Vogue

A Matter of Justice

In the past 40 years, incarceration in America has increased by more than 500 percent, with female prisoners the fastest growing population. Here are eight women taking a stand against a criminal justice system that’s anything but just.

March 8, 2018 Culture

One unseasonably warm day in February, photographer Stefan Ruiz and I wander over to the Brooklyn Detention Complex, a towering monolith of a jail that I’ve walked by a thousand times and never really noticed before. Ruiz is there to shoot a photo of the window where defendants—or more likely, members of their families—go to hand over bail money. I’m tagging along. It’s only a minute before a young man—gray sweatpants, white undershirt—emerges through the main doors. He’s grinning and wants us to take his photo, to capture his first moments of freedom after eight months in lockup. It’s not clear what crime he did or didn’t commit; he makes clear that he has no intention of going back. A corrections officer hanging out on the front steps sidles up to us. “What are you doing?” she asks him. “You can’t loiter here.” He’s waiting for the bail window to open so he can collect a MetroCard. “What are you doing here?” she asks us. We’re just passing by. She nods. Okay then. He slips back inside the building. In that moment the obvious is made all the more obvious. Neither of us is currently incarcerated, but we stand on two sides of an invisible line: He’s black, in prison-issue sweats, and part of the system. I’m white, in vintage Levi’s, and not.

“The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time,” writes civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander in her seminal book The New Jim Crow. “Once swept into the system, one’s chances of ever being truly free are slim, often to the vanishing point.” In America, where we have less than 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, we talk a lot about “mass incarceration,” but rarely do we stop to define exactly what that means. Data assembled by the Sentencing Project spells it out: Currently 2.2 million people are in prison or jail in the U.S. (some statistics say 2.3 million), and approximately 7 million are under some sort of correctional control (including surveillance, probation, parole, et cetera). In the past 40 years, owing in no small part to the war on drugs—born under President Nixon, realized by President Reagan, made indelible by President Clinton’s harsh sentencing policies and federal grants to expand state and local law enforcement—incarceration has increased by roughly 500 percent. Per Alexander, drug offenses alone “account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000.” And arrests for marijuana possession—a drug that is now legal for recreational use in nine states—made up “nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests during the 1990s.”

Crucially, prisons and jails do not reflect demographics outside, where non-Hispanic white Americans still represent a majority (about 61 percent). “Blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug offenses and 2.5 times as likely to be arrested for drug possession,” says a 2016 Sentencing Project report on state prisons. “This is despite the evidence that whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate.” (An NAACP fact sheet suggests that ratio jumps to six to one when you look at rates of imprisonment for drug charges—which could in part be explained by studies like this one, showing major racial disparities in the plea bargaining process, which accounts for more than 90 percent of convictions both at the federal and state levels.) One in 17 white men in this country is likely to end up behind bars. For Latino men it’s one in six. For black men it’s one in three. (Black women are more than six times as likely as white women to end up in prison—Latina women more than twice as likely—and women’s incarceration has been outstripping men’s at a rate of 50 percent since 1980.) Even for those who have finished paying their debt to society, as criminal justice reform advocate and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker likes to say, there are more than 40,000 collateral consequences, including decreased access to social services (food stamps, public housing) and educational and job opportunities, loss of ability to serve on juries and, in some cases, to participate in the democratic process (in Alabama, for example, nearly 30 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote).

Permit me a long quote from Alexander’s book: “When the system of mass incarceration collapses (and if history is any guide, it will), historians will undoubtedly look back and marvel that such an extraordinarily comprehensive system of racialized social control existed in the United States. How fascinating, they will likely say, that a drug war was waged almost exclusively against poor people of color—people already trapped in ghettos that lacked jobs and decent schools. They were rounded up by the millions, packed away in prisons, and when released, they were stigmatized for life, denied the right to vote, and ushered into a world of discrimination. Legally barred from employment, housing, and welfare benefits—and saddled with thousands of dollars of debt—these people were shamed and condemned for failing to hold together their families. They were chastised for succumbing to depression and anger, and blamed for landing back in prison. Historians will likely wonder how we could describe the new caste system as a system of crime control, when it is difficult to imagine a system better designed to create—rather than prevent—crime.”

