Joshua B. Hoe interviews Alana Sivin and Emily Galvin-Almanza about their work at ‘The Appeal Live.’
Full Episode
My Guests: Alana Sivin & Emily Galvin-Almanza
Alana Sivin is a Senior Legal Analyst and Co-Host of Appeal Live. She previously served as Senior Legislative Counsel to the Criminal Justice Committee at the New York City Council, where she focused primarily on drafting legislation intended to reduce incarceration and improve jail conditions. Prior to that experience, she worked as public defender at New York County Defender Services in Manhattan, where she represented indigent New Yorkers charged with crimes.
Emily Galvin-Almanza is a Senior Legal Analyst and Co-Host of Appeal Live. She worked as a public defender for most of a decade, first in California and then in New York. Emily is also the co-founder and executive director of Partners For Justice, a nonprofit that trains and places college graduates in public defenders’ offices to fight the enmeshed penalties of legal-system involvement, obtain access to vital services, and make low-income community members’ voices heard.
Notes from Episode 103 Alana Sivin & Emily Galvin-Almanza
The Appeal universe can be accessed from their website. They also have a YouTube channel (where you can watch The Appeal Live).
The book that Emily recommended was Felon by Dwayne Betts.
The book that Alana recommended was The End of Policing by Alex Vitale (Alex was one of our guests for episode 85 of the Decarceration Nation Podcast).
Full Transcript: Alana Sivin & Emily Galvin-Almanza
Joshua Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 103 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Alana Sivin and Emily Galvin-Almanza about their work at The Appeal Live. Now, we recorded this episode several weeks before a bunch of stuff happened publicly at The Appeal and in the press earlier this week. For a long time, I’ve been friendly with many of the writers and other content producers who work at The Appeal. And so I’m happy to report that management accepted The Appeal union, which is great news. And even better is that they announced that layoffs would be put on hold. And they also even rehired some of the people who had been let go. I hope this means that The Appeal is headed back in the right direction and I certainly value all the work of the many people I’ve gotten to know at The Appeal.
So let’s get to my interview with Alana Sivin and Emily Galvin-Almanza. Alana Sivin is a Senior Legal Analyst and Co-Host of The Appeal Live. She previously served as Senior Legislative Counsel to the Criminal Justice Committee at the New York City Council where she focused primarily on drafting legislation intended to reduce incarceration and improve jail conditions. Prior to that experience, she worked as a Public Defender at New York County Defender Services in Manhattan, where she represented indigent New Yorkers charged with crimes.
Emily Galvin-Almanza is a Senior Legal Analyst and Co-Host of The Appeal Live. She worked as a public defender for most of a decade, first in California, and then in New York. Emily is also the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit that trains and places college graduates in public defender’s offices to fight the enmeshed penalties of legal system involvement, obtain access to federal services, and make low-income community members’ voices heard. Welcome to the DecarcerationNation podcast Alana and Emily.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same first question. It’s kind of the comic book origin story question. How did you get from wherever you started in life, to where you were co-hosting The Appeal Live, and working at The Appeal? Tell us your story; either of you can go first.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I’m gonna give Alana a second to think because she always wants me to do that since I just pop off at the mouth. And she’s grateful for me tap dancing while she collects her thoughts and then says something brilliant.
Alana Sivin
You read my mind.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
We’ve been working together for a long time, babe. So for me, my path came through public defense. I mean, essentially, I never really felt like a real lawyer. I like being just a problem-solver and a person who can turn a crisis, ideally into something that is either less of a crisis or a good outcome. And that led me to really fall in love with criminal law as an area that I felt like I understood. Don’t give me a contract to look at, I don’t want to look at it. I understand trial work. And I understand the crisis. And my tumultuous youth made me not really have any basis on which to ever judge anybody. So it was a good spot for me to be. I spent the better part of a decade as a public defender, first in California, and then in New York. And I was practicing holistic defense in New York, thinking really hard about how public defenders across the country could get better access to the capacity to work holistically. Because honestly, if you’re facing a charge, sometimes the charge is your biggest concern. But sometimes the biggest concern is getting your car back from the police so that you can make it to work. And sometimes your biggest concern is making sure you’re not separated from your child. And sometimes your biggest concern is not losing an employment license. And I hate the idea of lawyers representing cases; lawyers should represent people and should be able to fight for what matters most to the person you’re supposed to be fighting for. So I had started this program, which you mentioned at the top, called Partners for Justice, which is a program designed to help public defenders across the country expand their service capacity, and also to create a great job for new professionals, usually folks who share, have lived experiences and identities with the communities we serve. And I’m sort of trying to be a felony trial lawyer and run this quickly-growing program to expand Public Defender Services across the country. And I realized I wasn’t going to be able to keep doing felony trials. I thought, the next time I get sent out to a felony trial, I’m toast. Luckily, at that point, I came into contact with what was then the Justice Collaborative, which is an advocacy organization doing really, really interesting work on a number of issues that all kind of related to the thing that I’m most fixated on, which is the intersection of the law and the social safety net. I had taken a position with them, which wonderfully enabled me to unify both sides of my life: My interest in policy and in advancing smarter solutions. And also my own work, my own nonprofit. That has grown now into The Appeal, which is really cool. Because as my work across the country grows, and I learn more about the challenges that are facing low-income people in jurisdictions across the country, I’m able to bring that back to my work at The Appeal, which is unique because it’s a mission-driven reporting organization, a mission-driven journalistic organization that actually lets me leverage my expertise as a defender and as someone who’s working on defense-related issues across the country, [that] informs my work on Appeal Live. So I get to talk about stuff I care about deeply that impacts my clients from a perspective of learning and policy change, [and] that’s really, really cool. That’s how I got here. And I feel very lucky to be here and sort of undeserving.
