Keith Reeves:	Why don't you come down to the prison for a VIP tour, and so that's how I found myself in this space. What I want to share with you is a bit of what my initial reaction was, and how it is that there is this linkage between so many of the guys that I work with inside of this facility, and what I'm calling and arguing is Martin Luther King Jr's last wish. In truth I had an abject ambivalence at the idea of going to prison, but there I was on a bitterly cold bright, blue morning of February 3rd, 2003 taking a nearly three hour tour of the state correctional facility in Chester. As some of you will know, Chester's just a three mile trek from the college. The facility very neat and unpretentious, and there's a picture of it on the slide. Interestingly, which was for me quite a shock, stands just a few walking blocks from my childhood neighborhood. Since its opening in April 1998, family and friends and former neighbors were never reticent in sharing their hairy stream of opinions in SEI Chester, the acronym by which the prison is known. 
	Years after its construction, they oscillate between feelings of resignation, and a quite indignation that a prison, a prison is now present in their backyard. In all candor, curiosity calls me to make the trip to SEI Chester that particular day. Its modest exterior on a major [inaudible 00:01:53] the scope, and the ambition of the work that is done there. It is quite remarkably Pennsylvania's fist facility to treat upwards of 1,200 male inmates with drug and alcohol and substance abuse addictions, and it proudly boasts somewhere up on the order of about 50 or so self help programs that prepare roughly 97% of these men for the eventual return home. 97% of these individuals who are incarcerated in this facility, but also across the state eventually will make their way back home. Over the years I have struggled pretty mightily with the right language to capture adequately capture how society should think of these men and women who are incarcerated at SEI Chester, and in jails and prisons all across the country. 
	What now captures that they have done their time, and paid their debt to society. Is it ex-felons, what about ex-offenders, ex-convicts, what about former inmates, and how do our labels help us in actualizing what Martin Luther King's concern about and for our neighbor. Nothing could have prepared me for the gut punch of what happened next. A sheer coincidence of timing brought about an improbable encounter with one of SEI Chester's inmates. Up until then the tour was rolling along rather smoothly. "Don't I know you, aren't you from Chester?" Came two questions in rapid succession. Frantically searching my memory to make out the older gentleman's face, I reflectively answered, "Yeah, I grew up in Chester on 2nd and Parker streets." "I'm Jesse Fosse." The gentleman's real name. "Do you remember me? You have a twin brother, don't you?" As he warmly spoke, came only a faint recognition that's standing in front of me near the prison library was in fact a former neighbor. 
	Jesse had grown up on the neighborhood of 2nd and Edwards streets on Chester's west end. My twin brother and I would venture through his neighborhood as we left our Friday evening scout meetings. The shock on my face I'm certain was evident. "What are you doing here?" I asked more curious than judgemental. "I'm a lifer." He said, matter of factly. What's interesting is Jesse has four children, two daughters, two sons. One daughter is a nurse who is doing quite well, he has a second daughter who is in and out of jail because of a serious drug addiction, and he has two sons who are also in prison. Not in the same facility, but they are in prison as well. Part of what is stunning, and of great concern to those of us who work in this space, is we're starting to see multiple generations of individuals who are ending up in prison. 
	Suffice it to say that at this jolted news provided a blunt quota to an already emotionally fraught encounter. I resolved to Jesse that I would in face return to see him. He nodded approvingly and for nearly seven years, usually once a week, I have. Try if you can to picture the scene of weekly visits at SEI Chester. Between the hours of 2:30 pm and 8:30 pm five days a week, visitors are genuinely welcome. One must arrive by seven pm, and no one is allowed in after 7:30. These very generous hours draw a steady stream of visitors, mostly young and middle aged African American women, some with teenage sons and daughters, other with very small children. The state visit ritual over nearly probably 200 times now over the years, feels fairly mundane. I take a number ticket and provide the correctional officer manning the entrance desk with Jesse's inmate number, my driver's license is inspected to ensure that the identification matches the name on his approved visiting list. 
	The desk officer hits a few keystrokes on the computer, and then calls to her counterpart who in turn tracks down Jesse to inform him that he has a visitor. I then choose a locker to store my personal belongings and greet the familiar assemblage of weekly regulars. In addition, I make certain to use the money changer to get tokens for drinks and food purchases once inside the waiting area. When Jesse's inmate number is called, I dutifully sign the visitor's log, record my arrival time, my name, address, usually 500 college avenue, purpose of visit, or inmate number, make of car, and driver's license. After which I wait for the desk officer to call Fosse, which is Jesse's last name. The melancholy in the waiting area is always palpable. Over the years one is privy to hundreds, hundreds of conversations. Some fairly common placed, other's emotionally gut wrenching. For instance, the following exchange could be overheard between two African American women, seemingly in their mid 20's. 
	Woman one, "This your first time here?" Woman two, "Yeah. I'm into the prison thing." Woman one, "If you're here today." Woman two, "Yeah, I'm not into the prison thing." Woman one, "If you're here today then you're doing it." Woman two, "I guess, I guess." The brief upfront conversation offered an interesting window into the prison thing and how the prison thing is responsible for an ever widening gulf between hundreds of thousands of imprisoned black men and their families, friends, and neighbors, who are forced to do time outside. Riveted by such exchanges and over an increasingly noisy waiting room, most times I do not hear the CO bellow very familiar names by now. Gonzalez, visitor Gonzalez. Taylor, Thompson, visitor Green, Wallace, Fosse, visitor Fosse. With my personal belongings that have not been placed in the numbered locker which usually include my watch, a locker key, and a glad plastic sandwich bag full of tokens I step up to clear the metal detector. 