To give some measure of how dangerously convincing Alexander’s argument is, her book was recently in the news because two New Jersey prisons attempted to ban inmates from reading it. The New Jim Crow has sold more than a million copies since it was published in 2010, but the theories Alexander laid out have since been made all the more accessible by Ava DuVernay’s 2016 Netflix documentary 13th—named for the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. Both projects connect the dots between past eras of white supremacist oppression (slavery, Jim Crow) and our current age of mass incarceration: the product of a system of policing and detention that insists on its own fairness and color blindness, but actually functions as a means of marginalizing and controlling people of color. The story told by the statistics above is no coincidence. In the wake of the civil rights movement, Alexander argues, “proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding ‘law and order’ rather than segregation forever.” In other words: If Jim Crow was the new slavery, mass incarceration has been the new Jim Crow. As activist and academic Angela Davis puts it in 13th: By the time Nixon took office, “crime began to stand in for race.”

Both Alexander’s book and DuVernay’s film came out during the Obama administration, when narratives of a post-racial America bumped up against truths about racist policing verified by camera phone technology and amplified by social media–savvy activists. President Obama made some reform inroads (he reduced the federal sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine—a blatantly racist policy set in the 1980s—from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and during his second term the federal prison population dipped for the first time since the Carter administration). And in recent years, criminal justice reform has been touted as that rare thing—appealing to politicians and funders on both sides of the aisle (even the Koch brothers are for it). But President Trump, a law-and-order candidate from a bygone era, has managed in his brief time in charge to muck up any positive trends (at least federally; at the state level, as Pew Charitable Trusts attests, there’s more reason to be hopeful). A Brennan Center for Justice report counts the ways: Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have fear-mongered about a crime wave that doesn’t exist; created a false connection between immigration and crime; instructed prosecutors to seek the most severe penalties for all offenses; resumed the war on marijuana (a drug that Sessions has compared to heroin); repealed an Obama-era directive reducing the use of private prisons; decreased federal oversight of local police departments; and expanded the practice of civil asset forfeiture. Most recently, the White House made news when the president announced that he wasn’t willing to get behind sentencing reform in a bill currently making its way through the Senate, urging Congress instead to focus on reentry reform.

What to make of this? I emailed the story to the formerly incarcerated activist Topeka K. Sam, one of eight women Vogue profiled for this portfolio—organizers, artists, lawyers, philanthropists, architects—who are helping to lead the charge in the fight for criminal justice reform and decarceration. (Why women? “We’ve always been at the helm of social movements,” says Patrisse Khan-Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives Matter and another of our subjects.)

Since her 2015 release from federal prison, Sam has founded Ladies of Hope Ministries, a reentry program for women like herself; helped draft the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, congressional legislation that would require prisons to provide female inmates with tampons free of charge and disavow practices like shackling during pregnancy and labor; launched a SiriusXM radio show about women in the system; and through a Soros Justice fellowship, she is working to put together a Know Your Rights guide for people on probation and parole (a process that in her own experience was “arbitrary. They do what they want to do. It changes from probation officer to probation officer, from district to district, from system to system. It’s counterproductive”).

Her take on the news from the White House? “We need to do everything. Not one thing.”