Josh Hoe
I don’t know why you feel undeserving, but Alana what do you think, what do you have to say?
Alana Sivin
Well, I was just gonna say that I always feel so lucky to hear about Emily’s story and all the work you’ve done, and I feel unworthy to be sharing virtual space with you.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Oh, just stop, I feel the same way about you. We can’t do this the whole show; people are gonna think we’re too obsessed with each other.
Alana Sivin
I mean, we are.
All right, let me calm down. So it’s funny. Every time somebody asks me how I got where I am now, I think there’s so many different parts, that every time I tell it a little bit differently. So I’ll just go with what I’m thinking at the moment. I also started up as a public defender, and I loved that work. I mean, it was super, I loved getting to know the people that I was representing, and sort of being able to problem solve the same way that Emily was talking about. But I think it was also at the same time really heartbreaking day by day to see how, one day you appear in front of the right judge who is receptive to a certain argument, and the person you’re representing goes free, but then the next day, you have a very similar situation, but with a different judge, and that somebody is locked up and separated from their family, and their whole life deteriorates because of that. And so seeing how random that process was, was really frustrating, and to be honest, emotionally taxing. And so I knew I really cared about this work, but wanted to address it in a way that would make it so that it’s a little bit – I don’t know – how this system can be more equitable. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but to address it at a systemic level, all of the inequities at a more of a systemic level. And so I specifically started looking for jobs in the policy world and I’ll say also that when I was looking for those jobs – prior to being a public defender, and going to law school – I was a teacher. I taught for a year before law school, thinking that might be what I wanted to do long-term. And I ultimately decided not to do that for many of the same reasons, which was that I saw this institution – in that case, it was public education – that responded to crises with this very punitive approach. And I saw the same exact thing happen in the legal system. And funny story, when I first entered the school that I taught at – kind of a side note, I promise – the teacher who I was teaching with, who was considered, or the first teacher I was teaching with, who’s considered one of the best teachers there – gave me a book on how to manage a classroom, and the book drew from broken windows policing. In a school that was mostly black and brown, I was one of the only teachers who spoke Spanish at school. And I remember later in life, connecting that we have all of these institutions that respond to people from the time that they are children, and specifically black and brown people, in this really punitive approach, rather than just looking at people as human beings. And that turned me off to teaching specifically, but also planted this seed in my head that we have so many systems that are supposed to be helping people that just are doing the exact opposite. And I saw that same thing when I was a public defender. And so that all led me to want to pursue a career in policy and so I started looking for policy jobs, particularly in the criminal legal system. And I found this job at the New York City Council where I was the counsel to the Criminal Justice Committee. Basically the way I always describe this is like, if you’ve ever watched a government hearing, there’s normally somebody who’s asking all the questions to the agencies. And then there’s the person next to that person who’s passing them notes, whispering, you know, that sort of thing. I was the person passing the notes and whispering. I worked on different pieces of legislation as well at the city level having to do with jails and incarceration, helped to negotiate a lot of really great bills that I think, I hope, moving forward will be implemented in a way that will do a lot of good work for New York City. And then this past summer, when all the protests started to happen, following the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I saw how government was moved by protest, and by outside forces coming in and demanding changes in a way that even working within government didn’t have that same influence. And so that made me want to stay in the policy world, but at a different end; I wanted to be the pusher not the insider. So then I started looking for organizations that would do that sort of thing. And I came on to what was at the time The Justice Collaborative to do policy work. And then it’s kind of funny, a few months in it switched to The Appeal, which has been really cool. And so you know, they had Emily and I host this show The Count, where we talked a lot about the election. And now we’re doing The Appeal Live, where we get to push on these issues in a way that I’ve never done before, which is through media and through storytelling, and it’s using a lot of the same skills that we used as public defenders, but doing it in a way that I think pushes on policy change – or not policy change – but brings attention to different changes in policy that should be made. So that’s my long-winded story.
Josh Hoe
I also went to public school, and all the public schools I went to were majority black and brown folks. And I actually got a really good education. But that was many decades ago. What do you think, having been a teacher – so much when we talk about criminal justice stuff starts when people are young – what if anything can you summarize that you learned from that process about what we get wrong? I would love to hear it Alana.
Alana Sivin
I think there are two parts of it; one is that we’re so focused on – at least – so the public school where I taught, it was a charter school. And it was one of the charter schools that I think was, many said, a model of what public education should look like. So I came in really excited to work there. But I saw that their metrics of success weren’t about developing human development, they were more about testing. And I think that created an environment that was sort of, I don’t know, it kind of felt like a military for kids. I think that was hard. So I think that’s one. And I think the other is again, the punitive approach that we take to children’s education. And I think, particularly when we see how black students face school suspension, at way more disproportionate rates than white students. And that’s a problem. And it instills early on this dynamic between – and by the way, most teachers, at least at the school that I was at – the majority of the teachers were white. And so it instills this really ugly dynamic, where you have students who are dealing with all sorts of problems, [and] rather than actually have their problems being addressed, they’re suspended, or sometimes we have cops in schools, who are automatically criminalizing students. So I think that’s a huge problem in the education system, where you have police officers who are in schools, police officers in schools, and also teachers sort of policing students in a way that’s not adequate. And I don’t ever want to say anything bad about teachers, because teachers are wonderful people, and I have so many teachers in my family. But I also think that there’s not always the part – partially because there’s such a focus on testing and all those other things – there’s not really an impetus to address the whole student and instead, to resort to these punitive measures, and that is only exacerbated when we see police officers in schools as well, who, because of the way, how we know policing works in a racist manner that affects black students more than it affects white students, it then ends up fueling the school-to-prison pipeline.
