Survivors Guide to Prison: Examining a Broken System with Matthew Cooke

Episode Notes

Transcript

Michael Semanchik:

What if the prison system wasn’t designed to rehabilitate people at all, but to break them? Today’s episode features Matthew Cooke, director of the documentary Survivor’s Guide to Prison, one of the most unflinching examinations of the American criminal legal system ever put on film. Matthew’s journey into this work began in an undergraduate economics class where he first learned that the war on drugs was not only an effective but actively fueling mass incarceration without improving public safety. That realization led him from making a film about drug prohibition to turning his lens on prisons themselves, survivor’s guide to prison centers, the voices of people who lived through the system, including wrongfully convicted men like Bruce Lisker and Reggie Cole, while exposing how plea bargaining, bail and solitary confinement have become structural features of injustice. In this conversation, we talk about what’s broken, why it stays broken, and most importantly, what actually works from restorative justice to rehabilitation programs with extraordinary success rates, Matthew makes the case that reform isn’t about being soft on crime, it’s about being smart, humane and effective. You made this movie called Survivor’s Guide to Prison. How did you get into the space of making a movie about prison and the criminal justice

Matthew Cooke:

System? Okay, so when I was an undergrad, I was totally unsure what my major was going to be. I knew I wanted to make films, but I also felt like I really wanted to know kind of more about the world. And I ended up just taking all these one-on-one classes and one of the classes I took was a survey course in economics at Harvard, and that sounds impressive, but Harvard actually offers summer school to anybody, including rough around the edge of students like me who didn’t always necessarily get the grades that would get you into an Ivy League, nor did I have the connections to do so, but I was literate enough to read that they accepted anybody into summer school. So I thought that might look good on my resume. So I enrolled in an economics course and there was an amazing visiting professor whose name I cannot remember, but he was from Vassar in the economics course.

He covered four. What he termed were economic failures, meaning four areas in which efficiency was not the norm, that almost everything that we were doing would be making matters worse, making the product the least efficient, the least quality one stuck out, and that was the war on drugs and going through the war on drugs. Once he outlined these things, it seemed like it was common sense, but until that point I assumed that of course, drugs are bad. You do drugs, they should be illegal, you should be thrown in prison for that. What I didn’t take into account was when you make something illegal that creates a black market, especially when demand has the kind of elasticity that it’s not going to reduce no matter what the consequences for if you’re an addict. Later, when I found myself confronted with issues of addiction my own life, I understood that intimately that the consequences really had no bearing upon my willingness or interest in consuming that product, economically speaking. And so that course really blew my mind. I went, oh my God, there’s this whole incentive to create an additional problem on top of the problem of addiction that already exists.

Michael Semanchik:

And the whole point of the war on drugs was to try to dissuade the use of drugs.

Matthew Cooke:

Well, that’s what we say. If that were true, if we took that on face value and said that the war on drugs, the objective is to win the war against the drugs, drugs lose. We win. We are failing to do that. So statistically speaking, when you make drugs illegal and prohibit them, including alcohol, if we include alcohol in that,

Michael Semanchik:

Sure, and we should.

Matthew Cooke:

It’s the most dangerous drug of all. It doesn’t reduce addiction rates or abuse rates.

Michael Semanchik:

You go into this class, this Harvard class, and he’s talking about drugs and the war on drugs and this failure that is kind of ongoing. At some point you do a deeper dive.

Matthew Cooke:

So I’m in this class and I’m thinking, oh, okay, well someone should make a film about the war on drugs. Well, I discovered that there have been lots of films about the war on drugs, but nothing’s happened. There’s still this stupid war. And not only that, but the history when you get into it is all racist. Not much has changed. We allow ourselves to be used by and opportunists use the worst emotional recourse, revenge, fear, paranoia, and we get played over and over by that stuff to be afraid of other people to kind of tribalized and to take a situation that’s wrong and use it to do worse by each other. I mean, the criminal justice system is sort of filled with that and yet, and yet there are organizations like the Innocence Project and you and individuals within those organizations and all kinds of people doing absolutely incredibly heroic, amazing life-changing work inside this monstrous system.

Those stories need to be told and applauded. And so that’s why I wanted to make a movie about the war on drugs, and I did, and it was called How to Make Money Selling Drugs. And at the end of the movie movie making process, I asked some of the guys who were in the movie to come watch the movie and tell me if I missed anything before I released it. One guy said, yeah, you missed the whole story about prisons, so that should be your next movie. And I went, oh God. And I went, all right, and I thought about it and then eventually I did it and that’s survivor’s got to prison.

Michael Semanchik:

Wow. Who was the person that told you that you needed to make a movie about prisons?

Matthew Cooke:

He was an electrician and he was a very successful union electrician who way in his past had been locked up for some drug business and now was an upstanding member of his community who just by the blessings of his life was able to really have a great life. And I think he saw a lot of people who didn’t have the blessings that he had because in so many situations people go into prison and it makes you worse. I mean the recidivism rate. So to talk about right off the bat, the large majority of people who go into state prison return within five years, high percentage of people. So the prison system doesn’t work in terms of changing outcomes, changing trajectories.

