Joshua B. Hoe interviews State Senator Sharif Street about his work on criminal justice reform
Full Episode
My Guest: State Senator Sharif Street
Senator Sharif Street is a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania State Senate who has represented the 3rd district since 2017. In 2018, Street was elected Vice-Chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.
An attorney by profession, Sharif began his public career as a community activist organizing a Town Watch group while in law school. Before being elected Senator, Sharif worked as a staffer for the Pennsylvania Senate, serving as the Chief Legislative Advisor to the Democratic Chair of the Housing and Urban Development Committee and had the primary responsibility for overseeing legislative, housing, environmental and economic development initiatives.
Notes from Episode 107: Sharif Street
Some of the bills we talked about included:
Ending Life w/out Parole in Pennsylvania: BIPARTISAN (BILL ATTACHED)
In PA Life is Life, this includes 2nd Degree Felony murder, hundreds of cases which include men and women who never took a life, but will spend the rest of theirs incarcerated. This site we manage provides great info on why this must end in Pennsylvania: www.passSB942.com
The bill was reintroduced as SB 135: Bill Information – Senate Bill 135; Regular Session 2021-2022 – PA General Assembly (state.pa.us)
Medical Parole (language in progress)
PA’s Compassionate Release is rarely used and demands the incarcerated be at death’s door. However we know people age out of crime and the incarcerated are ten years older physically than their calendar date. COVID has also created increased urgency around ending the warehousing of senior citizen inmates.
Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda – PA State Senate
Decriminalizing Cannabis : BIPARTISAN (BILL ATTACHED)
Under this legislation, possession or use of small amounts of cannabis will never result in jail time. It will instead be reduced to a summary offense and will not result in any driver’s license suspension. The penalty for possession will be a $25 fine for all offenses, and the penalty for consumption in public will be a $100 fine for all offenses. This legislation is based on local ordinances already in place in Pittsburg, Philadelphia and Erie.
Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda – PA State Senate
The two books Senator Street suggested were “The Miseducation of the Negro” by Carter Godson Woodson and “Making Ideas Matter: My Life as a Policy Entrepreneur” by Rep. Dwight Evans.
Full Transcript:
Josh Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 107 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 State Senator Sharif Street about his work bringing criminal justice reform to Pennsylvania. Senator Sharif Street is a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania State Senate who has represented the Third District since 2017. In 2018, Street was elected Vice-Chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. An attorney by profession, Sharif began his public career as a community activist organizing a town watch group while in law school. Before being elected Senator, Sharif worked as a staffer for the Pennsylvania Senate, serving as the Chief Legislative Advisor to the Democratic Chair of the Housing and Urban Development Committee, and had primary responsibility for overseeing legislative housing, environmental, and economic development initiatives. Welcome to the DecarcerationNation podcast, Senator Street.
Senator Sharif Street
Thank you, glad to be here with you.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same first question, it’s kind of the comic book origin story question. As the son of a former mayor and nephew of a state senator, you were raised in politics. But how did you get from where you started to where you were running for office yourself? And more importantly, how did you get invested in criminal justice issues along the way?
Senator Sharif Street
Absolutely. So it’s interesting, the origin story for me was being the son of a guy who’s selling hot dogs, and an uncle who was doing the same, and they were protesters and activists. And so my earliest memories are ….. about standing out and protesting and fighting for social justice. Over the course of their lives, they moved from activists to elected officials. My father – by the time my father actually became the mayor, I was a grown man, married with a child. So my formative years are his journey, my father’s journey from a guy born on a dairy farm who moves into the city, becomes an activist for social justice up to being mayor, which happened, like I said, in my early adulthood. And that activist stream about fighting for social justice, the idea that we’re pushing to make the system better, is incredibly important to why I’m doing what I’m doing. When I went to law school, and even while an undergrad, part of my focus was having an education that would allow me to understand the system so I can improve it. I always had a yearning to make the system better. But I grew up in North Philadelphia, a community that had been disproportionately impacted in a negative way by the criminal justice system. I grew up knowing people who – my first time I visited a state correctional institution, it wasn’t because I was a lawyer, or a legislator wanting to learn how to reform the system. It was because I was visiting a friend or relative, it was actually a relative, the first time, a relative who was incarcerated. First time I became knowledgeable about gun violence was because I knew people in the community that were shot. And by 12, I’d seen someone be shot. So both sides of it; both the perpetrators and the people who were …. and I came to understand at a very early stage that the people who were doing the shooting and the people getting shot and the people who were using drugs and the people were selling drugs, were in many cases parts of the same community and in some instances, the same families. And so systemic change was needed. I worked for Senator Kitchen while I was in law school and who I’ve known most of my life on an externship through the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and really came to have some real appreciation for the kind of good we could make in the legislative process. And you know, I ran for office and even eventually convinced the people of the Third District to elect me Senator, and then was able to take the challenges of fighting for what is right and reforming a system that desperately needed it to the legislature, and got there and immediately began to work on the issues and educate people on all sides. I worked with the former Senator Stewart Greenleaf who was a Republican on a lot of these issues. We toured the state and talked about criminal justice reform. We worked with longtime advocates, like my colleague, Senator Anthony Hardy Williams on the Democratic side who I’m working with on parole and probation reform now, but I never forgot talking to the activist groups, but also the churches and mosques and synagogues about it, understanding that we needed the full gamut of community stakeholders to get things where they are. And I believe we’ve made some progress. But we’ve got a long way to go.
