Joshua B. Hoe interviews Eric Reinhart about COVID in prisons and jails.
Full Episode
My Guest: Eric Reinhart
Eric Reinhart is the Lead Health & Justice Systems Researcher – Data and Evidence for Justice Reform – at The World Bank Research Group he is also a Resident Physician, Northwestern University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He describes himself as a political and medical anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and resident physician
Watch the Interview on YouTube
You can watch episode 118 of the Decarceration Nation Podcast on YouTube.
Notes from Episode 118 Eric Reinhart
Eric’s recent articles covering COVID in prisons and jails include:
“The Public Health Case for Decarcerating America’s Prison System” Undark, 6 January 2022
Republished in Salon, 8 January 2022
“Failure to Prioritize Vaccinating Incarcerated People Will Harm Everyone, Again” Jacobin, 23 December 2021
“As Covid Surges Again, Decarceration Is More Necessary Than Ever” with Amanda Klonsky. The Nation, 22 December 2021
“Why U.S. Pandemic Management Has Failed: America’s Epidemic Engines” STAT, 5 October 2021
“To help stop the spread of COVID-19, stop packing a major hot spot: prisons and jails” USA TODAY, 23 September 2021
“To Slow Covid Spread, Illinois Must Decarcerate” with Erika Tyagi and Amanda Klonsky. Chicago Tribune, 20 September 2021
“Covid-19 et prisons : attention au boomerang carcéral” La Tribune, 15 September 2021
“Get Police Vaccinated” with Amanda Klonsky. The Atlantic, 26 August 2021
“Punishment in a Pandemic: Eric Reinhart in conversation with Salmaan Keshavjee” IWM Post, June 2021
“Mass Incarceration Has Worsened the Covid-19 Pandemic For Everyone” Jacobin, 2 June 2021
The books mentioned during the interview included:
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Lacan, Desire and its Interpretation
Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
Full Transcript
Josh Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 118 of the DecarcerationNation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Martin Luther King Day. And thanks so much for joining us for the first episode of the fifth season of the DecarcerationNation podcast.
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 Eric Reinhart about his work and writing around COVID in carceral spaces, decarceration, and public health. Eric Reinhart is the Lead Health and Justice Systems Researcher, Data and Evidence for Justice Reform at the World Bank Research Group. He is also a resident physician at Northwestern University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He describes himself as a political and medical anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and resident physician. Welcome to the DecarcerationNation podcast, Eric.
Thank you, Josh. Nice to be here.
Josh Hoe
Thanks so much for doing this. You just told me you just literally got off shifts, so it’s very nice to have you here. I always ask the same first question. It’s kind of the comic book origin story question. How did you get from wherever you started in life, to where you were doing this work about decarceration in terms of public health, and I’m particularly interested in what the pathway was that got you interested in this kind of work.
Eric Reinhart
Not sure how far back I should go . . .
Josh Hoe
Go as far as you want, you can start at the very beginning, if you want; we’ve had people start from when they were little kids.
Eric Reinhart
Without details, then, from my childhood, there were people who were very close to me in my life early on, who very much occupied a position at the margins of groups, or society, whether that’s from disability, or for other reasons. And this shaped me from the time I was very, very young. And I think that kind of oriented my interests, particularly around language. Some of the communities I grew up in when I was young were deaf communities, where the idea of somebody else speaking for you was incredibly frustrating and incredibly condescending. And as I’ve gone through life, and I trained as an anthropologist, there’s a tradition of anthropology that imagines itself as speaking for the downtrodden or those who have been marginalized by systems of power, etc, often from great intentions. And some of that work is actually politically very productive. But I always felt very uneasy about doing that kind of work. So for a long time, when I was doing my dissertation fieldwork, as an anthropologist in Chicago, where I’d gone to medical school, where I had seen a lot of violence, I was very careful not to reproduce the history of urban sociology or urban anthropology. And in the US, that’s particularly focused on racialized populations and systems of violence, like gang violence, like police violence, like incarceration, because I didn’t want to be yet another external voice that was superimposing these kinds of narratives on others. So my work has always been about – until the pandemic – has been about the stakes of self-representation, the stakes of self-writing, and what it means to write oneself, from out of context that has been so over-determined by narratives of violence. When the pandemic started, things shifted a little bit for me, because a lot of the people that I’d become very close to over a decade of fieldwork and just friendship, had cycled through Cook County Jail, other jails, prisons. And as part of my own work of tracing how the different spaces in power networks have shaped their lives, I myself had moved through these spaces. So when the pandemic started, I was very keenly aware of the way that these spaces would have major implications for public health and the rest of society. And I felt, okay, maybe this is a time I should start writing about these kinds of things directly.
