You're Wrong About - The Prison Boom with Shannon Heffernan

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Where did all these prisons come from? WBEZ’s Shannon Heffernan is here to give us part of the answer, which involves “small government” (of course), Lennie Briscoe (as always), the pink flowers of Alcatraz, and a prison sweepstakes that produced the actual worst song of the 80s.Two quick corrections via Shannon: "I said Illinois has potential plans to shrink one prison and close another. That was an error. Both plans are about shrinking facilities.  I said CO's have a life expectancy of 56 years, the stat I meant to quote is 59 but since our interview, I discovered that statistic (and the stat about divorce) to be from studies/sources that are considered very weak so I've stopped using them."Here's where to find Shannon:WebsiteTwitterMotive (podcast)Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.wbez.org/staff/288/shannon-heffernanhttps://twitter.com/shannon_hhttps://www.wbez.org/shows/motive/8c9f445c-4f62-46d6-a7f6-dc70a835e99bhttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

I think we're going to take the path of like the country being taken over by baggers or something, you know. It's going to be something we cannot predict. If they were awarding this prison on the basis of ingenuity, creativity, determination, and a total absence of shame, Flora would get it. And I saw the humorous side to all of this through the tape, and I thought, why not? You know, let's carry on the tradition here, let's keep this thing rolling. There's nothing but goods that come from it.

But when you have two primary industries, agriculture and oil, which, you know, we're on empty now in the oil field, and you start to run high and low, if you had some basic enterprise in your area that would lend stability to the economy, this just seemed like the shoo-in thing. And I think that all those things are basically the reasons that we just got actively involved in because we knew it was good. Hello. Welcome to You're Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall. Today on the show, we are learning about prisons, and specifically a time when American towns competed to see who won a prison. And our guest today is Shannon Heffernan, who is joining us from WBEZ Chicago, home of Scruff McGruff. This will come up, unsurprisingly. She is working on an amazing podcast called Motive, and swung by my imaginary Mr. Rogers neighborhood to tell me what's going on in Chicago and beyond.

This episode connects with a few themes we've been talking about on this show lately. We talked about Reagan recently with Lacey Mosley, and we began the story of Go Ask Alice, which, if you haven't had the pleasure, is the great anti-drug, war on drugs scare tactic book of 20th century America. It has been terrifying teenagers and parents for the last 50 years. In our part two of that story, which we're going to release on July 4th, we are going to talk about how we ended up with that book and if it is, in fact, real. But for now, we're going to stick with the consequences of the war on drugs, which are

in fact very real. So that's about it for me. Shannon is going to come and tell us where we went wrong and why you still remember Scruff McGruff's address after all these years. Hi, I'm Shannon Heffernan. I'm a reporter at WBEZ, and I work on a podcast called Motive. We're in our fourth season, and we're looking at prisons. When you hear prisons, what do you think when you first hear about them?

My first mental image is of a trip that I took to Alcatraz a couple years ago, which I feel like specifically the fact that from Alcatraz you can see San Francisco and from San Francisco, you can see Alcatraz, and also that it's fairly pretty. The cell parts aren't, but when it was operational, I believe it was largely pink because of the flowers and the plants that were planted there to keep it from eroding. I don't know. I've had that mental image in my head ever since I was there because I feel like when I think of prisons, I have the sense of what's even out there, what's being hidden, what

is visible and what is invisible, how much is incarceration either hidden in plain sight or actually hidden from the sight lines of people who don't experience it? Yes. There's almost this feeling of it being this far away, strange thing. A lot of people know someone who's been incarcerated. Over 40% of the US population has an immediate family member in prison. I've had people I love incarcerated in prison, and that number is even higher for black Americans, like over 60%.

So it's this thing that we have this strange relationship to, I feel like, where it's very other and very outside, but also ever present. And I think as I started looking into prisons and understanding them are, some of what surprised me was not only how recent this history is, like within my lifetime is when we saw the prison explosion in the 80s and 90s, but also how particular the circumstances were that prisons emerged out of, and how, honestly, strange some of it is. Can I play you some scene-setting music maybe for the 80s and 90s where we're at? Yes.

Did you, are you familiar with McGrath? Did you grow up in an era where this was like a present thing for you? I am deeply familiar with Scruff McGrath, and I'm trying to figure out where I would have seen all these PSAs. For maybe like the younger folks who don't know who he is, who was like this dog, like a bloodhound. Sometimes he appeared in costumes, sometimes it was a cartoon, he was kind of like a hard-boiled dog detective, and he did commercials that were like anti-crime commercials.

If you tell me a phone number, I will forget it 15 seconds after the fact, but I will remember Scruff McGrath's address until the day I die, and it's Scruff McGrath, Chicago, Illinois, 60652. Like, it helps that he doesn't have a street number or a house number, he just is Chicago. Oh, wow, you really, I did not remember that, and I thought I was very McGrath familiar. I think Scruff McGrath is second only to Lenny Briscoe in terms of effective copaganda in my life personally. I don't know if you remember, but in my mind, he only talked about like don't do drugs,

but he had a whole like call the police thing too. Here, I can send you another video. Oh yeah, lay it on me. See that guy, he's stealing that bike. Now, see that lady, she's calling the cops. This is Mimi Marth, part of the eyes and ears patrol of Hartford, Connecticut, 126 of regular people like you and me working together against crime. Here's another one, Albert Bell.