	After collecting these items along with my shoes, I'm searched with an ion scanner, my right hand stamped with either an abbreviated Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday in yellow ink. Only then am I handed a white visitor's pass by the issuing correctional officer, and you see a copy of it to my left. Nearly three quarters down the page, the following tourist advisory never fails to command my attention. Notice to non-employee visitors to the department of corrections. Please be advised that as part of its continuing effort to prevent the introduction of drugs into its prisons, the PA DOC is utilizing electronic controlled substance sensing devices at our agencies facilities. These devices detect the presence of drug traces on persons, property, and clothing. I've learned over the years not to handle paper money anytime before I go down to visit Jesse in part because there's typically a false reading. Reasonable, so far I think. The notice continues. All visitors on institution property are subject to random screening. If you are scanned and receive a positive reading at a predetermined level, you will be given the opportunity to remove outer garments believed to be contaminated, and a second scan will be performed. 
	If after removing your outer garments you still test positive, entrance to the facility will be denied. I trust that you will support the agency's commitment to making all departments and facilities drug free. This will ensure a safe environment for all inmates and the common wealth of Pennsylvania, signed secretary PA department of corrections. A possible drug search is a necessary prelude before one can gain access to the visiting area. When I am randomly pulled aside, which happens occasionally, my body involuntary stiffens, my stomach tightens, palpable signs that no matter how long, how often I've been doing this, the random screening is always, always an exercise in high anxiety. Yet the department of corrections zero tolerance policy against controlled substances in its facilities is perhaps the primary reason that contraband, weapons, and drugs of any sort rarely get into SEI Chester, rarely. I have something to say about private facilities, but at this particular facility very rarely does contraband get in. 
	Despite thousands of inmates and visitors, and hundreds of employees coming in and out of its doors each year, and these employees include guards, they include supervisors, counselors and contractors, to medical and mental health personnel, remarkably just two instances of contraband in nearly 13 years of operation. They're doing something right. I stand behind a bright yellow line, patiently waiting for two sets of heavy green metal doors to slide open, and with a distinct and seemingly on cue clang, they do. I walk into a 35 by 35 feet cinderblcok room and sitting approximately 10 feet from the entrance is the visiting room correctional officer. In approaching the CO's desk with my white visitor's pass in tow, just off the restrooms to my left I pass a brightly colored space of cartoon characters instantly familiar to any parent with young children. Finding Nemo, SpongeBob, Tweety Bird, Tommy of Rugrats, Spider man, Shrek, and as my daughter used to love, Dora the Explorer, all meticulously painted by an inmate with undeniable artistic talent. As terrific and welcoming as this play area is, the hard truth is that the small children who laugh and cry and spend time here with their fathers are the most innocent collateral consequences of their fathers incarceration. 
	A 2000 study by the US department of justice, for example, documented that half of the nation's inmates are parents of children under 18. On any given day, more than 1.5 million minor children had a parent in prison, 1.5 million minor children had a parent in prison on any given day. To be sure the problem is [inaudible 00:14:41] acute for African American children, where the family experience of imprisonment is now almost common place with one in every 14 kids growing up with a parent in prison. I spent a lot of time in schools in Chester, and Philadelphia, and occasionally in Memphis and in Daytona Beach Florida, and I've had the habit over the last several years of asking kids, "Do you have a parent, a loved one, a neighbor, you know someone in prison?" Typically in a classroom of 32 kids you could easily find 28 to 29 kids who will raise their hand when I ask that question. 80% of males, and 86% of females in the Philadelphia prison system, which is very separate than the Pennsylvania department of corrections system for instance are parents. 
	Some 50% report that one or more children were living with them at the time of their arrest, and worse yet, approximately 14% of these inmates had children who are in protective services. When Jesse enters the visiting area each week he never fails to greet me with calm brown eyes, a broad smile, and a great bear hug. "Hey professor, how are you?" I notice that his hair and slightly grizzled beard are graying, his walk a tad bit slow, all tangible and sober reminders that he is part of the commonwealth's fast growing population of aging inmates who are very expensive to take care of. Some 2,520 at last count, and this is up from about 1,892 in 2001. As Jesse puts it, tells me all the time, "When I first came to the Penn they called by young buck, now they call me old head." We canvas the rather large visiting area for seats, but ones that face windows looking outside. At one point during our initial visit I politely inquired about his insistence on such a seating arrangement "I like looking out the windows Doc." He amused.