Agnes Gund, photographed at her apartment in New York City.
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
When you walk into Agnes Gund’s sunny, sprawling Park Avenue apartment, you pass by a lot of remarkable art: There’s a Cai Guo-Qiang gunpowder painting and an installation of shimmery glass cubes by Teresita Fernández. There are sculptures by Christo and Louise Bourgeois in the living room, a Calder mobile dangling in the corner, a Rothko canvas dominating one wall. Above the mantel in the turquoise-painted dining room is a piece by contemporary abstract painter Stanley Whitney, a dazzling, vibrating grid of color-blocks. It hasn’t been there long. If you’d come by even just a year ago, you would have seen Roy Lichtenstein’s cheekily named 1962 Masterpiece in its place. But then last summer, Gund, the former president of the Museum of Modern Art, sold the Lichtenstein for a record-breaking $165 million, and earmarked the lion’s share of those proceeds ($100 million) for the fight against mass incarceration. Gund’s Art for Justice Fund, a five-year initiative administered with Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation, specifically aims to reduce America’s prison population by 20 percent in a dozen or so target states. This isn’t the first time that Gund, a banking heiress, has sold art to fund her philanthropic ventures (previously she was best known for her Studio in a School program, launched in 1977 to replace arts education slashed by budget cuts). “I’ve sold so many things, and I really don’t like to do it,” she says, laughing, “but I promise things to people that I really don’t have the money to pay for.” In selling the Lichtenstein she sets a powerful example for how reform-minded collectors can—and should—leverage the contemporary art market bubble for social justice causes. That message is coincidentally amplified by the fact that the painting’s alleged buyer was hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, a Trump donor. There’s some poetic justice in putting Cohen’s dollars toward the kind of criminal justice reform that Trump’s administration has refused to get behind, though Gund “didn’t really think of it that way.” For her, the inequities of the system are personal, insofar as six of her 12 grandchildren are African-American, and therefore, according to statistics, five times more likely than their white cousins to be incarcerated. She proudly shows off a Vik Muniz chocolate painting of the brood that hangs in a study, and gives me a copy of last year’s Christmas card, shot by narrative photographer Duane Michals. “You begin to really be angry about all the discrimination,” she says, “that children in their lives who are white, nobody will come up to them and ask: ‘Do you have marijuana? Do you have coke or crack?’” Selling the painting was personal, too. She knew Lichtenstein well (he passed away in 1997) and remains friendly with his widow, Dorothy. Several things convinced her it was time to part with Masterpiece: A trip to Poland to see the concentration camps made her confront bystander apathy in her own country; she met Bryan Stevenson, the social justice activist, author, and lawyer whose museum dedicated to the legacy of slavery will open this spring in Montgomery, Alabama (his Equal Justice Initiative is now a grantee of the fund); and, at the insistence of artist Cindy Sherman, she saw Ava DuVernay’s incisive documentary 13th. Stevenson has spoken about the difficulty in fundraising around criminal justice causes, and Gund has encountered people she’s “quite close to” who ask, “What in the world do you want to do that for?’ They think some of these people deserve to be in there. They don’t understand that the whole thing is very unjust.” Dorothy Lichtenstein, for the record, isn’t among the detractors. Gund called up her old friend before auctioning off Masterpiece. “She was really glad. She thought this was important, and that Roy would probably feel the same way.”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, photographed in New York City.

Last month, a 16-year-old boy named Anthony Weber was shot and killed by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy in the Westmont area of South L.A. The Sheriff’s Department claimed that Weber was carrying a gun and that he matched the description of someone who had earlier pointed one at a motorist. After Weber was killed, the alleged gun was nowhere to be found. The authorities speculated that a neighbor may have taken it in the chaos following the shooting (a witness to the aftermath told a journalist that reports of chaos were vastly overstated). Community members organized protests. There was a town hall meeting in which Weber’s grieving family confronted law enforcement. And then: nothing. “It did a few cycles in the local news, and now it’s over,” says Patrisse Khan-Cullors, author, artist, organizer, and cofounder of Black Lives Matter. “The family is left to deal with the pain of losing a child by a state that is not willing to protect them. We have a public that’s completely desensitized to the killing of black people at the hands of law enforcement.” In the past, Khan-Cullors bemoans, mainstream media outlets might have picked up the story, might even have drawn a connection between Weber’s death at the hands of a sheriff’s deputy and a little-covered speech delivered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions about a week later to the National Sheriff’s Association, in which he went off script to invoke the “Anglo-American heritage” of the office—a phrase that is common parlance among lawyers (our legal system, after all, is largely inherited from England) but in context, one that felt more like an air horn than a dog whistle. “I think many of us knew that if 45 was going to get into office, all eyes were going to be on him,” Khan-Cullors explains about the way Trump has hijacked the news cycle. “I don’t think we fully understood that the attention to our movement would just literally end.” Recently, Khan-Cullors published a memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, which she refers to as “an intervention. I want to have a conversation about the criminalization of black people, about the fact that more people were killed last year by law enforcement than any other year we’ve recorded.” The book tracks her own upbringing in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles and the gothically cruel experiences her father, brother, and peers endured inside the California prison system. Another intervention: the new docuseries Resist, which aired recently on Blackpills, a mobile platform, and which follows Khan-Cullors and a number of other activists as they attempt to stop a $3.5 billion jail plan by L.A. County. She calls herself a prison abolitionist, but she acknowledges that prison reform is a necessary stop along the way. “You can’t just get rid of something overnight,” she says. “I actually believe in this concept called non-reformist reform, which I learned about from Critical Resistance, cofounded by Angela Davis. It’s creating reform that doesn’t reify the prison industrial complex.” Take body cameras, for example. “They seem like a good idea, but then if you look into how much they cost and how often law enforcement is turning them off, you start to realize that they give the state more money, more access, and they legitimize policing.” For the average person, eliminating prisons and police entirely may be a bridge too far. “I like to say, it might be scary for you, so let’s go somewhere else first,” she continues. “Let’s look at their budgets. Let’s put a five-year freeze on them. Let’s match those dollars with housing, with access to healthy food, public education, jobs. And let’s see what happens to ‘crime.’”