Yesterday, it was his turn to patrol. Halfway down the block, Albert sees a strange man nosing around a barnette's basement window. So, Albert calls the cops fast, and the cops pick the guy up fast. But it's basically just like teaching kids how good it is to call the police on your neighbors. Right. Okay, so the first thing is like you see a guy loading a bike into a van and you immediately call the police, and then you see a guy near a basement or like opening a window to a basement

and you immediately call the police. And both of these are scenarios that are just as likely to be totally innocent, I think. That's what stands out to me the most about this is that it's like, I mean, it's very in keeping with all the Facebook posts you see about how a mom in Georgia almost got human trafficked because she was in the same Walmart aisle as a black man two different times in the same Walmart trip and he had a Bluetooth headset on, so he was going to traffic her. It's just like anytime you feel like something might be going on, it is going on.

Well, what a scary way to move through the world if that's your mindset. Can you imagine thinking that and walking through the world being like everything is out to harm you or to harm others? You see a guy with a bike and you're like, that's probably stolen. It's telling you that there's crime constantly happening all around you and then I guess the two options are like you can be afraid or you can become a police officer just personally in your own mind. Yes.

Where did this dog come from? The ad council. So it's like easy to laugh about it because it's so strange, right? Like I laugh every time I look at one of these videos. His name is Scruff McGruff. I mean, there's, you know, as weird as it is, like it's also like coming from this dark moment in some ways. This is emerging out of this moment when we're thinking so hard about being tough on crime

and we're so deep into the war on drugs that we literally have an ad campaign targeting kids to help fight crime. So this is the same area you have to remember when we have Reagan, right? And like he's making these speeches that are full of dog whistles, no pun intended about young black men essentially. So like, like a quote I pulled from one of his speeches is he says, there's the portrait of a stark face, a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time, the face of a human predator, the face of the habitual criminal, nothing in nature more cruel and

more dangerous. I think nothing boils my blood faster than human beings being described as predators. Yes. You know, and it wasn't just Republicans, I read a Reagan quote, but we can track that back to the Clintons too, like you have both political parties fighting to like talk about how scary crime is and how much we need to fight it. Like something I think about a lot with Reagan is that he started off as a New Deal Democrat. He gradually became more conservative and helped lead the nation toward that is my analysis

and that when he was governor of California, it was much more normalized to have work release programs and people who were under some kind of probationary supervision, but who had jobs or had furloughs that there was just much less of a concept of we lock you away and throw away the key. And I'm fascinated by the fact that Reagan, you can find him in speeches defending this and saying like, look, it makes fiscal sense to not put people in prison forever. I don't know what to tell you. And that wasn't that long before he was president and he was president not that long before

the world we live in now. So like, this is maybe the big question. How do we get tricked into thinking that it's always been the way that it is? Well, I think it's that ever presence from 1980 to 1989, the prison population in the United States more than doubled. Surely Americans just became much more evil, right? Like what other explanation could there be? I don't like citing crime statistics because I think that they are not the most reliable

measurement of actual crime because what they're measuring is people who got caught. They're measuring the statistic of when we wrote it down and when we captured it. But to the degree we are able to capture it, you don't see a correlation between the prison boom and a rise in crime. It's not like it's this neat match between the two. And there's a lot of different explanations people give about why mass incarceration arose in this time and why there was such a fear of crime. But one question I got really interested in is like, when you have something happening

that big and that rapidly, it requires an infrastructure. You're incarcerating a massive number of people. Where are you going to put them? I feel like Americans typically have been able to engage in a lot of magical thinking about manufacturing and infrastructure and how things happen because the goal I think of this mechanized world is to not have to think about it. And I hope that after the past couple of years we're more able to think like, oh yeah, a lot of work and effort has to go into a system functioning in any way or even existing.

It's not like one day there were way more criminals and we're like, oh crap, we got to put them somewhere because we can't do anything suddenly in America is what I figured out. It seems as if on its own suggests the idea that there wasn't a supply of criminals and a demand for prisons, but maybe that there was a supply of prisons and a demand for inmates. Everything we've been talking about, this mood around crime, that's a national phenomenon. It's a national mood that's happening. But the changes that actually started putting people behind bars at the most rapid rate were things that happened at the state level.

So Illinois, which is where I live, it passed a law called Class X, which basically it made sentences longer and it created crimes that sent more people away. And Class X, it sounds very scary. Our governor, I'll read you the quote, he said, I made up the name. I thought it had a ring to it. I thought it could signify something to people instantly. Movies can be x-rated. Oh my God.

The X symbol was a powerful symbol in American culture. You X'd something out. Oh, God, that's, yeah, I mean, unfortunately, it first made me think of X-Men first class, but no, that's way worse. Yes, I don't know if Governor Thompson was familiar with the X-Men enough to purposefully reference that. Yeah, no, that's his first problem is lack of X-Men literacy. This law, along with, you know, other laws that were passing it, it led to this like giant prison boom, right?

The prison population is exploding. So you have cells that were originally designed for one person. There's now two people in them. You have gym floors where prisoners are sleeping on the floor because the prisons are just so crowded. And the governor has a problem. He needs to build prisons and he's going to have to build them fast because when you have prisons that overcrowded, you know, riots were starting to become a thing.

Before this time, nobody really wanted to be a prison town. Like it sounds, it doesn't sound very romantic, right? It sounds scary. It sounds dangerous. People were afraid of prison escapes. I talked to actually a guy who was in Thompson's administration from the time who went to this town, Geneva, Illinois, to sort of pitch this idea that they were going to open a prison there and the whole town was up in arms.

