Interview With Professor Andrea Armstrong
Linda Franks:
Our guest in this episode is Professor Andrea Armstrong. Andrea is a brilliant professor of law at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana where she’s a native, but more than that, she is just an amazing educator for the country, one of the leading in the country on conditions in jails, in prisons around the nation. She has worked so tirelessly to combine data, to compile data that allows for us as a nation, as communities to be able to track and to be aware of what is actually going on with our citizens who are being detained in these facilities.
Linda Franks:
I personally have a relationship with Andrea. She’s just an amazing person that came into my life at a very hard time. Just knowing that someone of that caliber was shining a light in a place that was dark for me was absolutely a godsend. The information that she has to share with us today is going to be so interesting both just the way that she brings the data together, the way that she explains the issues surrounding jail conditions, and what we can do as community to make it better, to really come together and to tackle some of these large issues that some of us quite frankly don’t want to face and to bring light and to shed a light on just the vast amount of unknown variables, but very hopeful, a very hopeful set of statistics that I think that you will find will motivate you to want to move towards being more active in this subject matter.
Dave Kartunen:
Professor Armstrong joins us today from her office via Zoom. It’s almost like we’re getting our own remote lecture in class today.
Linda Franks:
Good morning, Professor Armstrong. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really want to, again, tell you how much we appreciate you being our very first guest here on the Fair Fight Initiative Podcast, and we are looking forward to having a very robust and informative conversation with you about criminal justice reform and your views on what’s going on across the country and specifically in Louisiana right now.
Andrea Armstrong:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really honored to be your first guest, not just because of the work that you do, but the leadership that you show every day. So I’m honored that you would ask me to be a part of this inaugural podcast.
Linda Franks:
Well, you know that it’s very close to my heart and my story. So the work that you do has just been so amazingly important to the families, particularly here in Baton Rouge, but all across Louisiana, as well as across the United States as a template for what we can do for monitoring and being transparent in what goes on in prisons and jails.
Linda Franks:
What I’d like to ask you as my first question is just a little bit about yourself. I know you grew up in New Orleans. So tell me how you get from being a little girl in New Orleans growing up in the ’80s to this brilliant professor at Loyola doing all of this amazing work.
Andrea Armstrong:
I mean, I did. I was born and raised in Louisiana, in New Orleans. I live about a mile from where I grew up. I think family and schools are really the reason why I’ve been able to do the work that I do. So as a kid, we were pretty heavily involved in the church. So we would do soup kitchens and be at the orphanage. There was lots of community service, which I’m really thankful that my mom pointed us in that direction and made that a part of our lives.
Andrea Armstrong:
I’ll also say public school teachers, right? So I went to public schools here in New Orleans, and I can’t imagine where I would be without their support, without their love, without their lessons, and at every stage, whether we’re talking kindergarten, sixth grade, 10th grade, I had teachers who were looking out for me and who really pushed me to do the best that I could with what I had.
Andrea Armstrong:
From there, I mean, individuals make such a difference in other people’s lives. Sometimes they have no idea that they have led you to a particular point, and I’m just so grateful for those individuals who have really manifested in my life and pointed me to places that I never imagined I would have gone. I ended up going to Princeton because one of my professors in college had gone there himself, and he suggested it.
Andrea Armstrong:
I said, “Wait a minute. I don’t think they take people like me.”
Andrea Armstrong:
He said, “No, no. They do. They do take people like you.”
Andrea Armstrong:
I ended up at that college because that’s where Theo in The Cosby Show went to, right? If he could do it, then I could do it. So it’s little interventions, and it’s part of why I do the work that I did because I know the power of individuals in my life.
Linda Franks:
I know for myself being rooted and grounded in work that you really feel from growing up and being involved in the community. It makes it so much more rewarding. It makes the hard work a little bit easier, the late night studying and whatnot. I know that you stated in one of your interviews that you grew up during the ’80s during what devastated our community, there’s a crack epidemic, and you stated that it was very hard-pressed to find someone who was not either affected by addiction or affected by the violence that that addiction may have caused. Do you think that it was something that permeated and kept you and grounded you in the work of prisons and jails or how did that evolve for you?
