Although the following interview discusses Jacob's work as an employee of ACLU SoCal, all of the opinions in this interview are his own.

MC 00:00:03

Hi, Jacob, I want to say, I make sure I say, Jacob?

JR 00:00:07

You said it perfectly.

MC 00:00:07

OK. I wanted to go ahead and introduce myself. I am Monique Cardona. I am a second year public policy student at the Luskin School of Public Affairs. Um, I have an interest in prison law. And so I'm really thrilled and excited to be talking to you. I'm going to ask you to go ahead and introduce yourself, your title, and maybe what you were working on before COVID.

JR 00:00:34

Sure. Thank you for inviting me to do this. My name is Jacob Reisberg, spelled like Jacob, but it's the German pronunciation. I use he/him pronouns. And I work at the ACLU of Southern California on the Criminal Justice team. What was the last part? What did I do before COVID? My general work has been everything related to Orange County jails, including general conditions work, which means working with incarcerated people to defend their basic rights to dignity and safety. That's one bucket. The other bucket is to try to prevent more jail expansion in Orange County, because that's another big thing that's happening right now. They're trying to build 900 new jail beds. And so that's the other half of my work, is to try to stop that from happening.

MC 00:01:47

Right. That's super important. I guess if so, I like this question. So if you could come up with three adjectives to describe what it's been like to be you, professionally speaking, during the pandemic, what three adjectives would you use?

JR 00:02:11

Well, that's hard. I think I'm thinking “exhausting,” but I just worry that is too trite and not capturing all of the anxiety. Also, I don't know what the adjective is for anxiety, anxiety-provoking.

MC 00:02:44

Overwhelmed?

JR 00:02:45

Overwhelmed. Yeah, overwhelmed. What's the third? Occasionally hopeful? And some, yeah, sometimes defeated, sometimes hopeful. But I guess what I’m trying to get is that it's just ups and downs, and has been throughout the whole pandemic.

MC 00:03:14

So let's go back then to March 11, 2020, when things started to shut down. Can you tell me a little bit about how your life may have changed that week, professionally speaking? And if there's personal stuff that also happened, feel I mean, feel free.

JR 00:03:30

Yeah. Well, I think it's helpful to understand the professional by thinking back to the personal. I mean, I remember, in the very early days of the pandemic, feeling so uncertain about what was happening. We didn't have good information, everything seemed scary. I remember having panic attacks, and I'm not someone who normally has panic attacks. I remember Windexing my groceries. So it was that phase of the pandemic.

Then you imagine what that's like to be on the inside of a jail, incarcerated in a cage, where you're jammed up next to 60 other people in a dorm, and where you're getting no information about the pandemic. In fact, within Orange County Jails, a lot of the newspaper articles about the pandemic were being clipped out and censored by jail staff. My colleague and I started getting calls from people inside Orange County jails close to 24 hours a day, and people were desperate for information and for help, because jail was becoming even scarier than it normally was. So yeah, that initial phase was some of the absolute worst when, when just no one knew what was going on. And we didn't know how best to help.

MC 00:05:16

You said that things were getting scarier than usual. Can you maybe describe a little bit what seemed unusual at that time that was happening?

JR 00:05:26

Definitely. I mean, people inside knew that there was something going on. But like I said, deputies were preventing information from coming inside. The other piece of it was that people were learning about the things that they were supposed to be doing, like, trying to social distance, like having cleaning supplies, like wearing masks, and all of those things were either not allowed inside or not possible inside. If you're in a dorm in the Orange County jails, you're sleeping on a bunk bed, with someone below you, and a person to your right and a person to your left, so close by that you can reach out and touch them. These are extremely small physical spaces. And so social distancing just wasn't possible. Same thing with cleaning supplies, the jail staff was not giving any cleaning supplies to people inside. And people didn't have enough toilet paper, they didn't have enough soap. They didn't have any hand sanitizer and masks for at least the first month or so.

MC 00:06:49

That's really scary. Um, so with everything starting to kind of, I guess, shut down, what did you all focus on? It sounds like you couldn't get in. I think I know L.A. County was shut down, it was, you know, folks couldn't get into inspect for a minute, after everything shut down. So I'm curious what that was like for you.

