Interview With Eyal Press, Author of the Book Dirty Work
Dave Kartunen:
Our guest this week that Linda and I are just tremendously excited about is the author Eyal Press who is a writer and a journalist. He contributes to the New Yorker Magazine. He’s written several books, including Beautiful Souls about the people who did the principled thing under difficult circumstances. But his latest book is Dirty Work. And Linda and I are particularly interested in focusing on the first third of that book and the dirty work that gets done in our jails and prisons around America.
Linda Franks:
I had the pleasure of meeting Eyal in Baton Rouge when he came to interview me and some of the amazing family members of those who had died in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. And Eyal was doing an article for the New Yorker Magazine and Eyal came to Baton Rouge and spoke with a group of us actually in my salon. So I had an opportunity to really see him at work and what an amazing interviewer he is, and then to read his work. His new book Dirty Work that I would encourage everyone, everyone to pick up and read. I think that as we do this work in social justice, or just really in life, it is always great to take an opportunity to look at things from a different perspective.
Linda Franks:
And I am so just overwhelmingly pleased to be having an opportunity to talk with him today. And I am honored to have him on our podcast. I told him that I call him friend and I mean that in the dearest way. And I’m looking forward to going to New York and have him show me around that big, beautiful apple. And so welcome Eyal. Thank you again for being here. So I guess what I want to start out by doing is asking you about yourself. Where are you from? How did you get this passion? Even the idea, the perspective that you come from I feel is so important that you had to be kind of raised in this environment, right? That kind of helped cultivate that. So tell us a little bit about your background, and your family, and who you are.
Eyal Press:
Sure. But first, before I do that Linda, I just want to thank you for those incredibly humbling and generous words. I love what I do because I get to meet amazing people. And I can’t think of a more amazing group of people that I’ve met in my experience as a reporter than you and the women in the room the night that I came to Baton Rouge to hear incredibly wrenching stories that we shouldn’t be hearing, because these are stories of injustice and of people who were never sentenced to death and were sometimes never sentenced at all to anything, but paid with their lives because of the inhumane, brutal conditions in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. And as you know and your listeners know all too well, unfortunately that’s not an exception. We have hundreds, if not thousands of deaths in this country every year that take place behind the walls of jails and prisons without any scrutiny from the media, without anyone being held accountable, without any kind of public dialogue about why this is happening and who it’s happening to, that just really should be a source of collective shame in this country.
Eyal Press:
And so being in that room, you can read the statistics about mass incarceration, and you can read the statistics about jails and prisons in this country. But it doesn’t really humanize it. I think what you and the other women who were there spoke, and I know you’ve been active in your community week after week, month after month, year after year on these issues. You’re doing incredible public service and you’re taking the pain and the grief that you’ve been put through, and turning it into something that hopefully creates a more just and humane world, which is as honorable thing as someone can do. So I really am again, humbled and honored, and was just incredibly grateful to be let into that room. People often ask me, “How do you do the work you do?” Because I write a lot about social justice issues, but I also write a lot about trauma and grief, people who have been through awful experiences.
Eyal Press:
And what I’ve concluded and what I often say is that it’s not as hard as you think, because there are people out there who have been through these awful experiences and they don’t think anyone cares because no one was held accountable and no one listened. So all it really takes is being willing to listen a little bit. And of course having people like you who made that interview and really that article happen. Because without access to the folks who have experienced these terrible tragedies, I couldn’t have written that story. So thank you first of all.
Eyal Press:
Now to get to me, that’s the easy part for me. The more difficult part is talking about myself and where I come from. But I can say that I grew up in Buffalo, New York, in an immigrant family. My mother is Romanian and was the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and is herself a Holocaust survivor. My maternal grandparents had their lives upended in World War II because they were Jewish and they were taken to a camp like all the Jews in Romania, and suffered horrible, horrible experiences.
Eyal Press:
And I think that when you come from such a lineage, you feel both incredibly lucky that your generation somehow didn’t go through this, but also haunted by how easily it could have been you. So it’s not like we talked about this when I grew up. We didn’t. But I knew. I knew that my grandparents had lost a daughter, and I knew that this was because of hatred that was directed at powerless groups of people to whom the most unspeakable things were done.
Eyal Press:
So growing up in America, I always had that in the back of my mind, that that can happen. So when I decided to be a journalist, I think I carried some of this experience and that background. Both growing up in Buffalo and thinking about how the city became what it was, and the problems that are still there. And then my own family history, just thinking about how in this country, I think Jews became white in America sometime around the 1950s or ’60s. It took a while, just like with Catholics, right?
Eyal Press:
But the Black community in Buffalo and in I would say the United States more generally was locked out, locked out of opportunity. And to me, it just seemed like wow, this is so similar in so many ways. It’s a powerless, comparatively powerless group of people subjected to stereotypes and a minority that no one is looking out for.
