MD 00:17

Hi, I'm Marena Dieden a 2L at UCLA School of Law. I'm in the Epstein Public Interest Law and Policy Program. And I am on the public defense track right now. I worked for the alternate public defender in Compton last summer, and I'm going to be working this summer with the Los Angeles Public Defender. I did a lot of um prison work in my undergrad at the University of Michigan. I worked with the prison Creative Arts Project, facilitating Creative Writing workshops at a men's prison in Michigan for three semesters, which is one of the things that brought me to law school and, and brought me to be interested in this work. Um, so that you know a little bit about me, and then I would love if you could just um give a brief professional biography of yourself.

JS 01:06

Yes, okay yes. I also went to the University of Michigan. I studied history and philosophy, obviously, always going to be a lawyer. I went to Yale Law School. I then clerked for Judge Cole on the Sixth Circuit. After that I was a fellow at Public Citizen, which is Nader's Raiders, the sort of public consumer rights group. I then was a public defender, which was the dream, at PDS, the public defender service in D.C. I was there for five years, and then moved to Chicago for family reasons. I taught at Northwestern in the clinical program here for a year. And then really still one has been the courtroom. So I went back to the federal law, I went to the federal defenders in northern Indiana. I was there for four years. At that point, I left to do policy work at a group called the Justice collaborative, which then became known as the appeal then disbanded and regrouped. And they've had like a long history. And I left that job when I realized a) that I really wanted to be doing direct work, not policy work at a national level, but direct work in a specific place. Umm, and I really wanted to be working with people who are serving long sentences, but the thing that I really cared about was decarceration, through prisons, as opposed to jails and front (end) mechanisms, and that there was this real, like, really startling gap in the provision of services in Illinois. And that's true in lots of places and that it was not okay. And so I found it, I found it IPP in 2019.

MD 02:31

Wow, well, it seems like you have a wealth of knowledge and really interesting that you started out on the like front end public defense work and then realized kind of found your passion in the end decarceration setting. I'm just going to read um this, this disclaimer that I have to read. I want to start by explaining how we plan to use the conversation we are about to have. Our conversation is not legally privileged, and we will not keep what you say confidential. We plan to make transcripts and recordings of our interview available for use by future researchers and the general public. And portions may be posted online or discussed in posts on our website or other published writing. I want our conversation to flow freely. And I realize that you may discuss a sensitive topic or mention a piece of information that you later realize you would like withheld. If you request it now, at the end of the interview or later on after further reflection, we're happy for you to review the transcript of our conversation before it's made public and to redact any portions you deem necessary from the transcript in the recording. So I have some questions prepared, but I also really want to give you this space to address what you think um is the most important, what you want to focus on. Um, our hope in this is to bring insight into the lived experiences of incarcerated people during the COVID 19 pandemic, um the responses or lack thereof by the legal and political systems that decide their fate, documenting the personal experiences of those working in and around the legal systems during the moment of crisis, and strategies for coping with secondary trauma. And then also lastly, the insight into the functioning of the legal system during this time, the mechanisms by which the law has answered or failed to answer the demands for intervention by judges and other government officials.

JS 04:44

Great.

MD 04:47

Well, what have you been the most distressed, impressed, surprised by as you've watched um corrections administrators, judges, other public officials respond or fail to respond to the COVID threat?

JS 05:06

Um, it's hard to pin down just one thing. I will say that the first month of COVID were extraordinarily upsetting and distressing. Um, and I was really blown away by the inaction by a lot of systems players. People died who did not need to die because people were not willing to be creative or brave in the early days. Illinois like a lot of places, as a real breadth of mechanisms at their disposal, in the prisons, and in the jails, to decarcerate to release. And there was a lot of administrative hesitancy in in every agency. And so I don't want to I don't want to suggest that it was one agency and not another agency as a whole agencies. People were extraordinarily hesitant, even when given the tools explicitly by the governor to use them in the Department of Corrections space.

MD 06:34

What tools were were given by the governor?

JS 06:36

Yeah, the governor issued a medical furlough policy that allowed folks who are medically vulnerable to be sent home. And the department did send some people home, and that was really great. It sent a very, very few people. Not even nowhere near enough, just like nowhere near. Um…

MD 06:56

And were you um at this point, at early on in this time, were you litigating these were you or…?

JS 07:06

Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. From the second, you know, they were really litigated. The medical furlough processes is administrative entirely. And so, um you know, eventually, after the executive order came down, the department articulated like sort of guidelines around how this was going to be used. The process itself is really cumbersome, it takes forever to get approved. Um, it and, you know, in fairness to the department, it's not designed to be a long term solution, we actually passed a piece of legislation that creates medical release that so long term solution that will go into effect January one, I'm very excited about it.

MD 07:40

Congratulations.