	"When I was up at Dallas, which is a state correctional facility about four or five hours from this area, I like the spring, but love the winter more." He would say. While staring wishfully outside, Jesse elaborated, "With the leaves off the trees, you can see more." End quote. We take our seats, and eventually the thick air of microwave pizza, buffalo wings, popcorn, hot dogs, and fish sandwiches stirs us to make our way over to the vending machines. As we eat and sip at bottles of fruit juice, Jesse and I talk brotherly and frankly, and I ask, "How are you feeling?" Above the clamor of the waiting room, his response is always the same, always positive, "I feel good Doc, I pray five times a day, fast, work out, I play ball with the guys in here." For me it's always remarkable, because when I first met Jesse in  2003 he had already done 27 years when I first met him. His mood more often than not then takes a turn inward. Jesse is particularly circumspect at times, taking inventory as it were. "I don't want to die in the pen, I'm getting old." And you realize your mortality. 
	More than 40 years ago the late Michael Harrington, the socialist intellectual often credited with helping spark President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty made a discerning comment about the entanglement of incarceration and poverty. In the other America, a book that a great number of you I'm sure remember, published in 1962, Harrington wrote this, "The city jail is one of the basic institutions of the other America. Almost everyone whom I encountered in the tank was poor. Skid row whites, Negros, puerto Ricans, their poverty Harrington went on to argue was an insightment to arrest in the first place." Certainly Harrington's breathtaking observation proved to be precipitant. There is indeed a guardian knot tying race and class prison and the spiriting poverty. Poor people in particularly are constantly caught in the tentacles of the criminal justice system. Due not to simply impoverished neighborhoods and circumstances, but also often times as I've learned over the eight years of doing this work, careless self inflicted wounds. 
	Poor inner city communities with high concentrations of black men who are incarcerated, and then eventually return home, arguably make up the other America. To borrow Harrington's famous invaluable phrase a few decades ago. No doubt the US incarceration rate has grown to orders of magnitude unimaginable at the time that Harrington pinned his persuasive study. At the moment, 2.1 million and counting individuals who are in prison. Those of you who know Chester very well will know that it is a community that has about 36,854 residents and we estimate that there are about 1,200 men from Chester who are presently serving time in the sate correctional facility. Pennsylvania has about 26 correctional facilities across the state, this does not include the juvenile facility, this also does not include the county prison which is along route one. My policy friends say to me, "Reeves this is terrific. You have estimated the number of men who have gave a Chester address who are in prison, but you're not finished yet." That's an estimate, because the city won't give us real figures. It's an estimate. "You're not finished, because you've not accounted for the folks who are on parole and probation, so take you 1,200 people and multiply that by a factor of seven, and that will give you the total population who is under the criminal supervision of the criminal justice system."
	This also does not include juveniles, and I'm accounting just for the males, this does not also include the females. 2.1 million across the country who are presently in prison. "We have embarked on a great social experiment," says Mark Mauer the director of the Sentencing Project and the author of a terrific book called The Race To Incarcerate. No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of climate control, he argues. While Harrington understood that an African American poverty grew out of a long and painful chapter in American history that was built on the interlocking base of economic and racial injustice. He certainly could not have projected that black men would account for nearly half of the staggering sum despite constituting only six percent of the nation's population. If his blunt assessment about the cause and affect of persistent poverty was not convincing in 1962, it certainly is today. Point of fact, experts say that being poor or black is more strongly predictive of having a criminal record than in the past. On top of this, at the time that Harrington was writing, no one could have considered the enormous cost of imprisoning so many. 
	31 billion dollars a year, and this is up from five billion that the country was spending in 1978. This is money that could be going to elderly, services, social security, fixing roads and bridges, education. 31 billion dollars a year we spend, and if you add the cost of jail, and probation, and parole expenditures, the nation spends a staggering 50 billion, with a B, 50 billion dollars annually on corrections. The cost which has been attributed to black males is a reported price tag of 2.5 billion dollars, and these are fundamental disturbing facts. Equally troubling though, black males numbered 18 million and the general population, some 840,000 of them are incarcerated and the justice department predicts and the projections show that the chances of a black boy serving time has nearly tripled in three decades. Black males compromised approximately 50% of the adult male prison population and are ten times more likely to be incarcerated than any other group in the population. It seems increasingly unlikely that black America and indeed the nation can stir some previously inconceivable questions a generation or two ago. 
	What happens when imprisonment makes untold members of black men uninterested, unattractive, or unavailable for viable marriages and family life? As Bill Cosby and Harvard psychologist Alvin [Pussant 00:24:19] underscore, a household without a father is a challenge. A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe, and that's just about what we have today. If you walk into most urban communities, Chester, Philly, Detroit, Oakland, Daytona Beach, Memphis, you will see scores of neighborhoods in which there is a male figure, a father, and uncle, a son, who is not in the household in part because that individual is doing some time in a local jail or prison. What then also are the consequences for patterns of black family formation and interaction? What about the academic, emotional, social, and material well being of black children growing up in a neighborhood context where long stretches in prison is the norm. How high a toll does residing in such a environment exact on young children and adolescents in particular? 