JR 00:07:14

Yeah, same thing in Orange County, there were no visits allowed. Our sole contact with people was via the phone. Prior to the pandemic, our main form of contact was going to visit people in person, and then also communicating via letter. And so one of the first things that we did, at the beginning of the pandemic, was set up a hotline that people could call for free, and that was on the jails’ Do Not record list so that it was confidential. And at the beginning of the pandemic, that hotline number was just going to me and to one other person. And we were getting calls with people saying everything I just said, as well as expressing their fear. I mean, I can't tell you how many conversations I had, with people inside who would say, “I really feel like I'm going to die in here,” or, “I feel like I'm not going to see my kids again, or my grandkids again.” There’s a significant number of people in the Orange County jails who are medically vulnerable or who are elderly. And so those conversations were brutal, especially with people who are in their 60s or in their 70s. And yeah, just the level of fear was just off the charts and very hard to figure out how to address it, while people were in circumstances where they could not do much to try to protect themselves from it.

MC 00:09:19

Yeah, so that's the main thing that you had a phone, like a direct connection into kind of what was happening. Well, that sounds really useful for, like, information. It also sounds like you know, from a professional standpoint, really exhausting. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about what, how your, how you, your body responded to all of that stress and all of the distress and despair that was coming across the other line. How did you take care of yourself? What did you do? Did you, you know, does the ACLU have any support for this? I know it's unprecedented. But I'm hoping that, you know, somewhere, you were able to turn somewhere.

JR 00:10:11

Yeah, it definitely was personally difficult. I think one of the things that I tried to remind myself of was that no matter how hard those conversations were, no matter how scary for me, or how anxiety provoking for me, when the phone call was over, I could open the door to my house, and go walk down the street, or be outside with a mask on. My reference point always was, “think about how it feels to be the person who's inside.” And sometimes that's cyclical, because the more you think about that reference point, the more you also get fearful and anxious for them. And but at the same time, it's, it's helpful to remember, like, okay, it's scary for me, but I need to be fighting in solidarity with them. I still don't think that I have actually processed it. I mean, I, I really feel strongly that even though I'm now vaccinated, and the numbers are better in California, we're still in the pandemic, we don't know what next variant is coming around the corner. We don't know how long the vaccine immunity will last. And so, for example, right now, the COVID numbers in the Orange County jails are much better. And that's in large part because a lot of folks inside have been vaccinated. But I really, I do not feel like we're out of the woods yet. And so I don't know, I don't feel like I've been able to take that much of a breath of, okay, we're past it now. Because I just don't think that's the reality.

MC 00:12:26

That's completely understandable. Is, is that the focus of your work right now then, just continuing to monitor the conditions in Orange County, as things kind of develop?

JR 00:12:40

At the start of the pandemic, or close to the start of the pandemic, we and ACLU National and two law firms brought two lawsuits against the Sheriff. And the suits were very similar. The biggest difference was that one is in state court, and the other is in federal court. Those cases are still ongoing. They've slowed down some, especially since the vaccine rollout has begun. But those cases are one of the the main ways that we monitor what's happening in terms of COVID inside the jails. Now, there's still everything else that's not COVID, or that is related to COVID, but not actually getting sick. And that stuff we're also trying to work on. I think the best example of that, is starting at the beginning of the pandemic, Orange County no longer provided hot meals to people inside. And although they never really said it outright, our suspicion was that because basically, when COVID hit, the jail population went way down for a number of different reasons, which I'm happy to talk about. But with the lower population, they didn't have enough incarcerated people to staff the kitchens, which is how they normally cook food for hot meals. And so for a year and four months or something like that, now, people inside have not had consistent hot meals every single day, and often no hot meals for months since the start of the pandemic. Although that's not the same thing as getting COVID, it's connected to COVID and is an incredibly damaging issue for people inside. That’s one of the number one issues that people inside call us about. No hot meals. Instead, people get bologna on sometimes moldy bread, and similar items in sack lunches three times a day. So we're trying to address those connected issues as well, even if the virus itself starts to get under control.

MC 00:15:17

So, speaking of connected issues, one of the things that LA County is kind of dealing with, I'm sure you're aware, is our fun sheriff or lack thereof, not really fun. But I'm curious as to what's been going on in Orange County, and if there's any other agencies or officials who may be hindered aid, or made some decisions that you felt were more damaging than not.

JR 00:15:47

The Sheriff had to be fought every step of the way to try to get people out of the jails, which was our main demand: release the medically vulnerable, release the elderly, release disabled people, because those are the people who are most likely to die if they get COVID. And he had to be fought tooth and nail for the releases that did happen. The DA also was awful. The main damaging thing I saw the DA doing was using fear mongering tactics when the Sheriff did start to do some early releases. The Sheriff introduced some policies that would say, for example, if someone was 10 days out from their sentence, would let them out early. Then it was expanded to 30 days out, and so on. So he was letting a substantial number of people out early, as the pandemic went on, still not enough in our view, but he was letting people out. And the DA, came out with these fear mongering press statements, which were like, “sex predators on the loose.” I don't remember the exact language, but it was basically, imagine the worst stereotype of fear mongering for the sake of trying to get the public scared so that they don't support releases, in the name of safety, in the name of public health. And that's what the DA was doing. So I think he also was quite awful.