Josh Hoe
Before I started doing this kind of work, before I became directly impacted, I worked in higher education and came across a lot of the threads of critical anthropology, where they talk about things like this notion that you have to let people speak for themselves, not speak for them. And so it was very strange for me, in some ways, when I came into being an activist in the criminal justice field, how often people would say things like, we’re a voice for the voiceless. And, you know, a very good friend of mine, Glenn Martin said, No, we’re not a voice for the voiceless, they have voices, you just have to give them a microphone. And, you know, I’ve always tried to take more of that. I think that’s in the same vein of what you’re referring to; is that fair?
Eric Reinhart
Yeah, I think so. And I’m particularly interested not just in the fact that people speak, they’re always writing, they’re always speaking for themselves, but also the ways that people invent and create in the process of having to do so from the outside of power. And there’s an inventive possibility that comes out of necessity there that I think has a lot of subversive political power and possibility that is not often taken as seriously as it should be. So yeah, it’s very much in line with what you’re saying.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, there’s a movie, I’m forgetting the name of it off the top of my head, but where I believe the main character is the Marquis de Sade, and they take everything away from him, including his tongue, and he ends up writing in his own waste on the walls because he just can’t, he just has to have a way to present his own words in his own way. So we will talk about a bunch of things, including the public health case against incarceration and COVID in prisons and jails. I wanted to start this season off with COVID, again, because it’s becoming a crisis again, not that it ever really wasn’t, but more acutely a crisis again. But to put everything in context, in some of the stuff that you’ve written, you compare incarceration in the United States to the rest of the world. What are some of the things that make the US system stand out? And not in a good way?
Eric Reinhart
Well, first of all, what I think everybody at this point knows, is just the sheer size of the US system. Now it’s something like 20-22% of the world’s incarcerated population is held in the US, which represents only 4% of the global population. So just the matter of size is remarkable. But it’s not just the number of people that are held in the system at any one point in time that distinguishes the US system, but also the pace at which people are cycled through it. So our jail system features about 11 million distinct admissions and releases every single year, about 5 million different people are represented, and there’s 11 million admission release cycles. But at that scale, the idea that these spaces could ever be separate from our communities, as many people like to imagine, traditionally in public health, it has often been imagined to be the case. It’s simply not plausible, it’s not a tenable idea when you have that kind of turnover. So I think that’s one of the other distinctive features. Another is, among wealthy nations, peer nations, as the US would like to think of itself in relationship to Western European nations or other nations with a lot of wealth, the conditions in US jails and prisons are horrifically poor. I do identify with a kind of abolitionist, ethical horizon, and also pragmatic demand now. In that context, still, you can look at places like Finland, Sweden, Norway, and I don’t think prisons need to exist, I do think we need to have some form of custodial care in many instances, not many, but in some instances; I don’t think that should be prison. But you can see facilities within their existing prison systems and others, like Nordic nations, for example, the quality of the care and facility, just material infrastructure opportunities that are afforded to people for actual transformative shifts, rather than simply an attribute of punishment, are dramatically different from what you find anywhere in the US. So the US is not entirely unique in the incredibly punitive, retributive character of its penal system, but it certainly leads the world, I think, in its insistence on this, despite having more than sufficient resources to provide a very different kind of penal system.
Josh Hoe
You’re doing psychoanalysis and you are an anthropologist. So do you have any ideas, to what do you attribute – I have a lot of theories on this myself – but to what do you attribute this unique commitment to harsh, punitive, non-rehabilitative style of dealing with folks who’ve broken the law, as opposed to other countries?