	More over, can the occupational gap with white Americans be closed if a prison sentence, a parole appointment, or the failure of a urine test interrupts both the employment and earnings history of black men, and what does one make of the often irreparable chaos that incarceration and the eventual return home inflicts on the civic and social fabric of a neighborhood, say on volunteering, or mentoring, voting, church going, and or jury duty. One of the things that is most disturbing to me, those of you who know Chester very well or who have come down to 91 know that [Harrot's 00:25:58] Casino and racetrack is directly in front of, next to the prison in Chester, and those of you who know this area very well know that site where Harrot's sits used to be the site of Sun Ship, 64 acres of sprawling complex. The individuals who I've worked with over the years believe that they might be able to get a job at Harrot's. The reality is that they can't, and even if you have a felony conviction, you now are typically are unable to work in and around children so you've got lots of kids in the neighborhood in Chester, Philly, neighborhoods all across the country in which there is space for men to volunteer, to coach little league, to serve as scout leaders, and they are barred in part because of that felony conviction. 
	Also we know, and this is also equally disturbing, is where do we get our lists of folks to serve on jury's? They come from eligible list of voters, and if you are convicted of a felony, having done time in prison, there are tons of states and tons of communities in which you are not eligible to vote for some period of time, and in some southern states in particular, you lose your voting privileges for the rest of your life. Imagine a young kid who's 20, 21, is in prison for seven years of so because of some drug possession, drug conviction and if he lives in the wrong state if it were, he loses his voting privileges for the rest of his life, assuming a life expectancy of 56, 58 years old or 70. Enormously tragic for communities across the country. How does the whole subculture of going to prison affect individual and collective norms in a neighborhood, it's prevailing values, and aspirations and importantly, the decision making and choices on the part of black men and other residents who are living there. 
	These questions raise an even larger, once unthinkable set of questions, and they include how have we come to such a place? "Are we not the same citizens that struggled, and marched, and went to jail to rid the country of legalized racism?" This is a question that the poet Mya Angelou has asked recently. Then I think of the recent passing of the reverend Fred [Schuttlesworth 00:28:38] who exhibited such courage and conviction in facing down Bill Connor's dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham Alabama. Martin Luther King called Shuttlesworth, "The most courageous civil rights fighter in the south." Shuttlesworth guesstimates that he was arrested more than 30 times, and he said, he told a group of school children a few years ago, "I went to jail 30 or 40 times, not for fighting, or stealing, or for drugs, I went to jail for a good thing, trying to make a difference, trying to make a difference in helping to better the country." In his jail cell, Jesse my former neighbor thinks about Fred Shuttlesworth, he thinks about Dr. King, he thinks about the thousands of volunteers who headed to Mississippi to register for voters and were promptly arrested. 
	He readily acknowledges the jagged trajectory his life has taken. [inaudible 00:29:38] and plain spoken, Jesse is the first to own up to the fact that he alone is responsible for his present plight. "Where I grew up in the inner city in Chester, you didn't plan on seeing 50, not living the lifestyle we lived did you plan on seeing 50." He says, "It was a gap in the young men's lives. Jail or the graveyard, and the only reason I'm alive is that I'm in jail. The choices we saw were you hung out, you went to jail, you sell drugs, you died." He soberingly continued, "One out of the 11 men who hung out on the corner with me, only three of us are left, and we three are in jail. The rest are dead. If I had to do my life all over again," This is Jesse talking, "I would do it differently. The choices I made brought me here." As Jesse does time inside and sets eyes on the barbed wire rings around the perimeter of the prison, he is confronted with perhaps the most terrible and the cruelest of ironies. 
	SEI Chester, which you see in this slide on my left, is in the same warden avenue neighborhood where he and his running partners claimed as their territory. In the quietest of moments too, he pines for his old tight knit neighborhood and thinks about the historic Calvary Baptist church. Just a stones throw from his childhood home. It is this historic church where a young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, who was just 19 years old, preached and taught Sunday school while he was a student at nearby [inaudible 00:31:22] theological seminary. What's fascinating and disturbing, as some of you will know, Chester is 4.8 square miles, the distance between the facility and Calvary Baptist Church is a mere 1.4 miles. You can walk it, and Jesse thinks about much of this in his quietest of moments. Talking about growing up in the backdrop of this history, Jesse marvels at the fact that Dr. King actually walked the streets of his Chester neighborhood. He is aware of, but sadly has never seen the historic marker that now embraces the front entrance of this historic church, and it reads simply, Martin Luther King Jr, 1929-1968, King lived three years in this community and ministered under the mentorship of Jay Pious Barber, who was a friend of King's father. They were Morehouse classmates, and Barber was the longtime pastor of this wonderful church. 
	He graduated from [inaudible 00:32:26] theological seminary, 1951, a leader of the 1963 march on Washington, Kind won a noble peace prize in 1964. In all this, Jesse wrestles with the dissonance that in his home town, steeped in such rich cultural and social history, a medium security correctional facility is now part of the communal landscape. As I move toward my conclusion, I want to state this, and I'm going to open it up for hopefully some robust Q&A. For three years, King lived in the Chester community, and I have little doubt that he would be deeply troubled by the fact that so many of our young black men are trapped in a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment, and premature death. Dr. King's last wish, and most profound challenge to us according to the wonderful historian Taylor Branch, was that we act toward all humanity in the spirit of equal souls and equal votes, that we find a Lazarus somewhere from our teaming prisons to the bleeding earth. In other words, create the beloved community, which as many of you know, was something that King spent an enormous amount of time, over the course of his 13 year public career, advocating for, working for creating the beloved community. 
