My name is regional Dwayne bets and I just published a peace within the your tears magazine, senator and now vice presidential nominee Common Harris when I started working on this programme What is senator imagined? Imagine has something to say, because when I was sixteen, I went the prison the nine years came home out there trying to talk about her work as a prosecutor with her whole career started at the de MAX braces in no maybe gave me some different to say about her both about who she is and how her work is. It Prosecutor might tell us something about the conversations that we needed to have around from the justice reform. The story started out as a tradition, profile

nah. Maybe maybe that ain't even sure I mean I wanted it to start out as a traditional profile. But you know even the first flight I took to see her speak publicly. I had to stop in Richmond Virginia first cuz. It just coincided with a meeting I had with the Virginia Parole Board, where you know I was arguing for the freedom of a friend of mine who is doing life for was doing life for robbery and around that same time, to talk to my mom about this violent, violent crime in it she'd been a victim of its over me like very early. I recognise that whatever I wanted to say about Harris was was just in its. Why wit, with these things that.

I was trying to figure out about my friends, my mom and for me, a story about Harris ended up being a a story about all that. I am grateful for you taken the time and listen to it now hope you enjoy it being read to you by J D Jackson. So here it is calmer my mother and me in preparation for the? U S, elections, we ve taken critical steps at Facebook to secure platforms and provide transparency. We ve more than tripled our safety insecurity teams to thirty five thousand people implemented five.

Bad verification and launched a new voting information centre, learn more about how we are preparing an FBI, dot, com, sash about slash elections, that's F, b, dot com, sash about slash elections,. Because Senator PAMELA Harris has a prosecutor, and I am a phelan I've been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son track staff, curry threes before it was involved to criticise prosecutors My friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them Joggled, an oversized green jails rooms. I listened to a prosecutor, Fairfax County Virginia courtroom. Teller judge that in one nine I'd single handedly changed suburban shopping forever,

everything the prosecutor said I did was true. I carried a pistol carjack demand try to rob to women, he needs a long penitentiary sentence. The prosecutor told the charge I faced life in prison for contracting the man I pleaded guilty to that. To having a gun to an attempted robbery. I was sixteen years old The old hands in prison would call me lucky for walking away with. Only a nine year sentence had been locked up for about fifteen months. When I entered Virginia Southampton correction, enter and ninety ninety eight the year. I should

graduated from high school in that prison. They were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of us had lengthy sentences. Thirty forty fifty years, all for violent felonies, let's talk of mass incarceration has set it on the war on drugs, wrongful convictions and Kafka ask sentences for non violent charges. while circumventing the robberies home, invasions, murders and rape cases that brought us to prison. The most difficult discussion to have about criminal justice reform. Has always been about violence and accountability. You. Release everyone from prison who currently has a drug offence and the United States would still outpace nearly every other country when it comes to incarceration. According to

prison Policy Institute of the nearly one point: three million people incarcerated in state prisons. One hundred eighty three thousand are incarcerated for murder. Seventeen thousand for manslaughter one hundred sixty five thousand for sexual song, one hundred sixty nine thousand for robbery at one hundred thirty six, thousand for a sound, that's more than half of the state prison population. When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn't lose sight of what violence and the sourly creates. Does the families and communities and stand many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris's profession and two when in doubt

Men against her shorthand for her career became she's, a calm, meaning her allegiance was with a system that inspires through prison and policing to harm black people in America in the past decade, or so, we have certainly seem ample evidence of how corrupt system can be Michel Alexanders best selling, both the new Jim Crow, which argues that the war on drugs Mark return of America's racist system of segregation and legal discrimination EVA, do when they see us a series. but the wrongful convictions of the central part, five and her documentary thirteenth, which doves into mass incarceration more broadly and just Marcy about by Brian Stevenson. A public interest lawyer that has also been made into a foam chronicling. His pursuit of justice for a man on death row

who was eventually exonerated all of these describe the destructive force of prosecutors having a lot of run to the belief Anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants problem shame. My mother had an extra science that gave her a different perspective on prosecutor. No, I didn't know about it until I came home from prison by March. Fourth, two thousand, five. When I was twenty four that She sat me down and said: I need to tell you something: We were in her bedroom and the town house insult in Maryland that had been my childhood home, whereas a cage he'd call me bring her a glass of water. I expect her to tell me that despite my years in prison, everything was good now, but instead she told

about something that happened nearly a decade earlier, just weeks after my arrest, she left for work before the sun rose. Always Dan heading to the federal agency that had employed her higher life. She stood at a bus. Stop one hundred feet from my school awaiting the bus. That would take her to the train that would take her to a stop near her and the nations capital, but on that morning, A man named her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her head and raped her when she could She ran wildly into the six a m traffic my mother's words, turned me into a mumbling, incoherent mass unable to grow as partners could have happened to her. I know she kept the sacred to protect me. I turned to go arguments,