MC 00:18:01

Did, so after everything shut down, you know, you kind of spoke to, they fought releases. But I'm curious if there were any other things that maybe you or your staff encountered happening at the jail, where you just felt like, things were being less than transparent, I know, you mentioned they were filtering, like the information coming in. How long did that last? And did you see them? You know, I know, statewide policy is different than what governs, like the counties. And so I know, for example, statewide, they did have like an informa- they did have a mandate to do like some type of information campaign. I don't know how, if you know, if that translated to the county level?

JR 00:18:52

No, it's been, somewhere between awful and mediocre for all of the pandemic. And it's been awful in different ways. At the start, it was about information about the virus. Later on, it was information about the quarantine process and what that was, would look like. It ended up being that the quarantine process meant that people had to stay in their cell for 23 hours a day and only got an hour of time out of your cell. So that disincentivizes people from saying, I'm feeling sick, because they don't want to get tested. Because if they get tested and are positive, they'll be in their cell for 23 hours a day. Which makes no sense as a policy if what you care about is trying to have a healthy jail population, but I don't think that's what they care about. I don't think that they particularly care about incarcerated people’s health so long as it doesn't blow up on them as a bad press issue, but I don't think that they really care. Later onk the bad information was when they started giving out vaccines. They weren't giving people sufficient information about the vaccines or their safety. And so especially at the beginning, there was a massive amount of vaccine refusal, right, where people were just not trusting what the sheriff was giving them. And so one of the things we did much later on, and this is just in the last month or two was basically send in a mailer. That mailer wa an information packet on the effectiveness and safety of the different COVID vaccines, to try to have information coming from an outside source, to tell people the vaccine is safe and effective. But it's been bad throughout.

I think the thing that I would emphasize on the list of harmful things that the sheriff has done, , transparency and information sharing is on there, but it's nowhere close to the top. I mean, just in terms of basic safety, obviously, the best thing to do is just release people because you cannot have social distancing in a carceral setting, period. But beyond that, the Sheriff’s department wasn’t even doing the very minimal things that you could do in a carceral setting to help keep people safe, at least at the beginning of the pandemic. I would estimate for about the first month or so they weren't giving people masks. After that they weren't giving people real masks, what they were giving them was torn up or cut up pieces of bedsheets, and pretty often we would get phone calls saying there's like blood or fecal matter, urine on my facemask, because it's just a cut up bedsheet. They weren't giving people soap. I mean, so I just think the thing I would want to emphasize is, there were just so many different types of violations of people's basic humanity and safety. And another thing that I'd emphasize is it definitely was made worse by the pandemic, but this issue was the case before COVID and will continue to be the case after the pandemic is over.

MC 00:22:46

I mean, on that note, it sounds like it's hard to single out maybe like the lone offense that was the most surprising and distressing to you. But is there anything that maybe sticks out to you as like, you know, you knew things were bad before COVID is regards to this, but COVID just exacerbated this in a real way, if there was anything that was particularly, I guess, surprising to you.

JR 00:23:31

I had an image that our carceral system just does not care, or does not recognize the humanity of incarcerated people. And I think that's inherent when you put human beings in cages. But it was pretty shocking to see that, even in these unprecedented circumstances where you have a global pandemic, a deadly disease, and a disease that we know it is the worst possible situation to be in as enclosed, confined spaces, that even in those circumstances, there really wasn't consideration for people's humanity beyond a bare, bare minimum. Even that we had to fight tooth and nail for. So yes, that was shocking to me.

MC 00:24:36

So if there was maybe one policy you could have recommended during this entire time, what would it have been?

JR 00:24:44

Free them all. And I mean that seriously, I think, I think that there is a weaponized narrative of what public safety means and it's weaponized by law enforcement. It's weaponized by politicians. It's weaponized by pop culture to a certain extent. And it's a definition of public safety that serves to uphold white supremacy, and serves to uphold capital. And that definition is so narrow. What public safety is used to mean is if someone causes harm that we as a society, have decided to criminalize, the way that we're going to respond to that harm, is to put somebody in a cage. Nevermind that they're disproportionately black and Latinx. Nevermind that they’re disproportionately poor, nevermind that they're disproportionately medically vulnerable. That's going to be our societal response. And that gets defined as “public safety” because it's doing something about these particular harms. My version of public safety, what I think a better version of public safety means asking, for example, how many people in our community are getting sick? How many people are going to the hospital? How many people have enough food to eat, how many people have a home to sleep in, how many people have enough money that they can meet the necessities of daily life? And I think all of those things are achievable, and are just different metrics for how to think about safety. Or all those things could be improved without putting people in cages, and in fact, incarceration makes things worse. And we would have a much more safe and a much more just society. So I really do mean, my number one policy would be free them all, and build something completely different.