Josh Hoe
And just out of curiosity, do you remember your first “roll up your sleeves” legislative fight? And what did you learn from that you can share with people who might just be starting out in political activism?
Senator Sharif Street
I guess my first roll-up my sleeves legislative fight as an elected official would have been when the Governor was trying to close SCI, was trying to close the state correctional institution; eventually, SCI Pittsburgh was closed. And I noticed that there were Democrats who were against the Governor and who actually wanted to keep [the prison open], they didn’t think we should be trying to reduce the prison population, because they had people in their districts that worked in prisons and wanted prisons to remain open. And there were Republicans like Senator Greenleaf, who were allies. And what I found is that you have to meet each legislator and talk to them about their issues where they are. And then there were folks who hadn’t considered the fact that there were other alternatives to just subsidizing their workforce by putting prisons there, that maybe we could create other kinds of productive jobs, and they hadn’t considered the humanity of the inmates. So I found that there was real value in talking with everyone, not making predisposed assumptions about where people stood on the issues. And working together, we could get there. And ultimately, we did; we were able to close that correctional institution. And we’re able to redirect a lot of that money into education, reversing what many have called the school to prison pipeline; we’re now sending resources from corrections to education, and sort of reversing the flow of that pipeline.
Josh Hoe
And do you have any advice for people starting out in terms of how they should get involved, or how they best could get involved, or what they should know about what you learned from that process?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, I will say to a person who’s not elected: you got to be prepared to stand up for what you believe in and talk to people in your community about your issues. Once you get elected, you got to do the same thing. But then you’re going to be working with people who were elected by different people, come from different communities, [you must] understand their values and their perspectives, even when you disagree, even if you disagree with them. And the person you disagree with on this issue, or one issue today might be a person you’re able to find common ground with on another issue tomorrow. With each issue you’ve got to cobble together 26 votes if you’re in the Senate and 102 in the House to get it to the Governor’s desk. And that may not be the same individual on each issue. So be prepared to be open-minded and talk with people from different perspectives and understand that while you’re going to fight for what you believe in, trying to win on every issue, there may be different coalitions to help you get there. And you shouldn’t take it personally when people disagree with you on issues, but just understand that that’s where they stand on this issue. And you agree to disagree and fight hard, fight hard to win on that issue. And maybe you’re working together on another issue.
Josh Hoe
I’m glad you brought that up. Where I live in Michigan and where you live in Pennsylvania have similar legislative situations. We both have Republican-controlled Legislatures and Governors from the Democratic Party; despite this, both of our states have been able to get a lot of criminal justice legislation passed over the last several years. What has made this possible in Pennsylvania?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, I think we’ve been able to find middle ground. You know, there are some people, there are lots of Democrats who support criminal justice reform because they believe it to be a civil rights issue of our time. There are other people in the Republican Party who are motivated because they believe it to be a moral issue that their faith tells them needs to be addressed. And then there are other Democrats and Republicans who are interested in this issue because they recognize that it doesn’t make good fiscal sense to have large chunks of the population warehoused in cells. And then there are other people who recognize that mass incarceration has not made us a safer society. We are by far the largest per capita prisoner of people in the United States of any nation, but we are nowhere near the safest country in the world. And so people recognize we need to re-examine this and look at this differently. I think different people get there for different reasons. But it’s been good that we’ve been able to talk to people about all those issues and help bring people together on getting some things done.
