Inside The Historic Presidential Town Hall Where Incarcerated People Ask The Questions

By Zaron Burnett III


The “land of the free” has never been so for the 2.3 million Residents of the United States currently in prison. The United States boasts the highest prison population rate in the world with 10.6 million jail admissions per year, and nearly one third of working-age Residents of the United States having to navigate life with a rap sheet of some kind. As a result, there really are as several Residents of the United States who have spent time in back of bars as there really are people with a college diploma.


And once you’re in that system, there’s a high chance you’ll be in it for the rest of your life. A lack of services to aid a person’s transition back inside society often means it’s exceedingly likely that they’ll return to prison at some point. A 2014 study on recidivism conducted in 30 states noticed that 77 percent of state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within five years; 37 percent of these arrests occurred within six months of their release, and 57 percent occurred inside the opening year. Making matters worse, some of these incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people will lose their voting rights as a result of their incarceration, rendering them silent at the polls and politically disempowered overall.


This current era of mass incarceration in the U.S. Was place on Earth of a bipartisan task to be “tough on crime,” with a cornerstone part of legislation spearheaded by then-Senator Joe Biden that in particular targeted violent crime, drug crime, gangs, and youth violence, with mandated minimum sentencing and increased funding for local police. Yet rather than curb crime rates, being tough on crime as a substitute led to a prison population explosion plus a lack of adequate rehabilitation resources. Today, the cost to sustain America’s damaged penal system is estimated at $182 billion dollars a year. A few 2020 presidential Democratic candidates have already begun to articulate what they’d do differently if elected; Senator Cory Booker has called 1994 crime bill “awful,” and “shameful,” and pointed out in particular how it “accelerated mass incarceration and inflicted immeasurable harm on Black, brown and low-income communities.”


No matter how well-meaning the plans or policies, it’s key that we all remember to center the people who could be most impacted by such reforms: The incarcerated people themselves. For that reason, Voters Organized To Educate and also The Marshall Project are hosting Justice Votes 2020, the first-ever town hall on criminal justice reform, on Monday (October 28). The event is being contained at Eastern State Penitentiary, a former prison in Philadelphia. Only a few candidates in the crowded field expressed their interest and plan to attend: Booker, Kamala Harris, and Tom Steyer. It’s the initial time in election history that candidates will be posed questions by formerly incarcerated people, who will serve as both the moderators and audience.


One of the moderators is Norris Henderson, the co-founder and executive director of Vote NOLA plus a national leader in prison reform and voting rights efforts for formerly incarcerated citizens. Right after a wrongful conviction resulted in him spending 27 years, 10 months, and 18 days in prison, Henderson was freed in 2003 and has spent the last 16 years working to bring criminal justice reform to the center stage of American politics. Candid, concerned, and comprehensive in his understanding of what criminal reform is up against, Henderson prefers concentrate on the positive — for instance, getting presidential candidates to set foot in a prison at all. He confirmed to MTV News that prior to the event’s organizers had extended invitations to all Democratic candidates, and added, “There has to be some reciprocity in this. If people want us to show up for them in November 2020, they require to think about showing up for us in October 2019.”


Henderson discussed with MTV News ahead of the town hall about the significance of giving voice to the presently and formerly incarcerated, and actually listening to them.


MTV News: How did this town hall come about? It’s such a powerful visual symbol: Politicians responding to a group of formerly incarcerated people.


Norris Henderson: A lot of the candidates were attempting to reach out to us, sending us their criminal justice platform, asking us to vet it. So we mentioned, "Let's pull this thing with each other because everybody's talking about criminal justice reform, although they’re not talking to the people who've been impacted by criminal justice reform.


We looked at all of the town halls going on in this primary season. The week before last, there was the Equity Conference –– that was about the LGBTQ community. They had another one focused on education. So, it seemed like, “Okay, let's have one on criminal justice.” Yet it needs to be with people who've been impacted by the system. That's the challenge that we've issued to the party: in each instance, once you went to have a conversation with people, you had a conversation with the people who were directly impacted by that circumstance. All we're asking is, treat us the same way.


MTV News: The audience for this town hall will be exclusively formerly incarcerated citizens?


Henderson: Yes, everybody. The full event. The only portion of the event that won't be formerly incarcerated folks are the folks that we've contracted with to support us pull the thing off. Yet everybody sitting in the chairs indoors that prison for the town hall will be formerly incarcerated. I'm one of the four moderators that will be up onstage with the candidates.


MTV News: there really is a vast variety of issues that exist under the umbrella of criminal justice reform. What do you believe are the priorities to ask candidates about?


