Joshua B. Hoe interviews Dr. Nneka Jones-Tapia about her work with Chicago Beyond and her time as the warden of the Cook County Jail
Full Episode
My Guest: Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia
Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia was previously the warden of Cook County Jail and is known as one of the first psychologists in the nation to lead a correctional facility.
She is an experienced psychologist who is passionate about mental wellness, criminal justice reform, and supporting young people who have experienced trauma.
Dr. Tapia is currently the Managing Director of Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond
We are here today to discuss her Square One Justice paper “Harm Reduction at the Center of Corrections”
Notes From Episode 113 Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia
The books Dr. Tapia suggested were:
Khalil Gibran Mohammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
Marlon Peterson, Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song
Tarana Burke and Brene Brown, You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame, Resilience, and the Black Experience
Full Transcript
Hello and welcome to Episode 113 of the DecarcerationNation 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 Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia about her work with Chicago Beyond and her time as the Warden of the Cook County Jail.
Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia was previously the Warden of Cook County Jail, and is known as one of the first psychologists in the nation to lead a correctional facility. She’s an experienced psychologist who is passionate about mental wellness, criminal justice reform, and supporting young people who have experienced trauma. Dr. Tapia is currently the Managing Director of Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond. We are here today to discuss her Square One Project paper, Harm Reduction at the Center of Corrections. Welcome to the decarceration nation podcast, Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia.
Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia
Thank you for having me.
Josh Hoe
My pleasure.
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 are a warden, and later to being a therapist, then being a warden, and later, the Managing Director of Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond?
Nneka Jones Tapia
Interesting question. I think sadly, I can’t ever say that I’ve read a comic book.
Josh Hoe
You’ve probably heard there are comic books, though, right?
Nneka Jones Tapia
Yes, yes. And from what I’ve seen, just, you know, I’m browsing bookstores. I know that they’re pretty animated with pictures. And so I think for me, I’ll use pictures to depict where it all started for me. The first picture is one of me at, I would say seven years old, sitting alone on my living room floor playing with my black Barbie dolls. I grew up in a two-parent household, my dad sold African arts and crafts, and my mother was a nurse. And I have a sister, who is six years my senior, and a brother who is 15 years my senior. And so even though I have siblings, there’s such wide gaps in age between us that I was often alone. And for the most part, I would say I was a quiet child. I think the second picture that would depict where it all started was me at age eight, sitting alone on my family’s living room sofa looking at officers putting handcuffs on my dad. And what stands out most I think in that picture, is this mixture of fear and sadness on my face. And then we move to the third picture. And I would say me at age 10, with my mom, my sister, my grandfather, a cousin, and we’re all crowded around my dad in a prison visitation photo. And in that photo, I have this deep-rooted smile on my face, it’s bright because I’m with my dad and surrounded by love. The fourth picture I would say is me at age 11. Sitting in the dark with my dad, listening to jazz, he has this stressed look on his face, and the stress is because he had just come home from prison. And so you’ll see me rubbing his forehead, almost like trying to alleviate his pain as he’s laying across the living room sofa. The next to the last picture is one of just my brother alone standing in his army uniform in Korea. He’s about 20 years old, and he’s smiling beautifully. And he just looks larger than life. And the final picture that I think kind of depicts where it all started for me is one of my brothers, again alone, with this same mixture of fear and sadness on his face that I had in one of the previous pictures when I was a young girl. The difference is that he is the one with handcuffs. So that’s where it all started for me.
Josh Hoe
My dad also basically raised me on jazz as well. That really resonated with me a lot. Are there any particular songs or artists you remember sharing with your father?
Nneka Jones Tapia
Duke Ellington, I think is probably my Dad’s, or one of my Dad’s favorites, of course, John Coltrane. And I think there was – and I cannot remember the name of the song – but there was a duet that they did that my Dad used to listen to over and over again. And it was, those were, they’re fond memories for me now. But like I said, I just remember seeing the stress on his face as the head of our whole household, who had just returned from prison, trying to figure out how to support his family in a way that America was going to see fit. You know, my dad was incarcerated for possession of marijuana. And for two years, I lost my dad because that was the means that he found to take care of us. My dad has an eighth-grade education, had difficulty working in typical factory work that was pretty prevalent in our community because he has severe asthma. And to now see so many, particularly white men, making money off of this product that took my dad away and kind of left scars on us – you know that that resonates with me. I recently was at a Wendy’s with my son, getting him a kid’s meal or something, and right across from the Wendy’s is one of the marijuana dispensaries. Recreational marijuana is legal in Illinois now.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, here too. We have dispensaries everywhere. It’s crazy.