Eyal Press:
So I think I grew up kind of thinking whatever I do, I need to have a consciousness that this country is not whole in that way, that this country has these incredible disparities of race and of class. So when I became a journalist, my desire was to write about these issues, to write about why is it that there’s so much inequality in this country? There’s so much injustice. It’s the richest country in the world. What collectively should we be conscious of that we’re not? It’s a very idealistic notion of the press, because the press in this country is rightly maligned and hated because they focus on Britney Spears. They focus on, it’s just every new fad and so little on the have-nots and on people who are really in need of attention.
Eyal Press:
But there are among the journalists and writers I know, a lot of very idealistic people who believe that our job is to expose injustice, that our job is to bring to light the problems and imperfections in our society. I think I feel most at home, most comfortable talking to people who are on the margins. Who are not the privileged. Because to me, they’re my people in some way. I just feel like as reporters, we have a certain power. We can amplify things. So we need to use that power to amplify the stories that matter.
Dave Kartunen:
I don’t remember who said it. When you were talking in another interview about whether you choose to do the convenient thing or the principled thing, and I think you just encapsulated it there. Now ask me why I quit the news business. Right? And I don’t say journalism when I say that. I always say the news business, because those are two distinctly different things.
Dave Kartunen:
Let’s talk about this book. It was so moving. It’s so incredible to open up something and to see a forest rather than just trees. Your voice is incredible throughout. This is essential reading for anyone who does not want to be a passive Democrat, and that it will be a prologue to the end of our democracy if people don’t take its lessons. How did you settle on those three topics? And where did jails and prisons fit for you?
Eyal Press:
I think that what I wanted to do, the origins of this book, I had written a previous book called Beautiful Souls about people who stand by their principles when their jobs are at risk, or sometimes when their lives are at risk. And I think some of what I said earlier about my background can explain why I’m so interested in that. Because in any family that has survived trauma, you do hear stories of people who helped along the way, and heroic acts, and generous acts. And that was kind of the seed for Beautiful Souls. Just wanting to know more about that.
Eyal Press:
But as I was writing that book and afterwards, I was thinking more and more about how most people are not heroes. And the truth is that people who are placed in compromising and sometimes impossible moral situations, most of the time they’re going to get their hands dirty. They’re going to go along. And if I had to be honest about myself, I think that I don’t know what I would do in those situations, but I fear that I would be among the gray people who went along.
Eyal Press:
So I started thinking about all of the situations we put people in this country that are morally compromising and the kind of different areas of life, and who does that. And that got me to Dirty Work.
Eyal Press:
And so with prisons, I know from stories like Linda’s, and I know from stories like Darren Rainey’s, which I’ll talk about as we continue, a mentally ill man who was tortured and killed in a prison in Florida. And his story is very central to the prison section of Dirty Work.
Eyal Press:
But I know from those stories who the primary victims of mass incarceration are. It’s people who are placed behind bars in inhumane conditions and pay with their dignity, and all too often with their lives. And have years taken away from them, and are not really treated like humans, I would say. Are subjected to I would say a kind of social death, which is this term I think Orlando Patterson, a historian of slavery talks about social death. And I think that’s what prisons do.
Eyal Press:
But I do believe that a brutal system of prisons like the one we have is also dehumanizing to the people who work in it. And I think when we think about mass incarceration, we also have to think about the fact that it has sadly been a jobs program for a lot of communities. When the tough on crime talk was coming from both Democrats and Republicans for decades, you had a lot of counties and communities where mills had closed and factories had left saying, “Okay, well we’ll build a prison.” And I see those places here in New York state. You go upstate, you go to small areas, and there’s a prison, there’s a jail. And that’s where a lot of the folks around who have jobs work.
Eyal Press:
So I was thinking about that, and I wanted to write about what I consider a kind of secondary level of victims. Because they’re also perpetrators. They’re not as clearly the victims as someone like Darren Rainey. They’re in a position of power within the jail or the prison. But that power is within a structure that I think puts especially the low ranking people in really tough situations where inhumanity is probably rewarded. That’s certainly the case in the Florida prison system. And I heard that from guards who work there. The more brutal and inhumane you are, the more you’re going to rise up and get promoted. And if you try to be the good guy, you better watch your back.
Eyal Press:
And then to also hear about resources not being invested, and there are prisons and jails in Florida right now where a third of the staff is open. They’re way understaffed. And not surprisingly, there’s incredibly high use of force incidents. Brutality, mistreatment. Because the structural conditions having so many people incarcerated and spending the least amount possible to basically warehouse them in these facilities, you’re going to create situations that both brutalize the incarcerated people and put the people who work in those facilities in situations where they feel, “I’m either going to risk everything to stop this, or I’m going to go along with it.” And that’s where the idea of Dirty Work comes.
Eyal Press:
And so in the book, I start and look at the mental health unit of this prison, the Dade Correctional Institution. And the reason I did that is because as awful as the prison system in this country is, it’s all the more unfathomable that it is also our largest mental health system. That jails and prisons basically function as defacto mental health asylums in so many communities in this country because of a lack of community services. Because healthcare is not a human right in this country. Because too many people are left on the streets. I mean, I just have to walk a few blocks in New York to see this. Instead of getting treatment, instead of being put in an environment that actually is for the benefit of the person who is in the throes of a mental health crisis, we put them in the worst possible place. Which is handcuffed, behind bars, in a violent environment where things are going to go wrong.