Josh Hoe
There’s been a lot of talk about bipartisanship lately, and not always in the kindest of terms. But in both of our states, it’s literally impossible to get anything of substance done without active participation from the Republican Party. How have you been able to find common cause across the aisle during these incredibly partisan times?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, you know, …. on some of my work around marijuana legalization, I’ve got a Republican co-sponsor, the first bill to ever have a Republican co-sponsor. And that is legislation working with Senator Laughlin. And what we found is that there are issues that Senator Laughlin hadn’t thought about. And by having a real dialogue, we’re able to talk about [them], he hadn’t considered the fact that although usage of marijuana by folks that are white, and black and Latino is roughly the same, blacks and Latinos are four to five times more likely to encounter law enforcement, nationally. Well, when he realized that, there was a fundamental sense of his fairness that was triggered, that folks who are conducting themselves in similar ways should receive similar outcomes. Then he talked to his son, as part of a younger generation, who explained to him that you could already get cannabis. And then in fact, if we legalize it, we would be able to at least regulate and control what people are getting. And so that’s how he got there, because I talked to him about some issues. And then he went and talked to people around him that he trusted and believed and they verified that what I was saying was true. And then the economics of it make sense. He’s in an area that needs to grow. I’m in an area that needs to grow. On other issues like on criminal justice reform, or reforming the probation and parole system, I talked with Senator Camera Bartolotta, and she was willing to work with folks like me and my colleague, Senator Anthony Williams, to look at how we could address some of the issues around out of control, probation and parole. She was concerned both about the cost structure, and also about the fairness issues, and I worked with her with groups like Americans for Prosperity, who were concerned about the fact that fiscally, this does not make sense for our country. And so what we’ve been able to find is that, if you really talk to people and have a real conversation, we can educate folks and ultimately find common ground. So I’ve had a lot of success in working with legislators across the aisle on issues as diverse as Presumptive Eligibility for Homecare with Senator Brooks, a conservative Republican from a rural area; Senator Laughlin on marijuana, decriminalization and auto-expungement, and sealing of records of people who’ve had convictions; and with Senator Camera Bartolotta on issues like probation and parole reform.
Josh Hoe
One of the things your state was able to get done was becoming the first state to pass automatic expungement – Clean Slate – for criminal record sealing in the United States. Could you talk a little bit about how that happened?
Senator Sharif Street
The Clean Slate legislation came about because folks were listening to one another. We worked with a lot of stakeholder groups like the ACLU, but also Americans for Prosperity, Cut 50 Reform; they were all involved in the process. And both in the House and the Senate, their coalition included both Democrats and Republicans. In the senate you have folks like my colleague, Senator Anthony Williams, and myself working with Republicans. Then in the House, you had leaders like on the Democratic side, the now Democratic Whip Jordan Harris, who worked with Republicans there, and there were and because we’re able to have people from the east and the western parts of the state. The Republicans and Democrats from urban and rural areas were able to have real conversations, but it wasn’t just with legislators from the House or Senate, it was also with the stakeholder groups who allowed us to go out to the communities and talk to ordinary Pennsylvanians. And what we found was we were able to build some real consensus in the public around it. And that consensus in the public made it a lot more politically palatable for people inside of the legislature to support.
Josh Hoe
You mentioned my friend Whip Harris. He and I joke around about this a lot. But I mention to him pretty regularly that Michigan recently beat Pennsylvania by becoming the first state in the country to do automatic record sealing for some felonies. Whip Harris promises that this could be coming soon in Pennsylvania. Is this something that you’re on board with? Is Pennsylvania going to catch up with us in Michigan soon?
Senator Sharif Street
Absolutely. We’re gonna get there.
Josh Hoe
That’s good to hear. We just finished a year where COVID raged across our country, but in particular, in our prisons and jails. Both of us have worked very hard to address this problem. Can you talk about your attempt to broaden Medical Parole and increase commutation throughout the COVID period?