Nneka Jones Tapia
I’m seeing all these young white kids walking out with their bags. I get why marijuana is legal. It should have been legal. But it took me back to 35 years ago. And I lost my dad because of this product that now so many people are making money off of.
Josh Hoe
Yeah. And I know I first came to know of your work after seeing Sheriff Dart on 60 Minutes. Soon after that, I read the mental health template that Cook County put out. I assume you were part of that. Can you talk about how you went from where you were in the pictures you described to the journey of becoming a therapist and then award and like, what, how did that all happen?
Nneka Jones Tapia
It was because of [what] I saw my family deal with, during incarceration, before incarceration, during and after, that really, really led to my decision to want to help support the mental wellness of people who were incarcerated. And I started studying psychology as an undergrad. I actually take that back; when I first went to undergrad I wanted to major in biology and be pre-med. Well, that didn’t work out very well, because I almost failed my first biology course. So I had to switch tracks pretty quickly and decided to major in psychology. And that was right around the time that my brother was incarcerated. And that was really what prompted my decision to want to go specifically into correctional mental health. And I started working at Cook County Jail in Chicago in 2006. As a psychology intern, as a part of my doctoral studies, I had to complete a year-long internship. And because I knew I wanted to go into correctional mental health, I thought, why not go into one of the largest jails in the country and see if I can really do this because I still had a fear of law enforcement. So I really pushed myself and I pushed myself because it was personal to me. And so when I started working at the jail, my heart was in it. I was that person who came in early and stayed late. And I came to know the behind-the-scenes stories of many of the people who were incarcerated, like the dreams that they had for themselves and their families before they were incarcerated, and even the dreams they held onto for the moment that they were released. You know, in my eyes, I wasn’t working with quote-unquote “inmates”. I was working with people and those people reminded me very much of the people I loved. And some of them had done some pretty horrific things. But at the end of the day, they were people and they were capable of acting out in good and bad ways, just like all of us. And so because I was so committed to the work I was promoted pretty quickly to Chief Psychologist of the jail. And as the Chief Psychologist, I was invited to some administrative meetings that the Sheriff would host. He did this maybe every week or every other week. And at that point, I had never met him. So there was this huge conference room table, full of security executives with the Sheriff at the head of it. And then there were about 30 cheap seats, kind of cramped in the corners of the room. And of course, I was in the cheap seats. So they would go through different incidents that had happened, significant incidents that had happened at the jail. And when the Sheriff’s security executives would comment about the quote-unquote, “violent nature” of some of the people who were confined, I didn’t hesitate to speak up and give a more realistic and holistic illustration of who those individuals were; I didn’t want them to be relegated to just something that they had done, without the Sheriff also knowing the backstory. So I remember one meeting where the sheriff asked why a person had rubbed feces on his body, and all around his cell. And I remember one of his security executives, saying, you know, oh, he’s malingering Sheriff, he’s just trying to get out of his cell. And I raised my hand to speak. But I was so far behind everyone else that the sheriff couldn’t really see me. And so they were moving on to talk about something else. And I just couldn’t let it go. I yelled out, excuse me, Sheriff, but that’s not accurate! And I
went on to tell him, Mr. X has a long and well-documented history of mental illness like I was very much a scholar. And we’ve been trying to get him stabilized on his meds. And it’s been difficult for him to manage his impulses. And it doesn’t help that he has not had time outside of his cell to participate in social activities. I remember that so well because you didn’t speak out against correctional leaders. And so for me to not take a page from that book and to speak out was something that was pretty nuanced. And so after I corrected enough misinformation that his executives were putting out in all of these meetings, the sheriff started to look to me to hear more about what was really at the root of some of the behaviors the staff was describing. And typically, it was something that they were not allowing or some harsh way that they were treating a person that precipitated the behavior that was shown and, and I didn’t hesitate to share that. So after about three years, in the role of Chief Psychologist, I was going to take a promotion at another Correctional Facility; I felt at that point I had done all I could do to change the mental health policies and practices at the facility, and the Sheriff heard that I was leaving, and reached out to me and asked me to consider joining his executive team. And he hired me in 2013, to oversee the mental health programs for his law enforcement team and gave me latitude to be innovative. And in that role, that was where I established programs like the Mental Health Transition Center that became a model for other correctional facilities. And one day in the spring of 2015, surprisingly, enough to me, he called me into his office and asked if I would be the warden of the jail.