Eyal Press:
So I wanted to spotlight how as a society, this is our decision. We have made this decision over years by not being willing to fund mental health services, by not providing healthcare to all. We created a system where we criminalized basically poverty and mental illness. And what is the result of that? Well, that’s the first part of Dirty Work.
Dave Kartunen:
You laid out these two similar tracks that I was riding on for different parts of this section of the book. The victim of this system of mass incarceration and sort of the secondary victim, the low level employee who is put in just morally crushing situations. And one gets there because we haven’t funded our mental health system and ends up behind bars, or because they’re underserved or oppressed. And then the guard who gets there because the sociological chain down to the fact where we get to a person in the book that you call Bobby who says you either have the benefits and no pay, or you have pay and no benefits. Their community had also been left behind and sort of rotted from within. We as a society create the dirty work that has to be done, right? The choices that we’ve made somewhere up the sociological stream have left us with this dirty work to do. What did you think hearing that from the secondary victims?
Eyal Press:
So the first character in the book, this woman Harriet was a mental health aid at Dade Correctional Institution. What’s really striking to me about Harriet, I don’t even know if it’s in the book. But she had never worked in a prison before. And she went in I would say with as she would admit, very conventional ideas about who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. The good guys were the security guards, because she was a woman working in an all male prison. They were going to protect her. They had her back. They enforced the rules in order. And the bad guys were the incarcerated people. Now, she admitted this even though her job was a mental health aid to offer treatment, and group therapy, and so forth to the incarcerated population.
Eyal Press:
What happens to Harriet is that she gets to know some of the incarcerated people, and she actually sees, “Wow, these are human beings. These are people.” She hears their stories and what they went through. She got very close to some of the, and she was asked to care for.
Eyal Press:
One of whom I’m remembering was convicted of murder. And I think that the Harriet that went into prison would’ve said, “He was convicted of that? He must be a terrible guy.” Incredibly thoughtful person. The crime had happened very early in his life. The circumstances were murky. That’s not to say he didn’t do it. But 30 years down the road, he’s one of the most humane people in the prison. He’s a totally different person. And it’s kind of a lesson and something Andrea Armstrong has emphasized and told me, that she never sees someone as the worst of what they did. We’re all capable of doing awful things. That does not define who we are. We’re all capable of doing good things, and maybe that shouldn’t define who we are.
Eyal Press:
But anyway, to get back to Harriet. So she sees the humanity of the guys she’s caring for. And she also sees the brutality of the guards. The guards who they have unchecked power, and they are using it in this prison. So she’s hearing guys say, “Hey, they skip my meals. They don’t give me meals.” And she’s seeing that one of the guards won’t let group of guys she’s with into the rec yard. And keep in mind, this is their only opportunity to be outside. To have sunlight and just get some fresh air. And it keeps happening.
Eyal Press:
And Harriet eventually says something about this. She writes an email to her supervisor saying, “They’re not letting the guys out into the yard.” And immediately after that, the retaliation comes. She starts doing group sessions and the guard who’s supposed to be there disappears, right? She’s let into the rec yard, but then left alone. And on one occasion gets quite frightened and is nearly assaulted. And the message there is a really simple one. “We run this place. We, the security forces, we run it. Don’t get in our way. And don’t start talking about how we’re not treating people right.”
Eyal Press:
And that’s one of the structural ways that brutality and inhumanity takes place in these institutions. Because by this point, Harriet wants to do the right thing. She’s changed her thinking, but she can’t. She’s too afraid. She needs her job, and she’s scared to just not be able to rely on someone opening a security gate when she’s walking, and that’s what starts to happen.
Eyal Press:
And then that all comes before she learns what happens to Darren Rainey. I’ll tell the story as Harriet learned it. She comes to work one day. She hears that Rainey collapsed in a shower. And he wasn’t one of her patients, but she knew who Rainey was. He kind of gave people intense looks. And he was someone you noticed. She’s talking to the nurse. So she says, “What happened? He slipped, he fell, he had a heart attack?” And the nurse tells her, “No, he was locked inside of a shower where the water temperature and the water flow was controlled from the outside.”
Eyal Press:
And we now know that that water temperature was 160 degrees, which is the temperature of a cup of tea. And we also know that Rainey was not the first person in the prison to be put in that shower. It was known as the shower treatment. And he fell in that shower. We don’t know if that was because the water hit him directly, or because the steam built up. But he was screaming for help. And other incarcerated guys in that unit have testified to this. He was screaming for help. “Let me out, let me out.” And then he falls, and his body is covered in burns.
Eyal Press:
This is an egregious case of torture. And torture is unfortunately widespread in America’s jails and prisons. In solitary confinement, which is a whole separate thing I haven’t talked about, but the mental health unit in this prison consisted a whole wing of it, consisted of these solitary cells. That according to many psychiatrists is itself torture. Leave aside the shower treatment. That, just the routine placement of people in solitary units.