Josh Hoe
Emily, you said earlier that it was mission-driven work that you’re doing. For those who might not be familiar with the publication, what is The Appeal and what is the mission that drives the work?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Essentially, our goal is I say mission-driven. But I think that from a journalistic lens, what we’re really talking about, in a certain sense, is better coverage. As your listeners may or may not know, most of the issues we cover relate back to the criminal legal system, and other forms of shared vulnerability relating to the social safety net, because to my mind, and I think in our organization’s view, it’s really all intimately connected. One example I might pull out is that we have been covering transit, recently, cops on transit, equitable fares or free transit options. And to me as a public defender, I’ve represented so many people who had police contact, because they were not able to pay a fare. And they’re choosing to take the bus without a ticket to get to work or to get to school or a necessary medical appointment because they had no choice and [they] got arrested, and in some cases assaulted, because of inequitable fare choices on the part of a jurisdiction. So when we’re covering fare equity, when we’re covering cities’ choices about how they charge for their transit, or don’t, or whether they put armed police officers on public transit, we’re doing it with a lens that is deeply informed about the fallout into other seemingly unrelated areas, such as the criminal legal system. The reason I point this out is historically – I’m sure you’ve heard the term “if it bleeds, it leads”, right? So the reason for that is that back in the days of paper newspapers competing for eyeballs and competing for people’s, I don’t know, nickels, or whatever it cost to buy a newspaper in those days, newspapers knew that they would sell more papers, if they had the goriest details of incidents of harm in their pages. How do you get the gory details? Well, you build really, really close relationships with police. So then you have the roots of this system of journalists relying heavily on what I would now term propaganda, but which – we can call it police spokespeople, police information, as they’re sourcing – so you get this habitual practice of the media relying on police and prosecutors, in order to drive how a story is covered, accepting their information, uncritically I think. The modern-day manifestation that stands out to me the most is officer-involved shootings. Really, how is the officer involved? Would you please tell me more about this officer’s nebulous involvement?
Josh Hoe
Maybe by pulling the trigger?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Maybe by killing? It’s hard to talk about this stuff, because
Josh Hoe
There’s so much of it going on.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
There’s so much of it. And we are so awash in it, and it is so painful. And, you know, I’m just sorry, taking a minute to encounter the conflict of, we’ve got to talk about it. But I also know for a lot of people listening to this, it’s really traumatic to talk about it. So I think The Appeal is an effort to do better. You’ll notice that a lot of the people who work here are former public defenders. And that’s really cool. There’s also a lot of legit journalists working here and doing a great job of being journalists. But I think expertise in the sources who are often ignored: my former clients, people living in the community, people impacted by police violence, people living in jails and prisons, people whose families are incarcerated in jails and prisons, people who have experienced the harm of the criminal legal system, platforming people who are so often ignored in common media practice. And doing that in a way that’s not just for the sake of platforming people – which is, by the way, inherently good in and of itself – but also to show that we can do better coverage when we build better relationships with the community we’re trying to cover. I think a lot about Aaron Morrison, who used to work at The Appeal and is now at the AP, and he talks about how you can’t just be Aaron, the reporter who shows up. When something happens, you’ve got to be Aaron, who was at the community barbecue, the last six barbecues that were had, who everybody knows, [that’s] the way you build relationships. And the way you build trust is by doing the kind of reporting that prioritizes people harmed by public systems, and builds relationships and covers their story and their truth, rather than just relying on like the usual “copaganda”, and prosecutor press releases. And I do think we’re starting to see that our organization and its mission are having an influence. We’re trying to help create an America where stability and dignity are within everyone’s reach. And I think other news organizations are trying to head in that direction, and are doing a better job stepping back from “copaganda” and from officer-involved shooting. But think about how the George Floyd narrative was covered. When it first happened, the press release that came out, we all saw that go around the internet, the level of inaccuracy that has infected the media, when the media doesn’t actively try to push back against police and prosecutor narratives and in other forms the narratives of the most powerful. So that was the longest way of answering your question. I’m so sorry.
Josh Hoe
You started off though with kind of a business model lens, you said that, “if it bleeds it leads” happened because of the need to sell papers. What has changed? What have you been able to see change that’s allowed The Appeal to do a different variety of reporting in a time where the economics of news are – the easiest way I could put it – are fraud. Do you all have any thoughts about that?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
We’re a nonprofit, we’re not a for-profit news organization. So we’re not hoping anyone will pay us for our coverage. We’re funded by a series of grants. And our grantmakers are given fairly realistic expectations about what we’re gonna . . . this is an organization made up of public defenders, like how cantankerous you can expect us to be.
Josh Hoe
But you do still have to compete in that environment to some extent?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Yes, absolutely. And I think breaking stories and providing – I think one of our biggest values is not just like, obviously, all news organizations are competing to break stories. But I think that for us competing to have really great insight and framing and access to experts who can provide phenomenal background on the issues we’re trying to cover. I mean, my mission right now is no jargon – we’re covering really complex issues, niche policy that people don’t usually think about, but it’s actually massively influential in people’s lives. And I think breaking that down in a way that’s really really simple. I think that The Appeal Live breaking this down in conversations is the point, which is a really tight summary version of some complex issues. It’s intended to create value for ordinary people so that they can get a really good handle on these topics that are unsexy, but deeply important. How great to have unsexy, but deeply important, is definitely in the heartland and what we’re covering here. I think that’s really important. That’s a form of value competition, for sure.