JS 07:40

Thanks, thanks. But there was a lot of um there was a lot of hesitancy around like developing the protocols, and then actually implementing it and then actually using it. And in some ways, I like sort of get it focus on medical furlough and focus um especially books and medical further work are technically still in the custody of the department. It's a little bit like home confinement in the bureau of prisons. Umm, and so I, I get from like a liability reason why folks were nervous, but people were dying. You know, (Stateville) Prison was one of the largest COVID outbreak hotspots in the country. The Cook County jail was another like, really outrageous. You know, I don't do pretrial work. And so I you know, I'm not in those spaces, but I'm, you know, I work with those advocates, and with those, with the people who do work in those spaces, and um in the early days of the pandemic, the courts shot right and, and, and, in part because especially Cook County is so antiquated, in the way that they conduct court communicate, the attorneys communicate with each other, the way that records are kept. It's, it is just, it's like 30 years behind, that that getting up to speed quickly, did not seem in the cards. And so, you know, there's zoom court now, and that's the thing now, but in the early days, people were dying in the jail, people who should be released. Um and they just weren't being released and for ridiculous reasons, and because they weren't being released, when we would go to the Cook County State's Attorney and say, hey, this elderly man is serving, has six months left of a four year sentence on a drug case or on a theft. Can we please um agree, can we agree to resentence him and have a sentence be done? Because, you know, even before the resentencing bill, the Cook County says to me, and and has that power has always had that power? There's this really wonderful doctrine called revestment. It has always given the state's attorney the ability to go back with us and say, hey, we want to, we want to change the sentence. So easy, so easy. Um, but we got nowhere with that because they weren't even willing to do sort of the the really low hanging fruit, which is releasing people who are being held pretrial.

MD 09:58

And would you say that some of the major barriers there was just lack of will, lack of finances?

JS 10:14

It wasn't money.

MD 10:14

Lack of understa…of um…I've, I’ve talked to other people in in California, it would maybe an issue of where else would people go, maybe opening up hospitals, prisons that have been closed.

JS 10:33

No…and you know, one thing we did early like one of the very first things that we did was create a, like, quite frankly, a Google form. And in the Google Form, anybody who had an incarcerated loved one could identify that loved one and identify themselves as a host site. And we and we, we very quickly just had like 1000s and 1000s of entries of people, like some people had, like 40 places, there were some people who signed up just to say, I'll take someone into my home, it was really lovely. And we put it in a Google Sheet, because we really like online platforms. And we shared it directly with the Department of Corrections and with the PRB. Um and so and it was updated in real time. And so if a counselor had a person in their care, and they, sort of on their in their care, jesus. If a counselor had a person in their, on their caseload, and wanted to know if this person had somewhere to go if they were going to be released, they literally could look it up. Like we unlocked it, we made it really easy to access. The idea being we didn't want to make parole sites ever be an issue. And so what we were trying to do is say you can decarcerate right now, here are people places to go. And we we did work around, like figuring out what categories of different kinds of administrative release they might be eligible for, like, you know, we did a lot of work to make this as easy as possible. And it just it went went absolutely nowhere, just absolutely nowhere. We made progress in other ways down the road, but in the early days, in the very early days. Um, but for clemency, we got clients out via clemency, nobody got up. And it was it was stunning. I mean, it was so awful. It's really hard to articulate how bad it was, was like it's like actually sort of traumatic talking about it. It was really bad. And people were terrified. Our, our clients were terrified, but their families were absolutely terrified. And we would um you know, at that point in our like organizational growth, we had three paid staff members total. We're the only legal services organization offering services to incarcerated people, um offering release services like we were the only game in town at that point in any like, systematized way. There's obviously lawyers, individual lawyers who are always doing this work and there are lawyers doing prison conditions and like so much great work but not not the getting people out part. Um, and we really quickly had to like develop all these systems, fi-, find all of these mostly volunteers we just didn't have any money. Um, and we started fielding, we fielded 600 requests for legal services in like a month. Um, and we all day long would be somebody would be on the phone with someone manning our phones, with family members, and they, they would just be sobbing, everyone was sobbing, there was a lot of so much fear.

MD 13:29

So what would you say, in looking to the future when we would need a more immediate or we needed it then and we will need it again, an immediate response where um the actors are really once the tools are presented to them that there needs to be efforts really done. What would you say in the future? What are like what was the impede-, main impediments that you saw, what could be done in the future so that we are our systems are better prepared to act in emergencies?