Andrea Armstrong:
So I think it’s a combination of my professional and my personal values. So professionally, I’m interested in how the law works when it’s about people who are the most despised and the most marginalized. When we think about what that looks like here in America, that is people who are incarcerated. The law works differently. In prisons and jails, governments are at the height of their power unlike other spaces, and individuals have the least amount of rights compared to outside of prisons and jails. So that’s the professional side of it.
Andrea Armstrong:
Then when I think about that personally, everybody growing up in New Orleans knew somebody who had either been arrested for a crime or who had been a victim of a crime. So understanding that connection, that the people behind bars are there for lots of different reasons, and not the reasons that we necessarily think of first because of television and politics to be quite honest.
Dave Kartunen:
I think that you have a resume that in other circles would look like a future Supreme Court Justice, right? You clerked on a federal bench, and you went to these elite universities, and you served in the Peace Corps. I’m so grateful for where that fire came from to serve something more than just ambition. So I wanted to maybe get you started talking through this term that I first heard from you and walk us through and walk the listeners through and have them thinking about their own communities wherever they live about where hyperincarceration starts.
Andrea Armstrong:
Yeah. So actually, I can’t take any credit. It’s not my term. It’s a term that I first saw by an amazing scholar and writer, Loïc Wacquant. He was talking about mass incarceration and how that shrouds or covers what really is happening when we talk about mass incarceration.
Andrea Armstrong:
So it is completely true that we have since the ’80s fueled this expansion around who’s incarcerated, but mass doesn’t really get to helping us understand what the harms are because what it shrouds is hyperincarceration.
Andrea Armstrong:
What he means and when I use the term, what I mean is that incarceration is not impacting communities equally. So when we say mass incarceration, it’s as if everybody has the same risk and everybody suffers the same harms, and that’s not true.
Andrea Armstrong:
So when we talk about hyperincarceration, what that lets us see is that the groups that are most disproportionately represented in our prison populations are African-American males from urban areas, and that insight helps us both develop policies that can reduce the footprint of mass incarceration, but it also helps us better understand the harms and why some communities fail to thrive in part because of hyperincarceration.
Andrea Armstrong:
The last point I’ll make on these two different terms is that mass incarceration, we could take the mass out of it. We could significantly reduce our incarcerated populations, but if we don’t address hyperincarceration, we’re still going to see, even in reduced levels, of prison populations. We’re still going to see this disproportionate impact primarily on urban African-American communities.
Dave Kartunen:
Yeah. It becomes not a quantity problem at that point. It’s a potency problem because it remains potent in certain communities. Do you have a particular symptom that you think contributes to this the most? I mean, I just rattled down eight or 10 of them when I was thinking about our conversation today. There’s the validity of initial arrest. There’s trauma and deprivation inside our jails. There’s the fact that it’s been monetized in states like Louisiana. There’s the bail process. There’s the withholding of Medicare. Now there’s medical care. There’s COVID now, and then there’s prosecutors who dangle getting out to impact people’s records permanently. There’s probably 30 more that you could rattle off that I’ve missed.
Andrea Armstrong:
I think that there are very real reasons why we see criminal behavior. While I focus on what happens behind bars, part of the work has to encompass why do we criminalize certain types of behavior, what are the government responses to certain types of behavior. When we think about why people actually do commit certain types of crimes, it’s expanding our understanding of those things, right?
Andrea Armstrong:
So I mentioned infrastructure. The Marshall Project did do an incredible survey about a year ago of people who are incarcerated in prison. They were asked the question, “What could have prevented you from committing this crime?” They talked about jobs. They talked about housing. They talked about mental health. Those three things can make such a fundamental impact in lives, individual lives and in communities that we need to talk more about them as a response to criminal behavior rather than having jails or prisons be our only institutional response to certain acts.