	I argue that there are Lazarus's in the form of our young black males who are in jail or prison, and by connecting with them by getting past our sepeartedness with respect to them and their plight, only then can we begin the difficult but necessary task of helping them fashion a much brighter future for themselves, their families, and their children, and indeed the nation. As Taylor Branch reminds us and argues, that quest in common, seeing humanity in each other becomes the spark of social movements, and is therefore the engine of hope. With that, let's open it up to some very robust Q&A. Thank you. Also if you will state your name, and if you are [inaudible 00:34:46] alum, identify if you are alum or parent, friend, and then let me know where you're from please. The question is things are pretty bad, what do you do? What are the solutions, perhaps? One of the reasons why I stay at Swarthmore, is because my students and I over the years, particularly the ones in my honors seminar, I do an honors seminar on the urban underclass and public policy, and we get into Chester, we get into the prisons. I'll say something about a new course that I'm going to do in the Spring that actually will be inside the facility.
	I'll take 15 Swarthmore students who are political science majors, public policy majors, and I will choose 15 guys that I work with inside the facility, and we will do a class entitled the Politics of Punishment. Trying to get at why it is that the criminal justice system appears to be driven on politics, but also so rationalized. Part of the course will be working through group projects. There will be 30 students, so the seminar will be broken up into six groups of five or five groups of six, and the task will be to design a set of policy solutions that actually can be given to governor Corbett, the governor here in Pennsylvania, or the congressional black caucus, or stakeholders who have a great deal to say. Community folks who are advocating on behalf of the population. We are very excited about the course. I'm a little nervous, on some dimensions, but we've been working on this for about two and a half years to design it. The hope is that we will actually will come up with some solutions that can actually be implemented at the state level. 
	With that, I'm working on multiple fronts to try to create some solutions, so the inside out course is what we call it, taking Swarthmore students who are outside, inside students, guys inside the facility, and putting together a collaborative effort to learn from each other, but also to come up with some ideas and solution about what we can do. Let me just add, there a couple other things to add to the mix. You're absolutely right to say that the problem starts early, and a lot of it is in so many of the communities that I worked with of Chester, Memphis, and Daytona Beach specifically, individuals kids are born and impoverished in disputing poverty. That's a huge barrier to begin with. Add to that the over punishment inside schools. I have a student at U Penn who's dong their dissertation on the sort of severe punishment that is often times handed out to Latino and black males in particular. We know that there are high dropout rates. There's a huge correlation between high school drop out rates, and the likelihood that someone will engage in criminal activity. Add to that these guys are idle, so in the eight years that I've worked with them, they are idle. 
	They are hanging around on the corners. I have one guy who I work with incredibly bright, who happens to have a serious alcohol addiction, and he worked, unfortunately got fired. He was a mechanic. Got fired, and he's just hanging around all day so he decides to drive to meet his girlfriend and pick her up from work and he's swerving along 476, and he is pulled over by a state trooper, who of course runs the car and realizes he doesn't have a license, he's got priors, so by the time I meet him over at the county facility, he had already been in jail for about a year or so. I asked him, RT was his nickname, "What happened, how is it that you got here?" He says "Look, I'm idle, what do I do?" So many of the guys find themselves in circumstances where they are making wrong choices, hanging out with wrong friends, and then imperiously making wrong decisions that in other contacts might not jam them up but in this situation it ends up being really problematic, and in some instances, catastrophic. Add to that the other piece that his class ends up being a huge important part of the puzzle. 
	The folks that I see over at the count prison, who should not be there less than a two year sentence. It's usually supposed to be there for individuals who have a sentence of two years or less, or because they are waiting for trial. There are a lot of folks in the county prison who are there simply because they can't post ten percent of a 1,000 dollar bail, which is problematic. My students rightly remind me of that. "Reeves you're interested in the intranet connection between the incarceration poverty, don't forget class." They're really very adamant, don't forget class. Then you add to the mix, someone who does time, who comes out after two or three years or so, who will hire him or her? In Pennsylvania there are at least 50 to 60 job categories to which ex-offenders cannot be hired at all, and some of it makes sense. Bank telling and so on but other things, even some licensing, we have a friend of ours who works in Ohio. She has some reports that if you want to be a licensed barber in Ohio, you're denied your licensing papers. 
	All of those things are ways in which we create barriers that then makes it very difficult for these men to find work, and then of course they're out of work, and we know the recidivism rate is pretty high in part because within in three years, a large percentage of them will go back inside prison in part because they've either created a new crime, or they're there for technical violations, parole violations. They haven't shown up for a urine test, they haven't shown up for court appointment, they haven't been able to pay child arrears, which in some states continues to still be calculated even though these guys are inside the facility, and they're making two or three dollars a day, I'm sorry, two or three dollars an hour a day. There's all kinds of ways in which we jam them up, making it difficult such as when that they come out, they're land mines that are making it extraordinarily difficult to make them part of the community. 