Eric Reinhart
Psychoanalysis is, I think, a very useful discourse for thinking about aggression, hatred, racism. And I think what we see in the US is very clearly an instantiation of a deep, sadomasochistic drive within American society, which I think you can find in every society, but it’s expressed in different and contingent ways. The US penal system is inseparable from the history of us racism, the history of slavery, the history of the denigration of the figure of the black. And this becomes codified in various forms, not just in the penal system, it also is entrenched in our economic system and our systems of labor protections and hierarchies, all sorts of ways. But I think it’s an inescapable, obvious reality that what is negotiated through the US penal system is the designation of an object fit for hatred. There’s this idea in psychoanalysis of ecstasy from Jacques Lacan. The extimate relation is something that’s characterized, but the thing that is most intimate to oneself, the thing that you can least tolerate about yourself, is externalized, put onto another, and made into a legitimate object of hatred – it’s imagined to be – in that process. And I think what we see with the figure of the criminal, the racialized criminal, the pathologized criminal in the US, in particular, is a very strong instantiation of that kind of extimate relation. Why is it that in the US, it’s manifested through the carceral system? I mean, you have excellent historians there. And I’m honestly thinking through psychometric theory, but I don’t think that’s so important in this case, but like Elizabeth Hinton, and Michelle Alexander and others who have developed many different historical threads and arguments to piece together the contingent manifestation of hatred in the US carceral system. I think that’s probably more than I’m prepared to speak about, certainly today.
Josh Hoe
I am definitely excited that this is the first time we’ve talked about Lacan on the podcast, because I actually have spent way too much time delving into it on my own. In one of your articles, you talk about two studies that show that higher incarceration rates drove significant increases in community-wide mortality, and this was not COVID-dependent. So as we’re building the case towards where we start talking more specifically about COVID, do you want to talk a little bit about this as a foregrounding?
Eric Reinhart
Yeah, and if you don’t mind, zoom out even further beyond the US, you invoked the international . . . earlier. So there’s these two studies he mentioned, one by Seth Prins, and his colleagues at Columbia. And another study that had an assortment of people, one of which is Jacob Kang from the Vera Institute as part of this. And both of these showed that at the county level, increases in incarceration rates – one was a causal study, the other was correlative – were very strongly tied to increases in overall mortality across the whole community, for causes that can be linked to things that are exacerbated by the carceral system, whether that’s infectious diseases that are transmitted across people, whether that’s chronic diseases that are incubated and worsened in this place of intense healthcare [decline]. So the fact that the US carceral system severely undermines US public health is not remotely unique to the COVID era. But what we see during the COVID era was also prefigured in many other prior epidemic outbreaks around the world. I think the clearest example, but it’s not the only one by far, is the post-Soviet Russian TB epidemic. So in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the welfare state, increasing rates of poverty, there’s also an increasing rate of petty crime as people needed to eat and needed to pay their rent. We know very well that poverty is associated with crime. And you saw that very clearly in 1990, in post-Soviet Russia. With that you also saw a near or more than 50% increase in the incarceration rate in Russia from 1990 to the year 2000. Coincident with this increase in incarceration rates was an increase in TB cases in the prison system across Russia. Not just TB, or tuberculosis, but MDR TB, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis; what you have is a lot of people that are going into the prison system, there they may be diagnosed with TB, and they’re started on a drug regimen, but then they leave and it’s interrupted as they go back to communities. They don’t have integration with care there, especially as the Russian healthcare system was collapsing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So we had a lot of discontinued and disrupted treatment courses. And that is a prime opportunity for the development of resistance to the antibacterial medications that are used to treat tuberculosis. I’m mixing up my COVID terminology with my TB terminology. And so you had the emergence of multidrug-resistant TB in Russia at a very high rate. And in Russia, at that time, you didn’t have access to the medications needed to effectively treat MDR TB. So this is a huge problem for public health across the entire country. And what you saw was not just an increase in TB outbreaks inside prisons, but then as a consequence in the communities to which people return, to which visitors return, to which guards return. So ultimately, what you had, between 1990 – and it persisted into the late 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s – is a very large TB outbreak across Eastern Europe that actually went into Central Asia, went ultimately all around the globe, it’s impossible to track adequately. But we have tracked it to places beyond just Russia itself. An epidemic that was spurred by the increased incarceration rates in Russia. We’ve seen this in Paraguay, we’ve seen this in Brazil, other studies that have shown that the increase in incarceration rates undermine infection control for TB, but also for hepatitis C, HIV . . .