Michael Semanchik:

It’s interesting you bring that up. I know when I got started in this work in 2008 or wherever it was, the recidivism rate in California was something like 70% of the people that committed crimes and went to prison and then were subsequently released, went back to prison within five years. And it was not that long before that. I would say it was maybe within the previous 10 years that the California Department of Corrections added the word rehabilitation to their name. So they went from California Department of Corrections, CDC to California, department of Correction and Rehabilitation. But nothing changed. The programs actually went away because the funding kind of evaporated. And so the recidivism rate was staying the same, and it was like there’s no rehab here. We’re not teaching people how to not commit crimes. In fact, it’s actually the opposite. They’re coming out, they have no skills. They’ve lost all ability to put together a resume. They have this huge gap. Nobody’s hiring them on the outside. So the only opportunity they have is an opportunity that’s not legal.

Matthew Cooke:

There was a study, I can’t remember the name of the study, but there’s a study done that showed that people’s criminal earnings actually increased after they went to prison, that you would learn how to commit crimes more effectively if they were burglary or forgery or whatever it happened to be.

Michael Semanchik:

Right. And that makes sense. I mean, you’re surrounded by a bunch of people that were in the criminal mindset and you’re talking about the ways that you’ve committed your crime, what crime you committed and perfecting it.

Matthew Cooke:

Yeah.

Michael Semanchik:

So once you decide to do this movie, then where do you go from there? You start doing a deep dive into the prison system or how does it go from there?

Matthew Cooke:

I think I came up with the title first because look, this is not new information. In the seventies criminologists were saying we’ve got to do something about our prison system. It’s overpopulated, it’s not working. Recidivism rates are really high, and yet what happens is we get the war on drugs and we get the spike that happens in the seventies. I don’t know if you know the statistic of how many it was in the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, somewhere around there were under correctional control and then by now it’s like 8 million people or something like that.

Michael Semanchik:

Yeah, that sounds about right. I don’t know the exact figure, but it went from hundreds of thousands to millions, definitely

Matthew Cooke:

To millions. So in the seventies we already knew something was wrong. And if you think about something like cancer, well, we spend an enormous amount of money and invest enormous amounts of money into trying to find a cure for cancer. We actually are very close to knowing the cure for crime. We know that an enormous indicator for crime, poverty, economic insecurity, and then we know after the fact what works in terms of rehabilitation. There’s all kinds of programs that have a completely reverse statistics. So if we’re talking about 75% recidivism rates, were even up to 80, even 90%. Sometimes recidivism rates, meaning somebody returns to prison after five years, unbelievable failure rate. And we say in the movie, imagine any other product with a failure rate of 75% or higher, that product would be illegal. Our prison system should be illegal. There are programs that do, so going back to your question, how to structure a movie, I think that people’s first emotional impulse, the same impulse that gets played upon, kind of uses us and supports this broken system that doesn’t work is always wrapped up in this idea that if you don’t break the law, if you’re not a bad person, then you won’t get swept up into this system.

So stop complaining about this thing you don’t want to talk about in any way. You don’t want to talk about violent criminals, we don’t want to talk about poverty, all this stuff. It’s very easy to kind of trick people into going with the status quo or voting for the politician or the person with the simplest answer when our emotions are being played upon in that way. So what I thought was what is the doorway in which people are going to be willing to walk through to look at the criminal justice system? So that’s something that in the bunch of documentaries that I’ve done, how my training as a storyteller, the audience always is going to either want to or not want to put themselves in the shoes of the main characters and then walk through the story. That’s what happens when we tell stories. So if it’s horror movie, there’s a certain amount of masochism that goes along with that, or when you go on a roller coaster ride or something like that, you’re safe.

You’re going to sit down, you’re going to go through an experience, you’re going to be willing to go through it, witness what someone else has experienced. So the way to do that to me was through the eyes of an innocent person. So I wanted to find two people who were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted and trace their stories on how they survived prison. And that way I knew automatically the audience is going to be on their side. We’re not going to get hung up on anything. Well, they deserved it, so I don’t really want to identify with them. No, no, no, let’s just go to the hundreds because we think there’s hundreds of thousands of people possibly in the prison system who were innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been convicted. So let’s find two and tell their stories. So that was what I thought.

And also I think I’d gone to Jonathan Taplin is a film producer and writer and was a professor of communications at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, and he had a fundraiser to fundraise in opposition of the death penalty in California. And a guy named Bruce Lisker was speaking, and he was a man who spent many years in prison for the crime of the murder of his mother, a crime for which he did not commit. And so he became the first subject, and then I talked to you guys and Reggie Cole became the second.

Michael Semanchik:

So you’ve got Bruce, you’ve got Reggie Cole, two innocent individuals. You’ve talked to a number of other experts in the film. So take us through some of the things you learned about the prison system and sort of the prison advice that came out of the movie.