	One of the things that we have done in Memphis, is we have a demonstration project that actually we hope to be a partnership with the department of parole, department of corrections, the housing authority, because these guys are often denied public housing, and connecting with a set of entrepreneurs who are willing to hire these guys, provided that we do a lot of prerelease training and so forth with them, and in exchange for these guys being hired, there's a consortium of small entrepreneurs who will provide a whole range of knowledge and services and support to the entrepreneurs so that they can at least connect these guys. The goal is to create a reliable job engine, that's the goal, that's the hope. It's an extraordinarily complex partnership with government, with all of these agencies with entrepreneurs, and we're hopeful that it will work, but for me, that's the only means that I can see, that we push some notion of entrepreneurship so that these guys can get some meaningful gainful employment that will then begin to turn things around. 
	One last thing to add on the suggestion piece is I have a chapter in a book that just came out in March or April of this past year, and it's edited by former Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Good, who has been working in this space enormously for the last several years or so, and he's created a wonderful program called the Apache Program, which is a mentoring program for the kids of folks who have parents in prison. The goal is to connect them with a meaningful mentor, connect them with someone who cares about them, two or three hours a month, and connecting them and getting out to movies and all those kinds of things. It seems to be working in terms of preventing them from taking a similar path that their parents have. There are a lot of solutions out there, and then lastly I would say we have to reduce prison admissions. A lot of these folks have been in prison far too long, and we have to reduce their stays, and we also have to make sure that we prevent the low hanging fruit if you will. 
	The war on drugs is largely responsible for a great portion of the prison increase, particularly 70% or so of the folks who are at least in state prisons are there because of some drug or substance abuse. A lot of these folks also have mental illness, so the social services piece is something we have to do as well. It's a very complicated, comprehensive package and my own view and I'll be quiet for a moment is if we don't do something about this, not simply will we see the chaos in lots of urban communities, but we also know that as long as these guys remain out of and legitimate employment, they're not contributing to social security, and we know what the ratio is of individuals who are contributing to social security, and the ratio of folks who are pulling their benefits out. This si something that the country has to take seriously in order to do something about. The country was very successful in moving women from welfare to work, and part of what some of us who are operating in this space are arguing is for a similar effort to be directed towards so many of these men who are incarcerated. 
	Understandably, they themselves will tell you they're not the easiest group to advocate for, but the country has to do something if we're going to get off of this trajectory. Question here and then we'll go here.
Speaker 2:	What percentage of the middle aged and elderly prisoners who are released end up homeless?
Professor:	I see a number of them, quite a large percentage of them here in the population that I work with, and it's a really disturbing facet of this. Those who also go off to serve the country honorably, some of them happen to come back with drug addictions, substance abuse, mental illness is a huge piece of the puzzle as well, and they find themselves homeless and or in prison. One of the things that we are looking at and some of my students are specifically taking on this work, is working at Veterans Courts. There are some great models, particularly in New York State, in which rather than send these veterans to prison, Veterans courts are being set up as an alternative means of getting them the social services, the counseling, the help, and so forth that they need so that they get diverted from having to do two, three, four, five, years in prison. That seems to be really quite successful. Those are models that can be replicated, and it turns out not simply do they work, but they also are less expensive. It costs in Pennsylvania, about 31,000 dollars a year to incarcerate an individual, and that's assuming the individual is healthy. If someone has chronic illness, lung disease, heart disease and so on, we can pay upwards of 70 to 76,000 dollars a year just for that one individual. 
	The costs are staggering, and part of what has to be done is looking at alternative means that work, but also are cost affective. In Pennsylvania, I think the department of corrections budget is something on the order of 1.7, 1.8 billion dollars is the second largest budget item in the state, and we were slighted to build four new prisons, we're building three new prisons over the next several years. At present, the state correctional population is 51,000. This does not include the county, which has about three or 4,000 individuals there. This does not include the Philadelphia prison system which is totally operating outside of the state system. Presently 51,000 folks are in prison in the state. The state is planning to build three new prisons, it's expecting a prison population of about 61,000 people. The one point to add, all of you know this, even while this prison population has been growing over the last several decades, the crime rate across the country has been falling. There is no correlation between rising crime rates and rising prison population. We have to ask the question, where is this coming from? Why is the boom? 
	The boom is coming from the war on drugs, the boom is coming from the fact that economic development for rural communities is give us a prison. That's what the research, and that's what the data indicates. Look at the prison growth in the country from the mid 1980's through 2000, the largest share of new prisons in the country were built, and have been built in rural communities. Pennsylvania has 27 correctional facilities. Chester is the only urban prison, and it was designed specifically by the secretary who wanted to make sure that he at least gave some of these individuals a closer link. We know the research is real clear, if I am able to link with my family and friends and visitors, I do better. There are less disciplinary actions and so on. People turn out to be good citizens while they're in the facility, and you can help them to reenter society when it's their time to go. We've got to do something about this problem, but the real huge concern also is for those individuals who are veterans and who get caught up in this system that ends up being a real difficult spiraling piece for them. 
	There was a question here and then I'll take here. [inaudible 00:48:56]. Yeah, and it's very tough. In Pennsylvania, three quarters of the jobs are located outside of Philadelphia county, so that means the jobs are located in the suburbs, so you have to make sure that there's training, and you're absolutely right, transportation. You have to make sure where the jobs are, that the individuals who you're trying to connect can actually be the kind of employees that those employers want. So many of the guys I work with are tattooed all over the place, and while I believe in the freedom of expression, we are now with 70% of our economy is now service oriented, and that is one thing we have to also deal with. My colleague Michelle Alexander who has a terrific book out that some of you all know, the New Jim Crow, and she was here at Temple last night, and she is sort of making the case really quite remarkably, that this is an extraordinarily difficult time that we're in, because the prison population keeps going, and how do you connect people to work if they are denied housing, they are denied employment, and Michelle argues this is the one space in which it is legally okay to discriminate against individuals who have done time. 