Josh Hoe
Alana you came from the background of public defender, and then going into policy work and you’re a former teacher. How did coming from that perspective change the way you look at journalism and what you’re doing at The Appeal?
Alana Sivin
I think it’s interesting for me, it’s really interesting, because I came from this place where I think I’ve worked as somebody who has tried to push the needle in all different sorts of ways. And I’ve had to be really strategic about how I do that. So at each stage of my career, I’ve had to do that a little bit differently. As a public defender, it’s really clear; you’re getting people out of jail, everybody knows that’s your motive, you gotta do it, and you get to do it with full force. You don’t hide it; you are here to free people from jail. The job is not simple, but the mission is, and then I think, working in government, you know, I personally have views that have been informed by being a public defender, and I made it my mission within government to make sure that those who didn’t have that perspective could learn from the experiences I have had and learn from the experiences of the people who I represented, and was still in contact with. And so now working at The Appeal, I actually came in to do advocacy work to some extent, and then that changed, of course, but I still think it’s had very similar power, because for me, I’ve taken it as choosing the stories that need to be told. Because, obviously as a journalist, advocacy work isn’t necessarily what we’re doing. And that’s not something that we do; but telling the stories, I think in itself is something that has a really huge impact, kind of like how Emily was saying: making sure that we tell the stories that are maybe boring to somebody who isn’t entrenched in this world, but really important. For example, a little bit earlier this year, we made it a point to tell a lot of the stories of people who are on death row. Something that we learned from that, I think, was that there are a lot of folks in this country who aren’t sympathetic to people on death row. But there are also people who are, on both sides of the aisle. And that was something that I think even just as choosing to tell those stories, and choosing to tell them on air like they were closing statements, I think that in itself is really powerful. And so that’s sort of the lens that I’ve taken it through, because I do come from an advocacy background and I’m not advocating here, but [instead] taking the opportunity to tell the stories that need to be told. I don’t know if that answered your question.
Josh Hoe
I know neither of you are technically long-term journalists, but you do work in the media in this different format. And you raise an interesting question to me, which is this notion that reporting is supposed to be objective and unbiased. And then there’s another perspective, which is that there really is no such thing as that. And in the attempt to present objectivity, a lot of times you are taking a policy position. So I wonder how you wrestle with that, as people who are working in this area, and where you come down on how you choose stories and tell stories without taking a position or being part of the story.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I can say – much like you would expect a lawyer to do, I can slightly dodge your question while answering it.
Josh Hoe
That does sound very, very, very legalistic.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Look at me being sneaky and telling you about it as I do it. No, I think there’s what Alana and I do, and there’s what The Appeal does more broadly. And I think that it’s very important to differentiate these things. I mean, our reported work is great reporting, it’s original, great reporting. We cover a lot of under-covered local stories that have national resonance, and we connect the dots and things that are happening across jurisdictions and have amazing sourcing and the reporters who are working at The Appeal – I say reporter, because my grandfather was a journalist, and he really liked to be called a reporter – but I think these days, I gotta say journalists, the journalists at The Appeal are real journalists, and doing incredible coverage that we hope will get in front of decision-makers and opinion leaders and, they will use that unbiased coverage to pay attention to stuff that they might not have heard about otherwise, or get information they might not have seen otherwise, on Appeal Live. And in our opinion, or commentary, or explainer zone, I think you’re getting a really different type of communication; very often our live shows are covering ideas that I think are awesome. And it’s pretty clear, you can tell, that I think that this idea is awesome. And sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes I’m interviewing someone with whom I disagree deeply. And I’m trying to push really hard on stuff that I feel people should know about in thinking about these issues. So I don’t want to claim that a lot. and I are these perfect, unbiased paragons of journalism. We’re doing an interview show, where I think often we have a perspective, and we’re forthright about that. And it’s pretty clear. And I think people – just like any commentary, or interview show – I think that people can engage with that. And it provides a different kind of insight, or a different kind of take on policy ideas. So our work – as you know – on The Appeal Live, and what The Appeal is doing more broadly, are not identical. I think we’re a really meaningful part of the conversation. But I wouldn’t want to undersell the importance of the very traditional journalism that’s happening – traditional in the best way – the journalism that’s happening at The Appeal.
Josh Hoe
Earlier, we were talking about how often you see, for instance, on the major networks, the main sources for any criminal justice story being prosecutors and police. And that can appear to be very objective, but it certainly presents a point of view, does it not? I guess the question becomes: is it possible to be objective in reporting, in your opinion, or is it always – I kind of feel like it’s somewhat always – from a point of view?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Well, it’s the point of view of who you’re talking to. You’re getting – police and prosecutors have a strong perspective. And if those are the only people you’re talking to, no matter how unbiased the journalist might be, their coverage will be biased because they have very heavily biased sources. And I think this mistake, that governmental agents are not biased – speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time with those governmental agents – they’re super-biased and they have an agenda and they sometimes have a reputation for untruth. And I think that to the extent the media is relying on poor sourcing and poor, biased sources, the coverage can end up biased no matter how great the journalist is, and is trying to be unbiased.
Josh Hoe
So Alana, how have you tried – Emily talked just a little while ago about platforming people that aren’t traditionally platformed – are there other ways that you’ve been working to try to change the narrative around what’s 50 years of tough on crime politics and language surrounding the stories about crime and punishment?