Matthew Cooke:

I think it’s hard to believe how we wouldn’t want to know how willing police officers can be to just flat out lie. I mean so much so that there’s a term for it called test a lying. It’s actually a term. I think that the incentives for putting people away, for getting a conviction, for getting a guilty verdict, for getting someone to plea. I think a lot of people don’t realize this, but 97% or something like that of cases never go to trial because the prosecutors just pile charge upon charge upon charge. And if you are in jail and haven’t been able to bail out, you’re going to plead guilty because you want to get out sooner. You want the lesser of two evils. It’s scary in there. When I toured the LA County Jail, there was a prison guard who was giving me a couple of guys that gave me the tour, and that seemed like a punishment to me having to see some of the things that these guys had to see and witness and deal with some of the things that I was told, some of the anecdotes that I was told I didn’t put in the movie.

Some of those things I’ve never told a living soul because they’re so disturbing, they’re so upsetting. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have the memory of that story, so I just kept it. But the kind of violence that people have endured astounded me how the prison system, we talked about this before, but how being in jail or in prison, an environment where violence is taking place, makes you violent and of course that makes total sense or can force you into violence where you wouldn’t have been before. I mean in Reggie Cole’s case, he was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, and then when he was in prison, he killed someone in self-defense and it was only found out because of that trial that he shouldn’t have been in prison in the first place. What a nightmare.

That was a shocking story. And I think the thing of taking people off the streets and then putting them behind a wall where they just sort of exist, still exist with exacerbated problems that now the rest of society doesn’t have to look at anymore and that a whole economy exists to support these kind of cities within cities without having an incentive to make people’s lives better. There’s no incentive to make people’s lives better behind the walls, and there’s no incentive really to make people’s lives better outside the walls either. And everyone ends up being victimized by the system. We’ll be right back.

Michael Semanchik:

We’ve talked about some of the missteps of policing and how the system is kind of unbalanced and not really doing its job. Put yourself I guess in Bruce or Reggie’s shoes for a minute and how do you get through it? What are some of the things that you do to protect yourself or to stand the best chance?

Matthew Cooke:

If you’re accused of a crime, the first thing that you do is don’t say anything because nobody’s your friend, nobody. And the one thing you’re going to want more than anyone else is a friend. So you have to fight all your best instincts to reach out for help. You don’t talk to anybody except somebody or somebody you’re paying.

Michael Semanchik:

And that kind of goes right in with what we’ve talked about, which is incentives. So all of the people that are going to be trying to be your friend, the police, your cellmate, the guards, they all have an incentive.

Matthew Cooke:

There could be a voice talking to you through a hole in the wall and you could think that was sent by God to rescue you. That’s what I would think. Don’t talk to that person in the next cell over because there’s this whole incentive structure for people to get you to say something in exchange for some amnesty for them so that someone at the end of the line can get another conviction rate, win another election and get some more lobbying monies and buy that other house in the Hamptons. Meanwhile, you’re sitting there counting the days, counting the hours, counting the minutes. So that first thing that you want to do is say nothing. Shut your mouth.

Michael Semanchik:

There’s a part in the film where you talk about fighting back. There’s a movie out there called Felon, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It kind of captures part of that, which is sometimes you go into prison and there’s this segregation in prisons. So for those that dunno, there’s a segregation based on race and the races kind of form their own prison gangs. And those prison gangs go up against one another. And sometimes there’s fights within a particular race, but most of the time it’s a segregated system and the race is fight one another. And part of what happens in felon is the main character kind of goes to prison on something. It’s sort of like an accident of sorts. He kills somebody that’s trying to break into his house, goes to prison. He’s not a hard criminal by any means. He’s really hardly a criminal at all. And then all of a sudden, by the time he’s been a couple of years, he’s had to get some protection and had to sort of figure out how to survive. I think of that and I think of Reggie’s case, what do you do in that situation? You’re Reggie, you’re in and you know that somebody’s coming to get you. How do you survive that?

Matthew Cooke:

I don’t know. I mean Reggie’s story is insane. He became what they said he was. That’s his words. He said, you made me, what you said was they turned him into a murderer, framed him essentially for a crime he didn’t commit. Then he was attacked and he felt that he had to kill this guy who was going to kill him otherwise. So I don’t know. I don’t know that he had a choice.

Michael Semanchik:

We know that from our experience that the system also makes it pretty challenging in, it’s even more challenging. You don’t have the right to lawyers beyond your direct appeal. There’s limited resources for organizations like the California Innocence Project and others, but we make it even more challenging. We destroy evidence after you’ve been convicted. So you can’t do DNA testing if the evidence doesn’t exist and there’s no remedy if the evidence doesn’t exist, it’s just too bad. So what are you going to do when you’re a Reggie and you get to prison? What are you supposed to do? What do you tell people to do?

Matthew Cooke:

You try. You just try. You just never give up. You never give up. That’s all we can do. And I think you guys do incredible work. The Innocence Project gets people out of prison who’ve been wrongfully convicted and who’ve spent sometimes decade or more multiple decades, I mean unimaginable amounts of time. These are human beings who overall, maybe they had moments of despair, maybe they had countless moments of despair, but overall they didn’t give up and neither did you guys. I think we just try our best. That’s all we can do.