Linda Franks:
That is such a great response. I guess as I’m listening, what I’m thinking about is the historical perspective of incarceration as we know it in this country. So as we work through that paradigm, what do you feel? I guess it goes back to what Dave was saying is those facts, those lists of symptoms but that mitigating factor of the systemic racism of our society and the implicit biases that occur when we’re talking about the specific symptoms of what he’s saying. So in your work, what do you feel has been some of the, I guess, things that you come to know over the years of digesting the data that shows you, “Is this something that we can really tackle?” I mean, what do you think are some of the ways systematically that we can go at? Is this just a governmental thing or is it something that we really, really need to begin almost an elementary school as reeducating our population on how we look at each other in terms of race?
Andrea Armstrong:
Absolutely. I mean, I think perceptions of groups by race is one of the key reasons why as a society we haven’t prioritized what happens behind bars. There’s this idea that certain racial groups are more likely to commit crimes, more likely to be antisocial in a particular way, and are therefore more deserving of inhumane treatment and conditions.
Andrea Armstrong:
So that’s clearly part of our criminal justice system, the role that race plays, and there’ve been a lot of studies that have looked at our era of hyperincarceration and how that’s linked to the gains of the civil rights movement, for example, that our criminal justice responses are in fact a backlash towards achieving equality when we think about, in particular, African-American populations, but we also see it with Latinx populations as well.
Andrea Armstrong:
So I think we see a lot of the interplay of these things, of race and class, and how we think about solutions to the problem. So yes, we should start as early as possible, making sure that people see people as people, but I don’t think that that is the only response. I do think that there’s room and an obligation by the government to lead the way on these issues because it is a representative government for all of us, and because of that, where a racial minority in particular is being targeted or profiled or unfairly sentenced, that is the government’s obligation to take leadership on that issue.
Linda Franks:
I really respect your view on that. I know in the article for the New Yorker you made the point of saying that this is not a political thing. This is a government obligation. I think that’s very important to highlight. Could you expound on that just a little bit, please?
Andrea Armstrong:
Yes. I mean, I think when we think about prisons and jails, they’re government institutions in the same way that schools are government institutions. We do have private schools, for example, but the government has the obligation to provide an education for each child that is growing up.
Andrea Armstrong:
So I think about prisons and jails in many ways as similar to schools. Yet, when we compare these two types of institutions, we see that the types of transparency and accountability that we demand for our children who are often in our society the most valued, the most precious because they’re seen as innocent, we don’t demand those same exact types of mechanisms for prisons and jails.
Andrea Armstrong:
So when I think about what does that look like, that looks like a much more robust government response. It is a sacred obligation to take somebody into custody on behalf of our society, and we have the right as members of this representative government to demand that they take that obligation seriously.
Dave Kartunen:
You used a word there that I seized on really quickly, and that was innocent, of course, and school children are the poster children for a word like that, but there’s another distinction and if we start to go into your work and go into the places where you have done I would call shoe leather reporting in ways that most people have ignored even people who are in favor of defunding or abolishing or closing prisons and listening to the voices of the people who have experienced this as incarcerated people, and innocent is an interesting word.
Dave Kartunen:
Of course, as a law professor, you could school me for hours on not guilty, but let’s start on the distinction between prisons and jails because in the mind of the general public there is no distinction and yet, the three of us know full well that many of these horrors and some of your research even indicates that these conditions are worse and the deprivation of this sacred duty is worse among people who are in our society not guilty and are in our jails before they have even gone to trial. Can you tell the story about how that light went off for you?
Andrea Armstrong:
I mean, it’s really fascinating, right? As a society, we put the two together, but they’re very, very different, and they’re supposed to serve different purposes, right? So jails are there primarily for pretrial populations, meaning they haven’t had judicial determination of whether they’re guilty or innocent. All of us are presumed innocent until actually proven guilty.
Andrea Armstrong:
So jails are designed for short-term incarceration, right? They’re designed for holding people that a judge has determined are either a continuing and present threat to public safety and therefore can’t be released before their trial or because there is a significant risk that they will not appear for a future trial date. Those are technically and constitutionally the only two reasons that a person can be in jail.
