Thank you everyone for being here this evening
to share space with us.
My name is Dr. Grace Gámez, and I'm the founder and coordinator
of the Reframing Justice Project at American Friends Service
Committee here in Tucson.
And I thought it fitting to open our discussion tonight
with a poem from Lucille Clifton, "Why Don't You
Celebrate With Me."
"Won't you celebrate with me what I have
shaped into a kind of life?
I had no model.
Born in Babylon, both non-white and woman,
what did I see except to be myself?
And make it up.
Here on this bridge, between star shine and clay,
my one hand holding tight my other hand--
come celebrate with me that every day something has tried
to kill me and has failed."
The path from the punishment system to public leadership
is neither easy nor direct.
I'm from Tucson, which is a vibrant Latino community that's
also under-resourced and hyper-surveilled.
I've observed the impact of the punishment system,
and its practices as a community member.
And I myself spent 13 years in Arizona's punishment system.
Though I completed my term of supervision, though,
I have earned advanced degrees, including a PhD in justice
studies, I know that the impact of a conviction history cannot
be neutralized.
When we talk about collateral consequences,
we tend to do so in really narrow parameters.
However, for more than 70 million people in this country,
collateral consequences are not only
those barriers to voting, housing, jobs, education,
and other social services, collateral consequences
mean we're never done doing time and neither are our families.
I found that the true punishment lies in the way
that a conviction history distorts those unseen and more
intimate and cherished parts of life,
such as the parent-child relationship, friendships,
and the way that we see ourselves.
I'll never forget the two women that I celled with in Estrella,
Maricopa County Jail--
Rachel and Gina.
I learned a lot in my brief time with them,
particularly that the close quarters of a jail cell
require that you live on top of one another,
and that confined space held more than just our bodies.
It captured the residue of lost hope and brokenness and pain,
and it also held our dreams of freedom and our practices
for generating safety and community
in inhospitable terrain.
Rachel and her boyfriend were pimps.
Their relationship began when he turned her
out when she was a teenager.
And 20 years later, they became business partners
and she loved this rapper named Lil Jon.
Anyone familiar?
And her favorite song was "Get Low."
And she would sing it literally from the time
the lights turned all the way on till they went all the way off.
And I can easily recall the sound of her voice
in her head nodding to the rhythm
as she sang, (SINGING) 3-6-9, standing real fine.
Get low, get low, from the window to the wall.
Gina was a former veterinary assistant,
and she was sweet, and generous, and loving.
And she adored the Precious Moments characters.
And after I got out, she mailed me pictures
that she had drawn of them with a note that read,
don't forget me.
Gina, like Rachel, was a sex worker.
And it was a road that she began down
after becoming addicted to methamphetamines.
Both women had lost custody of their children.
Rachel had six, Gina had two.
But despite the hard roads they traveled
and the rough exteriors, talking about their children
softened them and brought light to their eyes
as both assured me and really more themselves--
when I clean up, my babies will come home.
The experience of the punishment system
is felt. I felt what it was like to stop being recognized
as human, and I struggled to negotiate the stigma that's
attached to the labels that are defined or used
to define who we are as people.
I struggled to find my place in the world.
I struggled to create safety for myself and for my children.
And ultimately, I decided that I would go to school,
that education was going to be my way forward.
And so I approached the doorstep of the academy carrying
all my hopes and dreams for rebuilding a way forward.
I earned a master's degree in 2008.
And in 2015, I graduated with my doctorate in justice studies.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
And I know some people in the room will feel this,
I exited school with $150,000 worth of debt.
And no way of paying it back, because no one in the academy
would hire me.
I believe that this work is a vocation,
and I came into it not by coincidence but by consequence.
I needed to create something that
reflected my own experience in the punishment system.
It really was the only way that I could feel free while living
under conditions of unfreedom.
And that imperative of creating something
that reads hope and healing continues to resonate,
because I made it in spite of the system, not because of it.