Senator Sharif Street
Absolutely. So, Medical Parole has been something that we’ve been talking about for a while. And COVID-19 just reinforced some of the issues. One is folks who are eligible for Medical Parole, either because they’re geriatric, or because of severe medical situations, have some of the lowest likelihood of recidivism rates, some of which are like 1%, or 0%; they are actually less likely to commit crimes than the average person in the general public. Secondly, we were looking at it because during COVID, we actually found that the density of people in prisons could actually increase the likelihood that there will be outbreaks and spread. Infamously in California, we saw the prison system and the spread in the prison system as one of the drivers of spread throughout the Commonwealth, throughout the State of California, both inside and outside of the correctional system. So we recognize that was both pragmatic for preserving the health of all Pennsylvanians – those incarcerated and those outside the walls – to reduce prison population and geriatric parole would be a way. The other thing is, while we’re trying to get a new expanded geriatric parole bill, we advocated for expanding use of the accommodation process to get people out. And additionally, we pushed the Governor to do furloughs and release people that way, which he did to some extent. And that didn’t go quite as far as the advocates and I would like but he did do what he thought he could in that space. So it recognized that there is both public fiscal sense in doing it, and there’s also a moral sense, because think about a person who’s only in jail for a fixed period of time and gets COVID and dies, because of the circumstances of their incarceration. That maybe a two-year, three-year sentence, five-year sentence just turned into a death sentence. And that, in and of itself, would be a huge miscarriage of justice.
Josh Hoe
I know, for me, at least, there’s been a lot of frustration and some victories throughout the COVID fight. And for these policies, have you learned anything from that fight that might help us in these crises in the future? How can we best get everyday folks and politicians to care more about the health of our incarcerated brothers and sisters inside?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, I think we need to recognize that what happens in terms of the disease spread and vectors inside of a correctional facility and on the outside are related; that in fact inmates are, from a perspective of disease spread, part of the community. So if you have an outbreak in the correctional facilities, that outbreak, because people are delivering things, people are working in the prisons and going home at night. There is transmission between prison, you know, between people going in prisons and the community. The other thing we know is that the way inmates tend to get initially infected is because someone from the outside brought it in; they’re not traveling anywhere. So we realized that you can have a simple thing of someone working on the outside infecting inmates, causing an outbreak, which causes lots of people who work in the prison to bring the disease outside and the two can create sort of a cyclical effect, where it starts with an initial, maybe lone person on the outside who comes in, spreads disease, which then causes lots of people to have to return to the outside who spread disease. So we needed to educate people that those folks behind the wall, one, they’re people with families and lives and folks who care about their fate; and two, when it comes to disease vectors, it is directly tied to the fate of the communities in which they are housed.
Josh Hoe
We’ve recently seen the start of a bunch of campaigns for what’s called Second Look legislation for the re-sentencing of people with long sentences. And we’ve seen Second Look for crimes committed while someone was a juvenile recently passed in the District of Columbia. You’ve been fighting for similar considerations. And in Pennsylvania, what have you proposed and where are you in that fight?
Senator Sharif Street
So for juveniles, the courts have already determined that they have to get a Second Look and they can’t be given life without parole. For everyone else in Pennsylvania, we are advancing legislation. We’ve talked to a lot of stakeholder groups, I think we’ve made some progress. I would suggest that we’ve talked with people, particularly talked with folks who both have family members who were murdered, and family members who are serving life without parole. And those groups are active, they are able to talk to people on both sides of the issue, helping folks find common ground. In Pennsylvania we have some of the peculiarities of a felony murder rule, where you don’t even have to take a life yourself, you could still be subject to life without parole, if you were part of a crime where someone else took the life. And because of some of the peculiarities of our system, let’s say a person would go into a store with merely the intent to rob the store, pull out a gun and ask the clerk to fill the bag. If the clerk were to attack the person who was trying to rob the store, and in the process of defending his or herself in the midst of an attack, the person being robbed, the person’s robbing a store kills the store clerk, well, you might charge that person with Murder One, but because of the provocation and the attack on the store clerk, it goes from not Murder One but Murder Three. But if you’re sitting in a car, you’re involved in commission [without] provocation, in affirmative defense you have to argue that something happened to you to do it. So the person driving the car away was involved in the commission of a crime, there was no provocation, it resulted in someone dying. And therefore because that affirmative defense is unavailable to the person who drives the car away, they actually can get life without parole, while the person who pulls the trigger and takes the life can often get a 25-year sentence. Because that person committed Murder Three , the other person committed murder too. And so that’s been another reason that we said look, we need to give the Board of Probation & Parole a chance to look at all these cases. Another group of people that require, that tend to engender sympathy are women who were convicted of life without parole penalty under Murder One simply because they killed their abusers. And this is before the battered spouse defense was a thing. And we know that there were people who were locked up who would now be not convicted at all, because we have an accepted practice of the battered spouse defense. But before the battered spouse defense became the norm, there were women who were locked up for just killing men who probably would have killed them anyway, their abusers. And so many of them are still doing life without the possibility of parole. So because we have these . . . and then there are people who just made extraordinary transformations, who may have been 19 when they were locked up, and who are now 55 or 60 years old and completely different people and no longer pose a threat to society and in fact, probably could teach people something if they were to be released. Because of the totality of all these circumstances, I think there are more and more Pennsylvanians who would agree that allowing the Board of Probation & Parole to review certain cases and make determinations as to who should be released and who should remain, is a prudent step. And it can save significant money, particularly as older people who are often geriatric can be much more expensive to house.