JS 14:12

Yeah. I mean, I think what happened in Illinois, and I know this, I mean, I'm sure this is what happened in every state is that there were so many problems really baked into the prison system that, you know, COVID just tipped us over the edge. And so it's less about having emergency systems in place for the next unforeseen pandemic and more about doing the things that we needed to have done decades ago. Right, and that is um creating more mechanisms for people who shouldn't be incarcerated to get out, make sure the system isn't overcrowded. Make sure that health care is adequate, food is adequate. Sanitation is adequate. All of that stuff that has been sort of steamrolled by this ever-growing prison population um needs to be addressed before anything else can happen. And I think if we had had a prison system that was below capacity that wasn't overpopulated by folks who are elderly or medically, um, or who have really substantial medical conditions, because that's what was happening in Illinois. A really sizable portion of folks incarcerated in Illinois are elderly. Another huge group um are medically infirm for a variety of reasons, including things like, you know, have cancer, had a stroke and are and are in a wheelchair, um all sorts of things. Um and so, when you layer on a pandemic, on top of that, on top of a system that is providing inadequate medical care in the first place, it's you know, it's just a powder keg. Prior to the pandemic, two thirds of the deaths in custody were medically preventable in Illinois. Like we were, we weren't doing the bare minimum to keep people in prison safe. And so we could not handle anything additional. And I think, to be in a position, position to be better prepared for the next unforeseen thing we need to do a lot of like, basic maintenance, which means decarceration.

MD 16:09

Yes. And I know you'd mentioned that, and I saw on your website, that you had passed this medical bill. And I, I understand that it's, I think one of the methods that you're hoping that can help with decarceration efforts. Was this in the works, this before the COVID 19 pandemic or…?

JS 16:31

It was, it was, it was so heartbreaking. So it was in the works before COVID. Umm, I had a client die. I took it very badly. And so I decided I'd write a book. Basically what happened is he was serving a life sentence on a armed robbery. It was ridiculous. It was such a heartbreaking case. And he had this really wonderful family and everything. Like he was just like the most wonderful guy. And the state’s attorney was like shh, you know. You know, he develops dementia, and he has dementia, and he has prostate cancer, and he is very, very sick. Um, and I need to kind of really rapidly is the other thing, like it took us, you know, by the time his family got in touch with me, he was already ((participant imitates mental deterioration with her hand going downward) and so I talked to the state's attorney. I had just gotten somebody else out through this, like prosecutor driven return to court. And it worked really fast. Five weeks after meeting the client, he was home, it was really quick. And so I was like, hey, Mr. Prosecutor, let's do this. And let's get this guy home right now. And Mr. Prosecutor said, nope, clemency. There's an emergency clemency process. I talked to the Prisoner Review Board, they say you should do clemency. I quite frankly never done clemency before. So I was like, okay, we'll do clemency, like sure. That's part of what we're trying to do, we'll do it. Um, and before the pandemic, the Illinois process around clemency was extremely burdensome. Uh, petitions had to be notarized and signed by the petitioner. They had to be mailed to the Prisoner Review Board, who did not accept electronic filings. All of this like ridiculous stuff that made it really hard, quite frankly. And so we put the petitions together. I mailed it in, I notarized it, I signed it because my client had dementia at this point, and he was slipping in and out of consciousness. So we really couldn't sign anything. They rejected it because he hadn't signed it and we, so we had to quickly get power of attorney set up which was just like a whole thing. Um, and his son, who…my client’s name was Joe Coleman…the son, his son is a downstate police officer named Joe Coleman Jr., just like the nicest veteran like the just the nicest human you'd ever want to meet. Um, he, he gets power of attorney, he signs it, he gets it notarized. I've sent it to him, obviously. And he's driving it to Springfield, because we can't like lose a day through the mail. And on the day that he's driving it to Springfield, I drive down to the prison that's like eight hours from Chicago to go see Mr. Coleman. And while I'm in the parking lot, and while Joe is on the road to Springfield, we get the call that he had passed away. And I was just like, I was just furious. Um, and so we shoveled all of that rage into a bill. And we were supposed to have the committee hearing on the bill in the third week of March. But obviously session got canceled. Yeah. And everything got canceled. And it was really immensely frustrating. Because you know, in the months that followed, we did we were really involved in the COVID litigation. I was on the negotiating team, like I spent every week with the state and with the governor's office just tried to hammer out some sort of settlement because our, our litigation was decarcerative only, we were not seeking injunctive relief on anything. We just wanted to get people out. Um, and one thing that kept coming up was the bill ((participant laughs)). Like I mean, like guys, we really did want to pass it, um but you shut everything down. And they had, that they didn't do that year they didn't do the session remote, but the following year we introduced it and it was not a COVID inspired bill. COVID certainly helped. We now only got no opposition. We got no opposition from anybody. But we worked with a Prisoner Review Board. So they ended up slipping for the bill, which was really important. Was really, really important. And and during the, you know, and throughout, and quite frankly, I think, because of the experience that the the sort of prison went through recognizing how limited they were in getting folks who needed to not be in prison, getting them out. They were they never didn't slip for it. They were neutral for internal policy reasons. But sort of, throughout our conversations, a theme that kept emerging is wouldn't it be nice if we could send this group of folks home?

MD 20:42

Mm…I was gonna say, it's interesting, because it seems that COVID may have created more of a political will to pass that bill.