He basically feels like he got chased out of town. So it's like this problem, like how are we going to like sell these prisons to these places? How are we going to get these things built? So he gets chased out of this town, right? But there's something else that's happening at this time, which is the economy is bad for a lot of people, right? You have manufacturing and big trouble.

And you also have family farms in big trouble. Do you remember Farm Aid? Yes. Yes. Okay. So like that kind of, you remember the era where we're all talking about like family farms are not doing great, but like what was Farm Aid? Was it a concert for farms?

I really don't know. I just know that it existed. It was a concert to like raise money for farms. So it was like started by Willie Nelson and Neil Young, I think, and it was like big, like big starts. I think the first one had like Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, BB King, people were worried about the family farm and how a lot of farms were closing. So in addition to manufacturing crisis, you had like people in these farm towns like looking

for work, not having a lot of cash, jobs were short, towns are really desperate. And this is also the era where we're cutting a lot of social service programs back, right? So people are on this jam, like what are they going to do for work? Brandon, this guy I was talking about earlier who got chased out of that town for suggesting a prison. He has this idea of how he's going to solve two problems at once, right? It's the era of tax cuts. You're not going to build up welfare to support these people who are out of work, but you

also need prisons. So it's almost like a jobs program, at least a jobs program for the white rural areas where prisons were getting built and it comes up with this idea of something called the prison sweepstakes. Small towns could compete to win prisons and all the jobs that came with them. Not to get too simplistic about it, that like the haves in America and the politicians whoever are like, okay, we're in a crisis where there's a lack of jobs for white working class people who we don't like, but we like people of color less.

And so we're going to put them in prison and then we're going to squeeze jobs out of that and give those to the white working class people and then they'll shut up. On Chicago's west side, for example, all the factories were closing, so you had like people who couldn't get jobs there and you had people in these rural areas who are having trouble with family farms and people are moving away. And you give them both the same solution, prisons. But of course, they're on entirely different sides of the equation. So I want to tell you about one of the towns, kind of one of the towns that compete it.

Mount Sterling, Illinois and Brown County, Illinois, farming town known for good deer hunting is kind of what the area is famous for. And in 1982, one in five people in Brown County are living at or below the poverty line. People are moving away, especially young people. Not enough tax money is coming in to support basics like schools, like people, I was reading newspaper articles from that time where they're like literally talking about being worried that the county's going to have to close its schools. A quote from a local editorial was, frankly, friends, it's worse than you think.

You're traveling at an alarming rate towards the black hole of non-existence. Wow. There's sort of a nickname that comes for this town in the surrounding areas of Forgottonia because they felt so forgotten by the state. Yeah. Yeah. It's its own unique place, clearly, but that seems like it's standing in for so many other places than it now.

Exactly, right? A place that's forgotten and that a solution is given to. There were three guys who kind of led it who called themselves the Chang Gang. They formed a committee and they decided they're going to win this prison. Wow. Like a lot of other towns at the time, they start to get kind of the stunts they're going to do to get attention. Their whole thing was flowers.

They were sending flowers to the secretary of the governor, to different politicians with poems like roses are red, violets are blue. When we think of prosperity, we think of you. They took and sprayed the entire football field in giant letters with like Brown County wants a prison. This is like Foxconn vibes. Foxconn? Foxconn is where this town, this area in southern Wisconsin, which also was lacking

industries, lacking jobs. This is a vast oversimplification of it, but basically they had to roll out the welcome wagon and sort of beg this Chinese company to come and manufacture, I think TVs there. These are different propositions and in various ways, I'm sure, but in this case it was like, you're giving this company so much and you're screwing your own citizens so much to entice this company to come and then they're not going to put money back in the way that they're promising. You are selling your town for an empty promise from someone who claims they're going to come

in and fix things for you and it's been very depressing to watch unfold. Yeah, that selling of the town, it reminds me a lot of what we've seen lately with the Amazon stuff, all these towns pulling stunts to try to get the attention of the company, although in this case what they're trying to get is the attention of a government entity bringing in jobs. Some of the stunts got really strange, to be honest. Such as? One town, for example, Flora, Illinois, which was also like Mount Sterling in really hard

shape. More than a thousand people applied for 40 jobs at Walmart and they entered the sweepstakes and they became the most famous competitor in the sweepstakes because they made this video that was a rap video called Is We Is or Is We Isn't, going to get ourselves a prison. Now I have to send that to somebody or I'll die in seven days. It's something else, I think it's at best it's cringy at worst, it's racist to see this play out. Yeah.

But I think what's interesting is it went like basically viral, like people loved this. And was it with the air of like, this is so cute, like please give this cute town what it wants? Like what was the tone? I mean that's the impression I got of it, of like look at these people fighting so hard for the cute town to say that. To be fair, like the town was like in bad shape. There were not a lot of jobs, they needed something.