Left: Architect Deanna Van Buren, photographed in her Oakland office, designs alternatives to prisons and jails (see examples of her work here). The Brooklyn Detention Complex (right), built in 1957 in downtown Brooklyn, is just the sort of facility she thinks we need to move beyond.

Last spring, when it was announced that Frank Gehry would be teaching a new Future of Prison course at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, the Oakland-based social justice architect Deanna Van Buren tweeted her disapproval: “While Frank Gehry explores the future of prisons, I urge us to explore the end of them.” She means this: If the values of our justice system are punitive, security oriented, and structurally racist, even a completely reimagined prison building will affirm and embody those ideas. “We manifest exactly what we believe,” she says. “It becomes very concrete. If you want to rethink mass incarceration, you have to abandon the system, because the system hasn’t changed its root values. It still wants to do the same thing over and over again.” Van Buren has made it her business to break that cycle, by building alternatives to incarceration based on the values of restorative justice through her Designing Justice + Designing Spaces project. She first became interested in restorative justice—which focuses on the rehabilitation of an offender through reconciliation with his victim, and with the community at large, so that “both parties can recover and return to the community unstigmatized”—after seeing the activist sisters Angela and Fania Davis in conversation on the subject at an Oakland church more than decade ago. “It was the first real solution I’d heard for our criminal justice system,” she says. She’s had the opportunity to put her theories into practice: Van Buren did one project in Syracuse, New York, in collaboration with the Center for Court Innovation, transforming a crack house turned art space into a peacemaking facility where community elders facilitate dialogue around cases that have been diverted from the court system. “It’s bringing these Native American practices into a non-Native community for the first time in the U.S.,” Van Buren says. She did another similar project in the Bay Area, in collaboration with Fania Davis’s organization, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. And she’s also expanded her purview. “The bigger mission needed to be, how do we address the root causes of mass incarceration: lack of access to jobs, to education, to housing.” She has sought innovative solutions, repurposing decommissioned Muni buses, for example, into mobile classrooms for the formerly incarcerated and landing pads for women released from jail in the middle of the night with nowhere to go. For the past five years, Van Buren has also had a side hustle designing virtual architecture for video games, and recently she’s been able to weave the two strands of her career together, developing a video game for high school students involved in the peacemaking process. Rethinking justice and dreaming up digital spaces are not so different after all. “The thing they had in common was being in the mind-set of reimagining our world,” she observes. “How do you create new laws around the physics of a place? How do you rethink the way things work?”