Alana Sivin
I think picking who we decide to interview is huge, right? We’ve had a lot of people on the show who are advocates, or who have themselves been impacted by the criminal legal system, who have been incarcerated and their family. Also, we’ve seen a lot of jurisdictions where, for example, deep progressive, decarceral district attorneys are being given a lot of negative feedback, I guess, from the typical sort of tough on crime types. And that’s dominated a lot of the media, I think, and we’ve tried to do the job of getting those prosecutors on our show, to talk to dispel all of those myths about what progressive prosecution is, or what decarceral prosecution is, and why it doesn’t make sense to go back and operate in this Minority Report kind of way. So, as an example, I think a really positive example of this, is the work that’s being done in San Francisco with Chesa Boudin. There’s a big tech community out there who has some things to say about him, and who have unfortunately blamed him for the things that are out of his control, to be quite honest. And having him on the show to talk about the real roots of crime and the responsibility of his office, and the importance of making sure that we’re not operating in this way, where we decide to just lock everybody up, in an attempt to avoid all sorts of crime that would happen. Because when you do that, you’re incarcerating people, completely ruining people’s lives, because there’s a slight chance that if you do so crime won’t happen. And we also know that that’s just not the case.The numbers don’t show that you incarcerate more people and crime goes down. That’s one example, where we see how the narrative has been warped in one direction, and [we] make sure that we’re picking people who can tell the other side of the story and giving them a platform on the show.
Josh Hoe
In my research for this, I noticed that both of you have done a ton of stories on The Appeal Live on police reform. And oddly enough, all the usual sources seem to be kind of both obsessed with the idea that alternatives to the police is a terrible idea, but also totally obsessed with talking about it all the time, which seems a little strange to me. You have recently done stories on potential alternatives to policing in Florida, California, Phoenix, Austin, Oakland, and even Durham, North Carolina. How could this be possible? Why is this discussion happening in so many communities, given the national narrative about how it’s a terrible idea, etc? And what have you learned from that reporting on the potential for a reduced police footprint?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
So this goes to something I think about a lot, and really, really frustrates me about our field, in criminal law, which is that if you have somebody making you a vaccine, you want that vaccine to be based on science and testing and evidence and experts. You don’t want whatever guy is standing behind the 7-11 to tell you how he feels about these vaccine ingredients, and then go based on that. But in criminal law, that’s exactly what we do. We go to the guy behind 7-11. [We ask] how do you feel about police? Do they make you feel good? Do they make you feel scared? By the way, we only talk to white guys behind 7-11s. And we do things that tend to make privileged people feel safer, and we punish things that tend to make people feel scared or angry. And we don’t think about – and this is across the board – this is not just in policing. This is in sentencing. This is in prosecution. This is in all the ways in which we respond to harm in our society, [they] are ways that [according to] the evidence are likely to cause more harm, right? What is prison but trauma, isolation, lack of opportunity? You’re robbing someone of years of their life and their future; that is not going to make that person more likely to succeed fruitfully when they come home to their community. Now, every last policy choice says the same thing. It’s all about anger and fear, and not about fostering success or public safety. I give this very long introduction because I think that the reason we’re talking about alternatives to police is because we’re finally at an evidentiary tipping point in our society where no matter how unaware of what black and brown communities are experiencing people might have been, it is now impossible to ignore the extreme level of violence police carry into black and brown communities. And you know it is impossible to ignore the constant stream of harm and trauma and death that is coming from this American institution. So if we were acting based on evidence, if bus drivers were killing people at this rate, we would not have bus drivers in the field anymore.
Josh Hoe
And it’s not just killing people. It’s also that a lot of the research suggests that they don’t do a particularly great job at solving crime either, right?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Exactly! Homicide clearance rates, rape clearance rates . . . police are failing at the things we want them to do the most, and they are causing a lot of harm in the things they actually do the most of; when you look at what they actually do, a lot of it’s low-level stuff. It’s dogs barking and noise complaints, trespassing, [and] cops show up and do harm. And so I think it’s actually really, really sensible, that communities who are ready to make policy choices based on evidence, expert ideas, who are ready to be smarter, are moving towards solutions that reduce the amount of contact between community members and armed police officers. And alternatives to police are a way to diminish contact and diminish opportunities for police to do harm. The only time you’ve got people railing against it, is when people aren’t thinking very hard about it, or when it’s not being explained well. Or people think that you don’t get to call 911 anymore, and no one will save you if something bad is happening in your house, you’re alone. It’s not the case, most of these [alternative] programs are routed through 911, where you get a better, more expert person showing up at the scene who’s more likely to keep you safe, and not hurt anybody else. And that’s really cool. It’s treating criminal law and public safety more like science and medicine. And I appreciate that.
Josh Hoe
Alana, you’ve done a lot of this reporting, too. What were your thoughts?
Alana Sivin
What I found to be really interesting is that in a lot of the alternative response programs that we’ve covered across the country, a common thread is that a lot of them originate out of communities knowing how to keep themselves safe. And I think that’s a result of the fact that police for so long, particularly in black and brown communities, have not kept people safe. So people have had to turn to each other and develop other sorts of mechanisms to do that. And so despite this national fear-mongering narrative that’s out there, people know better because they’ve been living this experience. And so I think that’s the answer I have to your question of how is it that all of these programs are happening, despite all the negative coverage of quote-unquote, “defunding the police” nationwide? That’s exactly it, because people have known for years that our model of policing isn’t working, it’s never worked, and that we have to start something new if we’re actually going to have a safe community.
