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Redemption in the DDUFull TranscriptErick Williams: It was just the ordinary day. we went to chow and a young man had an incident with a correctional officer. I think he attempted to throw a tray at the officer.Barry: The Massachusetts Correctional Institution, Cedar Junction, was for a long time known as Walpole, a maximum-security prison in Massachusetts, known to be one of the harshest in the country.Did you know this guy? Erick: I didn't know him personally no. You know he sat at a table that was a couple away from ours. The CO jumped on him. There were probably like five of them on this one kid.Barry: Riots, uprisings, hostage-taking, date back to at least 1959, just three years after its opening. Eric Williams started serving his time in Walpole in the late 90s.?Erick: and other inmates started to say something-- get off of him-- and the superintendent was punched in the face. It just led to a big brawl. You know my brother was there, they were trying to break my brothers fingers, they were just you know hitting us and eight of us were actually charged.Barry: In 1991 Walpole opened the department disciplinary unit, or DDU, a prison within the prison, with 124 cells dedicated to what Massachusetts correction deemed the worst of the worst.Erick: So you know two hours we were in Walpole in 10-block, and that's solitary confinement with solid doors closed on you. The cell is I think smaller than average bathroom. And you go there to await whatever punishment they have for you. That punishment being DDU.Barry: starting from that night, Eric would spend the next eight years in solitary confinement.Erick: DDU will steal some part of you that you probably didn't even know you had but you'll know it's missing.?I remember plenty occasions just waking up feeling like I was dead. I would block my window, I would hold my slot, put my arm out just so they could go get the move team. The move team would come, which is five or six correctional officers in shoulder pads, helmets, and a shield. They spray you with pepper spray, mace, and they come in the cell, they restrain you, cuff you up, F-- you up, whatever they do. But I would do that--Barry: on purpose??Erick: On purpose. Because pain at least felt like life. Like when you're in there, and you just by yourself, you're like in a box, your mind is racing. And you know that this can't be life. It seemed like a dream. So human contact came from getting your head kicked in, you swollen up somehow you know hey I'm still here.Chau: from slate this is Hi Phi Nation, philosophy in story form. This season, crime and punishment. Recording from Vassar College, here's your host, Barry Lam.Barry: Of the criminal penalty in America, only death by hanging has lasted longer than solitary confinement. And even that's ended. So why is solitary still around? That's what I said to find out in this episode. The language we've used for imprisonment has changed. The penal code, penal labor, or penal colony, is explicit about penalties. Prisons are a form of punishment. But then starting in 1820 we get this word, penitentiary-- naming a place where sinners repent, acquiring the virtue of penitence. On this view, prisoners are lost souls seeking salvation and prisons are there to deliver it. Today we have this word--corrections-- for what the prison system is supposed to be doing to people. Correcting them. Solitary confinement has survived all of these changes in verbiage. It's always been a practicing feature of American criminal justice. Something about keeping a person in a box for 23 hours a day for a decade has struck Americans of many generations as the right response?05:00?to criminal wrongdoing. Why is that?Lisa G: my name is Lisa Guenther and I am Queens national scholar in political philosophy and critical prison studies at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario Canada. Solitary confinement emerged in and through the penitentiary system. And so this was a liberal, humanist enlightenment project of shifting away from the brutal punishments of physical beating or harm and capital punishment towards a form of punishment?or accountability that would be more in line with the democratic ideals of the emerging US Republic. And so Benjamin Rush, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, was also a very enthusiastic penal reformer. And he was very against public punishments that he thought were degrading to people who were, for example, on a chain gang, forced to walk through a town and pelted with rotten fruits and vegetables and names. He thought this was degrading not only to the prisoner but also to the to the public. It brought out the worst in people. And so the experiment with solitary confinement came out of an effort to find a way of holding people accountable for breaking the law that also respected their dignity as a human being and a child of God. The penitentiary is very much a religious project as much as a political project.Barry: Lisa Guenther believes that evolving conceptions of the self, what in philosophy we call theories of personal identity, are responsible for the emerging and continuing practices of solitary confinement. A strong mind-body dualism of the early modern period permeated the religious teachings of Quaker Christianity, which was the form of Christianity responsible for the design of Eastern State Penitentiary, the first American penitentiary, and a model for the next 200 years of prison design. Mind-body dualism is the view that the mind and body are in principle distinct substances. The mind is an essentially thinking thing. and the body an essentially extended thing. The self is identified with the mind not the body. They're commingling in the corporeal. earthly world is also what is responsible for the corruption of the mind through the bodily