Andrea Armstrong:
What we know as a matter of practice is that often people are too poor to simply afford the security that is demanded by the government for their release. These types of conditions that are put before release are designed to address the concerns around public safety or of a failure to appear, but it’s really always been confusing to me that if you’re rich and you’re accused of first degree murder but you can afford the price that the court demands for your temporary perhaps freedom pending your trial, that you can go free.
Andrea Armstrong:
Whereas if you’re poor and accused of let’s say a drug possession charge, and you can’t afford the security amount because there’s a concern of threat or failure to appear, that you then are detained. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, why how much money you have should determine whether or not you stay behind bars while you’re incarcerated. So we see that our jail populations are primarily those who are represented by public defenders, which tells us that they don’t have money to pay for their release. So that’s what jails are for.
Andrea Armstrong:
Prisons are for people who have actually been convicted of a crime, but remember, even once they’re behind bars in a prison, that’s going to include the same variety in terms of the criminal behavior that got them there in the first place. So we tend to treat everybody who’s in prison as if they are a violent, serial murderer, and the reality is that is the tiniest proportion of the population. Instead, maybe we just think about the elderly who are a significant part of our prison populations.
Andrea Armstrong:
So explaining that to folks and helping them understand what these institutions do has really been important, I think, for folks to revisit their assumptions about who’s in jail or prison and why.
Dave Kartunen:
So as I understand it, you start by looking at the most incarcerated state and the most incarcerated country and you go to an infamous place like Angola. Prison is as I think probably more brutal than even any of us really imagine until we see it, but then you go to the East Baton Rouge Parish and it’s a misnomer prison where the overwhelming majority of people there are innocent until proven guilty, and you find worse.
Andrea Armstrong:
There’s a lot of reasons for that. Jails are less resourced than prisons. Jails are run by locally elected officials often. It’s really a contradiction because jails, technically, people in jails should have a higher degree of rights than those who are in prison. So there’s different constitutional standards that are applied for certain conditions whether you’re in jail or in prison.
Andrea Armstrong:
So in prison, it’s going to be the Eighth Amendment, this prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, but in the 14th Amendment, we think about deprivations of due process. So it is a misnomer for the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. That’s a historical legacy that comes from Louisiana, but what we see primarily in terms of the deaths is that jails are just not equipped with the types of services and safety, quite honest, that we would see in prisons.
Andrea Armstrong:
So questioning why is there that this difference that the place where you are with the higher rights and the less guilt because you haven’t been proven to be guilty or innocent somehow have fewer resources available to you than if you’re actually convicted.
Linda Franks:
So I know that you did the bulk of your work in the beginning with the prison system, and then after 2016 when you coordinated with The Promise of Justice Initiative to do the report on the protest of Alton Sterling brought you into that particular facility to see what was going on in the jails. Let’s go into that report of what prompted you to then go on and do the report for the entire state of Louisiana because I know that there may be some ongoing litigation with those protestors now and it was just amazing to see that report and all of the findings that you have. So could you elaborate on that just a little bit?
Andrea Armstrong:
Sure. So this work started after a series of protests in Baton Rouge around the murder of Alton Sterling. The protestors who had been arrested came out and they were saying, “Listen, we weren’t given medical care. There was pepper spray in my eyes, and they didn’t give us anything to take it out. We were singing in our cells. We were overcrowded. We weren’t given food.”
Andrea Armstrong:
There was a woman who had her medication in her purse, which she desperately needed, and she wasn’t given the medication that she needed even though it was right there in her purse.
Andrea Armstrong:
So that started a closer look for me around East Baton Rouge Parish Prison and that led to a report where we documented 25 deaths between a period of 2012 to 2016. I’ve continued that work now looking at it statewide. I think one issue that came up in East Baton Rouge was we wanted to know, “Well, is this typical? So are people dying there all the time?” It turns out there was no list. Nobody knew.
Andrea Armstrong:
I thought, “Somebody should know. Somebody should have a list.”
Andrea Armstrong:
The same thing was happening in the New Orleans Jail. A reporter would call and say, “Well, how many deaths have there been? Is this a typical death?”