The word re, along with my hometown and was racked by violence against women that I found. They told me her rapist was a black man and I thought he should spanned the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that knew so well. the prosecutors job, unlike the defence attorneys, judging is to do justice. What is that? and when you are ass by sea. To dole out retribution measure and years served, but and by others, for the damage incarceration can do. The outrage at this country's criminal justice system is loud today. But it has led us to develop better ways of confronting my mother's world from nearly a quarter. Century ago, weekends visiting her son President Virginia weekdays attending that

while the man who sexually assaulted her, we said goodbye to my grandmother in the same Baptist. Church that enjoy two thousand nineteen senator commonly Harris still pursuing the dim Braddock nomination for President went to give a major speech about why she became a prosecutor. I hadn't been inside Brooklyn Baptist Church for a decade and returning reminded me of Grammar Mary and the eight years of law. She made to me in prison. The occasion for Harris Speech was the annual freedom Fond dinner of the south. Carolina stayed conference of the inner cp. The evening began with a black national anthem. Left every voice and sang, and at the UN in court

Everyone in the Rome stood there to write about the senator had been standing already and miles. The words of the first verse before realizing. I never saw any further each table in the banquet Hall was filled with books, dressed in their Sunday best servers brought plates of food and pictures of ice. To the tables. Nearly everyone was black. The room was too loud for me to do more than crouch beside guests at their tables. And scribble nuts about why they attended speakers talk about the chapters Long history and the civil rights movement, one called for the current generation of young wrappers to tell a different story about sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said he just wants, to be safe. I didn't hear anyone mention mass incarceration.

and I knew in a different decade my ground, are. There might have been in that audience. Taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsive Letty, all the while wondering why her grand baby was still locked away if Harris couldn't persuade that audience that her experience as a black woman in America justified or decision to become a prosecutor. I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved, describing hurrah bringing in a family of civil rights activists. Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized black people and protecting the rights of black criminal defendants. I was clear eyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me. She said this matter for Harris because of the prosecutors that refuse.

To black jurors, refuse to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemn young black men to death row and look the other way in the face of police brutality when she became a prosecutor in ninety. She was one of only a handful of black people in her office. When she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in two thousand and three she recalled she was one of just three black DA's, nationwide and when she was elected California attorney general and two thousand ten, there were no other black. Journeys general in the country at these words, The crowd around me clapped

no the unilateral power that prosecutors had with a stroke of a pan to make a decision about someone else's life or death. She said Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence of the importance of a black woman doing this work once air hustling. She listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang affiliated. If a racial profiling manual existed there signals would certainly be included. Baggy pants, the place of arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she told her colleagues, so you know that neighbourhood you were talking about. While I got family members and friends who live in the neighborhood, you know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed. Well, that's actually stylish in my community chicken

then you'd. You know that music, you were talking about. Well, I got a tape of them, is it in my car right now? The second example was about the mothers of murder children. She told the audience about the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco to young women who wanted to see with her and her alone about their sons them came I believe, because they knew I would see them Harris said, and I mean literally see them see their grief see their anguish. They complained to Harris that the police were not investigating. My son,

being treated like a statistic. They would say everyone in that southern Baptist church know that the mothers and their dead sons were black Harris Outline the classic dilemma of black people in this country being simultaneously over policed and under protected Harris, told the audience that all communities deserved to be safe. Among the guests, in the room that night, whom I talk to no one, had an issue with her work as a prosecutor, a lot of them seem to believe that only people doing dirt at issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that, in a way, Harris was talking about black people's needing protection from us from the violence we perpetrated turn those years and a series of sir,

miles, there came up as a prosecutor in the nineteen nineties when both political culture and popular culture would developing a story about crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then found by black. The room there's no jack, said a menace to society boys in the tunnel. violence into a gene raw were more and crack dealing, whereas ever present as black fathers were absent. Those with the years when Representative Charlie Wangle Democrat argue that we should not allow people to distribute this poison without fear. that they might be arrested and go Jail for the rest of their natural life Where were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that

federal parole for people with three violent crime convictions and encourage states to essentially eliminate parole. made it more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions and cord and made it nearly impossible to challenge prison conditions back then it I was just one of an entire generation of young black men learning the logic of cow time and lockdown. With me were Anthony when too Ral Tally and a dozen others all lost to present during those years to Railways sentence two thirty three years for murdering a man when he was seventeen, a neighborhood beef turned deadly home from college for two

