you know, he did a decent job. And I wouldn’t say a particularly good job, but a decent job, given the environment, and he had the moral – he had the political capital to release people.
Will he prioritise the vaccine to give to people in incarceration? Probably not, but we are going to appeal until, you know, until he has heard – he’ll hear it left, right and centre from people like DeAnna, Celia, and everyone else, because people are people, no-one is less deserving than the next. You know, I will go back to the fact that we have millions of people locked up for stupid crap in America, you know, and again, some people who have not been sentenced to anything, and we have Politicians on the outside who are definitely morally questionable. So, should they be telling us who is allowed to get this vaccine, or, like, who is, you know, who is just in getting this vaccine?
Robert Yates
DeAnna, do you have thoughts on that?
DeAnna Hoskins
I do, because I think that’s what it comes down to, who’s deserving and who’s not? Who are we going to prioritise in this, and it took me back to a question that someone asked me yesterday around the commutations and pardons that have happened, under the current US administration. And one of the stark differences that I was able to identify was, all the pardons and commutations that this President in the US gave were based on socioeconomic status, or who you knew. Did you know a celebrity, whereas previous administrations were trying to right a wrong that had devastated Black and Brown communities with the war on drugs. But here we have 44 pardons, some even posthumous, of individuals who were politically corrupt, white supremacists, or they knew a movie star or some famous person.
That was the only way, and then, on his way out the door, and with the rate of wrongful convictions, he orders the execution of five African-American men, at the end of his Presidency, when most Presidents up their pardons and commutations to free people. This President has deliberately ordered executions, and we have a high – you know, I think, over the last ten years, the number of innocent projects that have sprouted out of colleges around this country and have proven people serving 25/30 years, sentenced to death, were not guilty of the crime. To order that on your door is an outright show of the socioeconomic difference and the disparities and the true racism in the United States criminal justice system, where your highest-ranking official acts in that manner.
Ashish Prashar
And also, look, think about this, President Biden, or President-Elect Biden, smacked the table in his speech when he said, in his victory speech, and said to the Black community, “I owe you.” He effectively said this, I mean, he does owe us. Frankly, the only reason he got elected, like, all the big cities from Atlanta that flipped: Georgia, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, how many people in the Black community knows someone who’s incarcerated? How many Black families have been touched by the justice system? If you actually care about Black people, like you say you do, and they won you this election, you will make sure that vaccine gets in the hands of people who have been incarcerated, otherwise you have let us down already.
Robert Yates
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, thank you, Ash. Now, I’m conscious that I’m falling behind with my questions actually, so if I can bring in Catherine now, who wants, I think, to raise the issue of another neglected service in particular. So, Catherine, would you like to pose your question?
Catherine
Thanks very much, Rob, and what a great panel. This is a super-discussion, brings together three of my real favourite populations I work with, which is older persons, persons needing hospice and palliative care, and incarcerated persons. Because I work on the rights of older persons, period, and the right to – we’re trying to get a convention on the rights of older persons, just like there is, and that will include a right to palliative care for prisoners, because if you take a human rights lens to this, general comment 14 of the Convention on Civil – on Cultural and – sorry, I’m forgetting all the right words, it’s very early here, the Convention with the Right to Health, specifically says you cannot exclude prisoners from the right to health. So, we work on – one of the things I work on is the right to palliative care, either in prison or in the community, per the Mandela Rules, where you’re supposed to have an equivalent healthcare service or other kinds of service that are available in the community, either in the prison. And I know because my son has been locked up at San Quentin during the pandemic, that the hospital and healthcare services there were completely overwhelmed, and they turned the furniture factory at San Quentin into a COVID dorm. But there was no hospice and palliative care provided in there for all the prisoners dying inside, most of whom were – well, not most of whom, but some were on death row already, but they just died from COVID. And the other thing, very briefly, is felony disenfranchisement, it’s a huge thing in the States, that was what I wrote my first book on, and that has a cascade effect on who’s disempowered, because they’re not even considered eligible or worthy of the vote or full citizenship. And that whole debate and narrative around citizenship is hugely important, and citizens obviously also, have a right to palliative care, but prisoners explicitly do. So, thanks for giving me the floor.
Robert Yates
Thank you very much, Catherine, and just wondering if, sort of, the panellists have got thoughts about, you know, the provision of palliative care in prisons and its absence, is this something that you’ve come across?