Andrea Armstrong:
I was like, “Am I the only person who has a list? This can’t be right. Somebody’s got to be collecting this information.”
Andrea Armstrong:
So that really led to the statewide project, this attempt to create a list and to better understand who is dying, why are they dying, where are they dying, basic questions that nobody had answers to.
Andrea Armstrong:
Ultimately, what we found is that East Baton Rouge Parish Jail is one of the deadliest in the state by far, and there, again, we’re talking about pretrial populations, so 75% of those deaths in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison were people who had not yet had a trial. Understanding that I think has really helped to have better conversations in Louisiana around what our conditions look like and when we as a society put people in those conditions.
Linda Franks:
So do you feel that by advocating for more transparency maybe on the legislative end some type of governmental oversight or demanding that there be a notification, that there be some type of reporting system? What part do you think that would play in maybe correcting some of these problems?
Andrea Armstrong:
So I’ve thought about this idea a lot and written about it, but transparency is not the same thing as accountability. I think really important that we understand that these are two different things. They may in fact reinforce one another or they may be coordinated strategies, but they’re not the same thing.
Andrea Armstrong:
For me, to have an accountability-driven conversation, we need to first know what we’re trying to hold people accountable for. So for me, transparency is a necessary first step or precursor towards a conversation around accountability. If we design an accountability system but we don’t know what exactly we’re measuring, how we’re measuring it, and really why we’re measuring it, then that’s not going to be an effective or sustainable system.
Andrea Armstrong:
So my work has really been focused on the transparency side of it, and I think that’s necessary and part of the conversation before we can even talk about monitoring our accountability. In Louisiana, I would just say that we have neither at the moment. I don’t think that we’re necessarily atypical in that respect. We do have some increasing movement towards accountability in other states, and that takes a lot of different forms, but what we don’t have is clear facility level information and transparency in the majority of states around death that occur in their facility, which is unlike the death penalty, right?
Andrea Armstrong:
So when someone is sentenced to death, we have national statistics that look at race, gender, the type of crime. We’ve done a lot of that work and I believe that that is one of the reasons why the death penalty is less widely utilized these days is because we understand how it’s played because we were forced to collect that data and to analyze it.
Andrea Armstrong:
When we talk about death simply by incarceration, we don’t have those numbers. That’s the point that I’m trying to get us to so that we can eventually have a more informed conversation about what accountability looks like.
Dave Kartunen:
I think we could spend another hour talking just about how bad those metrics are now. I discovered that on my own in Georgia as a reporter trying to peel back that onion and discovering that simple ordinal numbers were sometimes the best statistics that you could get with no explanation behind them, but rather than do that, can you talk about the tools and incentives behind the systems specifically in the jails that are not only not delivering good transparency, but incentivizing the opposite and, of course, will not lead to accountability until we undo it. So I think specifically about open records laws.
Dave Kartunen:
Your search is on a scale that I couldn’t have even fathomed having done that in one county in Georgia at the time, and to have done it in all of the parishes of Louisiana, my head wants to explode. In fact, 29% of the facilities never even replied to your open records request. There’s a whole system in Georgia I know that has spurned out of litigation I was involved in over a jail death that hides initial incident reports. Those aren’t the only tools, but all of the tools and the incentives right now in jails are to cloud, cover up, disguise, sometimes even release from jail before they die. The numbers tells us nothing at this point.
Andrea Armstrong:
Yeah. I mean, I think, and thanks for the compliments about our work, but what I will say is I couldn’t have done this work without my Loyola law students. So I teach a seminar and in that seminar, I have 20 law students. Their assignment is to file public records requests. So each year we filed over 130 public records requests collectively to get this information. My students worked really hard because technically under Louisiana’s public records request, you file your letter, you should get an acknowledgement of response within three business days, which then notifies you about the time that they’ll be able to give you the documents, et cetera.
Andrea Armstrong:
That happens in very few cases. In the majority of cases, my students have to follow up with emails, phone calls. Some of them have even driven to the facility to ask. They’ve had friends and family members who happen to know jail personnel or call and say, “Can’t you respond to my granddaughter’s letter that she sent you?” It takes an enormous amount of attention. That’s what my law students have done, including responding to objections that the sheriffs have raised in terms of releasing this information.