Eyal Press:
But anyway, so Harriet is horrified. She learns what actually happened to Rainey at that point. And as she said to me when I met her, “I knew someone had to report it. But it wasn’t going to be me.” And on one level, I think anyone who listens to that is going to say, “Well, why not? Why not you? Someone really has to report this. You have to. This is a crime that has taken place in a state institution. Someone has to step up.”
Eyal Press:
But if you read about the conditions there, you’ll come to understand that it wasn’t just Harriet. It was also [Lavita 00:36:28] Richardson, another mental health aid I interviewed and got to know. And she saw abuse too. And she also was told, “Don’t say anything. Don’t be a witness. Just turn away, pretend you don’t see it.”
Eyal Press:
So the only reason we actually know what happened to Darren Rainey is because this guy in the unit Harold Hempstead, a prisoner leaked it. He was obsessed with what had happened, because he heard Rainey that night. And he’s kind of a obsessive compulsive guy, and he wouldn’t let it go. He would not let it go. And eventually, he got information to the Miami Herald. They published some photographs and a story. And now we know what happened to Darren Rainey. But I am absolutely convinced that if it were not for Harold Hempstead, we would not know.
Eyal Press:
And just to offer a sort of haunting coda to this story, when I went to Baton Rouge and met with Linda and was reporting the story about deaths in jails, in prisons, I was also in contact with some folks in Georgia where they’ve had a lot of deaths at some very remote penitentiaries. And they sent me some documents. And in one of them, it’s a statement from a man. It’s the mental health area. And he talks about a scalding shower. This is in Georgia. This is eight years after what happened to Darren Rainey. And no one’s writing about that.
Eyal Press:
So it’s not as though we can just say, “This was an isolated case.” That to me is the wrong lesson. And the other wrong lesson, I think the dangerous lesson is that it’s the guards. It’s the guards who did this. Yes. Some guards did this. And I think I make it pretty clear in anyone who reads the first chapter of the book is going to think, “These guys, something was really wrong here. These guys need to be held accountable.” Okay. Yes. But what about the warden? What about the Department of Corrections in Florida? What about the then Governor Scott, who is now Senator Scott, who oversees the Department of Corrections and makes decisions about whether or not there will be rehabilitative programs, makes decisions about sentencing, and makes decisions about mental health services?
Eyal Press:
Those are the people we have to hold accountable. Florida was second to last in the country in spending on mental health services at the time of Darren Rainey’s death. And it had the third largest prison system in the United States. So look at where the money’s going, right? It’s not going towards treating people who have needs that might keep them out of jails and prisons. It’s going to warehouse them in those institutions. And that’s the problem. Much more than the couple of guards that they did eventually move to … I think they got rid of two guys. But as one of the guards told me in the book, and this is an important lesson. They always go after the lowest ranking people. So that’s who is held accountable.
Eyal Press:
And this is a story that I think resonates with Louisiana and Baton Rouge, the private companies. Because I know Linda you’ve talked a lot and been at demonstrations about giving these, putting a private for-profit company in charge of the mental health services at a jail or prison. Well, that’s what Florida did. They contracted the whole thing out to these two companies, Corizon and Wexford. And Harriet, the woman I mentioned, she wasn’t actually a state employee. She was a private employee. And to me, that creates more evasion of accountability.
Eyal Press:
I did actually eventually go to Dade, and visit the prison, and I walked around. And the warden showed me the things. And I think they did that in part because as a state institution, when the press is asking for access, you have a certain obligation. So I go to this prison and I’m there. And I want to talk to the mental health staff. And I ask the warden, “Can I talk to the mental health staff?” And he tells me, “Well, that’s not our decision. That’s Wexford decision, the private company.” And they said no. They said they would not talk to me. So here I am in a state prison, and I cannot interview the mental health staff because a private company that has been contracted says no. And something’s really wrong with that. It shows you just how these things, these arrangements create the injustice, right? They make it impossible to hold anyone accountable.
Linda Franks:
I know when I went through with what happened to Lamar in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, I had this moment where, and I’ll never forget it. I was in the shower and I was just really upset. And I was praying. And I was praying vengeance. I was really praying vengeance on the people that had harmed Lamar. And in that instant, I say the Holy Spirit, some people say conscience or whatever. But I had this overwhelming awareness that the people who were exacting or doing the dirty work, that they were themselves victims as well. So when you speak about the trauma that actually came after for Harriet and how she has dealt with the fact that she knew this information and withheld, it really brought that home to me and why.
Linda Franks:
Because sometimes when we’re doing this work and I know I’ve been guilty of it, we want to draw lines in the sand. So we can’t interact with the others because they are the enemy and da, da, da, da, and not really realizing that there’s an overarching apparatus in place that’s putting all of us in certain positions. The duality of being the prison guard that has scalded this man to death, but then also being the breadwinner in the family that lovingly takes care of your children and a leader in your community, the deacon at the church, you know?