Josh Hoe
That must have been pretty interesting. And I think, in the discussions that we have on the activist side, there’s always a tension, a fear that by being part of, or using – for lack of a better term – the Master’s tools, that you’re continually propping back up a lot of the bad things that you’re most afraid of. How did you navigate the tension between, I mean – at the end of the day, even if you identify with everybody in the jail as human, etc, etc, etc, they’re still essentially in cages. There’s still a lot – and you know, I wrestle with this all the time doing legislative work. So I’m just wondering how you, especially as a therapist, navigated that.
Nneka Jones Tapia
Yeah. You know, being at the jail as a clinical psychologist was a difficult position to be in. Yeah, I wanted to help my people, in that place where I felt very few people would be there for them and actually were there for them. And at the time, I did not fully appreciate how my presence as a psychologist just perpetuated the falsehood that there was something wrong with them, and not with the system; I didn’t fully appreciate how I was helping to uphold this racist system. And it was really when I left, and I started my work at Chicago Beyond, that I had enough distance between me and this system to see the full impact. And while I was there, I was able to do a lot of good for a lot of people and families and communities; I don’t want to minimize that. But ultimately, the quote-unquote “solution” to challenge such a heinous system, that so many other correctional facilities, I would say, learn from Cook County, just by my presence, was to hire a psychologist, it was like you if want to, you know, solve your problems, hire a psychologist. And I can tell you that I did not want to take the role of Warden of the jail; in my previous roles there, I was able to just kind of mind my own business and create programs to help increase opportunities for people who were incarcerated. I would say, my motivation was to ultimately help my people to be free. And I knew that as Warden, I was going to become the face of an institution of enslavement. And it was really my dad who convinced me to take the job by sharing with me his thoughts on how impactful a black female psychologist as Warden would be for the people who were incarcerated. And so where I sit today is Managing Director of Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond, [and] I still contend with that challenge of how do you support people who are incarcerated, because we have we have to stop the bleeding now, I mean, these systems are so heinous that no one should have to live in the conditions that they are expected to live in these systems. So how do you support the people who are incarcerated now? While ultimately, still fighting for real justice, ultimately fighting for a world where we don’t have jails and prisons. And so I center my focus on the people who are incarcerated. And that’s my North Star. As long as I am doing in service of the people who are incarcerated, my people who could have been my dad could have been my brother, could have been my mom, I feel that I’m doing the right thing. And I do believe that it is still within the abolitionist framework, to ultimately push, to not get complacent with the wins that we have, and to ultimately push towards the society we want to have where there is real justice for our people. But in the interim, I’m going to push for change within these systems.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, which is, you know, a lot of times the way that I land on these things, too – the name of your paper is about harm reduction. And I definitely consider myself a harm reductionist. But you know, I get to talk to a wide variety of people, but very rarely do I get to talk to people who’ve been wardens, and very rarely do I get to talk to too many therapists. And I have this, maybe it’s a misunderstanding of how therapy works. But for instance, when I see television therapists, it really bothers me, because it seems like you can’t, I have a hard time understanding how therapy can be good therapy or ethical therapy when the product is being advertised and put out there, and the people who are getting the therapy are part of the product if that makes sense. And to be more specific, in a jail setting, one of the stories I’ve told many times from my own incarceration was that when I first got to jail, I made the mistake of answering the screening questions wrong. I basically said I was a little depressed. And the next thing I knew I was whisked away to solitary and then the mental health wing, even though that wasn’t really what I was saying at all. It was a pretty terrifying way to start my first moments of incarceration. But the thing that really stuck with me over the years was that the guy who was in the solitary cell next to me had been in solitary for over a year, waiting for his trial. And later, I ran into the therapist that we both had, that ultimately got me out of there pretty quickly because I just answered the question wrong. And I asked her, I don’t mean to be unkind or whatever. But how in the world does keeping someone in solitary for a year as he’s waiting for his trial help his mental health? And she answered something that has stuck with me for all the years since, which is that she said “it’s not optimal”. And so I’ve always kind of wondered how you can do therapy in a situation that is so… where every single thing seems to mitigate against therapy being successful if that makes sense. Is it inherently corrupted, I guess is what I’m saying. I mean, I understand the need for a therapist to be there, and that it can be beneficial. I’m just wondering – there seems like there has to be a lot of tension there. Am I crazy here? That’s probably the wrong term to use. Sorry about that.