JS 20:53

Oh, totally, totally. Totally. I think that's totally right. I think it's totally right. I think it's what kind of build like…you know, quite frankly, Illinois…and Iowa was the only state now that doesn't have compassionate release. So I think there was like, I think it was it, we could have gotten through either way. But COVID certainly put a spotlight on the issues that we were trying to remedy through this piece of legislation.

MD 21:20

And I also saw that you're…um…the Illinois Prison Project, does a lot of work with very mentally ill prisoners, um and a lot of prisoners who are in solitary confinement. And I was wondering if you have, have, if you have a special…special anecdotes on how the pandemic affected mentally ill prisoners, and if that's just more of this, yeah…

JS 21:52

Yeah it's been really hard. You know, we have a, we have a group of clients who are seriously mentally ill, and a sort of subgroup of them are all at one treatment facility, which is designed to be therapeutic. Um, and it's like, it's still prison, but it is, it's certainly better than the other facilities. And um there's a lot more programming, both designed to treat and or sort of be….treat, treat symptoms of mental illness, but also just sort of recognizing limitations and special needs of folks who have disabilities around mental illness. Um, and during COVID, all the programming sobs and everyone had to return to their cells, because they were quarantining and social distancing, sort of, because you can't really social distance in prison. But that process was, um, in the months that our clients who had…and all of our clients in that campaign had survived solitary confinement often like decades of really awful, awful solitary confinement, um like really unspeakable things. And so it was really triggering for many of them, it was really retraumatizing for many of them. Folks who had been doing well started getting tickets. Um, I think it was really, really hard. I think was really, really hard.

MD 23:09

And so tickets were still continuously issued. And then, and then more…and which could result of course, in added sentences…

JS 23:22

Not, not so much for that those folks that the, the program that they were in is, is fairly non punitive…the…non punitive. I do think that there were folks in that group who were sort of earning back lost good time who were set back because of the pandemic. Um they weren't progressing in the way that they sort of needed to be according to the systems that were in place at the time. Um, so we've done a lot of administrative work on the back end around that, around those systems. Um, but you know, sort of more than, I don't think anybody's outdate moved further back in time because of it, but I do think a lot of people suffered.

MD 24:04

And I know you also…another group that you work closely with, um are women, domestic violence survivors, or women that have been caught up in criminal enterprises because of partners or domestic situations….um, do you think that the pandemic had a special impact on that group of clients?

JS 24:30

Umm, I will be perfectly honest and tell you that I'm the wrong person on my team to talk to about that. So all of our work on behalf of survivors of domestic violence, all that work is led by Rachael Ray’s domain. I’m happy to put you in touch with her. Um, but I…yeah, she's the one who does that work. So I don't know.

MD 24:51

Ok. No worries, no worries.

JS 24:52

Yeah, probably seems likely. I think, folks, um you know, one thing that was pretty universal is that people were not able to see their family for like two years. And phone calls and other sort of forms of communication were really, really curtailed. And so, especially our clients who are caretakers, mothers, grandmothers and something like 80% of women in prison are. Um, I know the pandemic was, was extraordinarily difficult because people were separated from their families, even more so than they already are.

MD 25:19

And that segways well into my next question about how you were able to communicate with your clients, you know, had to be working in real time, and needing to communicate. I know, I was actually trying to do a letter writing campaign with some of the folks in Michigan and we were having to wait long periods of time for the mail. Um, so wondering how that impacted your ability to communicate with your clients.

JS 25:48

Yeah. So we, um, everything, everything obviously moved remote right away, and we started doing all of our legal communications by phone. We still did mail, obviously. But at least, but all of these sort of in person interviews got replaced with phone calls. Not ideal. Our phone calls, all…almost all of the legal calls are 30 minutes, you cannot get more. And at some facilities, especially state though, where they experienced an outbreak and where because of its proximity to Chicago, just more people have representation or just more lawyers, and it’s Stateville, it's just a place where lawyers go. Um, it, and it's still like this way. It took…it was taking more than a month to get a legal call at Stateville. And now we're at about three weeks, which is still like completely unacceptable. We… I've said how small we were before COVID happened. We didn't get bigger right away, but our mail, our incoming mail, like you know, went up tenfold. So we developed a system that relied really heavily on volunteers to start scanning and sorting our mail everyday. We have, you know, it's actually the system we still use. It's extremely effective. Um, we developed an intake process, because in addition to our clients, now, it was an every, like, literally everyone incarcerated was writing us tickets, to have us provide representation, which was not something that we could do. We just simply like at that point, we had two lawyers on our staff, literally, two. And in fact, that wasn't even till June of 2020. So for the first three or four months of the pandemic, I was the only lawyer. Um, so we developed a toolkit, one thing people really universally wanted was help with computation. That was a very, very big topic, especially because the governor needed people right at the beginning. And then throughout the pandemic, quite frankly. Um, so we developed a toolkit, one for…that sort of looked on the website, and it was external and anybody could download, and then a truncated version that we started sending to the prison like on mass who would send in hundreds and hundreds of toolkits at a time. And that's what we did to try to communicate. And we've, we've been going back to the prison, now…it's been more than a year, um since everybody was vaccinated. Maybe it's not been more than a year, maybe it's been less than a year. We've been going to…no, it has been less than a year. It's been about eight months maybe since everybody was fully vaccinated, we've been going back. And um so I do, I don't know, two or three visits a month throughout the facility, sometimes more than that, depending on what's going on. Um, the guard vaccination uptake rate is low. And so there are plenty of folks who are not comfortable going back in and that is totally understandable. So it's still just the thing we're figuring out.