Essie Justice Group members, photographed in their Oakland Office (from left): Natasha Terry-Robinson, Catalina Bautista-Palacios, Starr McCraw (with baby Amara), Shawanda Scott, Essie founder Gina Clayton, Jasmine Brown, Taylor McCraw, and Anita Wills.
Gina Clayton was in her first year at Harvard Law School when someone close to her was sentenced to 20 years in prison. “I remember feeling the strange irony of going to criminal law classes, where we would study cases that were hypothetical,” she says, “then home to write letters to a sentencing judge in California to plea for leniency.” Clayton, who is from Los Angeles, wasn’t open with her classmates about what was going on back home. “In that space I felt very alone. Yet it activated me. It brought me to fully confront what incarceration’s impact really looks like.” (Such secrecy is common, notes Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: “Remarkably, even in communities devastated by mass incarceration, many people struggling to cope with the stigma of imprisonment have no idea that their neighbors are struggling with the same grief, shame, and isolation.”) After graduation, Clayton went to work in a public defender’s office in Harlem, representing people in housing court, most of them women with family members who had gotten caught up in the criminal justice system. Her clients were facing eviction because of failure to pay rent—“having a loved one behind bars is associated with a 64 percent decrease in household assets; you spend a tremendous amount on everything from bail bond fees to attorneys to days off work”—or because of clauses in their public housing leases that allowed their tenancy to be terminated in the event of criminal activity by anyone in the household. Those two experiences led Clayton in May of 2014 to found Essie Justice Group, a network of women with incarcerated loved ones—about 30 percent of them are also formerly incarcerated themselves—that serves as equal part support system (they’re inspired by the scale of models like Alcoholics Anonymous) and advocacy lobby (think: Mothers Against Drunk Driving). “I saw the way women were navigating complex systems, were the leaders of families, were taking on extra jobs to pay for the increase of expenses. I thought, what could happen if we broke the isolation and created a collective voice?” she says. That means both within the group—“I believe that community creates courage,” explains Clayton—and outside of it, where Essie has campaigned to end the money bail system in California. “You’re going to Sacramento, speaking to the public safety committee about the impact of a bill on your family’s life, writing your story in an op-ed, sharing it with stakeholders to help others understand the full impact that American addiction to incarceration has had” Clayton rattles off. “One of the things we know is in the wake of 40 years of punitive, bad policy, we are going to have a lot of healing to do. And women are well positioned to lead that process. What Essie imagines is a future in which they’re connected and supported in doing that.”

Left: A room at Hope House in Bronx, New York. Right: Hope House cofounder Topeka K. Sam, photographed in the Bronx.
When Topeka K. Sam left federal prison in 2015 after serving three and a half years on a drug trafficking charge, she moved back in with her parents. Many people don’t have that option. Women, currently the fastest growing prison population in the U.S., face a major shortage of safe housing options post-incarceration. “Most women would have to go through shelters, back into abusive relationships, back into conditions that are not going to benefit anyone,” says Sam, who was still behind bars when she and fellow inmate Vanee Sykes began dreaming up a facility that would help meet that need. Those dreams have taken shape in Hope House, a stylishly decorated transitional group home located in a rented duplex in a brick two-flat on a quiet side street in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx, New York. Sam and Sykes opened their doors in October of last year, bolstered by seed money from fellow formerly incarcerated activist Susan Burton, who has developed a slew of similar projects in Los Angeles. Three women—two out of federal prison, one out of Rikers jail—have since moved into the upstairs bedrooms. Sam and Sykes are hoping to add two more housemates soon. But in the meantime, they’re fighting an uphill battle with a community that doesn’t want them there. Hope House’s neighbors have called in complaints with the Department of Buildings and to Sam’s probation officer (she just got off federal supervision); some have showed up at community board meetings wielding signs that read “No Hope for Hope House.” “It didn’t dawn on me,” says Sam, who was up front with the landlord who rented them the space about her intentions. “We’re in the Bronx. Soundview projects is up the street. This is a community of color. One in three adults has been arrested. One in 53 is on probation, parole, or supervision. I’m like, okay, five women coming into Hope House aren’t going to be the only ones on this block affected by the criminal justice system. [They said,] ‘I think this is great what you’re doing, but not in our community.’ I said, ‘Well, okay, if not here, where? Where do you expect people to go? And why don’t we have a right to live in a safe community just like everyone else?’”