Josh Hoe
For decades a lot of prosecutors and law enforcement officers have suggested that a sentence is a bit like a promise between the state and the victim of crimes. You talked a little bit about meeting with victims groups. When considering Second Look legislation or things like that, how do we bridge that gap? How do we get to the point where everybody sees that it’s better for the community sometimes to let folks get relief?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, there are a couple of things. One, we put in the legislation provisions – Pennsylvania has Marcy’s Law – so that in any probation or parole hearing there are victims’ rights to participate in the process. Because we passed those provisions under law, those rights would simply be vested in this process as well. Second thing is this; there are groups like Mothers in Charge who are made up exclusively of women who have lost a child to murder, to violence. And Mothers in Charge supports doing this, supports this kind of Second Chance legislation. If you have groups like that who can speak in a very powerful way about it, it makes sense. I’ll tell you I was talking with them and personal testimonials can be really important. Talked to another guy named Will Little who goes around and he teaches emotional intelligence. He talks about how when he was young, he was engaged in negative activity and he took a life. He did, it was not Murder One or Two; he said he was paroled. And after he was paroled, he was working, years later [he] met the brother of the person whose life he took. That guy said that for years he had intended to take Will’s life if he ever met him. But they were able to reach an accord, where they actually, were the brother forgave him. And they now go out and talk about forgiveness and also how to make better choices and how to stop the cycles of violence that happen in communities. And they are another great example of people who are able to go out and talk through and help kids do better. You know, sometimes we have this image of victims as people who were sort of off in white picket fences, off in the suburbs, and the perpetrators of crime living in completely different downtrodden neighborhoods where they go out to commit crime someplace else. But most crime victims are victimized by people who live in their own neighborhoods. And most people who commit crime, commit crime right where they are, in the neighborhoods where they live and work and play. And so the cycles of violence, and sometimes retaliatory violence, are only exacerbated by an overly harsh system. And so finding space to have people have these dialogues, these discussions, and see that the typical victim may be a victim, in one instance, a family member of the victim, or a family member of a person being prosecuted in another. And so victims and what they desire from public policy are not monolithic. And certainly, a large percentage of them recognize the need for criminal justice reform, because they literally have friends and family members who are sitting on both sides of that equation.
Josh Hoe
You mentioned that there’s a prevailing narrative in people’s heads about how, for instance, victims are perceived. I know you’ve done some work on bail reform. And we’ve seen across the country that some of these narratives, these public safety narratives, “tough on crime” narratives tend to grab hold of the microphone, and the public’s attention. How do you think we start to break through with some of the stories like what you’re talking about, when people have been harmed, and people who have harmed folks get together and actually create a different narrative?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, I’ll tell you, on bail reform – and now I digress just for a second – sometimes the right person can create a big microphone – as they can be unfortunately dragged into a situation – for people to pay real attention to it. So I had a constituent of mine who committed some relatively low-level crimes, went to jail for a brief period, was released, and then was on parole. And then because of technical violations of probation/parole, spent almost a decade in and out of the system, when the time for the violations, technical violations of probation/parole far exceeded the original sentence and he was never retried for any new offenses. This constituent sort of brought attention to it nationally about how bad this system was, and it was because he was a talented young man, his name, Robert Rihmeek Williams, this is the name his mother calls him, but in the community, and nationwide, his stage name is Meek Mill. He lives in the neighborhood I’m from, and he’s a constituent and I know him. and his case really pulled attention to when he was re-incarcerated for things like riding a dirt bike or crossing a state line when we knew he was going to do a positive thing for work and resentenced to real jail time, under circumstances where everyone knew he didn’t pose any real harm to society. And what he did was he spoke up and said this is not just that I’m visible because of my music career. But there are many other people in my neighborhood who face the same circumstances who are unknown and unnamed. He helped to create reform along with Jay-Z and others, and he helped bring some real attention to the issue of probation and parole, an issue we’re still working on in Pennsylvania. And so there are sort of celebrity cases where people come from ordinary circumstances but have extraordinary talents. And that causes them to be able to elevate an issue. And, and then there are lots of just regular folks who are working hard to change the narrative, groups like I said, Mothers in Charge, and the ACLU and others who have been talking about these issues and pointing out the need for reform. And I’m pleased that we’ve been able to work with various groups and help to at least inform that there’s a broader narrative. And finally, you know, it’s interesting, I come from a neighborhood where we have the most gun violence, yet I support [Second Chance] legislation. It’s not because I want people to get shot in my neighborhood, but because I realized that reforming the criminal justice system actually makes people less likely to get shot. Because the system, in order for people to have confidence in it, must be perceived to be fair, and it needs to be perceived to be fair by the very people who are most likely to be subject to it. And those are people of color in the inner cities. And many of the reforms we’ve talked about, fundamentally make the system seem more fair to people in those communities.