Linda Franks:
So what your book did, what it did was really kind of get into the nuance of that for me. I think it was put in the context of the steak. We want the steak already ready on the table. We don’t want you carving the animal at the table with us. That’s barbaric. So I think that when we’re putting these positions and these guards are put in these positions, we’re ignoring where the highlight, where the light needs to be. Right?
Eyal Press:
I think it requires almost, it’s almost a superhuman ask to tell you or to tell someone else who has lost a loved one in a jail or prison, I would not expect you to feel any empathy for the people who are running that institution or working in that institution. I think it’s only human for you to think and to feel just this rage, right? In the same way that I think for my grandparents, it would be impossible to say to them the low ranking soldier who ordered you to get on those trains and maybe didn’t have much power, but was part of the system. You can’t expect them to feel any sense, anything but anger.
Eyal Press:
On the other hand, I think what you just articulated is there’s a larger system here. And the real problem lies above and lies within the structures. And I think that it’s hard to see that. It was hard for Harriet because as I said of her position, she had every reason to hate the guards because they retaliated against her and they made her life miserable. And she also, she said, “Look, some of those guys were awful. They were brutal. Some of them had no remorse.” But she was talking when she said more generally, as she thought about it. She said, “There were also a lot of guys there who were just trying to do their best, just like I was trying to do my best. And it was really hard to do anything other than go along with this inhumane system.”
Eyal Press:
So it’s really I think up to, I think I wouldn’t want or expect anyone who listens to our conversation to have empathy for the people in authority in these institutions. But I would want them to think of those guards as agents of society. It is society that put them in those places. And at the Dade Correctional Institution, a lot of the guards come from the community. And the ones I met and the ones I walked past were often women in their twenties and thirties from in the community. Many Black, some Hispanic coming from some of the same communities that are targeted by mass incarceration. And they’re working in the system. And it really does throw you to see that. Because you see how this is a system that is as I say, creating both these primary and secondary victims in some ways.
Eyal Press:
In terms of what you said about civilizing, I mean, I think about that all the time. Because in this country, we would see it as barbaric to flog someone, to hold a public square where someone is punished and people are watching it as they did in the Middle Ages, you know?
Linda Franks:
And they did with lynchings here in America, in the 19-
Eyal Press:
And they did with lynchings here in America not long ago at all. And arguably some of that same collective hatred, we’ve seen it in recent times expressed in different ways. But what I would say is the civilizing thing is almost like in quotes. Because what I mean by that is we have taken this violence and this cruelty and put it behind walls, made it invisible so that people don’t have to see it. Nobody sees those solitary cells in the transitional care unit of the Dade Correctional Institution. I happened to see them because I went to the prison. They are sitting there today. People are driving by to go to alligator rides, to get their smoothies and whatever else they’re doing. And they drive right past this institution, and it’s fenced off. Nobody stops. You can’t go in, you can’t see it.
Eyal Press:
But that is a form of what I would call civilized punishment that is actually every bit as cruel as flogging someone in public. Because you are leaving people alone in closet-sized spaces. No air, no fresh air, no sunlight. How can we even begin to claim that that is somehow going to rehabilitate someone? What are we teaching, and what are we actually expecting as a society will happen to the folks who come out after undergoing that?
Eyal Press:
So when I use that phrase civilized, I mean it in a kind of ironic way, that it really isn’t civilized. It’s just what is, it’s hidden. It’s privatized. It’s put behind all kinds of screens so that we, when I say we, I mean the privileged and the more powerful members of society never have to see it. But it is going on, and it is part of the problem here.
Linda Franks:
And I think that’s what makes the work that you did in Dirty Work so important. And I say that not because it further allows me to give an empathetic ear to the so-called guard. But what it does is that it exposes, right? It exposes that dynamic so that the more we expose it, then the individual has to ask themselves how much are they feeding into it. It’s one of the ways that I think that we move forward, right? In changing how like you said, the one that’s going to the alligator ride, the one that’s going to get their smoothie, that they actually are aware that you’re passing by a torture chamber, right? You’re living here and you’re allowing this to happen. So either you’re going to be complicit right about it, or you’ve got to make a stand on what you’re going to do.
Linda Franks:
As well as someone who’s working in the trenches trying to change this system has an opportunity to now reach out to the people on the inside and say, “Look, we are not enemies You want to work in a place that you can be proud, you can morally be proud of.” So how can we work together to do that? I understand where you’re coming from brother, you know? And that dichotomy of having the Black and brown people working in these facilities, essentially brutalizing their own people. I mean that right there is just absolutely mind blowing when I deal with it, you know?
Linda Franks:
And so your work really just kind of, if we understand, and I think I mentioned this to you when you interviewed me that we know that the prisons are the coal mines of Louisiana, right? So you go in and you want to shut down the coal mines because it’s killing, giving people black lung disease, but you’re not replacing it with anything else. Right? And so that’s where you get the backlash. So understanding that these people are work because they need benefits, working because they … and unfortunately in our society, there has to be this entity right now, this prison system. Then that gives a bridge to say, “Okay, this is how we can kind of intersect and work together to change it to make it better for everyone involved.”