Michael Semanchik:

While you’re sitting in prison and while people are in prison, what should they do to maintain their hope and how do they keep their mental health in check from the things that you’ve learned from making the movie?

Matthew Cooke:

Well, okay, so Bruce Lisker describes solitary confinement, which is called the whole, you do something wrong or you need to be segregated for some reason. And in prison there’s the additional punishment and that’s going into solitary confinement, which is torture. Amnesty International calls it torture. The UN calls it torture, it doesn’t rehabilitate, it’s just revenge. So we’re just torturing people and people are sometimes in solitary confinement for years. So imagine how it feels when you’re waiting for something when you’re at the doctor’s office and you’re sitting in the waiting room and you’re like, man, my appointment was 20 minutes ago. Imagine sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office for 20 hours. Now imagine sitting there for 20 months now imagine sitting in the waiting room for the doctor’s office for years and years and years, and in this waiting room, there’s no receptionist, nobody’s working the desk.

There’s no other clients, there’s no doctor or nurse or attendant coming in and saying, Michael, you’re next. There’s nobody just the sounds that are kind of in the cells down the hall, your food tray getting put in there, your toilets in the room with you. I mean, so what do you do to survive that? What Bruce described was playing the songs, all the songs that he could remember in his head, trying to remember places that he grew up, trying to remember every detail of a room, his own room, a place that he loved, his favorite TV shows. I mean, you just create this whole fantasy world and you try to live in there. I think that anyone who’s listening to me describe this right now is probably just shaking their head going, oh my God, oh my God. And the thing is that doesn’t change people, that doesn’t turn them into upstanding citizens, that doesn’t help them face the crime that they’ve done. If they have committed the crime, if they’ve done something for which they really need to atone, that doesn’t help them do it.

Michael Semanchik:

It does the opposite, right? It makes them crazy.

Matthew Cooke:

It drives people crazy. People kill themselves. People develop all kinds of psychosis. And we do that. We do that in the United States of America.

Michael Semanchik:

It’s so interesting that as you were talking about Bruce, I was sitting here thinking, you have no tv. You have in your normal cell, you can have a TV and you can have a CD player and you can have the music so you can put those things in your brain and you don’t have to have it all in there. And I just immediately thought to myself, how hard is it sometimes when you want to think about something or you want to remember the lyrics to a song and you can’t, and then I have the ability to just pull up my phone and figure out what it is. You don’t have that opportunity when you’re in solitary, and I could see where that would just drive me. Just that little thing would drive me crazy. You’re stuck with that same song, that little bit of the song that, and it also made me think of Reggie in 2008.

I went to interview Reggie in prison and his way of coping was he got a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and he started reading about stocks. And this is a guy that had no absolutely no background in Wall Street or stocks or any of that. And I distinctly remember sitting there talking to him and he’s like, look man, I did nothing to get here and I might spend the rest of my life in here and die. This guy, Bernie Madoff has ruined millions of people’s lives and taken billions of dollars. He’s much more criminal than I’ll ever be. But look, he’ll probably get away. And of course this is before we knew what would happen with him. He’s like, so I’m just going to sit here and learn about stocks. And that was his thing. That was the way he coped. It was like, I’m just going to learn a new thing. And he knew more about stocks than I could ever hope to know. He had nothing else that he could do. I just can’t imagine you have 23 and a half hours a day in a cell by yourself, and all you get to do is maybe talk to the person to the left or the right of you in the other cell

Matthew Cooke:

To the walls maybe. I mean, I think that was the other thing was just the lack of human contact, not being able to talk to anybody. We need

Michael Semanchik:

That undoubtedly. And I think you talk about it in the movie a little bit. I think you talked to one of the Iran hikers, if I remember right, about how Iran has solitary and it doesn’t even compare to what we’re doing in the United States,

Matthew Cooke:

Right? No, that’s an amazing comparison that Iran’s prisons are more lenient. They don’t have solitary confinement. They don’t allow that for the extent of time that we have.

Michael Semanchik:

Yeah. Reggie spent 10 years in the hole,

Matthew Cooke:

10 years

Michael Semanchik:

After his prison murder and to think that you could get out and not have mental health issues.