Josh Hoe
Part of your state, Philadelphia, is right in the middle of a contentious race for District Attorney right now. And I know you probably can’t weigh in too much on that. But one of the main things that are being raised is this spike in homicides that has occurred across the entire country. And for whatever reason, in every different city and every different town, people use that rise in homicides, which seems to be somewhat universal, and attribute it to criminal justice reform that’s particular in each of those places, in each city, in each town. Do you have any thoughts about where we are on that, about how to talk about that and how to message around that?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, I fully support our District Attorney and the reforms that he’s made. I think DA Krasner has done a great job. Not a perfect job, but a great job. And certainly, his reforms were needed. The second thing I would say is this. We know that for the spikes in crime that we’ve seen during COVID, mitigations have been more correlated with poverty, joblessness, and the lack of opportunity than they have anything else, though the way district attorneys choose to prosecute crimes in different cities can vary wildly, from people who were big on “tough on crime”, to DAs who are reformed, the district attorneys that want to make sure that everyone’s treated fairly, rights are respected, and they are considered more progressive. What we’ve found is that crime, if there is an uptick in poverty and will follow, and that an uptick in poverty and despair also creates an uptick in addiction as well. And so those upticks in addiction and poverty are always going to be positively correlated with upticks in crime. And those things are beyond the scope of a district attorney’s job to deal with. And those are some of the kinds of systemic things that as legislators we need to look at, pay very close attention to, because the answers to those questions are more likely to yield us a safer society in the long run than merely locking people up.
Josh Hoe
I think that there’s kind of this feeling that people get upset when they hear that problems are systemic, but a lot of the crisis in prisons, jails, violence, re-entry, all that stuff, is also a crisis in housing, employment, education. What are your thoughts about what government could do to address these systemic problems and how we get to the point where that is what government addresses?
Senator Sharif Street
You know, I couldn’t agree more, we have to start talking about the social determinants of violence. The fact that poverty, lack of access to health care, lack of access to education, post-traumatic stress of other violence, yields more violence; and the untreated, post-traumatic stress of entire communities. Those are things that we can deal with, and it would explain why we have political ebbs and flows in how we approach criminal justice prosecutions, and more “tough on crime” DAs approaches than reform approaches. Yet there is tons of gun violence that happens in big cities nationwide, every year, year in and year out, despite the fact that for many years, all these legislators have given a tough-on-crime approach. You know, the fact that we have district attorneys all over this country who have different approaches for how to approach that crime, it still rises. But when you look at what is positively correlated, things like lack of healthcare or lack of increases in salary, increase in addiction, lack of services, still post-traumatic stress from either violence or other or other indicia of poverty, those things are always positively correlated with rises in crime, no matter whether the district attorney wants to lock everybody up or wants to be as fair-minded as possible. And so if we look at what many of us are calling the social determinants of violence, we can deal with some of the systemic violence. That’s why we have this baseline of murders that occur year in and year out, decade after decade out nationally. We want to address that, not just the spikes, but the baseline; we really do have to start looking at the social determinants of violence.