appetites. Greed, lusts, avarice, the appetites that lead to criminal conduct. The solution was the removal of the person, the mind, from earthly bodily stimulation, freeing it to operate with a kind of purity, leading to its penitence and salvation.Lisa G: But one of the things that happened almost immediately as this practice was implemented and these Penitentiarys were built is that people came undone. They did not, by and large, have a spiritual death and resurrection. They underwent a kind of spiritual and psychological death without resurrection. Dementia was one of the the terms in the early 19th century that was used to describe the sort of mental illness basically produced through long-term isolation.?Barry: Fast forward to about a century and a half. We're now in post-world War two America with an emerging second wave of solitary confinement. At this point, were in the early years of empirical social science and psychology, when behaviorism reigned supreme.Lisa G: Starting in the 1950s, around the time of the Korean War, there were reports that the Chinese had these techniques for breaking a person down and then putting them back together in a way that controlled their behavior. Popularly understood as brainwashing, it was a topic of very intense psychiatric research funded by the military in large part. More technically would be understood as 'thought reform'.Barry: The theory behind thought reform was that the right techniques of brainwashing and reprogramming, just like reformatting and reinstalling a hard-drive, could not only allow you to program the perfect Cold War soldier, but also allow you to reprogram the criminal mind.Lisa G: These experiments in the 50s and 60s began in a military context but were very quickly transposed?into a prison context, where the prison is a kind of laboratory for experimenting with a period of extreme sensory deprivation and social isolation, alternating with intensive group therapy, including attack therapy, where other prisoners would be expected to provide a social context and social pressure to change the behavior of someone who had been softened up through extreme isolation. And then you'd go back and forth between these situations of social isolation and social bombardment. The vision of personhood animating these behaviorist experiments in sensory deprivation solitary confinement and sensory overload and social overload is that the body is a kind of mechanism. There are inputs and outputs. If you can control the inputs or the environment, you should be able to control the outputs or the behavior. By the 1970s, there were prisoners who were litigating against what they named as a form of torture. Cruel and unusual punishment. And so the 70s were a great period of successful prisoner litigation that put an end to many behaviorist experiments on people in prison.Barry: And yet solitary confinement didn't end. It just assumed a different official purpose. To this day we continue to use the language of reform, maybe even reprogramming, and pretend that solitary confinement is part of the process of Corrections. But Lisa Guenther doesn't think anyone believes this-- not the officials who implement it, not the policymakers that permit and fund it, and not the prisoners themselves.?Lisa G: The animating motivation behind solitary confinement as it's practiced today is more of a Supermax warehousing model, where the desire is no longer really to change the behavior of individuals but rather just to manage populations. And so the prison and the solitary confinement unit becomes a space to incapacitate prisoners, to minimize the impact that they can have on the safety and security and good order of the institution. More or less treating them as units to be held in cold storage.Erick: It's kind of like where they throw you away. For instance, I went there with guys that were already over there for ten years. Those guys you might deem crazy or insane so you have to you know be around people will call you nigger all day, or throw feces on you, or urine, or try to flood out their cell with feces so it comes in your cell bang on a cell on the walls all night to keep you awake. So it's like-- it's a torture chamber essentially that's what it is. It's almost like they and I when I say day I mean the system as a whole knows what is gonna happen to a person when they send them to DDU. You can't not know.Chau: Hi Phi Nation will return after these messages.?Erikc: My name is Eric Williams, I'm 43 years old. I reside in Fall River Massachusetts. I'm a father, friend, and a full-time maintenance man.Barry: Erick's road to eight years in solitary began on the streets of Boston and ended the night of the chow hall riot, with two important turns. Here's a misconception I've always had about the American justice system-- which is that when you're convicted for a crime, you're sentenced to time in a prison cell, and where that cell is and what it looks like is determined by the severity of the crime. It's not really true. it's more accurate to say that you're sentenced to be under the will of a particular department of the state or federal government-- the Corrections department. Where you live, what you eat, what counts as an infraction and what happens to you afterward are determined by procedures and practices within this department. Not in legislatures or courts, not by judges or elected prosecutors. This is Erick's story.?Erick: I was involved an altercation with a group of people who attacked the people that I was in a vehicle with. I defended the women that I was with and got assaulted in the process.?15:00?I left the scene came back with a firearm, opened fire on the people that assaulted us. I was on parole and probation so I picked up that new case. I waited trial for almost a year and a half. When you're waiting trial that goes on for two, three years