Nneka Jones Tapia
Yeah, you’re absolutely correct in that there is inherent conflict with this notion of providing mental health treatment in an environment that causes such detrimental harm. And what I naively believed, when I first started working in corrections, was that even in the midst of this horrific environment, I could provide some respite, some comfort for the person. And while I truly believe that in the moments where I was in session with someone, I truly believe that they were able to be present with themselves, I really believe that they were able to reaffirm who they were as people, and who they were as inmates, I truly believed that they were able to muster up some sense of hope to hold on to. I now recognize how fleeting that was, because as soon as they left that room that they were in with me, they would have to go out into this environment that was just wrought with hurt and pain and violence. And so yes, I fully agree with you that no one should believe that a jail or a prison is in any way a place that is conducive to mental wellness, it is not. And to take it further, you talked about your experiences in solitary confinement. I mean, the reality is that correctional institutions, and solitary confinement even more, deteriorate a person’s mental and emotional functioning; that is their function. And the problem is that correctional staff, and many people in the community, in reality, believe that we have to respond to bad behavior – violent or nonviolent – with punishment. I mean, that’s the whole premise behind our criminal legal system. And so when we respond to violence with punishment, we are responding to violence with violence, ultimately. And when we respond to violence with violence, we increase the likelihood for more violence. So there is this falsehood that incarceration makes us safer, and what I just explained is that it, in fact, doesn’t; it doesn’t just not make us safer, but it puts us in positions where we are exposed to more violence as a community. And when, when we take a step back, if we were to respond to bad behavior, violent and nonviolent, with an acknowledgment of the pain that has been endured, with action to move with that pain, or beyond the pain and accountability for the person’s actions, and we increase the likelihood for healing, and that is safety. That is real justice. And I’m not saying that anyone’s behavior should be excused by any means we have to be held accountable for what we do. But that does not mean that we must be punished, especially if we ultimately as a society want to be safe. And if we want to experience justice, we can’t continue to act in these ways.
Josh Hoe
And you know, we’re here to discuss your Square One Justice paper Harm Reduction at the Center of Corrections, which I think starts to raise the idea of what a different vision might be. So let’s start where I usually start in these discussions. And while harm reduction sounds very easy to understand, there are a lot of different definitions of it. So what does harm reduction mean?
Nneka Jones Tapia
In this instance, harm reduction is about correctional institution administrators actively working to reduce the pain, to reduce the dehumanization, to reduce the demoralization [that is] inherent in these institutions. For the people who are incarcerated, for their staff or themselves, and for the larger community, it is an acknowledgment that true healing cannot occur in these institutions because they are inherently violent. But what they can be held accountable for is to reduce the amount of violence that they inflict on people.
Josh Hoe
You mentioned in the paper that you trace the final moments of numerous men and women confined in the facility that died by suicide. There’s actually been a recent string of suicides in Texas prisons, especially during the southern summer months when the temperatures are very high and there’s no air conditioning. And there’s also been a recent report about the dangers of suicide, depression, and medical complications from people forced to dry out cold turkey in jails and prisons. Having been in those spaces and in one of the largest jails in the United States, what can you tell us about how dangerous, in a lot of senses, these facilities are for the people?