So that’s the backdrop for COVID. So when COVID began, there were a lot of people – their voices didn’t gain the traction that they should have – but a lot of people were publishing everywhere they could, speaking to everyone they could, to emphasize that if you have a pandemic come to the US with our carceral system, an airborne viral pathogen like this, it is going to be quickly multiplied in these spaces that are very tightly-packed, unsafe, don’t have proper health care, and it’s going to then roll back out into communities. And that’s exactly what’s happened. I think it’s maybe happened at a scale that’s even exceeded some people’s expectations. But none of this was unanticipated. And not just because we’ve seen that mass incarceration undermines public health always in the US, but also because we’ve seen specific epidemic dynamics elsewhere.
Josh Hoe
I mean, you would definitely think that if people just get the basic principle that people come in and out of prisons every single day, and if you make them an accelerant, that’s going to mean more comes back in your community. I don’t know why people don’t get that. But people don’t seem to get that, it’s very confusing, which brings us to COVID. Many of us all across the country worked extremely hard, screaming, yelling, jumping, doing everything we could possibly do to convince politicians that decarceration and vaccination for our brothers and sisters inside and for correctional officers was a moral and public health imperative. As an anthropologist, how would you describe what happened?
Eric Reinhart
You know, it’s a good illustration of what’s happened throughout the pandemic, in US Public Health writ large, which is we knew what was going to happen, anybody that had paid attention to the epidemiological dynamics around prisons, jails anywhere in the world, and seeing past outbreaks of different pathogens, we knew what would happen. There was not a dearth of knowledge that precipitated the crisis that came, of a worsening crisis that came, because there’s always been a crisis within US jails and prisons. There was a dearth of effective political mobilization. And I think it implicates us, not just the lawmakers that we’re constantly criticizing very appropriately, but we can’t figure out, we haven’t figured out how to mobilize effectively to shift this system. And yes, one can decry it in moral terms, you can decry it in public health terms ….. you can use criminological evidence. I’m no fan of the field of criminology, which I think often kind of just perpetuates more research about things we already know the clear answers to, but you know, leverage any field. This does not make sense. This harms everybody and especially harms people who are inside, which are not just the 2 million people, but the 70 million people in the US that have criminal records, live with criminal records; not all of them have been incarcerated but a lot of them have. So what we had was total inaction, not total, but near-total inaction; the level of action that we saw taken was woefully inadequate to the scale of the problem and remains so now, two years in nearly. It was very depressing to me, at the outset of the pandemic . . .
Josh Hoe
It was really depressing to me too! It’s still very frustrating to me.
Eric Reinhart
Well, when it first started, I shifted my whole orientation towards work; I’d never been interested in public work before frankly; I didn’t see that I had any particular potential to contribute to it. And it wasn’t something that particularly interested me, not that I didn’t think it’s important, but other people are doing it, they can do it better than I. But I had an opportunity, I thought. I had been in the space, I had an idea, I had a quantitative study that would make a very clear case for what was happening, and to implicate people’s own self-interest. This should finally help not just me, but all of these people who worked in this way at the outset, the pandemic should finally help tip the scales and make the US public recognize that this system is definitely dangerous for everybody. You may not care at all about ethics, you may not care about racial justice, you may not care about the violence perpetrated by this system, but don’t you care about your grandmother, don’t you care about your family or your neighborhood? Even if you live in the wealthy northern suburbs of Chicago, this affects you. But rather than the decline of the carceral state in the US, what we see is its intensification. Right now you have had a reduced rate of incarceration in state prison systems in many states, not all of them. But that’s really accidental. It’s just log jams at the front end, rather than deliberate action to release people.
Josh Hoe
And a lot of those are somewhat artificial, because you have increases in jail populations because prisons aren’t taking jail prisoners.
Eric Reinhart
And a lot of people are not in jails or prisons who will be once the log jam is clear. So we’re going to see a dramatic increase, whether it exceeds the prior incarceration rate, the rate before the pandemic, I’m not quite sure. But it’s nothing like what it looks like now, which is an artificially low rate. What you see is more, I think, indicative of what’s going to happen, what really has happened, is the federal prison population has gone up during the pandemic, or under Biden, has gone up; it actually went down under Trump.
Josh Hoe
Which ….. he did promise to reduce it by more than 50%.