And often the reason that people don't make it
is that those intangible matters of the heart and soul
of healing are rarely addressed in a meaningful way
should you happen to have access to re-entry programming, which
by and large tends to focus on developing some skill like how
to write a resume or dress for an interview, versus nourishing
the heart and mind of a person, and holding them in community.
We all need safety, dignity, and belonging.
These are human imperatives, and we
exempt a large swath of our communities
from those basic necessities.
Successful reentry requires community,
and that means that we all have a role to play in this work.
Reframing justice is explicitly focused
on pouring into the leadership capacity
of directly impacted people--
people who are routinely excluded
from meaningful opportunities to engage in policy and reform
efforts.
And what I've learned in these years of research,
the advocacy, and organizing is that those types of exclusions
are myopic.
People who have been system-involved
are closest to the issue and are necessary to create
effective and meaningful change.
If we consider successful movements
for social political change currently or historically,
people with direct experience are at the forefront
in leadership roles.
Can you imagine the Civil Rights movement
without people of color?
Or reproductive justice movements without women?
Consider the power of those voices
to not just raise awareness, but to affect
meaningful and lasting change, and that same logic
can be applied to this work.
We all want a justice system that
produces safety and healing ideally,
yet the strategies that are deployed time
and again frequently do not get us to that mutual goal.
Arizona is positioned as the lead incarcerator
of the Western United States.
We incarcerate women at twice the rate of other states.
We have a recidivism rate that hovers at 50%.
And as these numbers grow, so does
the rate of families impacted by incarceration.
However, we can safely decarcerate in Arizona
by addressing policy and legislation,
and by diversifying the leadership around these issues.
And this is the work of reframing justice.
We are currently in the process of shepherding
a bill through the legislative process, HB 2270.
It's the earned credit release bill.
We know that longer prison sentences do not reduce crime.
Yeah, Arizona is one of the last strongholds in the union that
require all people to serve 85% of their sentence
regardless of offense or evidence of rehabilitation.
HB 2270 would modernize this outdated sentencing law
and return people who have demonstrated change back
to their families and communities.
I'd like to now introduce Deb North
and then later Nate McKowen will come up after her.
These are two leaders in reframing justice,
and each will talk about their experience with Arizona's
punishment system and the impact of leadership
in the hope of legislative change.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
She's amazing.
Can you hear me?
There we go.
Hello, my name is Deborah North.
And I also want to thank you for being here, both for the poetry
and for listening to us talk a little bit about the justice
system here in the state of Arizona.
I am directly impacted because my husband is currently
serving five years in Kingman for a first time
non-violent offense.
And the only person that wanted him to go to prison
or do any jail time was the prosecutor,
and they are the only people with any power in this system--
no one else.
I married him in 1988, and the person that I thought I married
had two degrees from MIT, was a hardworking engineer
in the Silicon Valley.
But fast forward to 2015, and I was called home
from a business meeting because he was being arrested.
I got home to 30 police cars in my front yard and camera crews,
because according to the Sheriff's Department who
was holding a press conference in my front yard,
bad people live in good neighborhoods.
And that's how I came to this.
I initially met Grace a couple of years
ago when I was really looking for community,
because people don't really want to hear these stories.
It's very hard to hear them, and we all have our own problems.
So I am blessed to have found this community of people
who are working to change the justice system.
We have 5% of the population on the planet in this country.
And we have 25% of the prisoners incarcerated on the planet.
The numbers are staggering.
And we've built a business that needs more people all the time.
So meeting these people, becoming
involved in the leadership for justice and social reform
has really given me a community where
I can be open and fully honest with what's
going on in my life.
And I can tell you how important that is, because this
is a very isolating experience.
And for people coming out of prison,
it remains an isolating experience.
HB 2270 is so important for all of us
who are living with people who are on the inside.
We need our husbands, wives, fathers, sons, daughters,
mothers.
We need them back home because it
will help us save money, reduce what we're spending on.
We spend $1.1 billion in Arizona State tax money
on the prisons every year.