Eyal Press:
That’s so meaningful to me to hear. And I just want to say one other thing about those folks who work in the system. If those folks who worked at places like Dade or at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison were the elite psychiatrists coming from Yale, and Harvard, and you name it university with their fancy degrees and, “I’m a mental health professional. I’m going to work in an institution that is the largest mental health institution in this state, but it happens to be a prison or jail.”
Eyal Press:
If those elites saw and were put in the positions of people like Harriet and Lavita, you would be hearing about it. We would all be reading about it in the paper, seeing it on the nightly news, listening as the American Psychiatric Association issued statements saying, “This is an intolerable situation. As a society, we have failed the mentally ill. We are putting professionals in unconscionable situations, and we cannot continue to do this.”
Eyal Press:
But this is the key. The elites don’t get put in those positions. And as a result, it’s just people like Harriet, people like Lavita. And they cycle through, and then they go do something else. And it doesn’t hit popular consciousness, because it has been farmed out to the least advantaged just as the guards at Dade are among the less advantaged members of society.
Eyal Press:
And to bring it back to the slaughter houses that I wrote about, the poultry plants, you have an 80% people of color working in the phrase that was used that I use in my book. One anthropologist called it plantation capitalism. The company’s owned. Its ownership is entirely white. They never go to the front lines. They hire women and people of color to do this physically and really morally degrading work under conditions that are … in this plant that I look at, the women are not allowed bathroom breaks. So they have to go to work with an extra pair of pants. And they go to the bathroom on the lines because they’re not allowed to take breaks, because the lines are moving so fast.
Eyal Press:
And again, there’s no way that would be tolerated if native born Americans who were honored members of their community were being exposed to those conditions. It’s that we’ve delegated it. We’ve taken this dirty work, and put the least powerful people in charge. So lo and behold, they end up dirtying their hands. And the situation doesn’t come to public popular consciousness. So that’s a really important part of this story too.
Dave Kartunen:
I wanted to ask you to speak to those passive Democrats. Democrats small D of court, people who believe in civil society and believe that their vote and their voice still matters. Because we don’t want to know where our food comes from. And we would never go work on a poultry line because we would never take a job working in a jail or pushing the button at the end of a drone operator’s position. This is such a heavy topic. And we want to offer listeners hope in every episode, or action, or advocacy.
Dave Kartunen:
For the people who at least believe they are not passive Democrats, who have at least taken the step to listen to this conversation, who maybe are still uncomfortable thinking about what happens behind the walls of their jails and their prisons that’s being outsourced to private companies, but done in their name constitutionally. What small steps can passive Democrats take?
Eyal Press:
I’ve seen the videos as I said of Linda your group protesting, talking, showing up after a death occurs. And people come forward. And that’s the opposite of being a passive Democrat. That’s raising your voice. That is the work, the hard work that has to be done to change things.
Eyal Press:
And I guess in terms of hope, I began writing as a journalist 20, 25 years ago. I couldn’t get a magazine interested in a story about mass incarceration. Mass incarceration was not on the map. People weren’t talking about it. Before Michelle Alexander’s book, before people like Linda and others started to get out there and talk, and organize, and protest, it was like the air we breathe. Like oh yeah, we’ve just built the world’s largest prison system, but the media wasn’t talking about it.
Eyal Press:
And in the course of 10, 15 years, it has become a national disgrace. But I was struck by one of the debates between Trump and Biden. Because in that debate, mass incarceration came up. And what did Trump say? He attacked Biden for supporting the 1994 Crime Bill. Think about that. That bill was passed by Democrats. Bill Clinton, Biden, you name it. All the big Democrats got behind this bill to show how tough they were on crime. And here you had Donald Trump who an unabashedly racist president, a man whose crudeness on issues of social justice, from immigration to police shootings. You can’t capture it. You can’t say enough about how crude and insensitive this guy is. And yet here he is on national television attacking Joe Biden for supporting a bill that put more people behind bars.
Dave Kartunen:
Seen political opportunity.
Eyal Press:
Yes, yes. And that only happened, and that can only be the case because of a shift in popular consciousness. Because enough people have made their voices heard to say, “This is unconscionable. We can not have so many lives wasted in this system that has effectively become the new Jim Crow, that has effectively taken an incredible toll on the Black community and on the entire country.” That’s pretty amazing that in 10, 15 years. Again, I’m not crediting the politicians. I’m crediting all the people who stood up, and said something, and sought to change this.
Eyal Press:
So I do think that the hope comes from those small acts that cumulatively have a huge impact. We don’t see it in the moment, but it’s apparent to me that now, I was able to do this story about Andrea Armstrong’s work because the climate has shifted. And now it’s an issue that the media sees. We blew it. We let this happen for years. We didn’t question it, and we have a responsibility to cover it. And I think it’s similar with the industrial food system, that consciousness is changing. People are starting to realize, “Wow, my food comes from places I would never want to see.” It’s not even about do you eat meat? Do you not eat meat? To me, it’s about even the carnivores would not want to go to these chicken plants and see how people are treated, let alone the animals.