But what was offered to them was to compete for a prison. And so you have these kind of weird antics going for them and I have to wonder like what if they had been, you know, offered something else. Right. I don't know. I'm at the stage where it doesn't feel subjective to say that if you look at a prison, you can see a continuation of slavery because it's based on the premise that a black person in America is free extremely conditionally and that like captivity and forced labor or forced

whatever happens in there is the natural state. And I don't know, like the people making these videos don't have to be able to articulate that to like to understand that they are joyfully embracing an economic security or a dream of that that's going to come at somebody else's expense and the expense of a specific group of people. Yeah. And I think that's the gap, the gap that was there right in the sweepstakes that makes that the sweepstakes feel so strange to me is that gap between like it all felt silly

and fun, right? It was almost like either an ignoring or a forgetting or an unknowing, I'm, I'm guessing it's an ignoring. I don't, I don't know, I'm not inside these people's minds about what they were vying for. Right. One of the things that I think about a lot is just this thing of like who's getting out there every day and harming other people because I think for the most part it's people

who do not conceive of themselves as doing great harm. And in fact, people are able to do great harm by not seeing it that way because of course, if you don't see your victims as fully human, then you're not self aware about what you're doing. That's part of, I think what goes into the equation a lot is to not even think about the humanity of the people whose lives you are affecting or destroying. And I think that that you can't really assign motive to an entire town. There's a lot of people whose thoughts and beliefs and desires went into this, but to

me it like the most dangerous people in America are probably capable of doing that silly of a public access style music video. In fact, they thought they were doing something really good helping out their town. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this abolitionist and academic talks about how, you know, she thinks of the two places, the urban areas and the rural areas as actually being the single space because they both were like really hit hard by the economy at this time and they actually had a lot in common and that there was potential for like solidarity and cooperation around that.

But instead what was chosen was appealed to one group to throw the other group under the boss. You know, there's a different choice that could have been made in those moments. Right. Yeah. And that feels like one of the questions, I guess, that inevitably comes up as you're watching this baton twirling segment of a music video. Like, did anyone realize that there were other possibilities or were there or did they seem

to be in reach? You know, you watch the video, you laugh at it and you're like, oh, those folks are so out of touch down in those rural areas. But you have to keep in mind like the courts, the people who are sending a lot of these people to prison, they're out in urban areas too and they can kind of have this like distance to it that they're sending this away to another place to deal with. Yes. To the lovely town from the music video, it'll be great.

Everyone will have a good time. It was like completely disconnected from the reality of what we were talking about, which is building prisons. And so in this video, you have like all these people make cameos from the town, the mayor, a reporter, there's a police officer who like seems to be the best dancer of the group and he's like strolling down, twirling his baton. People loved it. It reminds me of just a couple of short little moments in Gone Girl where they show kids

and teenagers and just sort of a whole cross-section of kind of every demographic in this town looking for the Gone Girl, like walking through fields, riding like kids riding their bikes at Twilight. And it always struck me as a great expression of like how people just love to be brought together by something and even if it's by something awful, I think we crave the feeling of like all trying for something at once. Yes. I think you're late. I think that is exactly the mood you're capturing.

Like when I look at like rallies from these sweepstakes, like it seems like everybody from town is showing up and like members of the Cheng Gang told me it was like the most united they ever felt like their town was. It's the high school band. Here is the Flora High School marching band, all 120 members performing Jailhouse Rock. What else? I commend you for not allowing unfortunate economic conditions to rob you and your community of a good sense of humor.

All the world enjoys a good laugh. I know you will continue the fight to bring all types of new industry to Southern Illinois and wish the best in your efforts to capitalize on the national attentions that have been forced on Flora. So Flora, Flora, this town with the whole is-we-isn't-rap video thing. Despite being the media darlings, they lost. Oh, no. See, and why am I like, oh, no, you didn't get what you wanted.

It's, oh boy. Yeah. Okay. Well, good try, Flora. But Mount Sterling, that's the Cheng Gang guys. That's the guys with the roses and the flowers and the football field painting. They won. And they were citizens of the year.

There were all kinds of ads in the newspaper. They made a souvenir edition. Everybody got out of school and out of work for the day. The ads are, you know, to give you a mood of how happy people were. Like a dentist's office took out an ad saying we're wide open for a prison. The family doctor's office, the diagnosis is excellent economic health. The local tasty treat had Cheng Gang specials, so there were slammer burgers for $1.45, soft drinks in sizes minimum, medium and max.

So like the town's super, super happy. You hear those things like the slammer burgers and, you know, you see these parades with people walking in striped uniforms and there's such a disconnect of the reality of what the prison's going to be. But I do think there's a moment, at least in Mount Sterling, where they had to confront that. So after they won the prison, and it was literally right before the first people who were going to be locked inside arrived, they had a giant prison sleepover.

This whole thing is just so surreal. Yeah, it is surreal. It's very surreal. The state invited people to come stay the night. I think it had like a couple of different purposes. I think they wanted to show off this fancy new facility. Also, a lot of the staff were new. They never worked in a prison before, so it was going to be this kind of chance for staff

to practice and learn how this was all going to work and work with actual people. I've talked to several people who were at the overnight. They all met at the county fairgrounds. Before they went to the prison, it seemed like it was very fun and buoyant. Somebody told me there was a husband and wife there for their wedding anniversary. It just has this feeling of almost like those mystery dinners that people go to, where you fake a murder mystery. It's a little scary, but mostly kind of in a Halloween-y fun kind of way.

So I think people knew it might be a little spooky. It's going to be fun. It's going to be a romp, right? I've thought about this last Halloween, what is the difference between spooky and scary? I think spookiness is fundamentally a pleasant feeling, and you're like, I have chosen to scare myself or when you eat a really spicy pepper, you're like, I have chosen to experience something that is going to make me feel more alive in some way, and then I think scariness is something else.