Nneka Jones Tapia
I can tell you that jails and prisons have deplorable living conditions; they are dirty, there is limited light penetrating the gray concrete walls, they smell horrible, they’re crowded, the food is terrible. And there’s also this looming fear of being assaulted, real fear of being assaulted by a staff person, or another person who is incarcerated. And then beyond the living conditions, and the fear that people who are incarcerated have to live with every moment of their incarceration, there are numerous policies that intentionally or unintentionally rob people of their humanity. So from the moment a person is brought into a correctional facility, they become a number or a body. They’re disconnected from everything that makes them feel whole, their family, a job, their education, their community. And in addition to these horrific living conditions, in addition to the disconnection that they experience from all that they love, in addition to being reduced to nothingness, jails and prisons rarely, if ever, provide adequate mental and physical health care. And then in jails, there’s this added stressor of court, like not knowing what your future will be, not having control of what your future will be, being threatened with spending the rest of your life in these conditions. And all of that weighs on a person with very few opportunities to process it, to talk openly about it, to see beyond it. And so, to me, while mental health is difficult to attain, if able to be attained, in a correctional facility, this, the conditions that I just described, is the reason that we, I would advocate for programs that help people to see beyond that experience, to try to find something to hold on to, to give them hope. Because so many people don’t have it. And that’s why we have these disproportionately high numbers of suicide in jails and prisons. And look, during my career in corrections, I would say, the most difficult experiences that I had were when someone died from suicide, and that was for the people who were incarcerated and for the staff. When someone who was incarcerated died from suicide, I as a clinical psychologist, was a part of the process of understanding what could have been done differently, what the institution could have done differently. And in that role, I would often listen to their phone calls that they had with family members, I would look at their cell and any pictures that they had of family members and I really got a chance to just, as an intern and as a staff psychologist, to see the person beyond a lifeless body. At that point, I was able to see the person beyond what they had been accused of doing as a crime. I was able to see beyond any behavior that they demonstrated in the institution and I saw the pain that they were going through. I put myself in it and that has probably been the most difficult thing to let go of for me as a person, you know, you don’t walk out from getting that deep into a person’s pain, you don’t walk away from them unscathed.
Josh Hoe
One of the themes I return to quite often is how the public gets access to information about things like this, and how the media covers these things. You just talked about personal journeys you took as a warden, and as a therapist, with people who died inside of prisons. I remember the first time I really thought about this was after the Lee Correctional Facility riot in South Carolina, where six people died. And what stood out to me was that after the event, the press coverage, whenever they talked about the people who died, all they did was list their rap sheet. How can we move to where we get the humanization or the re-humanization that you just said you went through, after you encountered these things, and you were an official in the jail? How can we get to where that starts happening and translating that to a more public narrative, a more complete narrative of who people are?
Nneka Jones Tapia
Two things come to mind, you know. So first is that there has to be an increased level of transparency that we require of correctional institutions; they are often separated from the community that surrounds them by high brick walls, wired fences, and that boundary is like, once a person enters into a correctional facility, they are completely cut off from community. And that means that community has no idea what is happening behind those walls. And they deserve to know; their members are in this facility. And so to hold correctional leaders to account to be more transparent is and should be a requirement. I have to say, though, that as you were describing how media portrays people who have died by suicide in correctional facilities and minimizes them to their interactions with the legal system, one thing struck me. Recently, here in Chicago, for the weekend of the Fourth of July, there were more than 100 shootings. And when I read the paper, on Tuesday morning, that kind of gave the list of shootings that had occurred from Friday through Monday, you know, the headline was something like “more than 100 people shot in Chicago”, and it listed how many people had been killed. And the story didn’t give names of people, it didn’t describe them as mothers and fathers it just said, person, you know, black male, 41 killed on the South Side, black woman, 25 killed on the West Side; it really reduced them to nothingness, similarly to what I see happening in correctional facilities, and these are mainly black and brown people that are being portrayed in the media. And then I turn the page. And I see a story on a young man who was a student at a local university here, who was also shot and killed on that weekend. And the story really illustrated him as a person, it talked about his family life, it talked about what he went to the University to study; you were able to connect with him on a human level. And this was a white male, or at least non-black if I remember. And what resonated with me was how we as a society – even beyond correctional facilities, and how they are portrayed – we as a society tend to reduce specifically black and brown people to nothingness. And we see that happening in our communities where we choose not to invest in quality education for black and brown communities. We choose not to invest in businesses that are going to employ people with high wages. We choose to disinvest in mental health care and physical health care in communities, and all of these things have been America’s story and how it has treated black and brown people since we’ve been here. And so when you were talking about what you witnessed in the media as they portrayed the deaths of people in South Carolina, I just wanted to expand that view to say that is how we are treated as black and brown people in the media, period. And we have to do a better job of humanizing people. And what we have been seeing, especially over the last year and some change, especially in the social movement that has been happening in response to the murder of George Floyd, is an expression of grief. It’s an expression of pain that is rooted, very much so, in America not being willing to acknowledge that pain and acknowledge black trauma and not being willing to acknowledge black people as human.
