Episode 6 - The Victims of Mass Incarceration

Justice In America

The Appeal

News, Politics, Prison, Law, Criminal, Justice, Jail, History, Education, Incarceration, America

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2018

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Often, when people talk about the criminal justice system, they talk in big numbers— the millions of people serving time, the billions of dollars mass incarceration costs each year, the hundreds of thousands in jail at any given moment. But talking in big numbers sometimes obscures the fact that we’re discussing real people on this show—human beings, not statistics. On this episode, we discuss who these people really are and how this system affects not only their lives but the lives of their friends and family, particularly their partners and children. In particular, we explore look at how mass incarceration hurts women with loved ones involved in the system.

Our guest this episode is Gina Clayton, the Executive Director of Essie Justice Group, who joins us to discuss the phenomenal organization she has built focused on women with incarcerated loved ones.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Imagine if like our sentencing laws and policies took into account the fact that every time
0:11.4	you put someone behind bars it means that women have to take on
0:14.9	more jobs have to do all of the child care responsibilities have to pay the phone calls the
0:21.2	visiting the commissary bills, and are also criminalized, are also rendered
0:25.5	isolated and marginalized by the stigma that paints across families who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system. Hi everyone I'm Josie Duffy Rice and I'm Clint Smith and this is Justice in America
0:50.1	each show we discuss a topic in the American criminal justice system and try to explain what it is and how it works.
0:56.4	We appreciate everybody for joining us today. You can find us on Twitter at Justice
1:00.5	underscore podcast and like our Facebook page you can find us at Justice in America. Justice So we started the show with a clip from our guest Gina
1:14.0	Gina is the founder and executive director of SE Justice Group
1:17.4	which is an organization focused on harnessing the collective power of women
1:21.6	with incarcerated loved ones to end mass incarceration's harm to women and communities.
1:27.0	What Gina has done is pretty amazing. She's brought together groups of women and given them tools to let them build communities,
1:34.4	organize for change, and fight for their rights.
1:37.2	And she'll be joining us later in the show to help us discuss today's topic.
1:40.8	So today we're talking about the impact that this criminal justice system has on actual people.
1:47.0	This may sound silly because of course we're always talking about people, but we know we also talk a lot in these big numbers. You know numbers like 11.7
1:56.0	million, which is how many people cycle through jail each year, or 94%, which is about the
2:01.3	percentage of cases that are pled out instead of going to trial, or
2:05.6	80 billion, which is how much the criminal justice system cost each year.
2:10.2	But we know that these are big numbers.
2:12.8	And you know the saying, one person is a tragedy,
2:16.0	when million people is just a statistic.
	...

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