We could spend that money on education
and on dealing with the root cause of why
we have these behaviors that lead to incarceration,
much more important than having people behind barbed wire.
So thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Good evening, everyone.
I just got out of prison two months ago,
and prison is a different world.
I'll tell you that.
And I didn't really know if I was
going to have a place in this world
when I got out, because it's not like they prepare you
for when you get out.
Well, I met a guy named Joe and he introduced me to people
like Grace and the AFSC.
And they held out their hand and they said, come with us.
Stand up, we want you to be a leader.
They said, you can make a difference.
You can be a voice for the voiceless.
And I said, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
So this opportunity has given me a chance
to be a part of my community.
My community has opened their arms and welcomed me.
And because of that, I am seeing success and it's awesome.
So I want to leave you with one thing.
I got a piece published in The Sun right before I got out.
And this just little window into my world in prison.
My first year in prison, I turned apathy into my armor.
I didn't need friendships or love or trust,
all that soft shit was for the weak.
Prison was a hard place, and I needed
to be hard to survive it.
I fell asleep with a stomach ache every night.
As I moved in to my second year, I made a friend.
We told each other stories of our old lives
and we laughed a lot.
One morning, the guards found him dead in his cell overdosed
on heroin and pills.
I cried that night, not sure if my tears were more
for him or for me.
In my third year, I watched a man get his face stomped in,
the whole unit did, in silence.
Later, when we heard the man had died,
someone said, welcome to prison.
I laughed a little too loudly for a little too long.
Every song, TV show, and movie taunted me
with stories of intimacy and romance.
In the privacy of the shower stall,
I masturbated to fading memories of ex-girlfriends.
Then during my fourth year, I started
writing one of my ex-girlfriends,
telling her she was my soulmate.
She said I was hers.
We made plans for when I would get out.
In year 5, she stopped writing me back.
I became a Buddhist in my sixth year.
The monks who had renounced all worldly desires
became my role models.
But when I meditated, I felt no unity
with the universe, only a clearer sense of isolation.
In year 7, my neighbor got killed.
His homeboys came with smiles and handshakes,
and they left him with purple lips and shit in his pants.
I took the chair out of his cell and put it in mine,
so I'd have two.
I figured he didn't need it anymore.
I'll be released in six months, and I'm more afraid now than
when I came to prison.
The world out there is alien to me.
This place of violence, and death, and loneliness
has become my home.
What if I can't take off this armor
that I've worn for so long?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Nate McKowen by the way.
That was Nate McKowen, folks.
[APPLAUSE]
My name is Joe Watson.
I work for American Friends Service Committee
Arizona with Grace and with some amazing people,
with folks like Nate and Deb.
The images you've been seeing behind you, a lot of them
came from a little over two weeks ago.
We had an event at the State Capitol
called Reframing Justice Day.
We had over 100 directly impacted folks at the Capitol
advocating for sentencing reform.
What is a directly impacted person?
It's somebody who is formerly incarcerated,
somebody who has a conviction history,
and also the loved ones of those who are inside or have been.
These folks went there to tell their personal stories,
because as Grace pointed out, it's
these personal stories that have so much power
to change the system.
Folks like Deb and Nate sharing their personal stories,
being brave, that day was so full
of heroes, people like them.
I just want to salute them.
So if you could clap for them one more time, I'd appreciate.
[APPLAUSE]
Please do all you can to inform yourself about HB 2270.
It would restore fairness and proportionality
in our sentencing guidelines.
More importantly, it would restore hope
to people who are incarcerated throughout the state.
And we believe that hope is a catalyst for change,
not just folks on the inside, but the system, our communities
as a whole.
So please check it out.
We need folks to call their elected representatives
at the state legislature.
This bill has broad bipartisan support,
but we cannot get it heard in committee.
We have one person holding it up and unfortunately, they
have all the power.
So please educate yourself, contact these folks, and demand
that they at least give this bill a hearing--
just a hearing, that's all we need--
so that we can restore some sanity to this system.
I just want to say thank you.
Appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]