Something different. Well, I think they went in expecting spookiness, but as soon as they get on the bus, the guards are like, stop chatting with each other, like, don't talk. You can't talk. You have to stay silent. And they drive them to the prison and they book them. They get their fingerprints taken. They get numbers.

They get padded down. One moment it's like they didn't do cavity searches because you can't do cavity searches on the president of the PTA, so they're not getting exactly the experience as much as they may have felt like they were. And they take them in, they're making them walk single file, they're barking orders at them, they've hidden contraband on some of them, so they're pulling them out of line and taking them to segregation and yelling at them. And it's around this time that a lot of the people who I talked to went to the overnight

said that they started to get the sense of like, oh, oh, okay, this is not what I was expecting. And I don't know if people have articulated this, but like, what were they expecting or did they know what they were expecting? I don't think they thought about it much. I mean, you have to keep in mind that like, they just had gotten through with the prison sweepstakes, right? It's all been about like saving the town and having fun and festive.

Suddenly you're like, now we're in a prison. They take them all to this auditorium where they do like demonstrations for them. They have the prison dogs and a guy in a suit and they show them how the dogs can sniff things out and can attack people. They have this group called Orange Crush. Come in is the nickname of them, Orange Crush. They do riot control, but they also do... Oh, God.

Why the cute names? Yeah. Well, Orange Crush is a name that I think was maybe more came from. I actually don't know where it came from. My guess would be it came from prisoners, but I'm not sure. They wear these orange uniforms. And they have these like mask on and they carry batons, like these sticks. They come in and they do a demonstration.

One guy who was there, I remember the Cheng Gang said like just the sound of them was scary because they're marching in unison and there's like this kind of intimidation to it. And then after that, they take them all to their cells, which are, you know, tiny. And that's where the toilet is, but there's these big windows in front of them. So you have these like state dignitaries, like state reps and business owners. They have to like shit and piss in front of a window. They spend all these years in this fun festive competition for a prison. And they're sitting there realizing, oh, this was the prize.

This is what we got. This is what we won. You know, and I talked to the Cheng Gang guys after this who like, you know, they're thoughtful guys in a lot of ways. And, you know, they say like, we were thinking about the jobs. And, you know, it was fashionable at the time to be locking people up. Like that was the national mood. I don't know what to tell you.

People were wearing acid wash jeans as well. Not a lot of great choices going around there. But like one thing that struck me is like, so like one of the state reps I spoke to was there. She said the next day she cried the whole way home. And some of that was just like the lack of sleep. But some of that was like, what did I just go through? And I guess I kind of expected there to be like this change of heart. But she said, she's like, but you know, like I also realized like people wanted it this way.

People wanted punishment. People were hungry for punishment. Wow. Because to me, like the idea that you can go and have like a teeny tiny taste of this experience, right? Like the teeniest possible taste. And it's like overwhelming and really upsetting to you in some way, right? That you're like, oh God, that felt really bad. And then you're able to be like, well, whatever.

Like I'm sure there's a lot of reasons for that. And one is like, you know, sunk cost fallacy is in charge of us all. And also you need the jobs, you need the money like you're already in. But also it feels like there's a basic feeling of like, well, this feels really, really awful to me. And like maybe not something that humans should have to experience, but criminals are different. Hmm. I think that's true. I think that's why you have those terms like predator, right?

Right. And you know, and of course you bring in racial differences. Or even the term criminal, which I'm not crazy about to be honest, because obviously everyone commits crimes, right? Like there's not a human being, maybe babies don't commit crimes, but everybody else does. Everybody in their life has probably committed some crime. And if not a crime, at least a wrong. It's a question of who gets punished for it. So we're talking about this idea of like two groups of people who both need jobs.

Gail Frans and this guy who told me he came up with the prison sweepstakes. I was asking him like how he reflected on the fact. He gave jobs to these one places that was right in rural areas. And that these other people were taken out of their communities. He said, and I'm going to read to you a quote now, some people were critical of us for doing this because they felt the prison should be built closer to Chicago for the benefit of inmate families and friends, et cetera. And I was a strong opponent to that notion because I felt that the prison should be located

where taxpayers were paying for it. Famously no taxpayers in Chicago, right? Yes. Yes. Exactly. And I think for like white people and black people. And so I think so much of this also comes to like who deserves the programs that support them as workers or social service programs.

This is the same area you have to remember when we're talking about small government, which is a really interesting contradiction. You're talking about cutting tax dollars. You're talking about taking away welfare. And it's really interesting that's happening in the same era that you're building prisons. Like that's a huge state project. Yeah. So like at one time you have Governor Thompson, the governor of Illinois saying things like,

he literally has this quote where he says like, I had to cut cash. I had to cut all this welfare in schools. And he says, does that hurt people? Absolutely. Hurt school districts. School districts have to pay more local property taxes. Never popular. Welfare advocates will start beating you on the head the minute you touch the welfare

budget. But that's where the money is. You have no choice. So he's at one time viewing these one budget cuts as you have no choice and then viewing this other massive undertaking from 1973 to 1996, $1.2 trillion building new prisons. And you're viewing one of them as a choice and one of them as an inevitability. And also prisons just seem like possibly the ultimate expression of big government, right? Because the idea is if you violate a law, the government does have the right to essentially

strip you of everything that defines you not just as a citizen, but in many ways human. It's like the government is the arbiter of whether you get to be human or not. Like I cannot think of a bigger government thing honestly. Exactly. And yet it's not what we associate when we think about big government and small government. Not at all. And people aren't usually thinking about prisons or police. And to me it comes down to a question of like what is the job you want government to do?