DeAnna Hoskins
I wanted to – Catherine said two things that I think is very important for our audience to understand, and I want to start with the felony disenfranchisement. Whereas individuals who are serving time, except for Maine and Vermont, you never lose your right to vote. You don’t have a right to vote, but what we’ve found at this time, during the census, you can be in a prison, which most US prisons are in rural areas, but the population comes from the urban area, while you can vote while you’re in prison, during the census for political capital and political gain, that rural area gets to count that prison population as their home stake and that is fun being attached to each person, but that person will never reside in that rural area for services or resources. They go back to the urban area that didn’t get to count them to get that federal funding. So that’s huge, when you talk about felony disenfranchisement, but they will count you for political gain and finances.
Second, when we talk about, you know, community healthcare and correctional healthcare, I think people misrepresent. Prisons are in some type of community, so if they’re – if it’s supposed to represent what is in the community, it is part of communities. But in the United States, we have a Medicaid exclusion, which is an entitlement programme and there’s an inmate exclusion that excludes people who are serving time, which makes the quality of care not have to be equivalent to what we have federally said correctional – I mean, community healthcare should be. So, as all these federal rules that justify, what Celia talked about, the profiteering of healthcare, and the inability, and one of the lessons I learned as the Director for County Administrators, overseeing a local jail, while the correctional healthcare was privatised and taxpayers paid for it, there was a lawsuit about the medical care because that profiteering company was representing the county, the county was responsible for that medical healthcare because this was just a Consultant of the county, but the Consultant was the one who was mishandling the actual care of the individual. So, when you start putting all these together of accountability, we’ve actually allowed correctional healthcare, one, not to be accountable. Financially, they’ll have some standards of care, levels of care, but when it all is said and done and there’s some actual wrongdoing, typically the county or the city, the Mayor, ends up paying the family for any wrongful death lawsuits that occur in a jail or anything of that nature. So, it’s really this real disconnect of what’s said on paper, that correctional healthcare and community healthcare should match, but in practice, it never plays out that way.
Robert Yates
Hmmm.
Celia Ouellette
Rob, can I pick up on this, sort of, continuing nature of punishment, that’s like, you know, felony disenfranchisement being one good example of it, you know, that even when your time is done and your punishment is completed, that you continue to, you know, experience, sort of, being entangled in the prison system, in the justice system. You know, perhaps one that’s easy to understand and speaks to the group, the businesses, you know, companies that we talk to, we are facing an economic crisis following, or concurrent with, the public health crisis that we’re currently, you know, in, and I do think America’s system of punishment and its mass incarceration and ongoing punishment is, sort of, coming for a reckoning.
You know, one of the biggest things that we do to people who have experienced the justice system in America is effectively prevent them from being able to work easily after they get out of prison. 75% of people coming out of prison will be unemployed within a year. Now, you can be listening to this and think, I don’t really care, those people have done something bad, but it’s your money too. You know, if you want to think about it like that, it’s your money too, and in the US, that loss of workforce costs the US around 80 billion in lost GDP. You know, a great example that was remedied this summer was in California, if you are an inmate, you can serve on firefighting teams, you can be trained to be a firefighter and you can go out and you can fight fires. Until this summer, if you were released, you were ineligible to be a firefighter. So, even though you had the skills and qualifications and California desperately needs firefighters, you know, sometimes I think people say to me, “Well, why should you hire somebody who’s experienced incarceration instead of my son or daughter who has never done anything wrong?” In California, there is an urgent need for more firefighters. This isn’t a job that people are fighting hand over fist to get to, and it was only this summer that people with criminal convictions were allowed to apply to be firefighters.
Now, again, you hear people say, “Well, what if that person is a criminal and is going to escape,” or whatever it is, you know, they’ve not changed, leopards don’t change their spots? Well, all we’re talking about is allowing them to apply, okay? Now when you sit in front of a candidate, you can make a decision, during the interview or application process, about whether you want that person to work for you or not, but let’s at least give them the opportunity to kind of try. And I do think that removing barriers, whether it’s practical like this, or whether it’s more systematic, like allowing people the opportunity to have their record cleared automatically, rather than going through the expensive and difficult process of applying for it, you know, when they’re allowed to. Are, you know, pieces of policy and pieces of legislation and change that urgently needs to happen in America, if we’re not going to feel the effects of the pandemic for a generation to come and we keep shutting people out of the workforce and keep kind of continually punishing them, whether it’s through voting or through access to the workforce, long after their time is done.
Robert Yates
Yeah, thanks very much indeed, Celia. We’ve got about ten minutes left, and I’m conscious that we’ve still got some outstanding questions, and I’d like to perhaps switch to one now, though, which I think is more, sort of, forward-looking, and that’s Lena Patel’s question. So, Lena, would you like to come on air and ask your question to the panel?