Eric Reinhart
Right. The [ICE] population has increased by 70%, I think it might now be about 50%, over what Biden inherited when he took office. So we’re seeing not just not the dramatic movement that I thought we might be able to see towards the end of mass incarceration, we’re seeing the opposite. And this is incredibly frustrating to me. I mean, to speak of this, frustrating to me is almost obscene. Like it’s frustrating to 2 million people who are locked up, it’s frustrating to millions of people who are affected by their family members being locked up. This is frustrating on a scale that far exceeds any one individual. Why did that happen? I don’t know. What do you think? I mean, I know you’re interviewing me, but what do you think?
Josh Hoe
I think about this all the time. I led a very large-scale effort to get decarceration, and then vaccinations in our prisons, and we won on the second thing; our Governor did start doing vaccinations. And we’re one of the states that’s actually doing boosters, there’s already been 10,000 boosters. So I’m very proud of that. But I’m very frustrated that our Governor hasn’t commuted anybody. I mean, well, three or four people at this time. That’s very frustrating to me, I wish I understood because it seems to me the public health case is very strong. And I understand that people are deathly worried of allowing a jailbreak and someone recidivates and that one person then makes the whole thing look like a failure, which is what happens over and over again; people use anecdotal evidence to suggest that someone’s move was incredibly risky. We’ve seen it on all levels. We’ll talk about this a little bit more in a second. It has to be, I think, what you were suggesting earlier, there has to be something so deeply-rooted after 50 years of tough on crime, and we’ve seen nothing but television and movies for 50 years, that say that the only acceptable answer is harsh punishment for people who commit crimes. And no matter what the result of that has been, we’ve been told that over and over and over and over again, in every single form of media, and every single, you know, social experiment, I feel like it’s got to be part of our blood at this point. And only the people who’ve actually experienced it, or know people who’ve experienced it, or have come closely into contact with it, see enough of the truth of it to be able to . . . it’s like, there was an old movie, where a guy would wear glasses, and all of a sudden, he could see all the aliens. And, you know, I feel like, that’s kind of what it’s like if you’ve been close enough to see what it’s really like, if you put on the glasses, you know that the system is a total failure, and it’s bringing disaster to our communities, or at least certain communities. And, you know, if you haven’t worn the glasses you’re still drinking the Kool-Aid, and I think to some extent before I was incarcerated, I was probably drinking a lot of the Kool-Aid, even though I thought I was, you know, really in tune with all the social justice, you know, whatever. You know, I still thought well, on the whole . . . But you learn a lot in a short period of time. I think the very first episode of this podcast, one of the first things I said was, you’d have to be essentially blind to walk into a prison or jail in the United States and not see the racial disparities; that’s still true. If anyone would be willing to walk in, they would see that; it’s just most people aren’t willing to walk in. And the only way that they experience the criminal justice system is by watching Law and Order. And that is deeply dishonest and unethical television, in my opinion. And there’s lots of examples beyond them. I just tend to pick on them.
Eric Reinhart
I think it’s indicative of . . . throughout the recent months in particular, I’ve been thinking of the US prison and jail system as a microcosm of the rest of society, how we manage or fail to manage the pandemic, there is a reflection of what’s happening at a broader scale, more generally, in American society. And I think maybe the same reasons that there has not been the movement that I maybe naively hoped there would be . . .
Josh Hoe
I just want to, I want to push back a little bit, because you’ve said that a couple of times now, and I think the movement is there, there are a lot of people who fought extremely hard, and worked incredibly hard to try to get relief to people, it just hasn’t worked. So we’re not doing it the right way maybe . . .
Eric Reinhart
By movement I didn’t necessarily mean political movement, I meant like actual concrete policy movement. But I do also feel like I have, and I think, by extension, as a collective, we have not been effective in the way that we want to be. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of people’s intentions or commitment, but rather, we need to figure out how to have more effective mass politics.
Josh Hoe
We definitely didn’t win.
Eric Reinhart
It’s not just true for decarceration. But it’s true for all sorts of other policy platforms that have massive popular support, yet nonetheless aren’t implemented, like how do we generate a kind of effective mass politics? So the movement is there. How do we translate that social movement into effective policy? So that’s what I meant to indicate but I’m thinking, what you see with the carceral system, whenever somebody proposes mass releases, even just releases, the initial response that I often see is, that person did something wrong, they deserve whatever comes to them, you must hold them accountable. It’s always about individual virtue, individual responsibility. To shift the paradigm in the US from individual behavior, individual responsibility to collective responsibility is incredibly difficult. And we’re seeing this now also with the rest of our pandemic policies, you know, the CDC, the White House COVID Commission, whatever. Everybody is reinforcing – even public health agencies that are ostensibly predicated on a collective epidemiological concept of health dynamics networks – everybody’s reinforcing this individualistic paradigm. Now, we criticize liberal individualism all the time. But then we reproduce it ourselves often, as well. And I think it’s even deeply rooted.