Josh Hoe
So here’s the thing, in terms of recidivism – when people are let out of prison or jail – the first time someone does something to recidivate, everyone points out whatever caused the person to get out and says, Oh, see what happened, even though that’s out of context. And they don’t look at, for instance, the comparison of the amount of recidivism before reform, and the amount of recidivism after reform, or what exactly recidivism means and things like that. It seems to me in these programs, there’s a real kind of risk, a hazard that, you’re going to go to an alternative to policing, someone in the alternative form of policing is going to get hurt, and then everyone’s going to point at it and say, I told you so. It’s kind of classic Willie Horton-ism. Do you have any thoughts about how . . . in the past, I wouldn’t say our movement has been particularly good at being ready for those moments. And I know you all aren’t necessarily movement people in the sense that you’re working with The Appeal, but do you have any thoughts about how we can be more ready for what’s going to happen in the aftermath of those kinds of things than we were, for instance, after bail reform in New York. A lot of people, it seems like they got caught somewhat flat-footed by the harsh reactions.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I think what drives me crazy here is that I mean, you’re right about our side. I’m gonna put my Partners for Justice hat on so that I can be . . .
Alana Sivin
I’m gonna put on my former public defender hat.
Josh Hoe
I’m not trying to bring you, you know, bring you into the fold necessarily, but you know . . .
Emily Galvin-Almanza
It drives me nuts that we had three instances of police killing every day during the Derek
Chauvin trial, right. And there was not a reckoning, again, about the institution of policing, any more than there has been a reckoning since last summer. But you’re right about our side being really really bad at combating this narrative of you made a loosey-goosey change and now the crimeing is worse; it’s just really bad at responding to that.
Josh Hoe
That sounded just like a headline I’ve read before.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I’ll hand it off to Alana, but look at, here’s the numbers from 2019. In 2019 police killed 999 people in America. When you look at the number of officers who were killed on the job in the course of some sort of like felonious entanglement – in that year – 48. So by the numbers, police are much more dangerous to people than people are to police. Not that the police aren’t people, but you know, to civilians, police are more dangerous to civilians, by far, than civilians are to police. And fighting back against Willie Horton-ism, and sort of rhetorical, overblown – I hate the word hysteria, because it’s super-gendered but that’s the word that’s coming to me right now – hysteria about safety. To me, the only thing to do is to route back to the numbers and what we know, based on data, whether we’re getting safer or not. Police, I would really caution journalists, when they’re listening to police talking about whether crime is up. I mean, there’s all sorts of data that we take for granted. Well, the police said crime is up. So crime must be up. No, take another look; actually, very often police tell you crime is up when it’s flat, or in fact, going down across many areas. So I think we have to have really rigorous data in here. That’s my answer.
Alana Sivin
So two things I have to say. First of all, I 100% agree, when it comes to data. And I think particularly in New York, this was so frustrating, because the response that you talk about is exactly what happened, that there were rollbacks to bail reform because of all of the negative press. But the thing is, there was no connection between violence and the release of people from jails after bail reform was implemented. And even the New York Post at some point did a review of the 528 shooting incidents from the start of the year to the end of June. And only one person who had been released due to bail reform was involved in one, or had been charged with the shooting. And that was according to the NYPD’s own data.
Josh Hoe
They’re still saying it despite that, which is crazy.
Alana Sivin
Right. and the thing, too, is that if there is a rise in crime during a pandemic – duh – people are poor, people are sick, people are suffering.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
People are trapped in the house with each other.
Josh Hoe
The two big crimes that are up are homicide and domestic violence. Yes. If you put people in the house together for a lot longer, you know, that have a tendency toward abuse and haven’t that therapy, yeah there’s a lot, a lot of things that can go wrong, that’s for sure.
Alana Sivin
Right. And what we focus on at The Appeal, and you know, if you’re somebody who’s been following The Appeal for a long while, well, it hasn’t been around for that long. But for as long as it’s been around, you probably noticed that there’s sort of been this shift from – we definitely cover mostly criminal legal issues – but we also cover a lot of things having to do with the social safety net. And I think the reason we do that is because this is a perfect example. We’re in a pandemic, and many places – throughout the pandemic – have seen some rises in crime. But that’s because of the failures of our social safety net. That’s not because we’re not incarcerating enough people, because incarceration doesn’t prevent crime. But what would keep people safe? For example, in all the situations you mentioned, what if every person who was stuck at home had access to a counselor? What if everybody was given universal basic income? What if everybody was given health care, all of those sorts of things, then crime would go down. So I think what we try to do with The Appeal is two things: to dispel this myth that reforms in the criminal legal system are going to cause more crime, because the data just shows that that’s not the case. And it wasn’t the case, particularly when I came to New York. And second, also talk about the things that do reduce crime and do create safety and stability for people who have always been thrown into the criminal legal system.
Josh Hoe
It’s been a really tough year for incarcerated people. Do either of you want to talk about what you’ve learned throughout the year and through The Appeal’s reporting about COVID in prison and jails? I like to start with the really narrow questions.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I mean, not just The Appeal. I was reflecting on the fact that a year has gone by, and back in March of 2020, we and I mean, me and you and Alana and everybody else who knows anybody in prison or has ever been in a prison, was talking about how dangerous this was in a space where you cannot socially distance and have no control over your own movements or food or bathroom sharing or medical care. I mean watching a wave of people I deeply respect beg public officials to do the only thing that would actually keep people safe, which is to let people out. And knowing that there’s huge swaths of people who are elderly and sick and vulnerable, or within a few weeks or months of release anyway, or only in there on a parole violation. Looking at New York, where 60% of new prison admissions are for just technical parole violations; someone’s going to prison because they missed a meeting or stayed out past curfew. Key huge numbers of people who could have safely come home.