Josh Hoe
There’s a lot of cynicism about politics right now, for a lot of good and bad reasons. We’ve also seen an awful lot of injustice in our communities, in particular over the last few years, but certainly over decades. We have national politicians, in some cases, apparently uniting around an insurrection. You’re at least approaching running for, potentially running for Senate. What keeps your faith in the political process, running for office, and electoral politics so strong?
Senator Sharif Street
Well, you know, I’ve seen that you can address things in a systemic way through government. And it is a way for people who are ordinary folks without a lot of money to band together and participate in a way to have their voices heard. You know, I went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, which was the capital of the Confederacy. And it really did my heart good to see my fellow Morehouse men energize voters, working with Spelman sisters, our sister school right across the street, with Stacey Abrams organizing people, and with ultimate electing my Morehouse brother, Raphael Warnock, Reverend Raphael Warnock, Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock to the United States Senate, in a place that had been the capital the Confederacy. It showed that we can change. Who would have thought that a black guy and a Jewish guy would have been representing a state that was the capital of the Confederacy in the United States Senate, and be elected on the same day? It says something about the changes that America is making, there’s something about the potential for democracy to grow, as the people who are living in those democracies, ideas evolve. And so I was really pleased with what happened in Georgia. I watched the time in Philadelphia where, you know, a guy who was being harassed by the police for selling hot dogs on the corner with his brother after he moved into the big city from a small farm was able to ultimately be the Chief Executive that hired and commanded those very same police forces. As I watched my father go from hot dog vendor to Mayor and hear stories about him coming off the dairy farm. I’ve seen the power of democracy to take ordinary individuals and elevate them. And I’ve seen the ability folks have systems where we did things like we came together when President Biden brought us together to address COVID-19 and had a government that was able to mass distribute vaccines to get them in all kinds of communities to actually push back the tide of death from COVID. I remember when President Bill Clinton put together empowerment zones and money for affordable housing, in ways that when we watched high rise, public housing developments that were full of crime and were just really, the incubators for social problems become almost transformed communities into suburban-looking houses with little literal picket fences, in the middle of the community, still housing poor people, the same poor people who used to live in the towers. I watched that kind of power and I realized, look, government, when it’s at its best, can be transformative to people’s lives. I was the Chairman of the Board at one time of a drug and alcohol recovery program. And using government funds and dedicated people, we were able to treat 50, help 56,000 people on an outpatient basis a year. That kind of scale, that kind of good, only happens when government is involved and only happens when government is used to empower regular people, and regular people are empowered to take command of their government. So I’m very optimistic, but we got to make sure that we don’t have to do things that suppress the abilities of people to vote and to participate in the system. As long as the system is open and fair, and there is competition in the marketplace of ideas I believe, as Dr. King said, that while the arc of the universe is long, it ultimately bends towards justice, and so do democratic systems in the long run.
Josh Hoe
So now I’m going to give you a tough theoretical question. In a perfect world, what do you think our criminal justice system would look like?
Senator Sharif Street
In a perfect world, our criminal justice system would be fully integrated with excellent schools where you don’t have literacy issues so that defendants would understand their rights. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have people who are committing crimes because of addiction or post-traumatic stress. In a perfect world, judges will be able to fairly distinguish between people who have had a bad day and people who are bad people. In a perfect world, everyone would have access to adequate representation. And the people representing those folks would not be overworked, would have a reasonable caseload, and would be able to provide meaningful representation after serious consultation. In a perfect world, the number of people who are incarcerated will be much, much much smaller. Because in the perfect world the word[s] mass incarceration would not be needed, we would not need to mass incarcerate people. So we live far from a perfect world, but I always tend to think of it – there was a song that I used to like, a hip-hop song. Lauryn Hill talked about “If I ruled the world”, and the first thing it started, they talked about reforming the criminal justice system and legalizing cannabis, and making sure that we had law enforcement officers that people could trust and feel comfortable with. And I’ll tell you – in my perfect world – and the song was simply titled “Imagine”. And so I’ve been trying to imagine a perfect criminal justice system since I was a kid listening to hip-hop. And I’ll tell you what, I’m still trying to imagine it. And now we strive for it every day.
Josh Hoe
Any other favorite hip-hop artists you’d like to shout out? We’ve got Meek Mill, Nas, Lauryn Hill.