Josh Hoe
Even within individualism, though, there’s an old doctrine, and you know, the exact name will probably elude me. But the idea is basically, what are you individually responsible for? Are you responsible for the predictable outcomes of things that you support? You know, like, for instance, if I gave a speech, and I for instance, suggested a bunch of people attack the Capitol, am I responsible for that? We’re seeing some of that work out in discussions right now. And some people say yes, that you’re not just responsible, I mean, that you’re not responsible for utterances, that you didn’t have an intention to have a bad result. But when you say something that, you know, as an individual, that could have a bad result, you are to some extent responsible for that; there’s at least a theory of ethics that says that. Well, if that’s true, and we know that these decisions we’re making have poor public health outcomes, aren’t we somewhat responsible for that, just like someone’s responsible, for instance, for committing certain crimes or doing certain things? We don’t get disconnected from the chain of agency of responsibility, simply because it’s not in the legal books or whatever, right? We’re still part of that.
Eric Reinhart
And I think ethically, in terms of interpersonal ethics, in terms of holding myself accountable in the world, how I engage with people, I’m with you, I think individual responsibility is important. Individual responsibility is not a framework for effective policymaking. It is not a framework for effective governance, it is not a framework for public health policy. And it’s not a framework for effective criminal legal systems. We have to think about other ways of producing the effects we want to see in the world. So what we’ve seen is that a commitment to punitive individualism of the kind that we see in the US does not produce collective safety. It does not prevent crime. It does not, you know, facilitate personal transformation or break intergenerational trauma, poverty; it does the exact opposite, it more deeply entrenches all these things. So great. Your ethical theory might say, I don’t mean yours, I mean one’s ethical theory might say, we need to enforce retributive justice upon this person. Okay, well, that comes with a cost, that comes at a cost not just to that person, but to their family, to their community, ultimately, to the country. Ultimately, you’re the one who’s enforcing this punishment. This is why I said earlier, there’s clearly a deeply sadomasochistic character in this. There’s a sadistic character in the demand that the other be punished. And there’s a masochistic acceptance of the consequence of this. And there’s some weird – I mean, sadomasochism involves a kind of pleasure. I don’t know what the pleasure is. There’s a perversity in this pleasure if there’s some kind of return that people get on this.
Josh Hoe
I’ve always suggested that people want to have permission to be . . . it’s not that people are opposed to brutality or cruelty. It’s that they want to feel like they’re justified when they utilize brutality and cruelty. Maybe that’s the reward. 2
Eric Reinhart
Well, one feels righteousness in the moment of enaction of violence. There is a violent tendency. I mean, this is what I . . .
Josh Hoe
Well, yeah, how many movies have we seen where the victory moment of the movie is when someone finally kills the villain, or?
Eric Reinhart
Or assassinate Osama bin Laden or whatever, I mean, not, not that I’m defending Osama bin Laden as a virtuous person who should be treated so wonderfully. But the idea that these moments of violence are the moments of moral victory, this is deeply entrenched in our society, and I think it folds into this sadomasochistic drive that is constitutive of what it is to be a human being. So I don’t mean that Americans are peculiarly bad.
Josh Hoe
It’s such a weird thing, though. I think about this all the time. I could see in that same situation, feeling bad, that we’re at the point where the only way that things could be fixed is to kill someone.
Eric Reinhart
It’s the same logic of punishment that supports that idea. So yes, there should be a kind of sadness that there hasn’t been successfully cultivated another kind of possibility, that the only imagined possibility for ending violence is yet more violence, which of course is never going to work in any case. But even if you think it is going to work, you should mourn that that is the position you’re in rather than celebrate it.
Josh Hoe
You certainly shouldn’t celebrate that, yay, I’m doing one of the worst things I can do as a human being and one that we’re willing to punish people for on a regular basis.