sometimes. And from there I was sent to Walpole. I took everything to trial and was found guilty and subsequently sentenced to about 20-- I think I had 20 something years, it was 23 24 years. I ended up going to Shirley Max because they said I was a gang member. I've never been labeled a gang member but they have this this procedure where they can label your gang number and it essentially keeps you a maximum-security prison or prevents you from getting to lower security.Barry And you don't know how that happened? And you had no defense?Erick: No. I had no defense. They give you the option to denounce the gang, but if you're not a gang member how do you denounce a gang. So if you sign it you admit to being in a gang, if you sign it you're sentenced. So it's just one of those situations you just ride it out. I ended up in a maximum-security prison for that.Barry: When you're faced with charges of wrongdoing on the outside in principle there's due process, defense counsel, prosecutorial burdens of proof, judicial review. On the inside, the night of the riot, it began with a ticket.Erick: so when you catch a ticket the CO just writes up whatever he wants to write up and it's your word against his. They hear the evidence, you could call witnesses, but there's a box that says referred to the DA, to the district attorney. So what you say in defense or trying to plead your case at this hearing in jail can ultimately be used against you in a criminal court. So it's better not to say anything. If you say oh I hit him because he hit me or whatever this is now you're admitting to it you can then they'll then take you to court and you can get more time in court.Barry: So court is riskier than saying nothing?Erick: Because you know what's gonna happen is I'm gonna be here, they're gonna send me the DDU, but I'm not gonna get more time in a criminal court.Barry: I see so extension of your sentence. So anybody who goes in this hearing is thinking about their criminal criminal sentence--Erick: right, right.Barry: versus the time spent--Erick: the time spent in DDU. Once you have a DDU? ticket is kind of like given that you're going.?The same special hearing officer would be having lunch with the officers that wrote the ticket.Barry: So you're pleading your case before a CO?Erick: Before--he's called a special hearing officer. But he's--Barry: He's not a judge?Erick: No he's not a judge. He's just the correctional officer, that's his job is to hear the DDU hearing. Even a minor infraction, if if the CO decides to refer it to DDU then you know you're going to DDU. The most they can give you for a single incident is ten years, but while you're there, they can give you another ten years if you pick up another incident. So you have 20 years.Lisa NP: The bottom line is I really can't do anything.Barry: Lisa Newman Polke is an attorney and social worker who has clients who have been in DDU or may be placed there. She knows firsthand just how powerless anyone is on the outside to challenge the Department of Corrections on their disciplinary procedures.Lisa NP: I can write letters and that's meaningful to my client but nobody has to listen to anything I have to say.Barry: Maybe some of the punishments are justified, maybe some aren't. Maybe some make her clients repent while others make them even more dangerous to the public or general population.? The point is that neither as a lawyer nor as a social worker is there anything Lisa can do to investigate or defend her clients from any of it.Lisa NP: If someone's been sentenced to the DDU for five years, there is zero I can do to stop that from happening. And if there's mistreatment, yes I can certainly write letters about it, but in Massachusetts the courts basically said once somebody is inside it's an administrative issue, and if they feel that somebody needs to be placed in solitary confinement then is up to them.Barry: Hello senator.Jamie: Hi Barry, how are you?Barry: Massachusetts state senator Jamie Eldridge is the Senate chair of the criminal justice reform caucus.Who has the most power right now in stopping the practice of long-term solitary confinement in Massachusetts?Jamie: The Department of Correction does.Barry: Because the Department of Corrections has complete discretion over the use of solitary confinement?20:00?they can end it right away. There doesn't need to be a law passed or a governor's instruction. But it's not happening. Any progress is incremental.Jamie: Last session when the legislature took up criminal justice reform, we did include legislation that would require a 90-day review for every person put in solitary confinement as well as access to canteen education and also getting out of out of that cell these three hours a day. And so those things became law.Barry: Who's doing the 90-day review?Jamie: Well that's part of the problem is that the 90-day review is done by the Department of Correction. But shockingly we have found that until I just recently visited MCI Cedar junction, formerly Walpole and MCI Concord and met with prisoners moving into place solitary confinement-- and many have said that the review was really just a piece of paper stamped, you know reject or approved, there was no hearing, or that many new prisoners had not even had a review who had been in solitary a number of months.Barry: Ideally who would be doing the reviewing? Like what would you want to happen during that review period?Jamie: What we're asking for now is that that prisoner is provided counsel for the lawyer provided for those reviews, that those reviews happen in person, and that the prisoner has the right to call witnesses. Because often it's a he said she said and the Department of Correction is making accusation and it's really not a fair process for the the prisoners making his or her case about why he or she should be sent back to general population.Barry: Now I heard that you tried to spend the night at DDU or one of these institutions. Is that true can you tell me about that?Jamie: Yeah so so around December 2016 senator Will Brownsberger and I,? we asked to be placed in a solitary cell at the CDU. And and we were denied by the DOC saying quote it was not safe for us-- which is slightly ironic, so we toured the unit. If legislators or anyone is not safe in the solitary unit I think it speaks to the basic failures of solitary and the need for more programming and a more supportive approach for people that may be acting out in prison.Barry: Did you buy did you buy what they said about there not being safe for you? Or do you think something else is going on?Jamie: Not really. I assumed it was just that they didn't you know they didn't want legislators having such a direct interaction with with prisoners. Because they will say it's you know as much as I am by law able to go into any prison, and I recently did have one on one confidential you know meetings with prisoners. I can't emphasize enough the power dynamic between Department of Corrections staff and prisoners, you know, everything from, you know, access to canteen to you know the kind of food they get to, you know, also more serious concerns about how they're how they're treated in their cells. And the Department of Corrections really tries to limit honest conversations between prisoners and legislators.Barry: There's a term-- civil death-- that refers to the condition that prisoners are in when they're subject to the almost complete power of the corrections department. Philosopher Lisa Guenther:Lisa G: If you are civilly dead, you can be punished by law, but you are not protected by law.Barry: Civil death descends from another concept that aims to capture the condition of removing a human being from family, friends, and community against their will, and subjecting them to the will of another, without the kind of reciprocity or protection that family friends and communities provide. This concept is called social death.?Lisa G: Social death is a term that the historian Orlando Patterson developed to name what he thought was the core structure of slavery. That's not ownership of another person, nor forced labor, but rather this condition of what he calls natal alienation and social death that defines the slave. So natal alienation is the separation of a person from that kinship network that gives their life meaning in a social sense, and that also provides a protective network of support. So that if someone comes after your kin, you are obliged to protect?25:00?them and to to defend them. That the core of the way slavery works according to Patterson is to dislodge or separate a single individual from that protective, supportive network, so that they can be so radically exploited that they are forced to work without pay or that they are treated as property or as an object. So I was struck by the the way in which this account of social death seemed to name one of the ways in which the prison industrial complex was replicating the logic of slavery.?Barry: You might think it's an overstatement to equate death and slavery with stripping away a prisoner's legal rights to due process and just procedures of punishment. After all, isn't a conviction just a forfeiture of a person's rights? It's a good question. Just how much of a person's rights and livelihood are supposed to be given up on conviction? If you think the forfeiture of rights is total, well there's nothing to argue about. You're probably fine with waterboarding, dismemberment, medical experiments, and gladiator fighting. But if you think there are limits it's worth looking at whether civil and social death is a real phenomenon and whether long-term solitary really is a genuine kind of death sentence. Because if it is, then subjecting someone to a form of death without a just procedure will be morally equivalent to giving a branch of government the power to execute at their own discretion. When we come back, we examine the various forms of death, by looking at various forms of life with a little help from phenomenology and existentialism.Chau: We'll return to the rest of Hi Phi Nation after these messages.Erick: that is I think about how they try to kill your soul.Barry: some philosophers use the term bare life to describe the state of being alive without living a life. Bacteria have bare life. Comatose patients have it too. They have the minimal conditions of being biologically alive, but they're not living in the active sense. And it's an important question-- what we need to add to bare life to get a human life a life of significance and moral worth. Because prisoners in solitary occupy a liminal space between bare and human life, their suffering, their deprivation, tells us a lot about the answer. Philosopher Lisa Guenther.Lisa G: But many prisoners have described their experience in solitary confinement as their relation to time has come unraveled.?Barry: The breakdown in an inmate's experience of time seems to be the root of other common experiences-- the feeling of being dead, hallucinations, hyper-vigilance and anxiety. All of these features seem to begin with the inability to mark the passage of time. The inmate is unable to locate whether something happened a day or week or year ago. They can't tell what came before and what came after, and more frightening they can't tell from their experience whether they're remembering something or whether they're just imagining something that's yet to happen. When an inmate describes time breaking down in their subjective experience, it isn't that they lack access to external markers of time like calendars or marks on a wall. It's that what they experienced in the first person doesn't feel situated in linear time at all. This kind of breakdown in the temporal order of experiences