Eyal Press:
So if it’s a runoff to the communities, which are also poor, the environmental impact. All of that is changing too. And it’s not changing because politicians decided it’s bad. It’s changing because collectively, people are coming to realize is not sustainable. So that to me is the hope. That through these small acts, there’s a cumulative impact that you can’t see in the moment, but that over time is dramatic.
Linda Franks:
Well, what can I say? Thank you. Thank you again so much for your thoughtfulness, your insight, for sharing your brilliance. I can’t tell you again how much the work that you do and that you have done has so impacted my life and the work that has been put forth for me to do in this world. So I thank you so much for your time, for your graciousness. And I do look forward to seeing and speaking with you again in the future.
Eyal Press:
Thank you, Linda. And I hope next time it’s in person. But I will say that as someone who does this work, there’s no greater reward than to hear from you, to hear from people who are fighting the fight day in, day out, and have lived the experiences I’m writing about. That means more to me than anything. So thank you for having me on this program, and I look forward to spreading the word when the podcast comes out.
Dave Kartunen:
Eyal Press is an author and a journalist. He contributes to the New Yorker Magazine and has written Dirty Work, which we’ve just spent this time talking about. It is an essential read. This interview should not replace your picking up that book and reading it cover to cover. To learn more about Eyal Press’ work, about Dirty Work, Eyal Press’ website is eyalpress.com.
Linda Franks:
And now, It Happened To Me. Where we actively listen to the testimony of one person’s first hand encounter with our broken system of mass incarceration and the impact on their life, their family, and their community. In this episode, my amazing co-host Dave Kartunen in Boston will tell us the circumstances behind what has prompted him to be actually sitting here with me today, and why he continues to be such a staunch and amazing advocate for ending mass incarceration, and for highlighting the stories of those who have no voice.
Dave Kartunen:
So I want to make sure that I tell this story with a lot of self-awareness. While this story happened to me, I am not a victim of our system of mass incarceration like Linda is. But I am most certainly a victim of the institutions of power that benefit from that system. Those people that are in those same roles that Eyal Press talked about in our conversation with him who stay above all that so-called dirty work. And even in one case, one of the same companies who he talks about in the book who that dirty work had been outsourced to. This story came to me in the work that I was doing as a journalist in 2014 in Savannah, Georgia. It was at that time in my life that I started pulling on a string that had always sort of been there through my news career in Boston and in Miami, even in a lot of the same places that Eyal did his groundbreaking work.
Dave Kartunen:
It always came at that time in the form of a voiceless news release, and by places and agencies like local Sheriff’s departments that said an inmate in the jail had died. If this were Darren Rainey, who Eyal talks about in his book at the Dade Correctional Institute for example, that news release might have read something like, “Rainey collapsed in the shower and was pronounced dead,” right?
Dave Kartunen:
Well in late 2014, those news releases started coming at Savannah at some frequency that people that I had respected and trusted there told me that maybe I should start looking into them. One of those deaths was a young man named Matthew [Laughlin 01:04:40], whose death is actually profiled in Eyal’s book. And on the evening of new year’s day in 2015, another young man named Matthew, Matthew Ajibade died in the Chatham County Detention Center.
Dave Kartunen:
But since I had already begun pulling on the string of the deaths in the jail, I could start to feel some tension growing on that string. And for the months that followed, I battled with the local district attorney there, who theoretically should have been investigating the violent nature of Ajibade’s death. And the sheriff whose department ran that jail and was responsible for his detention. The two of them even filed a motion as joint plaintiffs for a declaratory judgment against my station, effectively suing my work to ask a judge to bar me from certain public records in that case that I believe could not be withheld from the public.
Dave Kartunen:
So I watched that same dynamic that Eyal talks about in Dirty Work, where the low level jail guards were held up as those responsible for an entirely rotten institution that had a mortality rate that was three times the national average for jails at the time. And then I got to watch a judge and the Georgia Court of Appeals uphold a decision that effectively said, “This jail shouldn’t have to bear public scrutiny for what some low level people working for them did in that jail.”
Dave Kartunen:
It’s probably another good place to stop at this point, for some context of why I was even Savannah in the first place and not still in those big TV markets like Miami and Boston, where I had spent most of my newscasting career.
Dave Kartunen:
10 years prior to this while I was working as a reporter for a TV station in Miami, I spent probably the worst 72 hours of my life in Louisiana and Mississippi cut off from the world for whom I had been sent there to tell stories of the storm of the century, Hurricane Katrina. Well, not only did I never make it on the news, but that ordeal led to me being diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. And over the next six years after the storm, sort of slowly self-destructed my career from within.
Dave Kartunen:
So in 2015, I was only back in Savannah where I had met my wife as a young reporter many years before, so that we could be closer to her family and so that I could work for an incredible person who had given me the license to do the type of journalism that the news business as I like to say, the difference is clear. The news business had never had time to do in Miami and Boston.