Nusrat Choudhury, photographed at the ACLU offices in lower Manhattan.
In late December, just before Christmas, The Washington Post broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was rescinding more than a dozen guidelines issued by the Obama Justice Department, among them a March 2016 letter to judges and court administrators reiterating that operating courthouses as for-profit endeavors is against the law. The advisory followed a Justice Department study a year earlier of Ferguson, Missouri, that revealed unlawful targeting of African-American residents for tickets and fines—penalties like $531 for an unkempt yard or $302 for jaywalking—meant to satisfy “revenue rather than . . . public safety needs.” Such practices were resulting in compromised incentives for law enforcement, and effectively creating debtors’ prisons (illegal), where those who can’t pay end up in jail, often even before a hearing or meeting with legal representation. “You can’t administer fair and impartial justice if you’re focused on the money coming in to pay your salary,” explains ACLU racial justice attorney Nusrat Choudhury. “The Constitution applies when you try to collect fines and fees.” Sessions’s rescinding of the guidance “sent a message basically saying that the federal government doesn’t care about civil rights law when it comes to protecting poor people.” Choudhury was already litigating against debtors’ prisons in places like Biloxi, Mississippi, where local courts ended up settling with the ACLU and adopting model reform practices. But suddenly, she says, the work has become all the more urgent—and difficult. She has had to fight to keep alive a suit the ACLU has brought against Lexington, South Carolina, where hundreds of people a year are incarcerated for inability to pay things like traffic tickets. Lead plaintiff Twanda Marshinda Brown is one of them. An overdue ticket turned into a suspended license, after which, lacking public transportation options, she continued to drive, which then turned into 57 days in jail when she could not pay her mounting fines. Brown lost her job and might have lost custody of her 13-year-old son had his older siblings not been able to step in. After her release, still without a license, she had to take lower-paying work within walking distance of her home. “Jailing her because she didn’t have money just made her life, her children’s lives, more difficult. It ended up making them poorer, making it harder for her to get a job, and to do what she wanted to do: support her family,” says Choudhury. Of course, debtors’ prisons aren’t the only arena in which the Sessions Justice Department has indicated its preference for retrograde “tough on crime” policies. In a speech to the National District Attorneys Association last summer, Sessions upheld the virtues of “broken windows” policing, and his boss, President Trump, while on the campaign trail, erroneously touted the success of stop-and-frisk (in fact, it has been discredited as legally unjustified and racially biased in such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia). Choudhury is also working to challenge the practice in Milwaukee, where records show that, even controlling for crime and other factors, people of color are subjected to traffic and pedestrian stops at rates six times that of white people. “That is a wake-up call that what they’re doing is illegal and needs to stop,” she says, reminding me that stop-and-frisk is a major driver of mass incarceration, funneling people into the system for low-level offenses and allowing disparities to accrete at each stage. “Challenging unlawful policing up front is so critical to addressing discrimination,” Choudhury attests, though she is increasingly convinced that civil rights advocates need to move toward thinking about the people making decisions at every juncture of the criminal justice process. “My experience of working on these issues in Biloxi has really converted me,” she says. “We don’t win when we’re talking in a vacuum. We win, and communities win, when there are people in power who are willing to take stands to dismantle each part of the system.”

Left: The bail window at the Brooklyn Detention Complex. Right: Rachel Foran, photographed near the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund office in Brooklyn.