MC 00:27:11

I'm inclined to agree. Um, can you tell me about the impact of the pandemic, maybe on the, on your clients, on the people that were on the other end of the phone? I know, you spoke to, like the conditions of confinement. But I'm also wondering, you know, there was a lot of isolation happening at that time. And I'm just wondering, it just, it was a different type of isolation. It didn't just feel like okay, I'm in jail now, it feels, you know, you spoke to that uncertainty. And so I'm wondering, what was this experience like for some of the people on the other end, aside from, you know, just the, the masks and everything else?

JR 00:27:54

Yeah, I mean, I definitely want to be sensitive, because some of those stories are not mine to share. Even if I spoke to people directly. I think it's crucial to speak to incarcerated people directly, so I hope you're including incarcerated people in these interviews to answer those sorts of questions. I can, I can say that overall, I mean, there definitely, there are some people who you talk to once or twice, and then they either are released or don't call back. There's a lot of churn in jails because of just the nature of jails compared to prisons. But there are also people who are in there for much longer term stints and who we have ongoing relations with where I talk to folks every single week, or sometimes multiple times a week. I think about the physical health toll on incarcerated people both related to illness and related to things like not getting hot meal meals or not being able to see your family or have programming. But the mental health toll on incarcerated people was also, is also, immense. And there is no treatment in sight for it, nor do I think that there can be effective treatment for it. Well, people are still incarcerated. Yeah, I don't think I can share some of the specifics, unfortunately.

MC 00:29:51

In what ways have your feelings about your role as an advocate, I guess shifted as a result of doing this work during the pandemic?

JR 00:30:05

That's a good question. I mean, I don't know if I have any clear takeaways yet, since I really still think we're still in it. I'm also still very new at this. This is my first major jail litigation that I've been a part of. And I don't think I have enough experience to have a full opinion on, especially what impact the cases will have. That is one very basic question that I sometimes ask myself is, what is the impact going to be? And I don't say that to be flippant, either, because I, I do think that there have been some real results from the litigation. I mentioned before that the jail population is way down in Orange County, it's down close to 40%, maybe even more than 40% from what it was pre-pandemic. And I do think that a big reason that it's down that far is because of pressure from the lawsuits. But at the same time, I think about the resources that have been poured into the cases -- an unreal amount of brain power, time, sweat, I'm sure some tears, and I'm deeply grateful for that. But at the same time, I think the reason that a case like this, like these COVID jail cases happen, is because COVID is seen as an emergency. And it is! It absolutely is an emergency. But like I mentioned before, one of the main other things that I'm working on at ACLU SoCal and with a broader coalition of people in Orange County, is to stop the construction of a new jail facility, the James Musick Jail. And I think regular, normal jail expansion just isn't seen that way. It's not seen as an emergency that needs the same level of legal resources or brain power or attention, at least from the mainstream legal community. I mean, there's there's really exciting and inspiring grassroots activism happening in Orange County. I sometimes wonder what it would mean for our Stop the Musick Coalition, the one that's trying to stop this jail expansion, if we had 40 lawyers to think about how to bring a case to oppose that construction, like we've had for COVID. And for me, that what I think that just shows is how used to jail expansion we've become, and by we, I mean, society and the legal nonprofit world. To that world, jail expansion is seen as more normal, it just isn’t reacted to with the same urgency.

MC 00:34:17

How has your experience thus far changed the way you think about prison law? And if there's anything that, anything about working during this time that maybe has illuminated parts of the doctrine that governs prison law in terms of conditions, that has kind of come up for you? Maybe more prominently during these past, what, 11 months?