	A lot of employers see that. Those of you know the band in a box initiative on most state applications, employment applications. There is a question that typically is asked, have you served time, have you been convicted, or arrested. Most individuals have to check that box. There are campaigns across the country, some of them successful, that have essentially eliminated that box from the employment form, so at least if I'm applying, that's not the first thing that an employer sees, in which case the resume, the application goes in the trash. This whole notion of connecting the individuals to employment is really difficult and challenging, and the pathways that a poverty grant we applied for two of them, one in Memphis and one in California is hopefully going to help in that regard, but it's extraordinarily difficult work. [inaudible 00:51:14]. Some of these guys know that 65% of their employment earnings can be garnished, and how do you tell a guy to do legitimate work when he perceives or believes that much of his earnings are going to be garnished, and he can't quite seem to get from underneath this. 
	It's also the case in some parts of the country that the individual who's been incarcerated and now released has to pay court costs, victim restitution fees, and in some instances in some communities, you have to pay for the cost of your imprisonment as astounding and absurd as that sounds. They end up being enormously burdened, and part of the challenge is how do you get them some space, get them some hope, but at the same time connect them meaningfully to work and keep them on the straight and narrow path so that they can begin to get their lives together. Of course so many of them have children as well, which is another huge concern. We've been looking at this over the next several years, but the challenge is enormous, absolutely enormous. Although the variables are interlocked, you get someone a job, and he's terrific, he loves it, you get him the transportation, and he has one relapse or he has mental breakdown, or stressed out, or is overwhelmed, or somehow has an encounter at work that doesn't quite go as well, and all of a sudden the whole piece falls apart. That's the challenge of how do you put together a protective net around the individual, the community, the family so that he or she can begin to heal in a way that really will be good for the individual, but also for the family and the community. That's a challenge. 
	There was a question here and then we'll go here. [inaudible 00:53:01] 
Speaker 3:	I really appreciate your presentation. Some things that are very dear to me about Swarthmore, and for me is the connection that you're making between our values and beliefs, and what we hold dear. 
Professor:	I appreciate you saying that. I will need to put everything you said into my iPhone so that from time to time I can listen and pull it up when I have a particularly bad moment, and wondering if this is going to work or not. I appreciate you saying that. That's my ultimate vision and dream is to do exactly as David described. When I left the Kennedy school in '99 I came back to Swarthmore partly because I was here as an undergrad, this was an opportunity for me to connect to Swarthmore and Chester, and I've been operating in this space for 13 years now. I've enjoyed every moment of it, and the reason why I continue to say at Swarthmore is really because of the students. There have been some attempts to sort of lure me away but I love where I am in part because I get a chance to have wonderful students. My work is better as a result of being here than it ever was when I was at the Kennedy school, and I say that in all sincerity. As much as I have been operating in this space with mentoring the guys, working with them and so on, my goal was how can I connect my students and connect the institution in a meaningful way that would actually be more than just going down and spending a bit of hours in the community. 
	The first part of this is to do the course, the political punishment course, and we're very excited about that. Then to figure out how that works, and if there were other departments inside the college who might come with us and join in. I have one student I won't embarrass her, who is doing a wonderful project around financial literacy. Which is an important piece of the puzzle. So many of these guys, some of them Jesse, if he gets out, he's a life sentence and he's now in his early 60's. The hope is that he will eventually get out but if he gets out he's never seen an ATM machine. He has no clue that we are doing all kinds of things with technology, Phones and so on. This one student is going to be able to bring some financial literacy to those individuals but also to their families. We are looking and thinking how can we grow this in a way that really brings the institutional piece. I will describe why this is such an ideal envision of mine. When Governor [inaudible 00:55:40], before he left office last year, he had commuted the sentences of three males who were given life terms. 
	Two of them I had met. I did some training, even though I'd been working in the space for the last couple years or so, I knew that teaching inside a facility and bringing my students along with some of the guys I work with, I didn't have that skill set, so I went through some specialized training from the inside out program at temple, which is a wonderful program. We did our training at [inaudible 00:56:09]. I met two of the individuals who Governor Rindell, who's sentences he commuted. One of them turned out to be the president of the lifers association, and they knew me before I came into the facility because of my work in Chester in the county. He pulled me aside and he says, "Doc" he's looking at me and we're having lunch, and he says, "We need a course on politics and public policy. We need this because we need to understand how the political system is jamming us up but at the same time what we can do and we know Swarthmore students are bright." He says, "Folks are going to try to get you to come to [inaudible 00:56:46], but whatever you can do to sort of really give us a course on politics and public policy, that is what we would want." 