Matthew Cooke:

Yeah, and there was another gentleman who had killed someone is a very strange, any story of violence is strange. His strange story was that there was a woman who was a victim of abuse and he went to go help her and get her stuff. And he described it as he stupidly brought his gun to defend himself and a fight broke out and he killed the guy and he was found guilty of murder. And then when he finally left, he was one of the few cases of patrolling out and after I can’t remember how many years, it was an enormous amount of time. They just said, okay, see you later. They didn’t ask him where he was going. They didn’t ask him if he had a place to go. He was just out on the street. So normally we spend years developing a vocation, a community of people, a path through life. He had no idea what he was going to do. And fortunately there was an organization that helped ’em out

Michael Semanchik:

With innocent clients, a lot of times it is like that. It’s night and day, so they are in prison and there is no expectation of freedom. And then the next day they get freedom and they haven’t had contact with friends or family and parole. Certainly in terms of contact with family and friends. They make it as difficult as they can putting you in prisons far away from the main cities, kind of where the land’s cheap and no real thought process as far as keeping you close to your family, which the research has shown that being close to family is certainly a reduction in recidivism rates and keeping your contact with your community helps to reduce recidivism. So talk to us about some of the ways that you envision reforming the system. And let’s start with the prison system. How do we make the prison system work better?

Matthew Cooke:

Well, I mean that’s the amazing thing is that we actually have answers. I have nothing to add to the conversation because there’s already been people doing amazing programs that span the gamut in creativity in culture. I mean, there’s the Shakespeare Behind Bars program, for example, where people who are incarcerated learn to work together. They learn team building skills and they learn language and stories that reflect their experience. And sometimes that’s easier done through a character who isn’t you suddenly you go, oh my God, I experienced that. I wanted to have revenge, I wanted to, or I knew someone who did exactly this, who did the wrong thing under pressure from someone who told them you should do this, or Hamlet, I had suicidal thoughts. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to live up to what my father did. Or these are universal human things.

Shakespeare behind Bars program has like a 90 something percent success rate. There is the ANA meditation program that also has an incredibly high success rate. Restorative justice programs, which are situations in which the victim of a crime and the perpetrator of a crime meet or if they don’t meet directly, a victim of a similar crime meets with a perpetrator of a similar crime. And all involved are forced by circumstance to confront the reality and consequences of what they’ve done. Those programs have incredibly high success rates. They are also, if you want to talk about being tough on crime, look someone in the eye who’s lost someone because of the same thing you did. So when I’ve witnessed that, I witnessed a woman named Rosa whose son was killed in a drive-by shooting. It was a case of a mistaken identity. So he was killed in a gang shooting, and she dedicated her life to touring prisons and speaking to lifers, people who had life sentences for murder about the effect that murder had and has on the mothers and the sisters and the brothers and the families of those who are left behind.

And man, I looked around the room, I was filming it. There wasn’t a single person who wasn’t deeply, deeply moved. And I remember I caught eyes with a guy we couldn’t be from more different worlds, and we looked at each other while Rosa was talking, he had tears in his eyes. I had tears in my eyes and we were brothers. We were brothers in the sense of experiencing something together, which was a witnessing of Rosa’s story. And one by one, each of these guys came up to the mic after and thanked her and said, thank you so much for sharing your experience. It really helps. And a couple of them were crying and she said, my son, he didn’t die in vain. He is helping you guys. Now, those programs where Rosa and people like her can meet with those who are serving time, that changes people.

There’s no escape from it. Those programs work and they exist and there’s tens upon tens upon tens of varieties of programs of all different kind of shapes and sizes, and it’s not one size fits all. It’s custom fit. And I think that’s the thing is judges as well need to be trained in ethics as much as they need to be trained in law, creative solutions to problems. There’s this beautiful anecdote. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, I have no idea if it is in that book Sheara where there’s this little village and there’s the Hindu community and the Muslim community, and there there’s a bit of tension there, and a Hindu boy and a Muslim boy get into a fight and then the families get involved and suddenly it looks like there’s going to be civil war in this village. And so they kind of ask the town wise person, what do we do?

And the guy says, okay, look boys, you’re going to tie your legs together and you’re going to do all your chores today as one and my young man, you’re a Hindu, you learn the Muslim prayers, young man who’s a Muslim, you learn the Hindu prayers and tomorrow you each need to recite the other’s prayers before their community and brings the whole village together. The two kids become best friends. It’s a children’s tale, but it’s also true. I mean, it’s true when we hear it that if someone can be rehabilitated, which most people can, most people are not psychotic. Most people who commit crimes are not sociopaths with no human emotion, who murdered small pets when they were a child, and were always going to be predisposed to some violent crime. Most people who commit the worst crimes, the ones that scare us at night are in a tremendously high stress set of circumstances in which they thought that that was their best option and they regretted it the moment it happened. Once you really change someone’s environment and start showing them a new path and give them tools and opportunities to have a good life, to have a healthy life, lo and behold, turns out most people want to do that. That’s why the recidivism rates are so low when you have programs which show any kind of concern for people at all, whether it’s as disparate as Shakespeare behind bars or a meditation program or these restorative justice programs.