Lena Patel
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a really, really interesting discussion, and I wanted to ask, we spoke a lot, or you’ve spoken a lot about President-Elect Biden’s commitment and Boris Johnson’s commitments, how do we hold government to account? What can, for example, businesses do to hold government to account, to make sure they enforce these kind of promises, or these commitments that they’ve made?
Robert Yates
Who wants to start with that? I can see Ash is chomping at the bit there. Ash, do you want to…?
Ashish Prashar
I’ve got two separate answers to that. One, I have less faith in Boris Johnson than President-Elect Biden, ‘cause I think he’s more aligned with Donald Trump, so it’s a thing. But, two, I think, look, I am not going to stop protesting in the street. Let’s just get really – I’ll get into the business answer in one second. I want to give Celia room to answer that as well, but, like, you know, we, as people, have come together in this pandemic, ‘cause we’ve seen so many ills in our society. And, you know, like, I think some people in Britain might not see this, but protests are still happening by the way. Like, ‘cause your media doesn’t cover what happens here at a local level at least, right? Even like I think in Portland they went on for nearly 200 days straight, or 150 days straight, but I think you guys stopped covering it after the initial, kind of, like, first month, right? It’s still going on in New York, like the Harlem protests this weekend, you know, we are still fighting for these things on the ground and trying to hold our Politicians to account.
We have elections in New York City, where basically, our whole council and our Mayor are up for election next year. They are gone. They did not defund the police. They are gone, you know, they did not defund the prison system. They are going to go, so they’re going to be held into account in a way – if you saw what the total vote of that election, what, 81 million people now have registered to vote for President Biden, a lot of them voted him not because of the President-Elect Biden, they voted him because – to get rid of President Trump. Those same people are going to turn their attention now on getting rid of people who didn’t do right by their communities, in these local elections, all next year, ‘cause they’re all across America, and the next two or three years. There is a reckoning coming to see this point about, like, the justice system. That is pivotal to, especially big city communities and urban communities.
On the thing about what businesses can do, and I’ll let Celia get into this a bit more than me, but, like, you know, I think – look, we spend $80 billion on our prison system. I’m not talking about private prisons, it’s only about four billion, $80 billion of taxpayer money goes to our prison system. And to bring it back to health as well, we spent 12 billion on a crap healthcare for our incarcerated brothers and sisters, 12 billion of your money, not to save their lives. It’s just like given to private healthcare companies, that’s what we do with our money, right?
I think any – we need to get to a partite level of sanctions on businesses that operate with the prison industrial complex. If you are a company and are involved with the prison industrial complex, you should be sanctioned. You know, you need to – your employees probably don’t even know you do this, most of them, like I think of companies like Black & Decker, I think of 3M, who make those Post-it Notes that probably everyone on this call has got a Post-it Note from 3M, they all are invested in the prison industrial complex. It’s time we sanction their arse, because they are punishing them, because if it happened in a foreign country, Britain and America would be sanctioning them. But we’re doing it to our own populations and we’re like, oh, but somebody needs to make some economic money from this.
Well, we need to take action on those businesses. We need to boycott them, because guess what? We are also consumers, right? We are people in the streets who can choose where to buy our stuff, and the more stuff that’s about to come out about who operates in the prison industrial complex, as groups like Black Lives Matter in America, groups like Just Leadership USA, identify the – Worth Rises is an amazing organisation that I recommend everyone here follows. They published a report, the 4,100 companies involved in our prison industrial complex. It is hard to disconnect your life from those companies but do it. Do all you can, because I’ll tell you what, if we don’t sanction them, like we did in apartheid in South Africa, what does it mean when we go and propose liberal democracy in Africa or the Middle East or wherever else we’re saying, and we’re giving them moral standards that we can’t do ourselves? So, I ask people here, on this call right now, think about the businesses you buy, sell and work with.
Robert Yates
Thanks very much, Ash, and Celia, what are your thoughts about engaging business and to, sort of, change behaviour?
Celia Ouellette
Yeah, I mean, this is 100% of what we do, so I’ll condense it into four succinct points, I hope, that I think also reflect what, you know, kind of broad spectrum of people can do, whether you’re an investor, small or large, whether you’re a business, small or large, or even in an, you know, kind of on an individual level. You know, number one, find your voice, and find your voice in a real way, not kind of just posting tiles, and the way to find your voice in a real way is to understand the actual needs of the communities that you’re talking about, and that seems like something impossible to do. There are organisations like ours, which will literally facilitate that and make that happen, like DeAnna’s, which will literally – we have hired one of the graduates of DeAnna’s programme on our team, you know, who is amazing. So, there are people who are reaching across and saying, “Have a conversation with me and I’ll tell you exactly what it feels like.” We have two people on this call who are doing exactly that.