“We want to put ourselves out of business,” says Rachel Foran, the managing director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, a nonprofit based on an age-old, community-organized, money-pooling model that uses a revolving pot of cash to pay bail for those who can’t afford it. The Brooklyn fund bails out about 130 people a month (all accused of misdemeanors, with a cap of $2,000 per person, by state law). Ninety-five percent of those recipients make their court dates, thus replenishing the pot—and the ones who don’t often have perfectly good reasons, says Foran, like fear of deportation. (The organization’s biggest problem recouping funds, she says, lies not with no-shows but with the city, which often fails to reimburse expeditiously.) She’s quick to point out that as much good as they may do, bail funds are “not the ultimate solution.” They’re a Band-Aid fix on a broken system that is costly to taxpayers (the Pretrial Justice Institute estimates that pretrial detention wastes $14 billion a year) and has become totally abstracted from its purpose: mitigating flight risk and protecting public safety. Rather, the bail system effectively “criminalizes poverty and race” by locking up predominantly those who can’t afford to buy their way out—or, in some cases, forcing them to contract with commercial bail bondsman, an industry that in 2016 in New York siphoned between $14 million and $20 million in legally allowed premiums away from largely low-income communities. (For some sense of the brokenness of this system, compare Sandra Bland and Robert Durst, as the Los Angeles Times did in an editorial last summer: The former, arrested following a traffic stop in 2015, died in a Waller County, Texas, jail, her family unable to post the $515 needed to free her; the latter, accused of murder in Galveston, Texas, in 2001 but heir to a real-estate fortune, paid his own $300,000 bail, then fled the state.) Those who get stuck behind bars without having been convicted of a crime—sometimes for years at a time, as in the now famous case of Kalief Browder on Rikers Island—suffer enormous collateral consequences: job loss, familial instability, depression. They’re also incentivized to take plea deals and admit guilt for crimes they may not have done just to regain their freedom. The absurd inequity of this system—particularly in the wake of tragedies like Bland’s and Browder’s deaths—has created momentum around bail reform in states across the country. The Vera Institute of Justice called 2017 a “breakthrough year,” highlighting efforts in New Jersey, Connecticut, New Mexico, Kentucky, and California. Locally, in Brooklyn and Manhattan, district attorneys have issued directives to cease asking for cash bail in most misdemeanor cases. Back to that going-out-of-business thing: The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund recently helped launch a court watch program in which members of the community post up in courtrooms “to make sure that DAs are doing the stuff they promised,” says Foran. “And what we’re seeing is that they’re still setting bail on misdemeanor cases.” What makes bail funds a “radical act,” she says—“community engagement in a system that’s so closed off to the people who are actually directly affected by it”—applies to court watch, too. “What does it mean for community members to sit in a courtroom, to say, ‘We elected you into office, we pay your salaries, you work for us. We want to see transformative justice.’ So we’re going to sit here and watch to see that it happens.”

A table of found objects in Nigel Poor’s studio in San Francisco.

Nigel Poor, photographed in San Francisco.
“Sonically, there’s so much that happens in a prison that’s fascinating,” says Nigel Poor, cohost and cocreator of Ear Hustle, the Radiotopia podcast that offers an aural window into life in San Quentin, the San Francisco Bay Area correctional facility that Johnny Cash once made famous in song. Poor, an artist who teaches photography at California State University, Sacramento, had limited experience in radio and none in podcasting when she conceived of Ear Hustle with two San Quentin prisoners: Antwan Williams, one of the show’s sound designers, and Earlonne Woods, Poor’s cohost and the Virgil to her Dante. On the spectrum of pop culture portraits of prison life, Ear Hustle is more Orange Is the New Black than Oz, owing to its focus on quotidian concerns—how to pick a cellie; pets behind bars; conjugal visits—and to Woods’s incredibly amiable, generous on-air manner. (“He’s golden,” says Poor. “His turn of phrase, the way he sees the world, is just fantastic.”) It’s also a function of San Quentin itself, which is paradoxically both site of California’s last death row and, as prisons go, rather progressive. “I don’t want to paint a picture that it’s rosy,” says Poor. “There are a lot of difficult things that happen there. But it is unique. It has something like 3,000 volunteers who go in every year to run programs. There are a lot of opportunities for men inside to participate in interesting things. Our mandate is really to talk about what happens when you get into prison: How do you find meaning? How do you find purpose? How are you not overwhelmed by the difficulty of your situation?” The gentle good humor of the show is all the more remarkable considering that Woods, currently serving 31 years to life for attempted second-degree robbery, and Williams, currently serving 15 years for armed robbery with a gun enhancement, as well as many of the men who share their stories, are “violent” offenders, the sort often left out of conversations about criminal justice reform. The podcast, about to launch its second season, has struck a chord with audiences both inside and outside prison walls. “When I walk through the [San Quentin] yard, guys are like, ‘radio lady!’” says Poor. “I wish they would say, ‘podcast lady!’” The cohosts have heard from prosecutors, defense lawyers, corrections officers, teachers who are using Ear Hustle in the classroom, and even a federal judge. “I really believe in staying in your lane,” says Poor, who had little background in criminal justice before she began volunteering at San Quentin in 2011. “But I feel like we’re supplying thoughts for people who make law.” Poor says she’s most touched by letters from victims of crimes, like a woman whose sister was sexually assaulted and murdered, whose mother was responsible for bringing a three strikes law into their state. “It made her think about how these laws had all these unintended consequences. Her family was devastated by this crime that had happened to them, and all these other families are being devastated by the law.” She goes on: “That kind of compassion, and ability to open your heart and mind, is stunning to me.”