Josh Hoe
There are multiple people in Michigan who were days away from release and died because of COVID.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
And to me, if the inaction of public officials in that context is not a total dereliction of duty, bordering on – not even bordering on – that is abuse of one’s constituents. That is an absolute dereliction of duty, the degree to which even the most liberal – I’m using that word deliberately – leaders didn’t do anything or didn’t do enough or did it really slowly, so slowly that it didn’t end up mattering. I’m still too angry to ….. Alana you should talk about it, because I’ve got nothing to say other than that it was an absolute human rights crisis that our country failed to deal with.
Alana Sivin
I echo absolutely everything you say. I’m constantly annoyed in New York, because people always talk about this being such a model state and a model city in so many ways. But we saw a lot of our leaders fail here, particularly the District Attorney, I would say, failed here. And our governor, we saw that he had the opportunity to grant a whole host of commutations that he just did not do. We saw that he had opportunities to save the lives of elderly people. And he didn’t do that either. Earlier I wrote an article on this in The Appeal, where we interviewed one woman whose brother died of COVID-19, just a few weeks before his release date, after serving more than 24 years in prison. And he could have just been released earlier, and he would be alive. And so it all comes up again, what does it serve our society to keep someone locked up during COVID, particularly when their release date is approaching? It just completely shows a disregard for the lives of people who are behind bars. And I think, and I think also what COVID has done is to put a magnifying glass on the problems that are already there. And I think we have a huge problem across this country, of throwing people in jails and prisons, and then just pretending they don’t exist and not thinking about their humanity. And I think COVID really did that, or COVID really magnified that, but it was always there. And yeah, I’m definitely disappointed by that response. And I’m disappointed by it now, continually. I continue to be disappointed by it. Now, I will say, in New York City, there was a huge reduction in the jail population. You know it before, I want to say, but at one point during the pandemic, it had reduced by, I want to say at least 1000. But now we’re seeing it creep back up to levels that were higher than they were even pre-pandemic. It’s above 5000 when before the pandemic it was in the 4000s. So I think that has been, I’m just like: can’t you learn your lesson? Don’t you understand that jails are a public health crisis, and that incarcerating people who don’t need to be incarcerated is fatal? and is going to be fatal the next time we have a public health crisis? And so it’s disappointing, for sure.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Also don’t you understand that every single person living in a prison or a jail in your jurisdiction is your constituent? Don’t you understand that their children are your constituents, their loved ones, their family? I mean multiply every person of those 5000 by three or four or more, to calculate the number of your constituents who are impacted by this absolute human rights crisis. Cory Bush visiting her constituents in jail meant a lot to me because I feel like there is just an absolute refusal to recognize the fact that elected leaders represent everyone, whether they like them or not, whether they agree with them or not, whether they’re in jail or not, these are your constituents, and you have a responsibility to, at the very least, make moves to keep them safe.
Alana Sivin
But that’s also why I think voter enfranchisement is so important. Because we basically have allowed it; by not allowing people incarcerated to vote, we make it so that elected leaders don’t listen.
Josh Hoe
I was gonna say that one of my favorite memories is being at the Parnell Facility here in Michigan, and our Lieutenant Governor was giving a speech, and there were prisoners, it was at the facility. And so half of the crowd was incarcerated folks. And he said: I wasn’t elected just to serve as the governor, I was elected to serve as the governor of everybody in the state. And that includes incarcerated people. And it was such a breath of fresh air. And I’m just surprised that has never occurred to anyone else before. I laugh to stop myself from crying really.
Alana Sivin
That’s what we all do every day.
Josh Hoe
You only have a limited number of things you can do to deal with all the sadness of all this. Usually, I ask a question about Willie Horton politics here. But we’ve already had a lot of that discussion. So what can you tell us about some of the work that other people are doing at The Appeal? And then how best can people connect to the larger Appeal ecosystem? How can they find you?
Alana Sivin
We’re on the internet.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
We air the show on Facebook and Twitter, and it’s on YouTube. And we’ve got a website; we’re actually really easy to reach; my DMS are open. We are extremely online. The Appeal is pitchable, but there’s such a horrible glut of stories in our heartland of subject matter about smart policy, but also really horrifying things happening to people at the hands of the state, that sometimes it can be hard to get through the noise, but we do our best to be super-receptive. And like I said, My DMS are open. It’s very easy to reach us.
Josh Hoe
Do you have any stories, in particular, Alana that you’ve seen recently that you thought people should know about?
Alana Sivin
There was recently a story on New York being the first state to end solitary or long-term solitary confinement, which is a really exciting development.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, one of my good friends has worked on that for about a decade. So I’m really happy to hear that.
Alana Sivin
Oh, who’s your friend?
Josh Hoe
Five, do you know Five?
Alana Sivin
I know Five, I mean, not personally, but I’ve definitely seen Five testify and they’re fantastic – back in the City Council days. It’s super-exciting to see that pass. And I think implementation will be something that folks will need to keep a close eye on moving forward, both in New York State and also to see if other places will do something similar. 1
Josh Hoe
I’m also asking people this season if there are any criminal justice-related books, they might recommend to others; do either of you have any current favorites?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Well, how about – so I bet people always give you nonfiction in this category, right?
Josh Hoe
They do. That’s true. Yeah.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Yeah, nonfiction. Okay. So you’ve had plenty of that; everybody’s done the reading for school. That’s great. I think that everybody should read Felon, a book of poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts.