Michael Semanchik:

Yeah, there’s a woman named Jennifer Thompson who is a victim of a violent sexual assault, and she misidentified police had kind of, I would say certainly caused this bad ID to happen based on the way they put the lineup together and everything that happened. She ends up identifying a guy named Ronald Cotton and Cotton goes to prison, ultimately, DNA exonerates him, and then Ronald and Jennifer Thompson end up connecting meeting. They then put a book together called Picking Cotton, and then they go and travel all over the United States and talk about reforming the eyewitness ID procedures and making it so that the way that police conduct these procedures, we can lessen the possibility of a bad id. Well, Jennifer went on to do an amazing thing called healing justice, which is exactly what you’re talking about. It’s restorative justice where she brings victims and some of the perpetrators together to meet and try to heal together and the stories that she tells. I’ve gone to a couple of her sessions where she’s talked about it. It’s so powerful, and you’re absolutely right. That is the thing that takes recidivism down to near zero. I think you’re right. I think the programs exist and we just need to make better use of them, expand them and see that those that are in are actually going through the rehabilitation process.

Matthew Cooke:

We should think of it as a extremely practical and necessary investment in the safety of our communities and our country because if we rehabilitate people, they will come back and be income earners, breadwinners for their families, for their relatives. They’ll be model citizens for their kids and so forth and so on. I think there’s also this kind of knee jerk reaction sometimes where it’s like, geez, I didn’t get these kind of programs. I didn’t have to. You didn’t have to. Thank God, thank God, but if we can divert maybe a couple of pennies from Lockheed Martin into the pockets of some programs that could really use it, our communities will be safer as a result. And that’s the thing is that if we want safer communities, if we want more human communities, we need to behave more humanely. I mean, if anyone’s looking for what’s the pattern that all of these programs have in common, so different. It’s just being human.

Michael Semanchik:

That’s

Matthew Cooke:

It. It’s just being a good person. It’s just taking care of each other. Oh, that’s what, that’s such a high percentage, particularly in women’s prisons of people who are victims of sexual abuse and assault end up in the prison system abused again, and it’s the cycle of abuse that keeps it going. Again, if we want to reduce crime, then invest and those investments will pay off in dividends. I mean, I think that there was a study that was done about this one city block that was in the survivors got to prison movie. It was like a million dollar block, and it was if we took a million dollars to house all the people from a community in prison and said, invested it in that community in the first place, my God, who knows what benefit there would be to society, not just counting the fact that those are people who now wouldn’t feel like they needed to commit crimes in order to make ends meet.

Michael Semanchik:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that’s the key is if you want to make it as simple as possible for people, you can say that they would be a taxpayer, not a tax burden at the end of the day. Right. We’ll be right back after this break. Talk a little bit about mental health in the movie, how we closed all of the psychiatric facilities. Psychiatric care kind of went downhill. Then we saw this influx into the criminal justice system. How do we fix that? Should we go back to the psychiatric facilities?

Matthew Cooke:

Well, I think we need to innovate and we need to be constructive instead of destructive. So the answer when something isn’t working isn’t to just throw it out completely, it’s to just keep trying to do better. So I don’t have a succinct answer as to what to do about mental health issues overall, but I can say that we can’t operate on incentives that are counterproductive to healing and counterproductive to wellbeing. So that exists in kind of all aspects of our society. We need to have human values, not material values. So we can’t just close down state hospitals because they’re not a good investment without anything in its place because then prisons become the state hospitals and then that is even worse. So the variety of mental health issues need to be addressed by experts, and if we want to reduce our outsized prison population, that is astoundingly enormous, and if we want people to have the best chance at rehabilitating, then we need to have specialized facilities that are available to help people rehabilitate, whether they’re struggling economically, whether they’re struggling psychologically, emotionally from physiological addictions or concerns and all the myriad intersections of those homelessness.

It requires a multi-pronged approach to reduce it. So we have to hit all those things individually and with great precision and mastery. Again, that requires a willingness to say, Hey, this is a public responsibility. We want to have a public mental health or public healthcare system that’s like nasa. We want to see it as a patriotic, put a man on a moon kind of thing. Why don’t we just eradicate poverty, eradicate homelessness in the United States as like a patriotic mission? If we’re thinking that we’re being communists because we’re talking about a social safety net, we’re kind of screwing ourselves. So it requires massive investment, but the payoff is insane because not only do you get taxpayers instead of tax burdens, you get an economy that’s kind of thriving. We’re establishing kind of a value system across the board and we’re saying we care about each other. We don’t want to let anybody slip through the cracks. I don’t want to step over anybody in any of our major cities as I’m going to work or going to the subway, and so just prioritizing it and making that not be a taboo thing to say where you feel like you’re being labeled, you want a Venezuelan failed oil state or something if you make that comment.

Michael Semanchik:

Yeah,

Matthew Cooke:

I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Republican. I don’t consider myself liberal or conservative. I think those words are pretty meaningless, but I do see us getting caught up in these kind of labels when we talk about investing public funds in certain ways. We invest in enormous amount in the prison system in our current criminal justice system. It is a giant tax burden and our returns are terrible. Yes, we support economies that exists for people who get work as all the various jobs in the prison system and legal system and so forth that exist, but this is not a healthy system that we need to be injecting money into. That’s the result of a materialistic profit driven mindset rather than going, not every vertical in our economy needs to be a moneymaker. There are profits on the other end, but we’re going to make a ton of money by not having addicts and homelessness and crime and all of this kind of stuff will benefit a lot of very smart people.