Josh Hoe
One thing that I think I’m hearing come through some of what you’re saying – the societal part, I think you’re spot on. But another thing I feel is – and in reading your paper, you mentioned it pretty specifically – that there’s a lot of cost, psychologically, to people who work in these facilities as well. And you talk about your own exposure to trauma, at different points, while you were working in the facility. Every place that I was incarcerated, there I don’t want to talk like I’m saying good apples and bad apples, but there were officers that were responsible and officers that were not. And it almost seemed like in a lot of cases, that was not only accepted but part of the way that those facilities worked. And I wonder how much of that is tied up in culture, and how much of that is tied up in trauma, because I think everybody who works in those facilities is exposed to trauma, even, in many cases, for a much longer period of time than the people who are actually incarcerated there, because they tend to move around, etc. So I just kind of wanted to get a feel for that end of things. I don’t necessarily talk about correctional officers in that way that much. But I do think it’s an important piece of this in my mind.
Nneka Jones Tapia
So what I have experienced throughout my career in corrections, and what I experienced as a young girl, even going to visit my father in prison, is that the pain that correctional facilities inflict extends beyond the people who are incarcerated. And it impacts the people who work in these facilities. And it impacts the families of people who are incarcerated, and of the people who work in these facilities. And so, because these numbers are so large, it ultimately impacts the broader community. I think we saw this really play out with the rising numbers of people who had contracted COVID-19 within correctional facilities and extending within communities. I think the pandemic helped us to see how these things are not limited to the correctional facility and how they easily spread their negative impact into communities. And so I think that the problems within these facilities are twofold. One, correctional facilities have the foundation of violence, they have the foundation of an infliction of pain. And so they are inherently and systemically violent and traumatizing. And so because of that, there is going to be some level of violence that occurs. And I don’t know that there is any way to completely mitigate that because that’s the foundation of these institutions. But also, I know that people who work in these institutions also experience disproportionate levels of trauma themselves. No one group has been more negatively impacted by these institutions than the people who are incarcerated. I want to be clear about that. But I also recognize that staff do not come out unscathed. And so to that point, the systems are really not working for anyone, you know, correctional staff have higher rates of suicide, they have higher rates of divorce, higher rates of interpersonal difficulty, higher rates of substance use, their life expectancy is like 20 years shorter than the general population, all of that speaks to the toxicity that exists within these systems. And so a part of the negative behavior that we see exhibited by staff, as well as by the people who are incarcerated, is because they are living and working in an environment that causes violence. And so it produces violence. It inflicts violence, so it produces violence, and then a part of it is because these systems have remained unchecked for so long. And, [are] so disconnected from the values that we say we have as an American justice system; we know that things happen there that shouldn’t. And so what we experienced in this last year, with the bravery of people to capture cell phone video with police encounters with people, as we experience increased transparency into the system of policing. And as a result of that, we are holding the police to higher accountability, [and] we have to have the same level of transparency into other aspects of this criminal legal system and hold other aspects of the criminal legal system to higher accountability.
Josh Hoe
You argue that we need to move beyond simply understanding and treating trauma, to actually engaging in harm reduction. We’ve just spent a lot of time talking about how hard it is to do this in these kinds of places. So, let’s get to the bones of what you think we should be doing, to make these places where people can at least ostensibly be healed.