Dave Kartunen:
But I was really still suffering. Here’s another good place to be self-aware. I’m white, and I’m male. And I had the trappings of incredible psychological care after Katrina that helped me function after the trauma of that event that so many thousands of people didn’t have.
Dave Kartunen:
But what I hadn’t recovered from were all those job related functions of the trauma. Those deadlines, and getting the story, and going out there on my own. All those tasks that had made me a good journalist, but also had sort of been hardwired, had trauma hardwired into them because I was doing that job while experiencing the horrors of Katrina.
Dave Kartunen:
So when people associated with the sheriff’s office started knocking on the door to my home in Savannah unannounced, or when jail guards wouldn’t identify themselves who I didn’t know that I could trust wanted to meet with me in secret about conditions in the facility. Or when I uncovered that the county, and the district attorney, and the Sheriff’s office had lied in their depositions and hidden evidence in our court case over those records. Well, that’s when the news business caught up with me again.
Dave Kartunen:
It was at that point when I uncovered the evidence in our own case of a coverup of the coverup that I found out my station no longer really had the appetite to pay for or pursue legally the misconduct in our own case over jail records, that caused me to slip into a state of nervous exhaustion that finally made me had to confront the job related trauma of my career that was still destroying me. And that was the weekend in 2016 that I quit the news business and went back into trauma therapy.
Dave Kartunen:
So in the couple of years after that I spent putting my life back together, I contributed to a humble effort by some of the attorneys in Savannah that I had grown close to through my coverage of the jail. And in 2017, they asked me to accompany them to Baton Rouge to produce a video about a courageous mother who was leading an advocacy effort there over the death of her son in a jail there. And that’s how I met Linda.
Dave Kartunen:
On that trip, we discussed all the power inequality in the system of mass incarceration, even down to really elite attorneys who would really want to try to bring the cruelty out into the open and talked about crowdsourcing could maybe eliminate some of that power inequality for plaintiff’s attorneys to take those cases that may be impactful on the system, but not necessarily lucrative. And that’s how the Fair Fight Initiative was born. And it happened to me.
Linda Franks:
Thank you for your honesty, but moreso for your courage. I personally know what it’s like to go up against conglomerate for lack of a better analogy, and then really be so disillusioned to realize that they’re not what you had expected that they were. And the honesty, the integrity, the loyalty that you were garnering, that you were doing when you were coming from a place of integrity was not respected, in fact was attacked.
Linda Franks:
And I just want to tell you that although I lament what happened to you. But if it has brought you here to me, then thank you for weathering that storm and being the whole person that I see before me, that I love so much and I respect so much. And I know all that you went through has aided in that. So for me, I’m always going to find something good, a silver lining. You are the silver lining for me in that story. And I thank you again my friend so much for honoring us with your experience.
Linda Franks:
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Dr. Martin Luther King said that. And despite the finite disappointment of the stories we share on the Fair Fight Initiative podcast, we maintain infinite hope that we can end it.
Linda Franks:
And right now, I’d like to highlight something going on in actually right in my neighborhood Baton Rouge, which is a vigil being held at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in honor of International Human Rights Day. International Human Rights Day is December the 10th of each year. And we will be commemorating and working with the Louisiana Stop Solitary Confinement Coalition of which the coalition that I’m a part of is a member. And actually, I’m going to be a featured speaker there. And we are going to be giving some uplifting words of hope, giving our community information on how this fight for human rights is so important that we all take up the banner in any way that we can in our individual lives. And we will be lighting candles and commemorating those who have lost their lives in that facility as a way of codifying and bringing a cohesive group of people together that are dedicated in their community to advocate for those whose voice has been stopped. Those people who have been quieted, who are in the margins and feel as though they don’t have anyone to speak for them.
Linda Franks:
Well my friend, thank you so much for just assisting me, being my co-host here on another I think amazing episode. The talk with Eyal and the information provided. I think it just blew me away. I mean, it’s just another layer of the conversation, of being added to this conversation when we talk about criminal justice reform, when we talk about highlighting the stories of people who have been rendered voiceless. And that’s what really want to do here. I think it was a wonderful podcast, and I am looking forward to our next podcast. This adventure continues.
Dave Kartunen:
And it was another full plate, right? You said it. I’m stealing this phrase, because every episode needs to be a full plate. And we had a full plate here of education, and testimony, and advocacy, and I hope some hope.
Linda Franks:
The Fair Fight Initiative podcast is a production of the Fair Fight Initiative.
Dave Kartunen:
Founded in 2017, the Fair Fight Initiative is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to crowdsourcing litigation, which advocates for equal treatment under the law, confronts systemic injustice, and helps victims challenge abusers of power in court.
Linda Franks:
We believe justice crowdsourced is justice delivered.
Dave Kartunen:
By crowdsourcing resources from our contributors, we’re able to finance the litigation that no attorneys will take because of the overwhelming upfront costs to seek justice in our legal system.
Linda Franks:
You can learn more about our mission and how to contribute at fairfightinitiative.org.
Featured in The Media