What do you view as a protection of freedom? And I think this was an era where you have politicians talking about to be free from crime, to be free from the harms of crime, but for who to be free from the harms of crime, right? We're at an interesting moment I feel like where people are talking about policing more, people are talking about incarceration more. And in Illinois the prison population has shrunk like a bunch. And we're getting to the point where there's like a prison they're talking about closing

and another prison they're talking about shrinking. But at the same time you're also having this backlash here against the, and I think you're seeing this everywhere across the country, this sort of backlash against those movements. And you're seeing sort of a reemergence of, it's tough on crime rhetoric, pushing back against like, but you know, defending the police. And I think we're in a really interesting moment, I don't know which path we're going to take. I'm not sure which direction we're going to choose.

I think we're going to take the path of like the country being taken over by baggers or something. You know, it's going to be something we cannot predict. The last few years are any indication we're going someplace unpredictable and strange. Definitely badgers. Definitely badgers. Yeah. It's going to be baggers.

Put your money on baggers. But we have, I think, this commonly accepted myth that like the 60s, they were great. All the students just like rose up and marched and flower power, et cetera. And in reality, I think the conservative backlash against hippies and any kind of leftist movements within the 60s was stronger than any leftism that existed. But like essentially the 60s, we refer to them now as like this sort of monolithic event where America got freer, but it seems actually to have paved the way for a gigantic backlash. So that's fantastic.

Well, I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of people who talk about this era of mass incarceration, which is complicated and has a lot of causes. But one of the causes being that you had movements like the Black Panthers that then there was this desire to control and part of that backlash being heavier surveillance, heavier policing, which then leads to heavier incarceration. Like it begins to open up those doors. Yeah.

I mean, I think one of the big takeaways for this, for me in true, you're wrong about fashion, you know, I think when people think about like what's wrong with prisons right now and like why they got built, I think a lot of people think about private prisons and the profit of private prisons like, oh, like we had a prison boom because there were going to be these corporations that got to benefit because prisoners would be given jobs and they'd have to do free labor and people would profit off that free labor. Because someone has to make my Walmart furniture, right? It is a very small fraction of prisons in the United States that are private prisons.

And a very small number of prisoners have jobs that are actually making things for for profit companies. But just because you remove for profit prisons, like Illinois doesn't have for profit prisons, by the way, you don't remove that people can see themselves as profiting off of it. Right. Do you think that there is a kind of a school of thought that like we get rid of private prisons and then we can have like more ethical prisons because of that? Is that something you've seen people arguing?

I do. I mean, I see that. I see that argument and I see the argument that like the reason prisons boomed is it was this like drive to have prison labor. Like sort of using a slave metaphor, which is like interest. There's definitely like a line one can draw from that era to the era of mass incarceration. But I think the idea of the for profit company as being the thing that's driving this is too simple.

It is just too small of a piece of what we're talking about. Like you have to talk about the way government saw its job, like what you saw government feeling like it needed to do at this time. It's also way too optimistic regarding manufacturing, you know, like surely it's cheaper to just outsource manufacturing overseas and oppress people that way. And then you can turn inmates, you can make them somehow financially useful without giving them a job even. Yes.

Because you can make, you can give other people jobs to incarcerate them. Right. And there's something as big as Charlie mentioned, you know, the basic. Construction of a facility of this magnitude is $41 million. That's an immediate influx of that money into your community to begin to build and begin to grow. That's exciting. And then the prospect that 400 jobs, 80% of which would come from the local area as new

employees. And then that was going to generate an annual $10 million payroll. Mount Sterling, which is this town that I focused on, everybody there believes the prison was a huge help to their economy. But it's really hard to actually measure in that town specifically because at the same time the prison opened, this company.foods opened a big wing. So I cannot tell you with good numbers what it did for Mount Sterling. What I can tell you is that a lot of meta studies show that the financial benefits can

be kind of a wash in terms of jobs and that they don't actually end up doing as much for these towns as promised. But one thing they do do is they can bring in more tax money for people because prisoners are counted as living in the town where they're incarcerated. They're not counted as being from the town they're from. So they get that tax money, like one of the quotes I found from a town that had just gotten a prison in Illinois, this town called Ina. I'm going to read you the quote from the mayor.

He was bragging that they had repaved the roads and built a new community center and been able to do all these things since the prison came. And he said, it really figures out this way, this little town of 450 people is getting the tax money of a town of 2,700. And those people in that prison can't vote me out of office. Oh, Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. Wow.

That's some self-awareness right there. That's what I'll say. Yeah. And sort of like unashamedly. So you're like, you're literally like taking these people out of where they live in a place like Chicago and moving them to another place where they're providing these benefits or perceived benefits to these other places. So sort of think about the social cost of these towns.

In prison towns, like divorce rates go up, suicides go up, addiction goes up. The average lifespan of a correctional officer is just 56 years. Oh my God. I remember talking to a CO who is about to retire and I was like, oh, are you happy and excited to retire? He's like, well, yeah, I am. And people talk about one of the great benefits of our job is that we get to retire really early.