You know, number two, businesses need to use their leverage. They need to align what they do with the needs of the campaign community. Again, that’s 100% of what we do, so it’s like this isn’t difficult stuff to do. Whether that’s through a human rights lens, or through a workforce lens, or whatever lens that is, businesses have considerable power, especially at a policy advocacy level, at a narrative level, a public education level.
Number three, businesses need to clean house, you know, Ash talked about this. There are powerful ways that businesses can create change through, for example, site selection, don’t invest in states that are building new prisons. Here’s a good example, Alabama is building new prisons right now, and say that the reason why you’re not investing in that state is because you perceive a risk associated, a brand, a reputation, or an investment risk associated with investing in a state that is going backwards in 2020. Look at your supply chain, look at your partnerships, be looking for prison labour, bail involvement, prison involvement, immigration detention involvement. And I think number four, you know, maybe hopefully, thinking in a, sort of, a hopeful way, be part of the solution, you know, people who are members of Chatham House, people who work for businesses are incredibly resourceful and innovative and intelligent and direct that towards, you know, system solutions.
Hiring practices is a great example. Innovating with technology I think is coming up as an alternative to kind of biased human practices. Innovate through service provision. Philanthropy, you know, that none of us would be here without corporate giving and philanthropy. So, that would be my, sort of, top four for where businesses fit into this, and thanks for the question.
Robert Yates
DeAnna, have you any thoughts on that, how to improve accountability?
DeAnna Hoskins
So, one of the things definitely with the premises of what Just Leadership, we believe those closest to the problem are closest to the solution, but furthest from resource and power. So, we have built a criminal justice system, a system to address the needs of individuals impacted by the criminal justice system, that doesn’t include our voices in those conversations. We always try to create a system to say, this is what individuals who have been impacted need, and we simply say, ask us. Invite, do not make decisions about us without us. We don’t make decisions around women reproductive rights without women. We don’t make decisions around veterans without veterans. We can no longer continue to make decisions around criminal justice and people who have been impacted by the criminal justice, without us being at the table, and this is exactly what Just Leadership is. We empower people who have served time, been impacted, to elevating, utilise their voice to say enough is enough. This is what we need. This is what our communities need.
Our communities are marginalised and oppressed, and we’ve really created a system that actually keeps people entrenched in that cycle of oppression, once they’ve either served time, which is supposed to be rehabilitative. So, my call to everyone on this call is to start having conversations. I call them non-traditional conversations. Sitting down with a person who has been impacted by the system that you traditionally would never sit down with, and we can work with Celia and Ash to actually start facilitating some of those. I think this is how we’re going to start being aware of what the needs are, because you went directly to the community most impacted to get that information.
Robert Yates
And likewise we, at Chatham House, very much want to facilitate things like, you know, sort, of convening and bringing in groups together who don’t often meet and discuss, so if we can be part of that process, we’d be delighted to as well. I’m conscious we’re at the top of the hour now, so strictly speaking, we should be stopping, but if I can just sneak in one more question from Ben Cummings, and in fact, Ben has asked a couple of questions. So, Ben, would you like to come on and you can choose which of your questions you would like to ask, but only one, please.
Ben Cummings
Oh gosh. I mean, actually my first one was actually answered very succinctly by the panellists and thanks guys, it’s been incredible, well done. Just, I would want to point out about the defund the police conversation. Barack Obama came out recently decrying it as a divisive slogan. Defund the police, do you see it as being an issue? Do you see it as being potentially divisive for the movement, and what would you propose as a way to assuage those concerns?
Robert Yates
Thanks, Ben. So, Ash, you brought up specifically defund the police.
Ashish Prashar
I did. Sorry, and this conversation has got beyond like in the sense – like, I completely understand, like, DeAnna and me probably have similar views on this. It’s the sense that, like, look, there’s lots of things, right? Barack Obama, I worked for him, and DeAnna’s worked in his Justice Department, like I have nothing but love for Barack Obama. But also, he is not – he is an extremely privileged individual, too. He is – has a mixed-race upbringing in America. He had a white upbringing, frankly, in America. There’s a lot of people in the African-American community who would say that Barack Obama has an upbringing that they don’t have in America and had a lot of privilege. But I don’t even think that is the reason he said what he said. I mean, very transparent about this. I think he gives Joe Biden cover to not do much by saying that, because the damage of that statement coming from Barack Obama is that the most powerful Black man, or the most visible Black man in America, is saying that this statement is divisive.