MD 28:45

That kind of brings me to what I was just wondering, you know, we're still in the COVID pandemic. And, of course, staff have…prison staff has very low vaccine rates. Different communities distrust the vaccine for various reasons. Um, we have many strains. So is this work still going on? Like, are we still trying to decarcerate people during this COVID pandemic? Or is that initial rush over?

JS 29:23

Um…so I think what we've realized during the course of the, the past 18 months, or however long it's been, is that at least in Illinois, COVID was a spotlight. It was not a problem unto itself. And so systemic problems that have plagued the prison system for a very long time are now starting to get attention. So you think about medical release, like that should have always been in place. The clients that we have successfully released through commutation are, quite frankly, cases that that we picked up, you know, at the front end because they were compelling, um and because they were these like really obvious injustices. And so I think they are cases that would have worked, that…that probably should have worked eventually at any point. And so I think what it's… what COVID has done is helped push Illinois forward on issues that they were going to fix, or they should have fixed either way. I don't think COVID was ever, in and of itself, a reason that this state was going to decarcerate. And I think it continues to not be a reason if that makes sense.

MD 30:43

But it has illuminated the… some of the immense problems and need, I guess more of an opening where people are more aware, and then also more of a political will from the electorate even to want to address some of the problems.

JS 31:04

Yeah, that's exactly, exactly right. That's exactly right, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. And so when we think about like, Delta and what's happening, like, what, none of that is going to lead to releases. That said, um Governor Pritzker, has been very good at making sure that… so for example, that incarcerated people, they were the first batch in the first group of people to get the vaccine. And so that's been a priority. And that's thanks to advocates like Uptown People's Law Center, and others who are really in that those spaces pushing for that. So I don't want to you know, there has been…COVID is definitely on the minds of the administration, but it's not going to be an independent basis for decarceration. I don't think.

MD 31:54

Sure. And…I had something on that, that I wanted to follow up on. But I've....I forgot that, that part of it. But I did want to ask you, because you have been in and around the criminal justice system for a very long time and have, have worked for criminal justice reform for a very long time. How has this work in the past couple of years, impacted you and your role as a lawyer and an advocate? Or how you look at these issues, if at all?

JS 32:35

Yeah, totally. Um, I think, you know, it's been interesting. Our…our whole organization is built on the theory of expanding underused and novel legal mechanisms for releasing people like hacking through administrative bureaucracies to create pathways out. And this, I mean, this work has made me just like more committed to that as an ideal. For example, one thing that we did in the settlement, the COVID settlement is, one of the ways that we negotiated a resolution is we got the department to give 1000 people sentencing credit. It's totally, it feels totally ridiculous, right? It's not, um, tied to them. And it's not…like we weren't suing over sentencing credit. But it was a creative way to decarcerate And it resulted in the immediate release of people. And we could figure out how many people and we could, like, see that happening. And so it's made me much more committed to thinking outside of the box when we're thinking about people's freedom, because quite frankly, the box doesn't work very well. Courts don't work very well, going, you know, litigating post-conviction cases, like it just doesn't work. Um, and, you know, this is like, you know, instead of an error feature, it's probably a feature. But what it means is that we need to be a lot more creative in how we approach individual representation, how we approach relationships, um, with systems players, how we think about problems. Um…yeah.

MD 34:17

Can you expand a little bit on, um, what your…what your, what you mean by thinking differently, or outside of the box in our in our relationships with other systems players?

JS 34:31

Yeah, totally. So like we, um, we have really good relationships with the Department of Corrections. And it's really important to me and to us as an organization that we maintain those because the reality is, um, they hold a tremendous amount of power. Both sort of in individual cases, but in the crafting of policies. So here's a good example. Right now Illinois has a law that restricts the award of earned discretionary sentencing credit, which is like a year that just it's just an extra year, people just get an extra year off their sentence if they've been sentenced to more than five. There's an administrative directive, which isn't a law. And it's not a policy, it's sort of imposed right by a regulatory committee that restricts…that prohibits those awards going to people convicted of murder. I don't know why it's that way. Um, but it is. And so we've been working with the department to get that directive chair, to get that regulation changed. And there are people in the department who are like really motivated to who said to me, like, yeah I would love to give (EDSC) to folks who've been convicted of murder. The older people who've been convicted of murder are like the least likely, like they know the science, they're the least likely to reoffend. They're great people, I'd love to be able to send them home. And I said, well, let's change the rule then, and they said, okay, and now we're doing that. And, you know, in another life, I would have been very angry at the Department and I would have figured out, like, how do I sue them, but actually, they also want to change the rule. And so we could work together to get the real change, which is exactly what's going to happen. Fingers crossed the paperwork has been a little bit of a slog, but something like that will save a year for like, 1000 people.