But what people don't realize is also like, we die really early. I'm happy to retire, but I'm also like, well, I probably don't have statistically that much time left. We talk about prisons you were talking about earlier about how much you have to dehumanize someone to be willing to put them in a cage. But I also think it has an effect of how people who work there think about their own humanity. Ruth Gilmore, who I learned a lot of this stuff I'm talking about, who's done a lot

of the analysis of prisons and prison economies, has this phrase like, where life is precious, life is precious. And so if you devalue life, you devalue life. Something that's important to me about prison abolition is we're not arguing for this to be nice and because wouldn't it be nice if we were nice to all the inmates and then wouldn't it just be nice if we held hands under a rainbow? People kind of have this jaded assumption of like, sure, like you want to release all the prisoners and hug all the criminals and then wouldn't that be nice if we lived in

a utopia where we love criminals and we're hardworking Americans have to suffer because of it? And it's like, no, like you shouldn't, like this is a terrible job. Like it seems like this is good for no one. And I used to subscribe to, I think it was Corrections One, the Corrections Officer newsletter. I love that fact about you. I think I unsubscribed from it finally because I guess like every additional email in my inbox makes me scream internally as I've discussed recently on the show.

But yeah, I mean, I found it fascinating and that was where I learned and this is I'm citing this from memory. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But essentially the statistic that Corrections Officers have rates of PTSD, essentially the same as people who've done active tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah. It just seems like prisons destroy everyone they touch. That's how I'll put it.

Like, you know, you see that from the prison overnight, just like a simulated event, not a real one for one night, having such an effect on people, imagine going to work there every day. And I'll imagine being incarcerated there, not having the choice to quit, like those things shape you. No one's like, grows up dreaming of being a CO or maybe not no one, but probably not very many people. In the same way that I don't think most towns were like, oh, if we could imagine from scratch

what we would want to have to save our town, I don't think they'd come up with a prison. Like I imagine that a lot of these places, if they were given a choice, would have wanted to have a way to bring back their family farms, to bring back some solid working class jobs that you could get without a college degree and raise a family on and have enough economic opportunity that your kids don't feel like they have to move away. Speaking of Chicago, I read a few years ago, Studs Turtles Working, which is for people who haven't read at this wonderful compendium, basically interviews with people across almost every kind of job that was imaginable at the time.

I think he was conducting these interviews in the 70s. And there's really interesting themes that come up. And what I remember is like a really consistently recurring thing is that people who describe them themselves as having a job that they like and a good quality of life because of it. It's because they don't have to act like a machine and it matters that they are the ones doing it. Like there's something about it where they feel like they are contributing something

personally to what they do. If prisons were about rehabilitation, if the entire system were completely different, which I think it's, I don't think that we would ever get there trying to sort of change what we have into a drastically different version of it. But if rehabilitation was the goal, I feel like you could have prison jobs, like a general CO job that would potentially give you good quality of life. But it seems as if the goal really is to, like your goal ostensibly is to contain people, but it also seems like you have to be complicit in breaking them down psychologically.

It's so interesting that you bring that up because like on this season of motive, like one of the things we talk about is mental health staff who work inside these facilities. So I spoke to these two women who, they felt like their skill set was going to be a really good match for helping out these guys who were incarcerated, many of whom had mental illness, many of whom had never seen a therapist a day in their life, and they go in sort of excited watching how much they felt like they were then asked to be part of a security apparatus instead. You know, they started reporting abuses that they saw and then there was a lot of backlash

from fellow staff, including fellow mental health staff, basically saying like, well, whose side are you on? That's made me really think about like, what kind of work is possible inside these environments? And they both laughed, they both laughed, they both ended up feeling like all they were doing was basically going cell to cell and asking people, like, are you going to kill yourself? So like, I mean, I think that people do go in hoping to make a change sometimes, but it's a very difficult environment to maintain that in. I mean, I think the other thing that abolitionists talk about, that whether or not you're an

abolitionist, you can learn from, is they talk about this idea that it's about presence. It's not just about like, making prisons go away. It's also about like, what's going to show up instead. And I think when you think about like the amount of money we spend on prisons, so like in Chicago, between 2005 and 2009, there were 851 blocks in Chicago, city blocks, that were designated as million dollar blocks, which meant the state spent at least a million dollars incarcerating people from just that block. So what are other ways one can imagine using that million dollars?

Yeah. I mean, this is my beef with the movie Seven. I have no idea why I'm talking about David Fincher so much today. But that like Seven is like this wonderful, you know, extremely stylish, pretty scary serial killer movie starring Kevin Spacey is a serial killer. So that's fun spoilers. The whole tension throughout is that we have Detective Somerset, Morgan Freeman, who's about to retire.

He's doing one last job. So of course, that's going to go great for everybody. And then we have Brad Pitt as the brand new detective who's like from the sticks and is like he's like wants to be a good cop and make a difference. And he's just like this cute little puppy dog. And of course, over the course of the movie, we have to watch him be psychologically destroyed and basically receive the lesson of like people are pure evil and they will cut off your wife's head and like stop trying basically just like give up on humanity.

Goodbye. The give up on humanity answer is like, it's the easy way out. I think trying to make that same profound, the experienced person's conclusion seems very insidious to me because I think that the mature thing and the difficult thing and the thing that takes wisdom is to be like, no, like things legitimately could be better. And if you're like, well, we need all these prisons because there's just this many criminals and they're really bad and we just got to lock them away or they're going to cut off Brad Pitt's wife's head.