JR 00:34:50

I guess one thing that I have thought about is the law itself, and whether lawsuits are an effective vehicle to help people who are incarcerated. And here too, I , I think about the fact that COVID was so clearly a life and death emergency. And yet, on the federal side, on our federal case side, even though we got a good order pretty early on from the district level court, as soon as the defendants brought an emergency stay appeal up to the US Supreme Court, the order went away, because the Supreme Court stayed the order. And maybe that has to do more with just who's on the current US Supreme Court. But I think it also has to do with just how incredibly high a bar is set by prison law, jail law, to try to help people inside, even in the context of an emergency. Same basic idea on the state side, although there, it was less that the main impediment that I saw was an awful US Supreme Court, and more about the nature and speed of the legal process itself. And that's just a long way of saying it's slow. And so even when the pandemic requires speed, because it is an emergency, our state case moved so slowly. I think the best example of that was in December, we got an incredible order from the state judge that said, the sheriff had to reduce the overall Orange County jail population in congregate areas by 50%, five zero. And he didn't have to let everybody go, the judge said he had discretion to do electronic monitoring or transfer people or whatever. So he gave him discretion. But instead of saying, you have to do that fast, he gave the sheriff a full month to come up with the plan for how he was going to do it. And in that very month, from December to January, there was a massive, massive COVID outbreak in the jail. I mean, more than 1000 people got sick. And that, for me just shows the nature of legal process, which is so slow. Also makes me wonder, is it actually an effective way to help incarcerated people?

MC 00:38:44

Well the stratified nature right of when of the way releases did happen, I'm wondering if you could speak to that because I thought that was also interesting to watch how like, some people got out and some didn't, and it kind of depended on the charge. And, you know, what, how the district attorney feels in your particular county? So I'm wondering, can you talk a little bit, I'm more familiar with LA County, but how did that process, what kind of discretion was used in Orange County as far as releases go?

JR 00:39:16

It was similar to the zero bail order that the California Judicial Council issued, saying that certain charges should presumptively, not be booked in, or released on zero bail. And the sheriff did something similar using his own authority by picking charge categories of who to release. I think one of the worst aspects of the sheriff's release policy was that unlike the zero bail order, where the question was, what are you being charged then, and so, if you're charged with some small offense, you're not going to go to jail, you're not going to be put at risk of COVID, not going be putting other people in the jail at risk of COVID, et cetera. But what the sheriff did instead was to say, I'm not only going to consider what you're currently booked on, I'm going to consider your entire criminal record. And so we spoke to people who were in on some very minor charge, but because they had a slightly more serious charge from 5, 10, 15 years ago, they weren't given the early release policy or said, just tough luck. So that just made absolutely no sense.

MC 00:40:58

What lessons do you think we as a society should take away from how we treat people in emergencies? And just how we treat incarcerated people in general? Especially medic, medically vulnerable, incarcerated people?

JR 00:41:16

My overall answer is that we need to see the humanity and dignity of incarcerated people as worthy of respect and basic safety. I think one particularly insidious and very intentional features of incarceration is how it's very hidden away from lots of society. What I mean by that is, unless you've been incarcerated or had a loved one inside, jails and prisons are pretty much hidden away, out of sight, out of mind. A lot of people in the United States are never forced to reckon with the suffering and pain that's inherent in all incarceration, not just in COVID context, but in all incarceration. But I think in the context of COVID, what I saw starting to happen in some real positive ways was more people were thinking about what does public health mean, or how does a virus actually spread. And people started to realize that we're all actually connected, physically, as human beings. And that includes those human beings who are in a jail down the road out of sight. People saw that when they saw the virus exploding in jail populations, and started to realize, oh, it's not going to stay there, it's going to spread into the community, because custody staff go into the jails, and then come home. What happens inside of the jails ends up coming back out into the community. Or when people got sick in the jails, they have to go to the hospital. That takes up hospital bed space. All of this, I think shows that there's a real interconnectedness. And I hope that that leads people to also see that there's a shared humanity, rather than just a population that should be separated and ignored. The other huge takeaway for me, and I think this too, I've started to see people catch on to in an exciting way is related to the financial toll of the pandemic. And people I think, are starting to see their local government saying things like, sorry, we're not going to have money to pay for those extra unemployment benefits or the school lunch program, or rent assistance or whatever people actually need. And then the people see their local government turn around and give law enforcement more money than they ever have gotten before. And that's true in Orange County, especially. Orange County Sheriff's Department got $200 million last year, and their budget is up I think 150 percent over the last decade. You compare that to what the health agency and the social services agencies are getting, which are down 20%, or for the last decade. So I think people are starting to catch on, that this is not how it should be. And I think that also reduces the legitimacy of law enforcement and incarceration, and handing over these massive sums of money to law enforcement. And in my mind, anything that reduces the legitimacy of law enforcement and gets people to say, you know, what, we should be defunding the police, we should be spending that very same money, dollar for dollar in ways that actually help people. Jobs, housing, community based mental health care, that I really see as a positive effect of this crisis. And I really think we're only starting to see the very beginning of it.

MC 00:46:03

Hopefully. Jacob, Jacob I want to thank you for your time. Let me go ahead and stop recording.