MD 36:26

And do you think that's kind of a rare or mentality…that your viewpoint on working with the Department of Corrections, and you think that is not a common mindset among people in these arenas?

JS 36:44

So at least in Illinois, there aren't very many people in this particular arena, which is why we're here, right? Like we'd… if this already existed, I wouldn't be doing this. I would do something else? Um, I think, yes, I do think so. I think a lot of policy folks look at relationships strategically and think about collaboration a lot. I don't think as many direct representation folks do. And part of that is because like, when you do direct rep, in an adversarial system, you are taught, right, that the other side is your adversary. And like, it makes perfect sense why right? Like, um and you're…when people, people who do direct reps think, well, I'm doing direct rep, I’m not doing the policy stuff. That's the policy, my job is to negotiate around the policy. Um, but I believe pretty strongly that policy and advocacy work is strengthened through the experiences and stories of our clients, right. Um, and so you can't really do the advocacy work as well, if you're not on the ground, seeing what happens. And if you're on the ground, seeing what happens, if you're also doing advocacy work, then you can actually see the problems that need to be fixed. So I think we've been able to do both, which is pretty cool. Um and has…and it's not that common, like there aren't that many folks doing both.

MD 37:56

Definitely. I mean, I know. That's something that I would be looking for in a future employer and in it's not often that you would find both of those together in one spot. I wanted…you might not want to answer this. And that's totally fine. Because I know that it's, you're in practicing in Illinois, you work with these people all the time. The, the role that judges played in, in maybe in the earlier days, when there could have been perhaps exercises of discretion, or did you meet a lot of…um…skepticism or lack of will from judges or…?

JS 38:46

So we, um, our work does not actually involve the judiciary, like…

MD 38:55

Okay.

JS 38:56

In part because, you know, in Illinois and everywhere else, courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. They have the authority to do what the legislature has given them the authority to do. And one thing we generally don't have the authority to do is change a sentence years and years after it's been imposed, simply because the person is now a wonderful human being like, that's not a thing. So I will say that most of our clients are serving mandatory sentences, mandatory life sentences, and so it's like, there's not that much they could’ve done. So I have no, I just have nothing to say about the batch. I just don't know.

MD 39:31

Sure. Yeah. Do you think, you know, I think it's very, very interesting to be thinking about really out of the box ideas. I think that's really necessary. Um, do you think that that would be beneficial to, to draft some law that would give like judges…I mean, I know that I'm running into a lot of separation of powers and, but that would give judges discretion in people serving like mandatory minimum sentences and stuff?

JS 40:05

Yeah, I mean, a piece of second look legislation. So Illinois just passed a, a prosecutor driven resentencing bill that lets the prosecutor take cases back to court, quite frankly, they already had that power. So I'm not like that…maybe I hope I'm wrong about how great this bill is gonna be. A real piece of second look legislation that let…prosec-…that let people petition the courts for resentencing, even if they had not served the term of their mandatory minimum would be game changing. Absolutely game changing. Yes, we like absolutely need that. We need it very badly. That would be amazing. I think, you know, it's a, it's very analogous to some of the parole bills that have been floating around Illinois lately. Is this feel politically maybe more achievable? Yeah, that's a great idea.

MD 40:59

And…let's see here. Yes, I'm…I don't know, do you want to talk a little bit more about the COVID settlement? And what's going on? I don't know if that's confidential.