Like that's residing yourself actually to saying like, our politicians are corrupt. We're turning human beings into passive profit generators, you know, whether in the slim minority of people who are actually making bookcases for Walmart to sell or the people who are just sucking up money for roads they can't drive on and swimming pools they can't swim in. Like saying we need this apparatus because people are awful and we need a place to stuff them into I think is actually accepting a situation where the people running the society that you're in are given free reign to be as corrupt and as morally unchecked as they

want to be. There's this idea that to believe that that there aren't just people who are pure evil out there is naive, but isn't it much more complex and difficult to believe like people do really bad things and how we tackle that is maybe like more complex and messy than just dividing out categories. People often want me to tell the story of the person who's in prison for a marijuana or a crack cocaine conviction or they want me to tell the story about the person who I'm I'm so sure is innocent right and like those things do happen.

There are innocent people in prison. There are people in prison for very minor crimes. That is true. There are also a lot of people in prison who are there for crimes that are really serious like crimes that make me uncomfortable crimes that make me angry. If we really want to talk about prisons and we really want to talk about incarceration, we have to be honest about that and we have to wrestle with that messy stuff too. Yeah.

What do we actually want when those bad things happen? Yeah, and I feel I'm sure there are a ton of people who would confidently say like, yes, everything's fine, like the system as it is seems fine. And I would also guess that they have not even tried to imagine themselves or someone they love getting lifted up by that system. That you think of it as happening to to someone else. It's just right. It's just it feels like there's this eternal sense of like it's somebody else.

And you know, and for many Americans, particularly white ones, like that can remain at least apparently true for your entire life. But what that feels like it does is just allow you to not think of this as affecting human beings. If we continue on trend, you'll see shrinking prison populations. And at some point, that's going to mean prison closures. And does that mean that there will be pressure or, you know, I assume there is pressure to keep prisons going and therefore keep people inside of them because that means continued jobs, right? Right. Well, I mean, in Illinois, there's an effort to close one prison and an effort to shrink

another. And you've seen the union step in and say like, this is going to hurt these towns. And you saw something similar a while ago when a few prisons were supposed to be closed, that were stopped from closing because the governor stated specifically that the reason he kept them open was we were in an economic recession and he didn't want to do that to the towns at the time. To me, this answers the very question of like, how do people do bad things? Like how do people, rather than being born bad, kind of like go step by step and find themselves in a situation where they are doing harm. And this feels like exactly like that,

where it's, you're like, well, we're in a recession, we don't want to lose jobs, we have to keep this prison going, like we, people have to work, it just makes like, I don't want to lose this prison from my town. Right. Like just a place, a morally repugnant place that you get to by degrees. Because you can say, I'm not that person. And I just need to figure out who those people are and get them away from me. But also it means that like, if I'm not reading a book about how to be evil, then I know that I'm not evil. And in reality, I myself right now am complicit in a system

that takes care of me at the expense of others and that sees me as harmless because it sees other people as intrinsically harmful. And I'm complicit in that. And that sucks. When it comes down to the question of like, what do we define as violence? Yeah. Is violence only a physical striking of somebody? Right. Is it violence if you let someone die without proper medical care? Is that violence? Right. Yes. I would say yes. And then things get more complicated. So now that we know all this, now that we have heard the flora prison rap anthem and are going

to try for the rest of our lives to forget it, what can we do with this information? Knowing what we do, how can we take that knowledge into the world and try and make it a little better? So I think the first thing, I mean, this all sounds like squishy, but I really do think this is where you start. I think the first thing that I hope people do when they hear this information is they start to ask like, what else could be possible? It's probably not going to be a single thing is what I hear a lot of people who work on prison issues talk about this, that we're asking the prison system to do so much, deal with the fallout of mental health issues in our country, deal with the fallout of segregation and poverty. You're not going to have one thing replace that.

So what are the, what Maryam Kaba, the activist and scholar calls the million experiments that need to be done? And I don't know if that's like an unsatisfying answer because it's not like, go here, write this senator. But I really do think that's what the next step is for folks is to just, if you can realize it's inevitable, then together we have to think about, well, what are the other possibilities? Yeah, I mean, I think that makes sense to me because I think we should be wary of people who offer simple conclusions or simple answers, right? Like how do we solve society's problems? How do I fix my city? How do I make my town safe? Call the cops whenever you see someone moving a bike into a van, that'll fix it. You know, like I trust you more than I trust Scruff

on this. Yeah, so that's my messy, unsatisfying conclusion. Tidy wrap ups are for presence. You know, I think that there is nothing braver than waking up and continuing each day to imagine that things could be better. I think that that's the same kind of courage that comes from waking up and continuing to love people and to love the world, which doesn't mean that you're seeing it as something it's not. It means that you're seeing it for what it could be and what miraculously it has been able to do despite everything. Go get ourselves a prison. I'm Charlie, mayor of the town. People call from miles around. Is we is or is we isn't

going to get ourselves a prison? Thank you so much, Shannon Heffernan, for coming on our show today. If you want to hear more listeners, you can check out Shannon's podcast, Motive, and learn more about the prison sweepstakes and so much more that goes into creating this great nation of ours. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, our producer, who makes this show sound great even when I record it in a McDonald's parking lot. We have a nice new Patreon episode coming out for you later this month where I get to talk about Shakespeare and Love with Dana Schwartz and we discuss our controversial opinion about Ben Affleck's role in the movie. So if you feel like supporting the show, you can go on patreon.com

slash you're wrong about, or you can spend your money on literally anything else like three tacos. And thank you, listener. Most of all, thank you for being here. Thank you for learning with us. Thank you for singing songs and cracking jokes with us through our Hot Girl Apocalypse. Thank you for being here. Take care of you. See you next time. you