I don’t care if Jim Clyburn says it, or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, no-one gives a crap, but when Barack Obama says it, it means something, and he’s basically doing a favour for his old mate Joe, who I love and adore and I’m proud that he’s elected, but he’s doing a favour with Joe. He doesn’t have to aggressively pursue some of the things that he possibly would have had to pursue, without the cover of having the most visibly powerful Black man in the country say that. And it’s not divisive, let me just get this straight out there, we’re not – it’s not even asking for the abolishment of police. I am a prison abolitionist. I don’t believe in the policing system, but this thing isn’t even asking for that. It’s asking to move resource, move the ten billion that, say, New York City spends on policing. By the way, we’ve a tank, I don’t know why we have a tank, but we have one ‘cause we spend ten billion on stupid crap in the city too. Like, we have the biggest military in the world and a National Guard, but, you know, in New York, NYPD needed a tank, we spend ten billion on policing. We’re asking to move some of that resource, defund it, that’s not a controversial thing, and move it to mental health, community care, to healthcare, frankly, opportunities in our community, and also, to schooling, to community centres, so our communities have the same chances that privileged communities, like the one Barack Obama grew up in, have themselves.
DeAnna Hoskins
I want to follow-up on that, and I’ll follow-up on it because I think what has happened is what Just Leadership pushed for. Just Leadership pushed to control the narrative, and at the height of Black Lives Matter, the George Floyd death, ‘defund the police’ became the words and we allowed the opposition to control the narrative to define what that means.
In New York City, Just Leadership led the campaign to close Rikers Island, but we said close Rikers Island to build communities. It went over like a hitch. Same definition of defunding the police. We’re saying when you close Rikers, take that funding and build our communities. Invest in our communities around mental health, substance abuse, housing, education, but because it was attached to defund and the people of privileged communities had more access to media and the narrative, they controlled the narrative, and this was my argument with Black Lives, when we say something, we have to own it and define it, because, if not, the other side will take it to define it to diminish its worth and its impact and that is what has happened. So, I’m a huge wordsmithery. Words mean different things for different people, and if the wrong person get a hold to the definition, that’s the definition. So, it’s not defund the police, like Ash says, it’s really invest and building the most marginalised and oppressed communities that have been impacted by over-policing and over-incarceration.
Ashish Prashar
What we need to spend our money on. What you, as your taxpayer money, whether you’re in England or in the US, what you choose to spend your money. Do you want to spend it on tanks and guns and automatic weapons, or do you want to spend it on schools and healthcare? Right, that’s what you choose to spend your money on. You’re electing these people, like, what you choose to spend your money on. Defund the police, it is a thing, but it’s like they also didn’t learn the lessons of ACA. Like, the Democrat Party here, who are now calling this a divisive topic, they didn’t learn it – they let the Republicans control the narrative on the healthcare, when Obama had a Bill, which he also included a public option, but they let the Republicans and the media on the right control that narrative, and they haven’t learnt. The Party hasn’t learnt, but the people have learnt. So, while they control the media and are saying all these things up here, DeAnna’s org, Black Lives Matter, they are not – we’re not going to stop saying it, and we’re not going to stop explaining it. We’re just going to keep say – and the difference between this and the past is the media controlled every way of consumption during the civil rights movement.
Now, because of this thing, and everything else that we have, we can’t hide what it really means. They can’t – you know, The Sun or New York Post can be pro-police and do whatever they want, but they can’t stop videos of brutality, they can’t stop the oppression being shown, they can’t stop anything, so the revolution will be televised.
Robert Yates
I know that DeAnna has to, sort of, call off now, so I will bring proceedings to an end, but just to thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating discussion, and I think what we’ve ended on there is, sort of, clearly, sort of, coming out of this crisis and with, sort of, public financing constrain, there are going to be huge political debates about priorities for society. You know, we’ve just seen here in the UK, in the last couple of weeks, there’s cutting overseas aid, but then, rapidly increasing defence spending, and, you know, a lot of people have got very strong feelings about that. So, we are going to be seeing these huge debates, you know, around the allocation of resources, which groups get covered, which groups don’t get covered, and I think we’ve identified a very, very needy group today that unfortunately, I think are starting this position clearly neglected, clearly overseen, and really that we’ve identified that, you know, this needs to change and tactics to bring this up the political agenda and, as we were saying, you know, this might, you know, involve some sort of direct action to bring about, sort of, you know, change for the good.
So, thank you very much indeed, an absolutely fascinating discussion, and I could have talked for a whole hour about the US healthcare reforms, but perhaps I’ll have you back on that to discuss that in the future. But thank you so much for joining us, and I hope everyone has a lovely weekend. Thank you.
Celia Ouellette
Thank you.
Robert Yates
Bye.