Nneka Jones Tapia
I do not believe that people can be healed in these institutions. But I do believe that they can start a journey towards healing. And my statement about people not being able to be healed in these institutions is really, again, an acknowledgement of just how violent these institutions are and how toxic they are. But what I do believe can and should happen is that correctional leaders have to actively engage with every policy, every procedure, every program that their institution operates on, in a way that they’re always centering how they can reduce harm that is inflicted on the people who are incarcerated themselves, to staff, to the larger community. And to do that I developed a framework for reducing the harms in these systems, and I call it the “stack framework”. It’s about centering safety. It’s about centering transparency, and trust-building with community; it’s about centering agency, actually giving people the tools that they need to start their healing journey. It’s about centering asset-based approaches, really seeing people for more than what they’re accused of doing. And it’s about centering connectedness. I developed the stack framework while I’ve been working at Chicago Beyond, so my work at Chicago Beyond has been focused on supporting youth and adults who look like me, as they navigate the challenges of society that have been created for them. And as a part of that, I reflected on the moments in my correctional career that put a smile on a person’s or family’s face. The first job fair and graduation of participants at the Mental Health Transition Center, seeing a father hug his child for the first time in two years, seeing the natural connection and empathy between two men who have shared their stories of pain with each other and those men happening to be a correctional officer and a person who was incarcerated. And so I pulled out the core principles that were foundational to those things happening and created this framework.
Josh Hoe
And can you give a more specific example of how you might see this working in an everyday kind of situation?
Nneka Jones Tapia
During my tenure at Cook County, something that I often saw was hundreds, if not 1000s, of kids coming to visit their loved one who was incarcerated, whether it was a parent or a grandparent; and most jails, Cook County included, don’t allow people who are incarcerated to have contact visits with their loved ones. And prior to the pandemic, Chicago Beyond partnered with a local Children’s Museum, a community mental health organization with expertise in childhood trauma, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office to pilot child-friendly contact visitation experiences. We have 2.7 million children in this country who have a parent who is incarcerated; many of them not being able to touch their parent is problematic. We know two things are needed in order to build opportunities for success for our young people who are dealing with parental incarceration, and that’s having a positive adult in their life, and being able to maintain a positive relationship with their incarcerated parent. So we want to highlight the importance of positive family engagement, not just for the quality of life for people who are incarcerated, but for the millions of children who are dealing with parental incarceration. So we piloted these contact visitation experiences that were child-friendly. And we then took the learnings from those visits and the learnings from a handful of other jails across the country with family engagement programs, as well as looking at research, and we created a model for visitation for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Because those visitation programs that we piloted were so successful, Cook County Jail now offers in-person visitation for all people who are incarcerated and have received their vaccination for COVID. And to live in a country where most people, most jails do not allow contact visitation, and to know that by creating situations where we centered humanity and dignity, and by exposing the jail’s administrators to experiences that had multiple positive effects for them, for their staff, for the people who were incarcerated, for their children, for the families, they were more open to continuing to keep families connected in meaningful ways, even as they face the challenges of the pandemic. And so their in-person visitation program is one example.
Josh Hoe
Another area where I think there are a lot of unique challenges that you’ve probably got more experience with than I’ll ever have is incarcerated women, who are often treated by the system in much the same ways as men. Are there ways that this framework or things that you experiment with might be better ideas for dealing with what women who are incarcerated are facing?
Nneka Jones Tapia
Yes. The women’s incarceration rate has grown exponentially compared to the incarceration of men. And we know that many of the women who are incarcerated are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, and they are dealing with high rates of substance use issues, they’re dealing with high rates of mental health challenges, and most of them are parents and single parents. And so as a part of this framework, the core components include connectedness. If a single mother is incarcerated – I can’t think, as a mother myself – I can’t think of a worse situation to be in than to be disconnected from my child. And so the core component of connectedness requires correctional facilities to think about how they can keep parents connected with their children, how they can keep families connected, whether it’s a mother or father who is incarcerated. Thinking about one of the other core components, you know, women are often exposed to sexual and physical violence within correctional institutions. And the first core component of the framework is physical and psychological safety. What are these correctional facilities doing to really center the safety of everyone touched by them? And that means not turning a blind eye to the harmful ways in which their staff behave, the harmful ways in which other people who are incarcerated behave, and really involving the people who are most impacted in the policies and procedures that are being developed to protect them. Like, who are we listening to when we’re thinking of ways to make these institutions better? We have to listen to the voices of the people most impacted.
Josh Hoe
And it’s such a tough thing to navigate. But, if you were talking to a group of wardens across the country, and you were having this same kind of conversation we’re having now, kind of in summary form, if you only had a couple of minutes or a couple of seconds to talk to them about how things could be different, what would you say?