eggs a nineteen year old, Anthony ROD for convenience stores, even carrying a pistol during three after he was sentenced by for judges. He had a total of thirty six years. Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having wit asked or experienced brutality before committing our own prison, a factory of violence and spare introduced us two more. The same and though there were organizations working to get rid of the death penalty and mandatory minimum. bring back parole and even abolish prisons. There were few ways for us to know that they existed we suffered and we felt alone because of this. Sometimes I'm reduce my friends stories to the crew, of doing time. I forget that around I walked prison yards teenagers, disgust, Malcolm X, and searching for men to wars and the men around us.

I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonya Sanchez. The way others praised DM acts He taught me the meaning of the word patina and introduced me to the music bill withers there were Luke and fats and juvy who could give you the sharpest edge up in America with just a razor and calm when I left prison in two thousand five, they all had decade left. Then I went to law school and believed I owed it to them to work on their cases and help them get out. Have persuaded lawyers to represent friends. Pro bono put together parole, packets, basically job applicants,

and for freedom, letters of recommendation and support from family and friends, copies of certificates attesting to vocational training, the record of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanations and context. We argue that today, each one. Little resembles the teenager, who pulled a gun, and I write a letter which is less from a lawyer. a more from a man remembering what it means to want to go home to his mother. I ride struggling to condense decades of life in prison and to a ten page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the Parole Board Office in Richmond Virginia and try to persuade the members, to let my friends say a sunrise for the first time, Julian Luke have May Perrault fats represented by the innocence project at the university

Virginia School of LAW, was granted a candy. General pardon by Virginias, Governor RAF North and all three a home now released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of so many others. Still inside now. They ve sent me text messages with videos of themselves, hugging their mothers for the first time in decades, cast fishing lines from boats drifting along rivers. They didn't expect to see again- enjoying a cold beer contraband in February after twenty five years, Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least twenty years, crimes they committed before their eighteenth birthdays, eligible for parole, men who imagined they would die in prison. Now, they daylight.

Tomorrow, will be eligible. These years later ease the mentor we searched for helping to organise from the inside community events for children, and he spoke and publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victims. Family. My man, Anthony, was nineteen when he committed his crime in the last few years, he's organised paltry readings, book, clubs and fatherhood asses when Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the dog and school of business at the University of Virginia began and entrepreneurship program at deal when Correctional Centre Anthony was among the graduates earning all three of the certificates that it offered a work, me invited, as the commencement speaker

and when I remember most as watching him sheriff mail with his parents for the first time since as arrest, but he must pray that the governor grass him a conditional pardon as he did for fats. I tell myself that my friends are unique Then I wouldn't fight so hard for just anybody, but maybe there is little particularly distinct about any of us. Beyond that. We serve enough time in prison. There was a skinny lied scanned fifteen year old. Kid Who came into prison during the years that we were there. The Roma was that he broken into the house of an older woman and sexually us commissioner, we all knew he had three life sentences someone's all his shows people threatened him. He'd had to break Man's jar, with a lock and sought to prove he'd fight, is pushed ass. A teenager he was experiencing the worst of

and I know that, had he been Mysel made, had I known him the way I know my friends if he reached out to me today that probably be arguing that he should be free. But I know that, on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. during the middle of Harris's presidential campaign, a friend refer may to a woman, with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear years ago. This woman sister had been missing for days and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience. Would then attorney general. Paris, a coordinated multi citysearch followed. The sister had been murdered, her body was found in a ravine, the woman told me that commoner understands the politics of victims

nation, as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case a fifty year old Black One, gone missing were found dead, ordinarily does I get any resources put toward it. they caught the man who murdered her sister and he was sentenced to one hundred thirty one years. I think about the man who assaulted a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice, and I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn't spend the rest of his life in prison. My mother purchased her first single family home. Just before I was released from prison. One version of the story:

is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn't spend a single night more than necessary? the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving suit lend my mother meant to burn the place from memory. I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the chords. I was wrong. The first time she must work to attend court proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a kid the same age as I was when I robbed man. He was probably from Suitland indeed attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time my mother attended a series of poor dates involving me, dressed in her best work, close to remind the process

Peter and charge, and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time my mother took off days from work to go to court. alone and witnessed the trial of the man who raped her into other women. A prosecutor subpoena forced her to testify and her Silas came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others, After my mother told me what had happened to her, we didn't mention it to each other again. For more than a decade. But then in two thousand and eighteen

and I were interviewed on the pot, death, sex and money. The host asked my mother about going to court for her sons trial when he was facing life. I was raped package point my mother said it happened just before he was sentenced. So when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a quite trial for myself I had forgotten what happened but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger made it far more devastating. On the last day of the trial of the man who raped her, my mother told me that judge, except guilty plea to remember is only that. He didn't get enough time She says our nose began to believe me when I asked her. Why she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied and I'd taken the deputies gun shot.