seems to happen the longer an inmate is subjected to the repetitive cycle of the prison schedule.Erick: I don't know what it does. I don't know what the isolation does to people-- so your schedule is Monday Wednesday Friday is when you take showers. You're in your cell 24 hours a day.Barry: Can you tell me the dimensions of the cell?Erick: I think they're six by twelve maybe. The size of an average parking space yeah. Come out for an hour a day and it's a dog kennel.30:00??It's probably five feet wide by 12 feet long andBarry: Fencer?Erick: And yes fenced in you go in there shackled they take the shackles and cuffs on?and you just walk back and forth in the kennel next to the other guys that are on your tier. Sleep is an issue. You develop these little quirks like you want to clean your cell all the time, you don't want to use a mop so you use the towel.Lisa G: Robert King managed to create pralines. So candies, when he was prisoner for 29 years in solitary confinement at Angola prison. So he would gather sugar packets from meal trays. He managed to get a tin can and he would use toilet paper to create a little fire and then melt the sugar in the tin can and then make that into candies. Just by engaging in this creative work that gets your mind working towards a future that would be different from the endless repetition of the same is a really amazing imaginative and creative way to take control of the agency to to exist not just in someone else's time schedule but to actually structure your own possibilities as an agent.Barry: The 20th century existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir had this insight about one thing you need to add to bear life to make it a human life-- you need to add the experience of your own future as being open to possibilities, possibilities that are not determined in advance for you, and possibilities that are not determined in advance to be exactly like all of your other experiences.Lisa G: Very deep in Beauvoir is this idea that what it means to be human is to exist in relation to possibilities that are open-ended, that are unforeseen. The way that Simone de Beauvoir defines oppression is in terms of a cleavage or a cutting a part of humanity into those who have a relationship to an open future, those for whom possibilities are live and ongoing and not prescribed or determined in advance, and those who are condemned to endlessly repeat the same thing over and over and over again.Barry: De Beauvoir's insight is that a source of social death comes from the way long-term solitary alienates and inmates experiences from time by using austere schedules and spaces to extinguish any role and inmates current actions can have on their future. Well, almost any role.Erick: My level of I guess violence all of that increased. I think the recidivism rate for the department it has to be greater than the recidivism rate for somebody coming to the street. I don't know-- I can't explain, I don't know why that happens. I just I've seen it I've seen everybody that that comes to DDU I've seen them almost all come back.Barry: Talk a little bit about that first time that you were trying to reintegrate yourself in the general population and what happenedErick: That didn't work well. Leaving DDU I was I was sentenced to four but I ended up doing five years. When I got out of DDU I was just extremely paranoid extremely anxious and I ended up stabbing someone and going back. I was only out for 40 days. The thing is is it's considered you having a behavioral issue instead of a psychological meltdown. I was having a meltdown.?Barry: Do you remember how you felt when you knew you're going back?Erick: Relieved.Barry: You felt relieved?Erick: I've never met anybody that has gone to DDU who doesn't go back. And it's not because they like it is because they come accustomed to the chaos and everything that's over there. You know the the isolation-- you become accustomed to that, so when when you're now in population and you're seeing people move with their hands and they're talking and they're around you you're paranoid. Always somebody's out trying to get you, they want you to go back, they want you to fail, that kind of thing. Because whatever whatever happened over there it it's the human lack of human contact.Barry: And how much longer were you there for the second time?Erick: Three years. So did a total of eight years. Five years?35:00??and three years the second time.Barry: There's a pathology to the American approach to criminal punishment that's marked out by our continued use of solitary confinement. It isn't a biological death sentence, it's a civil and social death sentence. But in the corrections system, it's deemed by someone somewhere with power as a necessary evil, necessary for safety, necessary as a deterrent, necessary as a deserving punishment for wrongdoing. Yet when an inmate comes before a parole board, or is considered for release the general population, their time in solitary is recognized as making them more dangerous to others. And they are. It again raises the issue-- what is a particular practice in criminal justice for? If it's safety, it undermines it. If it's a deterrent, then why is DDU recidivism so high and why is there a waiting list to get in there? And finally, if it's a last resort way to hold a wrongdoer accountable, then why does it fail in every case?Lisa G: The very meaning of accountability is undermined by the practice of solitary confinement. Accountability, in any meaningful sense in my view, is the capacity and the obligation to give an account of yourself to someone else. And what we say to someone when we send them into solitary confinement or when we construct prisons that are spaces of more or less permanent exile is that we are not accountable to you and you don't really have to be accountable to anyone else; you just have to