Nneka Jones Tapia
I would say that we can no longer, we as a country, can no longer afford correctional leaders who operate outside of community. What they do within their correctional facilities has reverberating impact on their families, and all of our families, and because of that, it is incumbent upon them to do things differently. It can no longer be an us versus them type of mentality. They have to recognize that they alone do not have the tools that they need to reduce the harms that these facilities cause. And with the centering of community, they can more appropriately begin looking at how they center the well-being of not just the people who are incarcerated, but their staff, themselves, and the larger community.
Josh Hoe
This season, I’ve been asking people if there are any criminal justice-related books they might recommend to others. Do you have any favorites of your own?
Nneka Jones Tapia
Hmm, I have a few. So I think my go-to book is Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness. There’s so much depth there that I often reread it. I just recently, maybe a couple of months ago, read Marlon Peterson’s book, Bird Uncaged, An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song.
Josh Hoe
He’s been on the podcast to talk about it; it’s a great book.
Nneka Jones Tapia
And it really depicts how prevention, and simply seeing people in their full experiences, can help to mitigate a lot of the challenges that we see happening in our communities, like how his life could have been different if he had had someone within his school system, to see that he was being bullied and to offer some support. And while it’s not a criminal justice book, I would say right now I’m reading Tarana Burke and Brene Brown’s book, You Are Your Best Thing. And it’s really a story, it’s a compilation of stories about pain in the black community, and the requirement of us to acknowledge black pain and to work with it and move beyond it to a place of healing.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question, what did I mess up? What question should I have asked, but did not?
Nneka Jones Tapia
I don’t think you messed up in any way. I feel like this was a great conversation. I wouldn’t dare say that you messed up!
Josh Hoe
Well, I always put it that way. Just because I want to give people an opportunity to talk about anything I didn’t cover; it’s kind of a humility question. You don’t have to take it literally. But if there are things that we didn’t cover that you would like to talk about, feel free to.
Nneka Jones Tapia
You know, I think one thing that I would love to just emphasize is where do we go from here? I do believe that we will get to the world that we envision, where we have true justice. And that doesn’t include jails and prisons. But until we get there, we as a collective community effort to hold every cog within this criminal legal system accountable for the pain that it inflicts. And that requires us to also be a part of reducing those harms in whatever way we can. And then I also believe that we have to fully support the people who have been impacted by the system and that support starts with centering their voices. And truly giving them the things that had they received as children, had they received as young adults, quite possibly could have changed their trajectory.
Josh Hoe
And do you want to say anything else about your organization? Or about the work you all are doing? Or where people can find you?
Nneka Jones Tapia
Sure. So I am the Managing Director of Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond; we are an impact investor focused on youth equity here in Chicago and beyond. You can find more about our organization at www.chicagobeyond.org.
Josh Hoe
Great, and thanks so much for doing this. It was a real pleasure to have you on the DecarcerationNation podcast.
Nneka Jones Tapia
It was a pleasure for me. Thank you very much, Josh.
Josh Hoe
And now, my take.
I’m not sure what the right response in Afghanistan is. I hated our intervention there. I hated the nation-building premise. And I’ve hated the 20-year occupation. But at the same time, I also feel that we have an obligation to all of the Afghan people who risked their well-being and health to join in the effort to build a new Afghanistan. What really bothers me is the tendency of the press to platform almost the exact same people who were ascending in foreign policy circles after 911, the same people that got us into this war, the same people that caused most of the problems, the neocons, the military specialists, and the intelligence functionaries. I bring this up because there are similarities between the press coverage of what is happening in Afghanistan, and what we see in criminal justice reporting on a daily and weekly basis. I’m not sure if ultimately it’s more about official sources having sophisticated media organs or offices, or if it is about the press, preferring to get opinions from traditional prosecutors, former and current police officers, and former and current FBI officers. Regardless, the results are that the public largely only hears official narratives, and rarely hears from criminologists, from public defenders, or from directly-impacted people or families. It seems clear that significant change becomes increasingly unlikely the more our narratives favor the same old narrators, the ones that are heavily invested in the continuation of a broken status quo, or a broken international system. I suspect the same is true in our coverage of Afghanistan. I’m not sure what the best answer is, but I do know the people of Afghanistan have been much on my mind and in my prayers over the last few weeks.
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