JS 41:16

Sure. Yeah, no no, it's not confidential. Um, so the settlement was different. You know, it was different from some of the other COVID litigation about other places, we brought concurrent 1983s, seeking the only injunctive relief, we saw it was released, and a habeas on behalf of basically everyone who was eligible for electronic detention through a variety of mechanisms. So anybody that the department was empowered to release. And we said, release them up, um which they did not do. But what they did do, and quite frankly, you know, probably maybe you're gonna cut this part of the interview, but like, we will, it was a stretch, legally speaking, the position itself, so please cut that part out. But what we did do during the course of the eight months that we were negotiating the settlement was, it took a very long time, is a couple of things happened. First, the department created its first electronic detention policy in like decades, so they always had this power to release people on electronic detention, they could release anybody who was over the age of 55, who was in the last 12 months of their sentence was like, very narrow exceptions. Um, and they could release almost anybody who was serving on a class two, three, or four felony, which was at that point, like a third of the percent was eligible for release like this, like, they literally would have just sent them home, and they wouldn't have legally been in custody. So some of the problems around medical furlough where if you're out, you're actually still technically in the department practice. Like those problems didn't exist, they could have just done it. And they didn't. But they did, they did articulate their first policy around it, which was huge. They also, um, articulated and actually just on the first of the month, implemented a new policy around earned discretionary sentencing credit, that's that extra year, people that are just eligible to receive. It used to be that if you were convicted of a forcible felony, you just and that's, that's most felonies, many felonies, um you were just not going to receive it. There was no path to earn it, there was nothing. So now everyone is…there's a path for everyone to receive it, except for folks convicted of murder. And we're working on that. Um, and so that was really huge. And then even before they implemented these policies, because again, some of them really did just get implemented. Part of the settlement was that they gave a blanket grant, one time grant, of some chunk of time to everybody, I think it was different who was classified as a lower medium security risk, which was a lot of people. So that's what that that's what the settlement looked like. It was not a consent decree. We were really hoping for a consent decree and ongoing monitoring. We didn't get any of that. But we did get people out. So that was pretty cool.

MD 44:05

And what would a consent decree be?

JS 44:07

Oh, a consent decree is an agreement that is monitored by the court. So that would have kept us in federal court, it would have given us mechanisms to go back. We did not get those. But we also didn't waive anything and like for me that's principally ( ).

MD 44:23

It’s still, it really…amazing victory. So congratulations.

JS 44:27

Yeah. I mean, quite frankly, you know, if, if all you're thinking about is getting people out of prison, which is really all I was thinking about. It was it was it was good. It was good. It was really good. You know, some of our named class members, a fair number of them actually got clemency. So we did come and see you at the same time and so a good number of folks are home, which is great.

MD 44:51

That's good. I'm really glad to hear that. We can start wrapping it up. We have about 13 minutes, we can go a little longer. Um, so please feel free if there's anything that you haven't had a chance to speak about that you would like to, to jump in with that. But I also have more questions. This, this is something I think about a lot. And in the decarceration movement, just based on how our society views these issues right now, I feel that practitioners are a lot of times forced to be in an advocacy position of advocating for some classes of inmates to be released. What…and then at the same time, basically, in making those arguments, you're then distinguishing them from people convicted of murder or the less tolerable felons. So how do we uh address that problem? Because, you know, obviously, when you have a client, you're going to work, you're going to advocate for them and distinguish them from the others. But in the end, that's just then kind of reinforcing the narrative that some felons should not be eligible for release, you know, so how, what do we do with that?

JS 46:28

Yeah, I mean, at least in our work, we never, ever make a…um we never make a um, we never set up those binaries. So we try. We very much avoided nonviolent as a dichotomy to violence. We, we don't have any categorical exclusions about who we represent, although sometimes we have categorical inclusion. So like, for example, right…we had a natural life third strikes campaign, and in that campaign, we represented people who are convicted of armed robberies and drug offenses. There were certainly people convicted of sex offenses that we didn't represent. But it wasn't, but we never made that sort of outward comparison, all of our advocacy efforts on behalf of the group, the entire…entire group, some of this is just like a bandwidth issue. We just can't represent everybody. Um, we represent sex offenders in other campaigns. Just not in that one. Um, yeah, I, you know, we…most of our clients have been convicted of a serious felony, most of them, probably most of them armed robbery, actually, but many of them murders many, many, many, many, many, many, very many. Three people on our staff, who were former clients who we won their freedom, all convicted of murder, one of them was on death row. They are our team like they are us. They are who we are like, well, there's no… there's no dichotomy here in our…In the COVID litigation, the only dichotomy I guess that existed was the people who are statutorily eligible for administrative relief and the people who weren't and it was, there was no, there was never any merit or judgment in those claims. It was just where do we have a full legal path, um which is really based on like categories preset by the department. But quite frankly, included violent offenses and serious offenses. So the over 55 folks, people convicted of murder are absolutely eligible for electronic detention. So, yeah, yeah.

MD 48:45

I mean, I think that's, I think it's really important in the…in this arena to try to stay away from the dichotomy language, and it's something that I have noticed and have thought that that's definitely an issue that as advocates and practitioners we need to, to kind of all band together and say how are we going to start talking about these issues so that we're not making up these distinctions? Um…

JS 49:17

Totally.

MD 49:18

Okay, so what…how did this impact you? What are your takeaways? And then I guess my last question for you would be what, what is the path forward…in…with decarceration? What, what are your priorities right now? Like, where do you think the movement is?

JS 49:47

Yeah. Well, where I think the movement isn't where I think where I am, might be different things. But what was your first, what was the first part of that?