The heads of a lot of big corporations know that branding is an exercise that really helps. It would be a big value shift in this country if we really invested in, like I said, sort of a NASA level of innovation around eradication of poverty and mental health issues and addiction issues and the things that are really the major indicators for whether you’re going to get involved in crime. I think it’s very convenient argument, like the tough on crime one that plays into people’s emotions to say, oh, don’t allow for regulating anything or allow people to just kind of do whatever they want, this kind of warlord capitalism sort of approach, and that creates the kind of environments in which we have a private prison system, which is prisons for profit. They’re going to lobby for longer prison sentences or they’re going to depend on people to commit crimes to get paid.

I mean, it starts with meter MAs. If there’s an incentive for people to park in a way that’s hazardous to being able to freely move about the city, if you’re depending on people messing that up to fund your city budget, you’ve made a mistake. And I think we just kind of have to look at those things and have a little bit of broader thinking and going, oh yeah, this isn’t idealistic or utopian to say that there’s some areas in which government investment works. I mean that’s historical and real if we can do it. I mean, it’s incredible the amount of change that happens in short amounts of time. If we look at the difference in culture between the 1960s and then 40 years later things happen, so no one should be too pessimistic because all it takes is a couple of people talking that’s a little drop. There’s another drop, and then pretty soon you have a river and then there’s a hurricane.

Michael Semanchik:

I think that’s a great way to segue into my next question, which is the movie comes out and just since the movie has come out, so many things have changed and we’ve seen this sort of change in the criminal justice system. So what are the things that you’ve seen that have changed most drastically since the film came out?

Matthew Cooke:

I have seen people working across the aisle, so to speak, republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives talking about the need for reform. That’s massive. That wasn’t happening before. I think that’s pretty astounding culturally speaking. So that’s big. I definitely am not going to let our film take any credit, but I think what it is is it’s credit to the zeitgeist that that’s happening, that there’s a lot of people who’ve been talking about this and talking about it for long enough, and so that’s why I’m glad we’re doing this podcast and it’s still a five alarm fire in terms of it’s like an emergency level of reform that needs to take place, and that’s a hard thing to kind of take on, but just we can’t do that. We can do it. We can just say, Hey, it’s a five alarm fire. It’s ongoing. We’re not going to put it out this afternoon.

But it does need to put out and to continue to talk about it and encourage people to watch Survivor’s Guide to Prison or watch another film or read a book. Yeah, I mean, I’m not here to hock a movie. I’m here to push for change and reform and reformed thinking and in taking this on because the criminal justice system represents the foundational way that we approach conflict resolution. Really think about that. It’s how we let everybody know our children, our grandchildren, our country, other countries in the world, this is how we solve problems. Do we solve them constructively? Do we solve them creatively? Do we take every effort? Do we seize upon every opportunity to celebrate our humanity, to increase people’s likelihood that they can change and become better members of their own community and model citizens, or are we destructive and kind of revenge oriented?

That value system exists in this moment as kind of the test of humankind, whether we survive or not. Certainly the United States, United States is in this really funny moment here. We are talking about the criminal justice system. We’re also looking at a country that isn’t sure if its democracy is going to entirely last, and it’s because that’s same kind of value problem. Are we going to invest in our people? Are we going to have a social safety net? Are we going to have a good education system? Are we going to heal the mistakes of our past? Are we going to try to repair and restore or are we going to kind of just go every man for himself and Mike makes right, because one of those is a recipe for disaster.

Michael Semanchik:

Yeah, I think the approach that we’ve taken has certainly been the lazy one, if you will. It’s because we don’t have a solution. We didn’t want to think hard on it. I think part of it is we’ve forced ourselves because of the cost to come up with more creative solutions. And now we’re kind of starting to see the sea shift here.

Matthew Cooke:

What are some of the things that you’ve seen that are inspiring?

Michael Semanchik:

We’ve changed the way we approach juveniles in the system. The sentencing structures change. We’ve gone back and said, well, if you were sentenced as a juvenile for life without parole, Supreme Court has even come around and said, okay, we shouldn’t be maybe doing that because they were juveniles at the time. We’ve seen a shift in prosecutor’s offices around the country where they’re now, a lot of them are opening conviction review units and conviction integrity units, and they’re going back and actually taking a look at their previous work. You tell me that seven years ago that that was going to happen. I’d have been like, yeah, no, you’d have to have that one crazy prosecutor that gets elected in order that to happen. And now it’s kind of becoming this cool thing to do, and it should be cool because they’re working with us to find instance cases and we’re getting the right people out of prison sooner and without having to fight in court, we’ve made it easier to access evidence.