Josh Hoe
What about you, Alana?
Alana Sivin
I’m gonna go with the school reading, which is The End of Policing. It’s sort of required reading for anyone talking about these issues.
Josh Hoe
He [Alex Vitale] was on the show to talk about it. That’s a great book.
Alana Sivin
And he’s just, he’s wonderful, I’ve known him for a while. Those are two great books.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question: What did I mess up? What question should I have asked but did not? It’s kind of the forced humility question. I like to assume that I mess some things up and find out what you all were thinking. To be honest, I used to watch the show Inside the Actor’s Studio. Did you all ever watch that? He always had these set questions. And so at the end, I always have a set number of questions, and he would always rotate some and keep some the same. And this is the one that I’ve always kept the same, because I think it’s good to find out what other people were thinking.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I think you didn’t mess anything up. I would say that one thing I do love to talk about when given the chance is where we’re headed, because even five years ago we were not in a world where ordinary people, who do not work in the criminal legal system, cared this much about the future of criminal legal policy. And I think for all of us who work on this, it’s really important to take a moment to think about where we were five years ago, and how uphill this mountain seemed then, really uphill. And there’s a staggering amount of work to do to dismantle this incredibly oppressive system. But I say – without my Appeal hat on I say, with my Partners for Justice hat on, which is an abolitionist organization – I just think that it’s great to feel the momentum building among people who don’t work with us, or for us, the curiosity among people who want to learn more about this, the ability of media to now platform people who have experienced incarceration, and people who have experienced the impact of the system, and listen less to people like me, and more to people who actually have lived experience. I think that’s phenomenal. So that’s the one thing I want to highlight, which is that we’re living in a different world. And I’m really excited to see the world we’re going to be in five years from now.
Josh Hoe
What a great answer. Do you have any other thoughts, Alana?
Alana Sivin
I was kind of thinking maybe I’ll bring up some New York things.
Josh Hoe
I am from New York City, too.
Alana Sivin
I think something that’s really important to focus on right now. We have that recent ruling requiring people who are incarcerated to be allowed to get vaccinated and staff as well. But we’re seeing that at least among staff, that the number of staff who are getting vaccines in city jails is pretty low, compared to staff at nursing homes and adult care facilities who’ve been eligible for about the same amount of time. And I think considering that jails are settings that are hotbeds for the Coronavirus, it’s pretty concerning. And I’m curious to see why that is. And I think a lot of it – from a lot of the data showing – that a lot of it is vaccine hesitancy, but that is also something that really impacts people who are incarcerated in a really devastating way. So I’m hoping that local corrections, both in the city and statewide, look at that data and figure out ways to combat vaccine hesitancy within jails, because otherwise, I think we could really be looking at some dangerous consequences similar to the ones that we saw around this time last year.
Josh Hoe
I think jails are a really good place to end because we’ve spent so much time, at least I have over the last year, pushing for releases and vaccinations in prisons, that jails often get overlooked. And in a lot of senses they’re the ones most directly put in the communities so yeah, I think that’s a really great point.
Alana Sivin
it wasn’t as poetic as Emily’s but . . .
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I’ll bring the rhetoric; Alana brings the substance. This is why we believe we’re made for each other; we just belong together.
Josh Hoe
It does seem like you know . . . I’m reading a book about the band New Order right now. And they kind of famously fell apart, their songwriting duo, and that happens so often; it seems like you all actually really enjoy each other. So that’s great.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
This is until we get famous, and then we’re gonna go on tour, and there’s gonna be drugs and other women.
Alana Sivin
We do have a band name.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
We do! We took it from the comments on our show. Do you want to say the band name, Alana?
Alana Sivin
You made the t-shirts. I feel like
Josh Hoe
You have t-shirts?
Emily Galvin-Almanza
We’re the Demon Rats.
Josh Hoe
Demon Rats!
Emily Galvin-Almanza
People were trying to insult us for our progressive-ness. And they called us demon rats, instead of Democrats. I will say that’s the only non-curse word thing we got called. There were a lot of words being thrown around, which [are] totally cool to say if you’re in the UK but not here. So demon rats was actually a real refreshing change in the name-calling and now we have super-cool t-shirts.
Josh Hoe
I might have to get a t-shirt at some point.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
I would love to send you a Demon Rats t-shirt. I will have more made. You can join the Demon Rats; you can be the drummer if you want.
Josh Hoe
I am a drummer. So that works out very well.
Anyway, thanks so much for doing this. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast.
This was a lot of fun.
Emily Galvin-Almanza
Thank you for having us.
Josh Hoe
And now my take.
Part of the reason I started this podcast was to demonstrate that a formerly incarcerated person could sit at the table with politicians, jurists, and every level of policy expert and have meaningful discussions about our criminal justice system. Part of the project was to create unity, part to prove concept. And I would be lying unless I said that part of it was to prove that I could pull it off. Yeah, I certainly agree that maybe this was presumptuous and certainly egotistical. But it was worth a try and the podcast is still rolling right along today. Regardless, at the end of the day, part of the reason for all of this is that I believe – and I’ve always believed – that formerly incarcerated people can be right at home and fit in and even lead at every possible table. I was really excited to talk to Emily and Alana from The Appeal Live because they are starting to create a news outlet that lives these same values. It is my hope that ultimately, there is a place for abolitionists, formerly incarcerated people, progressive politicians, and activists to have a voice and a platform in the media. I appreciate them and look forward to what is happening on The Appeal.
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