Harris has studied crime scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted man in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted, the elderly scout their lovers and her two thousand nine book smart on Crime Harris praised the work of sunny Schwartz creator of the resolve to stop the violence project, the first restorative Justice programme in the country to offer services to offenders and victims which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims

To help inmates who have committed violent crimes by giving them tools to de escalate confrontations, Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health treatment, and she argued that safety is a civil right and that a sixty year old sentence for a series of restaurant armed robberies where some victims were bound or locked in freezers, should tell anyone considering viciously pray on citizens and businesses that they will be caught convicted and sent to prison for a very long time. Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration as a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the nineties Ninetys have largely not been revisited, while the evidence of any prosecutor doing work on this fraud. Islam. As a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to unravel.

The decades long effort to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh to the point of being inhumane, criticized the bail system and called for an end to private prisons and criticised the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and elect on monitoring services in June months into the covert nineteen pandemic, and before she was tat as the vice presidential none. May I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone, a police, officers me on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him ass. He could for how had been captured on video each night thousands around the world protest it. During our conversation. Whereas told me that, as the only black woman in the United States Senate in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor

and Ahmad arbitrary. Countless people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism. Harris said that she was I'm about to start telling them about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country. As part of the greatest stain on this country exhaust said she no longer answered the questions. I imagined she believes, as Tony Morrison once said, that the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work, but these days, even in the conversations that I hear my children having raised suffuses so much I tell How is that my twelve year old Son MECCA, I told his classmates and teachers, as you all know, my dad went to jail shouldn't the police who killed fluid go to jail.

My son wanted to know why prison seem to be reserved for black people and wondered whose voice Ellen's, demanded a prison cell in the criminal justice system, heiress replied the irony and, frankly, the hypocrisy is that when We used the words, accountability and consequence. It's always about the individual who was arrested again. She began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the system accountable, and while I found myself agreeing I began,

The fear that the point was just to find ways to treat officers and the same brutal way that we treat everyone else. I thought about the men I represented in parole, hearings and the friends I'd be representing soon had wandered out loud to Harris. How do we get to their freedom? We need to re. Imagine what public safety looks like the senator told me noting that she would talk about public health model. Are we looking at the fact that, if you focus on issues like education and preventive things, then you don't have a system that reactive, the list of those?

becomes long, affordable, housing, job skills, development, education, funding, homeownership. She remembered how, during the early two thousands when she was the San Francisco district attorney and started back on track a re entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drunk charges. Many people were critical. Your idea you're supposed to be putting people in jail, not letting them out. She said people, told her it always returned to this morning, who should be in prison and for how long I know that american prisons do little to address violence if anything They exacerbated if my friends walk out of prison chain And from the boys walked in, it will be because they fought with the system with themselves.

And sometimes with the men around them, to be different. Most violent crimes go unsolved and the painting Mars is nearly always unresolved and those- were convicted. Many maybe I'll do far too much time in prison, and yet I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contact amount Other informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for Barone. I'm sorry, write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn't go to work because she was in hospital, tell the board the memory of a gun, pointed at her head ass, never laughed Explain how, when I came home, my mother told me the story,

some violence changes everything. The thing that makes you suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having to row Anthony Fats Luke and Juve have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should be free, as our friendship learning, that a black man in the city I called home, raped. My mother taught me that the pain and anger for a family member can beyond. The mobile. It makes me wonder if parole agency should contact me at all if they should ever contact victims and their families, perhaps of Harris, becomes the vice president. We can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses around crime and punishment for three decades,

as a line prosecutor, a district attorney, an attorney general and now a senator her work, allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient target, but if the system is broken, It is because our flaws more than our virtues animated, confronting. Why so many of us believe prisons must exist, may force us what mad that we have no adequate response to some violence still. I hope that Harris reminds the country that simply acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it. Any more than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and terror.

that landed them there. This was recorded by autumn autumn is unhappy, can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers such as the New York Times, the New Yorker Vanity Fair, and they had acting as we plan for the future see. I t provides you with the financial expertise and agility you need to help you bank, like your best days, are ahead. That's tomorrow, thinking empowering you to bank, like you visit, cit dot com to get started. Member after I see