Henderson: One, do they actually understand what caused this population to grow from 200,000 to 2.4 million people over 40 years? To be able to see whether or not they have any institutional knowledge about how this system actually works. That’s the opening thing, to set the stage: How did we get here? Do you all really know how we got here? We got here, primarily, as the federal government incentivized states to begin locking people up. They built prisons. They gave states cash for tougher sentencing. They created so several prohibitions with zero patience. All those failed policies are accountable for where we're at today. The big ask from us is going to be: Are you all prepared to undo the crime bill? That's the begin of things right there.


MTV News: Some of the issues you commonly supporter for include money bail reform, rethinking mandatory minimum sentencing, addressing prison conditions and medical care recommended to incarcerated people, and putting an end to mass incarceration and the death penalty. What are the major reform issues this town hall plans to focus on?


Henderson: Everybody's like, “we need to decriminalize marijuana.” That's not even a question! We do not even wish to talk about weed. They've legalized pot in half the states across this nation or decriminalized it, that isn't a beginning point. Like you mentioned, we’ll ask what they’re going to do about money bail, about draconian sentencing. Let's own this. We've been doing this stuff wrong. And we need to repair it, because we harm people.


MTV News: In that past, Democratic politicians have worried about losing centrist voters if they weren’t “tough on crime.” Do you feel like that’s changing?


Henderson: They're testing the water, putting their feet in the tub, attempting to be able to see if it's lukewarm. And based upon polling, people visualize the harm [incarceration] has caused and are ready to mention, “Let's try something else.” Throughout the crack epidemic, the solution was “We're going to build more jail beds, and we're going to put them in prison!” Right now, with this opioid crisis, it’s like, “Oh no, we need to find them some treatment,” to the extent they're suing the pharmaceutical companies.


So the prison population has shifted, as far as who's going into these places. All of a sudden everybody's concerned. The concern should have been there. And I applaud people who aspire to step up right now, and fix it. However we really got to repair it. We can't put a Band-aid it. We have to repair it. And the only way you're going to repair it is to sit down and converse with people who can tell you what's broke.


MTV News: increasingly people from all walks of life are using their platforms to lose light on the penal system. Ava DuVernay has really helped Residents of the
U.S. Grasp the problem and the required for prison reform, in particular, with her documentary 13th and her Netflix series, When They Visualize Us. 


Henderson: I’ve seen all those stories, 13th, When They Visualize Us –– that one was really a tearjerker. It tore at the hearts of people. Right now folks are beginning to be able to see the injustice that's going on right in front of their faces. Right now, everybody got an iPhone or a smartphone and so they document what’s going on, so it's not like this stuff is just in the back alley no more. It is live. It is on TV.


MTV News: Two major causes of mass incarceration In the United States are profits and racism. Are Residents of the United States starting to understand slavery’s pervasive influence on incarceration?


Henderson: For years, people would talk about race or they would talk about criminal justice — although they wouldn't talk about the nexus between one and the other. Right now these conversations are beginning to happen. Ava’s 13th, her documentary, helped change that. Today's technology has taken us to places that we would have never been able to go.


MTV News: In 2018, Florida voters passed a referendum to let former felons to vote. Yet the state legislature has moved to block it, and it’s right now being litigated in the courts. It seems terribly un-democratic to not protect voting rights, although there really is a racist history of that in America. 


Henderson: The thing that redlines people right now is the fact that they’ve come in contact with the criminal justice system. Voting is an inalienable right in this nation, [but there’s a] history of all these Jim Crow policies to strip people of color of their voting rights. Lately, they’ve just took it to another level. That shouldn't be happening in a nation where, just a couple of many years back, as soon as they toppled Saddam Hussein, everybody in Congress held up a purple thumb in solidarity with the people in another nation, applauding their democracy, their right to vote, and so they won't give that very same right to people that reside in this country.


MTV News: How do you view prison abolition functions in the town hall, and also because the conversation at large?


Henderson: It's more like: How do we get there? I think if we begin putting policies in place, bail reform, pre-trial stuff, it will diminish prison through attrition. It's become obvious that prisons have become a growth industry in this nation. People need to own that for what it is. This beast has been consuming food for a long time. And you should starve him. The way you starve him is on the front end, not on the back end. Nobody has to go in.


MTV News: You've often mentioned, “Although people aspire to assist us, they can't speak for us.” What do people on the indoor want people on the outdoors to know? 


Henderson: One thing I tell people all of the time, what they often miss, is that we wish to be safe in our communities, also. Some of our folks have been impacted on both sides of the coin. Some of our folks have harmed people, and then some of our folks in that same household have been harmed. So how do you reconcile with that family member, who has a family that's in prison, and then has another family who got harmed?


Any time we’re out registering people to vote, and as soon as we get to that box that asks which party affiliation, take a guess what most people check. They check Independent. As soon as you ask them why they mention, “Because what happened to us was bipartisan, so I'm not leaning left, I'm not leaning right, I'm leaning forward.”