Andrea Armstrong:
So one, the tools are relatively weak to be able to access this information. As you mentioned, the incentives for the sheriffs to release this information affirmatively are also preventing this closure. They don’t have to report it. There’s not state law in Louisiana that requires them to report a death in their facility to anyone other than the coroner, and that’s because the coroner has to pick up the body.
Andrea Armstrong:
So some sheriffs will issue a press release every single time, but that’s the minority of sheriffs. Others do fear conversations about what happened in the facility because it’s a possibility that they could be legally liable for that death. That is part of operating in our litigation environment that they are concerned that releasing that information ahead of time could lead to some liability on their behalf.
Andrea Armstrong:
I personally don’t think that that should be the primary dominating concern for a government institution, but I can understand why they might feel that way. These litigation expenses can be expensive, but it also has other repercussions. It can increase their insurance premiums, for example, and making it all more expensive to run their facility, which their budgets are locally controlled.
Andrea Armstrong:
So we have to think about all of those factors when we’re talking to sheriffs and trying to help them understand their role within this broader system and why they, too, have to be held accountable for the performance of those institutions.
Linda Franks:
Yeah. You would just think if you run your facility in a way where it’s not subjecting people to possible death, then you would not have that to worry about, but I digress. With that being said, what do you think are some of the ways that we can improve upon the system? What do you think are some of the things that we should be advocating for in the community? What should we be going after and fighting for to help to strip the system of all of these curtains that they’ve put up, remove the veil so to speak because I do think that once you begin to shine light in dark places, you can then, like you said, start the business of accountability and what that looks like whether it’s an individual or whether it’s a complete administration or if it’s legislation? Give us some of your insight having done so much research. I’m sure that you can broaden this conversation into how we can make it better.
Andrea Armstrong:
Absolutely. I mean, I think the first bit is really understanding that jails in particular are our institutions. We should feel free to be able to call our sheriff and say, “I’d like to visit. I’d like to see.” Most of the jails that I’m familiar with do allow, I mean, COVID has impacted this to some extent, but do allow for volunteers in the facility. That could include tutoring. That could include certain types of skills building. That could include arts or that could include religious services. That could include all types of things, but I do think that the walls between jails and broader society are too thick, and that we hide everything from public view.
Andrea Armstrong:
I do think the other part is helping the sheriffs understand why transparency is in their best interest. We should be clear. People die. They do. It is not always the fault of the facility per se, but I think that we won’t trust that a death wasn’t preventable unless we are convinced that the sheriff has been transparent in their operations historically and currently. That’s the only way. You have to build that community trust.
Andrea Armstrong:
So what that means is when you issue request for proposals for healthcare that you lay out exactly what you expect your healthcare provider to do in situations. It means empowering your medical staff to overrule security considerations when it comes to making sure that a person has what they need in order to be healthy while incarcerated.
Andrea Armstrong:
I think it means going to our elected officials beyond sheriffs, our city council, our metro council or our statewide legislative bodies and asking them to include jails and prisons as part of their general work. In many cases both at the local and the state level, there is this deference to jail and prison administrators to say, “Oh, well, we don’t want to step on their toes. We’re going to defer to their judgment.”
Andrea Armstrong:
There are some reasons why they may want to do that, but I think that doesn’t eliminate the basic function of ensuring that these institutions are performing in the ways that serve our interest rather than harm our communities.
Linda Franks:
I saw that you are working on compiling narratives and stories to give the human face to the statistics and the data that you’ve so graciously been able to provide for. I guess I want to know, well, I do know, but I’m asking you to, again, expound on that in your experience in that attempt to, again, humanize for society the very numbers that they are seeing and in a way encouraging because when we talk to our listeners here that are listening to you right now, they may say, “Well, what can I do? Why should I care?”
Linda Franks:
So knowing these narratives and putting these out there we’re encouraging our community to see our citizens as human beings and not just, like you said, stereotypes and bywords, but can you again give us an information on that work that you’re doing and how is that coming and how is that progressing along?