Senator Sharif Street
Yeah, I’ll shout out Jay-Z for the work that he’s doing with reform and, of course, local hometown favorite Meek Mill for work he’s doing on criminal justice reform as well. But there are so many people who have spoken up on this issue. And we need people to keep on speaking up. Whether you’re a hip hop artist, a bus driver, a police officer, an elected official, a mayor, congressman, or the President of the United States, we need you to speak up, speak out, let your voice be heard on an issue that’s so important to so many.
Josh Hoe
This year, I’m asking people if there are any criminal justice-related books they might recommend. Do you have any personal favorites?
Senator Sharif Street
You know, there are so many books written on criminal justice reform.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, I end up having to read all of them almost!
Senator Sharif Street
You know, we talked a lot about the social justice implications. And I will tell you, Carter G. Woodson did a book called The Miseducation of the Negro. It’s an old book and younger people might not like the language, but that was how people were called, referred to at the time, Black people were referred to, and it talked about, and if you look at that, some of the things have changed. But some of what he deals with, some of the social determinants of crime in there, and poverty and how they were particularly directed at Black and Brown folks, I think that was important. And then I think if you want to just talk about how you can make the system, how maybe we can use government to do reform? Congressman Dwight Evans has a book called Making ideas Matter; it’s not specifically criminal justice reform, but it is about how we can make government make big ideas, [and] change, how we can take big ideas and turn them into public policy that changes the lives of people, and I would recommend both of those books.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question. What did I mess up? What question should I have asked but did not?
Senator Sharif Street
I think this was a good interview. I appreciate the fact that you’re highlighting the issues. And the one thing I would do, the only question you didn’t ask, is what can we do to encourage ordinary people to do themselves to be engaged. And I would tell ordinary people, if you care about criminal justice reform, one, understand the local laws in your system, and what laws are changed or affected by local government, what changes need to happen at the state level, what needs to happen nationally, on the federal level, and understand where the legislators in those systems stand on those issues. And then push the ones, encourage the ones and support the ones who are fighting for reforms you believe in, and speak out and encourage the ones to change who take positions that you don’t believe in. An educated electorate ultimately is the best way to reform our system. And each person should understand that if you are a person in this system, you have some ability to influence it. If you’re a voter, you should vote; if you’re too young to vote, you can influence others to vote by educating them. And so young people have educated their parents about change. But I’ve got these books, quotes by John Kennedy and Martin Luther King behind me, and in a picture with Lyndon Johnson, that movement where King and Johnson and Kennedy are changing things. The people who inspired those changes were young people who felt empowered to change the society and so for young people, and not-so-young people, each of us has a responsibility to get engaged, get involved, and be active. Because when we do that we really can change the system.
Josh Hoe
Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to do this Senator Street. I really appreciate it.
Senator Sharif Street
I appreciate you as well; thank you so much.
Josh Hoe
And now, my take.
I just saw the news that the DOJ has pushed for an execution. I don’t know how much more I have to say here. The person they want to execute was one of the Boston bombers. I get why people feel the way they feel. But killing someone doesn’t send the message that killing is wrong. It sends the message that killing is justice, and that is or should be considered wrong. There are lots of other problems with the death penalty – billions of problems. There’s problems with effective representation, with non-unanimous juries, with racial disparities, and the sheer cruelty of the act itself. I guess I just wanted to share that the last year of the Trump administration, when they went out of their way to kill 13 people as quickly as they could, was very emotionally devastating to me and many other people across the country. I think that most anti-death penalty folks, I think most of us were on board to some extent with President Biden because he promised that he was against the death penalty. In fact, when Jen Psaki was asked about this exact question, this exact case, she said the President was against the death penalty. The idea that Biden’s DOJ is pushing for an execution makes me absolutely sick. I understand that the DOJ has some level of independence. But when Biden has come out explicitly and said even in this case that – or his these representatives have [said] – that even in this case, that there shouldn’t be, that he doesn’t believe in the death penalty. Either the people at the DOJ are putting the President out to dry, or the President is flip-flopping. You know this is just a terrible time for this. We have South Carolina moving to firing squads, and other states are starting back up to gas people to death. I mean, what the heck is wrong with us? Strong presidential leadership is critical in this moment. When we kill someone, we are saying much more about the United States, about us, than we are about the people we are furious with and executing. I just hope we find it in our hearts soon to stop with all this lust for violence and revenge. Things have really gotten pretty dark over the last several years, particularly in the last year in this country. Maybe in this one way people on the left and on the right or even at the very least religious people on the left and on the right can come together on this one thing. It is time to end the death penalty.
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