MD 49:59

Um, If you want to…if you want to discuss like, how this personally has impacted you and brought any trauma…

JS 50:07

((Participant laughs)). Oh God, I have not even…Yeah, I have not even started to unpack that as evidenced by the fact that like talking about it now, for the first time has been like a little triggering. Um, it was really awful. Like, I can't. Yeah, I don't actually think I've like…I've not fully processed how bad it was. And I will say like, our, our organization was only three months old when COVID hit. So like we are, we're a COVID, baby. And we've had really exponential growth in terms of like staff and size and systems and clients…

MD 50:40

Yes, and we wanted to share how, how big your, your staff and organization is now because it's really incredible.

JS 50:45

Yeah, yeah yeah. So we now have I think 14 or 15 people on our team that includes four lawyers, a bunch of program managers who actually handle sort of the case files and the, the pro bono attorneys and the all…all of our really wonderful colleagues and allies. Um, we also and I'm really proud of this, we have a, an education team that is run by and almost exclusively staffed by formerly incarcerated people. They do two things, they do community education to help folks understand the harm of mass incarceration, on themselves on their communities, on their families, on the wider world. They work with our ambassadors who are formerly incarcerated, um people who are participating in the leadership cohort. So we train them up a lot to help put them in the best position that they can possibly be to be moved to be movement leaders. And then our community educators, the other thing that our communications team does is we provide education to folks who are incarcerated or who have loved ones who are incarcerated so that they can access these legal systems themselves. So we actually had a meeting with the Department of Corrections today. We are launching an internal training program. So we'll be doing trainings on commutation and sentencing credit and transfers and all sorts of things. Um we'll be doing zoom trainings, we'll be doing live in person trainings. And we're also going to be doing recorded ones that will live on the institutional channel. So folks who have tablets can just watch them.

MD 52:10

Wow.

JS 52:11

Yeah, it's cool. And the, the really cool part about that is one of our community educators, Anthony Jones, um was serving the life sentence on a murder. He got our toolkit, the one that I talked about before, he used it to file his own commutation petition, which was granted. He was made eligible for parole. We were able to represent him before the parole board. He came home in June. And he's been on staff since September, something like that. So it's…

MD 52:41

Amazing success story for years. And…

JS 52:44

Yeah, it's really great. And he's really great. And it's, you know, it's not only like, like a really great reflection, I think of our values, but it's, it really roots what’s in the work that we're doing, the clients that we're serving, which I think is really important.

MD 52:59

Of course, do you think that, um, these toolkits and, um, just the out of the box strategies that your team has been developing are transferable to other states and other people working on these issues?

JS 53:18

I do. I think they're transferable to other states. I think there are people in other states doing this work, especially in Oregon and Washington…where very similar programs to what we're doing are sort of up and running based out of universities. Um, but I do think that in most states, there isn't anyone doing this work, and there really needs to be a dramatic increase in folks who are representing people currently in prison, whether or not they see the path forward. And like, I think that's really important. Most people do not have a traditional, at least in Illinois, do not have a traditional mechanism for release. Um, and that needs to stop mattering to attorneys so much. We need to be doing these cases no matter what.

MD 54:04

Very interesting. Very interesting. And just my last question for you. Um, where do you see the, um, possibilities and potential? Yeah, maybe like two or three of these out of the box mechanisms?

JS 54:23

Yeah. Yeah. So the, the really big one, the one that like keeps me awake at night, because I think it's cool is um commutation as a mechanism for retroactivity. So, so many great pieces of legislation get passed every year, narrowing the scope of the criminal legal system, as we learn more about, for example, juvenile brain development or domestic violence, or should felony murder really be first degree murder? Probably not. And so the law changes and it gets more progressive, but it almost never applies to people who are already in retroactivity. And, and there's like complicated political and constitutional reasons for that. And this really varies state by state. But one thing that I think that we should be doing and that we should be normalizing is this idea that the governor should always be using commutation, especially here in Illinois, to make progressive legal reforms retroactive. So in Illinois, there's like great precedent for this. If you think about the marijuana expungements, um I believe 2017, 2019 maybe…I think 2017. Um, in any case, Illinois passed a piece of legislation that's…that legal-… decriminalized marijuana and all these people had already been convicted of marijuana. So what do you do with that? You issue them all pardons. Pardon is just a form of clemency. Um, and so there is this mechanism that the governor could use to make prospective only criminal legal reform retroactive. So that's what I'm thinking about a lot.

MD 55:55

And that, that's already a power that exists, right that could…

JS 56:00

Totally.

MD 56:00

…needed to go tomorrow could happen tomorrow.

JS 56:01

Tomorrow. Governor Pritzker could do it tomorrow. He probably won't do it tomorrow. We are in an election season. It has started, but he could do it this time next year.

MD 56:12

Well, of course if you…I'm that's my, all my questions, but if you have anything else that you'd like to share, please feel free to, to do so.

JS 56:24

I would love to share more stuff. I do have a five o'clock so I have to run. But thank you so much.

MD 56:30

Thank you. Let me…how do I stop this? Okay.