We’ve increased the amount of funding for DNA testing federally. We’ve increased the amount of compensation that’s happened across the board for the wrongfully convicted. I think at this point, there’s still something like 20 states that don’t have state compensation when you get wrongfully convicted, which is absurd. And Missouri is one. If you follow the Strickland case out of Missouri, thankfully his GoFundMe brought in like $1.8 million, but it shouldn’t be on the public to step up for that guy because he’s won. There’s many more that didn’t get the publicity that he got and won’t see the kind of support that he’s got. I think we are starting to kind of go down this path of there’s certainly been some great progress made the change in how we approach drug cases and expunging old cases, banning the box so we don’t have to put down that you’ve been convicted of a felony before you when you’re applying for a job. All of these things are things I probably couldn’t have imagined happening 10 years ago, and here we are.

Matthew Cooke:

That’s great.

Michael Semanchik:

It’s a change the bail reform process, I mean, there’s still a lot of work to be done there and there’s a lot of fighting going on, but I think the simplest example is this. In 2008 when I started, there were 220,000 people in prison in California, I think we’re down to 108,000, so we’re under half we’re the amount of people from when I started to now

Matthew Cooke:

And what are the crime rates from then to now?

Michael Semanchik:

Hugely reduced. We’ve seen a drastic reduction in crime, and the question is why? What has caused this massive reduction in crime? Police are always going to say, well, we’ve done better job policing, but what have you changed in terms of how you police? Have you actually changed something? Does increasing the amount of funding change anything? Typically? No, you have more money, you have more police. Does it cause it actually usually results and they find more crime? So what has changed, and I think it has to a certain extent been the economic insecurity, reducing the level of poverty, having government support, creating better educational opportunities for those that are in worse off situations that otherwise wouldn’t have those opportunities. But I don’t know what else. So I think we have seen a great movement. We have a long way to go, but there’s some positive out there

Matthew Cooke:

And I think it’s testimony to the fact that there is no rational reason to be pessimistic. It’s just a hard situation and it sucks if you get caught up in it, but that’s why we should do something about it and we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to it. And doing something about it can mean whatever’s right for you, but certainly educating each other and making sure people know that we have a criminal justice system broken. There are ways to fix it. We know how to fix it. All we have to do is elect to do

Michael Semanchik:

That. So you got some really awesome people involved in the film. Danny Trejo, Reggie Cole and Bruce Lisker are the exonerees included, Susan Sarn and Van Jones, Busta Rhymes Q-Tip. You talk about Cleef Browder’s case, Michelle Alexander Ice tea. I mean the list is lengthy. Patricia Arquette. How did you get this awesome collection and this unique collection of people together to talk about these issues?

Matthew Cooke:

Well, I know the Arquettes from their family and my family are old friends, and Adrian Grier was also is an old friend of mine. He played the movie Star on Entourage Fence and Entourage had a lot of guest stars and Adrian made a lot of friends with other entertainers and such. So there was, I dunno, this kind of friends of friends and stuff like that. And we asked a few people and the Arquettes asked a ton of people and everyone just said, yeah, a lot of people do know that the system is a mess or they know someone who got caught up in it and wanted to do something about it. And I just thought it’s a good way to get people to watch something that they might not normally watch. Like I said, I think it would be great, I dunno if Gravitas would do it, I’d love to ask them if at a certain point we could kind of just break out that cutting room floor footage and re-release the movie as a web series or a podcast or something, just because there were so many stories and so many Warren G be real, Brandon Boyd, singer of Incubus.

I mean there are all kinds of people that just came out and wanted to be a spokesperson for criminal justice reform and doing the right thing. Busta Rhymes.

Michael Semanchik:

And I think you’re right. I think having those voices contribute certainly helps to get the word out and get people interested in the film. So I hope that continues and I do hope that Gravitas would be interested in expanding on the work you’ve done. I think a lot of it’s probably already done, right? You’ve done the interviews, you’ve got probably a ton of additional footage and maybe you can wrap that into something cool.

Matthew Cooke:

And if anybody’s listening and hasn’t seen the film, may it inspire you to make your own content too or seek out other types of things and recommend it to others. I mean, I think it’d just be great if we all did a little bit and keep kicking this can down the road and then in a few years we can see more changes and more changes so that we don’t have a kind of a cycle of abuse that’s happening on our watch. We got to fix it.

Michael Semanchik:

What makes Survivor’s Guide to Prison so powerful is its insistence that our current system is a choice and that better choices already exist. Programs rooted in accountability, healing and human dignity consistently reduce recidivism far more effectively than incarceration alone. Since the film’s release, we’ve seen real progress conviction review units expanded, DNA testing, bail reform, and significant drops in prison populations without corresponding increases in crime. Change is possible when we’re willing to confront the facts. This conversation is ultimately about values. As Matthew argues, criminal justice reform is a patriotic project, one that asks whether we’re willing to invest in people rather than punishment and whether we believe redemption should still be part of justice. If you like what you heard, share with your friends and tune in next time. I’m Michael Semanchik, executive director of the Innocence Center. Thank you for listening to Matthew Cook, on For the Innocent. For the Innocent is produced by myself and Adam Lockwood. Our assistant producer is Ally Kvidt. Our theme song is by exoneree William Michael Dillon For the Innocent is a proud part of the Legal Talk Network in InfoTrack Company.

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