	I thought about it and thought this was going to be really heavy lifting, and started the process of trying to get that in place. For two years now, two and a half years we've been working on that. We finally got it approved, knock on wood, because all kinds of things can happen, but we're very excited that we're going to get a chance to bring in the space. As we were mocking up the course and trying it out for dry run, I always take my students inside the prison, we get a wonderful tour, they get a chance to see the space, and again in the Swarthmore way, that only we can do it, marry theory with practice. With the being in the space, and the students of course are incredible. One of them Peter Bardner who is in DC now had the fortune or misfortune of coming with me when we were going into the prison in the morning, and we were there for four or five hours or so, and later that evening he was introducing Congressman Joe [inaudible 00:57:47]. To this day he is still just trying to figure out that dissidence of being in the prison three miles from the college, and just the same day a few hours later he's connecting with a US congressman. 
	He sends me an email as so many of my students do over the course of the year, and I hear from them always at the right time when I'm in the moment about the giving up, and it always comes in at the right moment when they come and say that the experience of taking us in, and the experience of giving us a chance to marry our values and our theory with the practice has been incredibly, and even if we're not working in the space that you're working in that experience stays with us and it is the most meaningful experience for them. We're trying to do that, and my hope is that we will be able to do more of it. It's an incredibly heavy lifting as you can imagine, but we will just take a little bit at a time. That will be my vision is to figure out if we can do essentially adoption of the correctional facility if you will, with lots of folks, not simply students, but faculty, our alumna, lots of our wonderful staff who work here who want to operate in this space and give something meaningful to this community. 
	When we were doing the course, we have a wonderful closing ceremony and I had invited Tyrone who was the president of the lifers association, who comes and spends time with us in this last close out, and of course for the students it was wonderful because they had the chance to meet him, and I said to him, "Just be honest and candid. My students can handle it, we can take it." We had an extraordinary few hours with him in which the students could see the connections that I was trying to get them to make, and of course Tyrone who looks like a federal judge. If you see him, he looks just like a federal judge. It's astounding to us that he was in prison. At that time he had done 36 years before Governor Rindell commuted his sentence, and he's trying to find ways in which he can be helpful for us and to our students, and so we're trying to think creatively about how to sort of make all this work. I would love your ideas, your participation, your support, anything that you can ... You're encouragement. I like this idea of being able to do something even grander and more ambitious than what we are doing here, so thank you very much for that. 
	There was a question I thought over here, yes? [inaudible 01:00:18]. The question was if I can paraphrase it, the impact of this on children. Is it best for them so see their fathers in this situation or not? The research I think is a bit mixed on this. We don't know, quite honestly. I have a lot of sort of personal ethnographic experiences that suggest that it turns out to be good for the kid and for the father. That's all anecdotal. What I would want because I'm a social scientist is of course classic controlled treatment experiment, figuring out how guys and the kids do if they're not given access to their parents, their fathers, and so on. At the SEI Chester prison, superintendent Bird set the space up not simply because it's there and the kids can come and spend time there, it's really quite extraordinary to see, and to see the guys who knowing that they might have a visit from their kids do everything that they're supposed to. I think there's some correlation between the visits and access to their kids, and the lack of disciplinary infractions, all of those kinds of things. 
	One of the things that concerns me, and we have a separate research project on this, is for most of these kids in the urban community, particularly adolescents, the first civic engagement, their first civic lesson is really unfortunately with law enforcement, or the courts, or seeing a parent or a loved one, an uncle, a neighbor insnarled in the criminal justice system. What I know to be the case from lots of kids I've worked with and spent time with in Chester, Philly, Daytona, and Memphis is that they have very corrosive attitudes about the quote unquote criminal justice system because they view it as unfair and discriminatory. If we don't do something to really come in and change that perception as a country, respective of the communities, we're in real trouble. Now you will see kids and others around them who will consciously and deliberately do everything they can to undermine the criminal justice system. In many instances that's part of what we've been seeing. 
	When King in the aftermath of the 1965 riots said, "If I feel that I have no stake in my community, if I feel I have no stake in my community, I will unconsciously seek to destroy it." That's essentially what has been happening, and lots of urban communities across the last couple decades or so, that there is this disconnect between adults and kids, in which they feel that they're not valued. When I go to the barbershop every week or every other week, my barber who's in his 70's says to me, "I'm a throwaway guy." That always disturbs me. I always have a tear in my eye when he says that, because he's saying to me and I said to him, I said "You have to stop saying that to me, because I come in with a great attitude and I'm an optimistic person. I leave and you have me drinking a couple glasses of wine." What he says, and it disturbs me, but that's the sense of every guy I've ever worked with, and that's why for me the whole notion of giving them hope is so critical.
	Most of these guys believe that they are throwaway people. Those of you who know and are familiar with King's last campaign, not simply the poor people's march, but he got diverted to go to Memphis. Why? Because he was advocating on behalf of garbage workers who were not paid very much and for the African American garbage workers, when it rained, they could not come inside with their white fellow sanitation workers. Heavy rain, two guys, African American sanitation workers could not come inside with their white counterparts and they were taking shelter in the back of their trash truck. No one realized they were there and they were killed. When you see the placard, and you remember the placard, I am a man not some piece of garbage, essentially. So many of the guys I've worked with over the years view themselves as garbage, view themselves as throwaway guys, and somehow we have to change that perception and that reality. Thank you guys so much for your time, appreciate it, enjoy your weekend. Thank you.