behave in such a way that does not become overly disruptive to the order of the institution. And if you do, then we will put a lid on you and we will incapacitate you. Accountability requires capacitation. It requires relationships. It requires the agency of one person to be responsive and responsible for the well-being of others.?Barry:?The insight comes from another 20th century philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. People who are socially and civilly alive constantly experience other people as playing a role in their own future, and they experience themselves as difference makers to the future of other people. When you’re stripped of this vulnerability and power for such a long time, its no wonder that your reaction to being in that space again is pathological. Lisa G: So for Levinas, the meaning of time is ethical, it's inter-relational. What gives time meaning is not primarily my own relation to my own possibilities, my own projects, but the way in which those projects can be interrupted and opened out in to unforeseeable horizons by the ethical command of the other. So if what concerns me is not just my own mortality, but the way that my actions could affect other mortal human beings, then the meaning of my time, which is really the meaning of my existence, is for the other and not just for myself. And so if you're living in a space that where you do not share space with other people, it's very difficult, arguably impossible, to undergo that ethical experience that Levinas situates at the core of his philosophy. Which is to be faced by another person and to feel at a very deep level that their future matters to you, that their mortality matters to you.?Barry: So in a nutshell, can you describe the account of personhood that has come out of thinking about the first-person experiences of people in solitaire?Lisa G: For me, perhaps the most powerful expression of relational personhood, it's Reverend Desmond Tutu, who defined the African concept of Ubuntu as a person is a person through other persons. For me this captures the practice of becoming yourself in relation to other people in an ongoing way, where we share a world together and we build the world that we're sharing. That is both a beautiful vision and also a very practical understanding-- that if a person is a person through other persons, then we're vulnerable to one another and it really matters how we behave and how our actions affect other people, and that matters not just in everyday life but also in state-run state-managed practices of punishment.?Erick: This time it was different because my best friend and I had formed the pact to change our lives, to change the narrative. We just wanted different-- we both grown up just locked up all the time.Barry: That best friend's name was Eugene, Eugene Ivey. Eric and Eugene have known each other since they were teenagers, and Eugene was given ten years in DDU which turned into a total of 13. It so happened that when Eric was sent back to DDU the second time they were housed together in the same tier, so they could write letters to each other, speak to each other during their hour in the dog kennel, they even communicated through the ventilation system. What they decided to do was start a book club.Erick: I remember this book, All God's children. All God's children is about Willy basket. It essentially broke down a historical overview of his entire family and everyone's criminality. He picked up like a homicide as a juvenile and he had spent a lot of time in isolation. They would drug him, strongest dose of Thorazine, and it wouldn't do anything to him. He just became extremely violent, extremely paranoid. We related to that story. I mean we we've read so I couldn't even tell you all the books I've read. Anything that's how you got out of DDU. And we just formed this plan to to hold each other accountable.Barry: From their pact, from their relationship, Erick started to educate himself about legal procedure and the Massachusetts sentencing process. Eugene got his GED, enrolled in college. Both got out of DDU, insisted on getting mental health treatment. Eventually Eugene even served as a facilitator for conflict resolution in the prisons new restorative justice program. He started training therapy and service dogs. And Erick was able to sue the parole board for procedural violations and eventually in an early release in 2014.?Eugene is still locked up.?40:00??But it's a complicated story. You'll hear about it in our slate plus segment this week.Erick: I try not to think about that Like my my time out and I just try not to dwell on it. I've made a lot of strides, so` to know that they didn't succeed, the system didn't succeed. If I'm already in prison for a crime, I'm already being punished. I think that comes a point where you have to think about what you're doing the people. Another human. People would be up in arms if the dog was treated the way they treat us. Can't even leave your dog in the car for 20 minutes without something calling the police. But you can leave a a person in a box and hope they'll be alright, hope we're not making the time bomb, hope that's it.Chau: Hi Phi nation is written produced and edited by Barry Lam, Associate Professor of philosophy at Vassar College. Editorial dDrector for Slate Podcasts?45:00??is Gabriel Roth. Senior managing producer for slate podcasts is June Thomas. operations manager for slate podcasts is Asha Suja, editor for slate plus is me Chau - our new executive producer for slate podcasts is Alicia Montgomery special thanks to Carrie Figdor whose patronage help make this podcast possible production assistance this season provided by Noa Mendoza-Goot visit hiphination dot org for complete show notes soundtrack and reading lists for every episode. ................
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