Andrea Armstrong:
So we’re actually going to launch our In Memoriam section on November 1st, All Saints Day. Again, this is produced through my students who have this as an assignment, but they review a list of people who have died in our New Orleans Jail, and then they pick somebody on that list, and try and research, “What do we know about this person?” Even when sheriffs do release a press release, for example, saying that somebody died, more often than not, it’s the person and their charge, perhaps some details about the con for which they were charged.
Andrea Armstrong:
They more often than not do not talk about that person as a parent or a caregiver. They don’t talk about that person as an economic breadwinner for their family or for their community. We really are glued to this idea of the person at the worst moment of their life instead of understanding that we are all complex human beings, and that we’re all somebody’s mother or brother or sister or husband or uncle, and that they are victims of crimes without a doubt, but we often understand the humanity of victims in a way that is denied to us for the people who are accused of hurting them.
Andrea Armstrong:
So my students have done some amazing work. They have tracked down librarians in high schools in New Jersey to get photos of some of the people who have died. They’ve interviewed family members, fiances, children. They have visited public schools that were in that area or gone to their churches. We learned that some of them, for example, got a promotion or a new job just days before their arrest, thinking of the opportunities that had been lost by incarcerating this person who ultimately died in the jail. That’s the project.
Andrea Armstrong:
So we’ll be launching on November 1st on our project website, which is incarcerationtransparency.org. That’s where we’ve got all of our data, our data analysis, as well as this soon-to-be released section.
Dave Kartunen:
Professor Armstrong, is there anything you’d like to add?
Andrea Armstrong:
I think when we think about criminal justice reform, we really think about diversion, so fewer people walking in the door, and we think about reentry, so fewer people returning to that front door after doing prison. I think it’s critical that we really insert the conditions that people do their time in into that conversation.
Andrea Armstrong:
I firmly believe and I’ve done research on looking at what are the consequences of incarceration and we’ve talked about one of those consequences, which is death, but there are a lot of other consequence. Unless we pay attention to how we hold people behind bars, even the best designed reentry program won’t be able to account for what in some cases is decades of what for all purposes is torture, right?
Andrea Armstrong:
So if we’re really serious about reforming our system, if we’re serious about making it something that is not only equitable but serves our communities both in terms of public safety, but also in terms of our community thriving when we have to talk about conditions. Leaving conditions off the table is already going to hobble our efforts. So I’m really glad that you all have allowed this focus conditions and its importance in this broader movement.
Linda Franks:
Well, all that I can say is it is always my pleasure to just see you and to talk to you and you’re just so brilliant. Knowing that there are people like you out there with your eyes on this issue, it gives me such hope. It gives me so much confidence that I know God is moving, that He has positioned people in the right place at the right time. I’m so glad that you decided to come home and to use all of your amazing gifts for your and our community.
Linda Franks:
I lament the fact that I had to lose my son in order to meet you, but I am grateful, again, for his life and his sacrifice because it has brought me into an arena of such amazing people to learn and to grow from and you are one of those angels that I always reference, that everything you do is authentically for the love of community and for people, and it’s rooted and grounded in integrity. So thank you so much, Professor Armstrong, for sharing your time and your brilliance with us today.
Andrea Armstrong:
I’m just so honored. I mean, both the ways in which we’ve been able to work together and grow together, this work is not possible without people who are directly impacted leading the way. So I am so thankful and grateful that I have been able to support you in demanding better from our elected officials, and I’m just so honored that you wanted me to be on this podcast with you.
Dave Kartunen:
Professor Andrea Armstrong is professor of law at Loyola University in New Orleans. Her project, which is now expanding beyond the state of Louisiana to other states to put stories and statistics and measurable metrics behind this opaque ordinal number of a death behind bars. You can read all about I ton her website, incarcerationtransparency.org, and we cannot thank you enough for being here for the pilot episode of the Fair Fight Initiative Podcast.
Andrea Armstrong:
Thank you so much for having me.
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