Eric Reinhart
We do this all the time, as a society, and I think, throughout the world, we will do this. And I think until we transform our imagination of our relation to violence, and to collectivity, such that we can understand violence as reverberating beyond the object upon which it’s enacted, the person upon it’s enacted. We can take that very seriously. I think we’re gonna have a very hard time making some fundamental shifts. You can see this in Frantz Fanon from Martinique, a psychiatrist trained in France, and who then was part of the Algerian and Tunisian struggles for independence. He has this famous book The Wretched of the Earth. The first chapter on violence is read very, very widely – the last chapter – and that’s like a full-throated embrace of anti-colonial violence. John-Paul Sartre wrote the foreword and kind of made it even more and more famous and more strident in how he rendered it in his foreword [piece], I forget what it is. But the last chapter of that book is Fanon as a psychiatrist, working with his patients, some of whom had been freedom fighters who have been tortured, some who were torturers themselves, the French colonists. And what you come to, rather than the kind of very optimistic liberation through violence in the first chapter, is the recognition that anti-colonial violence, which is perhaps necessary, is important. This isn’t a denigration of that, but I’m saying, well, what Fanon says, is that it reverberates, it doesn’t end, it comes back in your dreams, comes back in your relations, you know, that the French torturer who tortures the freedom fighter, then goes home and tortures his own children and his wife, etc. There is no escape from this violence. And if we imagine that we’re going to make our world a better place, or a safer place through just deeper and deeper infliction of violence on people’s bodies and psyches and lives and communities, it doesn’t take us where people imagined it’s going to take us.
Josh Hoe
Well, it obviously hasn’t! It’s funny, you see in the press almost every day, you know, the object of scorn and the reason we have violence is apparently criminal justice reform, which we barely passed, you know. I can name probably all the major pieces of legislation that passed across the country; it would take me a little while, but I’m fairly familiar with all of it. But it’s not significant. It is significant and has helped people, but it’s not the kind of thing that would cause . . . but we have spent, you know, every year we’ve spent $80 billion on policing, and yet we have an increase in violence – who gets blamed? It’s the criminal justice reform, not the police, not the poverty, it’s always the thing that’s probably least responsible if you want to be totally honest.
Eric Reinhart
So I feel like, you can invoke these kinds of high languages of violence, like I just did to some degree, not very eloquently. But I’m not very interested in that. I want to know what’s going to have an effect. I mean, I think . . .
Josh Hoe
I think we all do. I’ve personally been involved in passing, I think it’s now like 51 pieces of legislation that had optimally some effect, and I’m very proud of all of that, but I’d really like for us to do some of the major stuff like end life and long sentences, or deal with life and long sentences, get rid of some of the more terrible abuses that are happening in our prisons, especially in the south, although not exclusively in the south. There’s a laundry list that would go on for weeks.
Eric Reinhart
And this is, I think, you know, so important that we tether our work and our rhetorical work to the effect. And this isn’t a criticism, this is just thinking like, this is what the challenge always is, especially as an academic. I don’t have an academic position right now, I don’t identify as an academic, but a lot of this work has been done within academic circles. What’s rewarded within the university? Publications, notoriety, press mentions, not policy effect. I mean, of course, we all want that in some sense, but it’s not actually what’s incentivized. And so I think it takes a kind of work, dedication and sacrifice sometimes, because sometimes effect doesn’t come with all the other things that are rewarded. So how do we collectively orient our work towards effect? You know, almost everybody that I talk to in the US rhetorically seeks the end of mass incarceration, condemns this system. But very few people – and I don’t mean you or others who are really engaged in this kind of work, but just in the general public – have a concrete sense of what that would entail, how that could be possible? What are the policy paradigms that we need to push forward? Who might represent them among the representatives that we could vote for now? Or why would we be discontent with the current options we have, and demand something of a practical policy platform for doing that? This is not part of the common language in the US, at least insofar as I’ve seen; I maybe have a narrow view of it. But I think that’s what we need to do. We need to push, we have enough moral condemnation of these things. We need a real policy movement, and how do we do that? I’m not always sure it’s through, you know, through the moralizing languages, which are totally appropriate, but I’m not sure effective. . . they deliver their own kind of satisfaction, that often diverts energy from the fact of work that needs to be done.
Josh Hoe
We have suggested several things – and we’ll talk about that in just a second – that could potentially be solutions. But first, I want to just tell people that in Michigan, at the initial stage, we had 144 people die in the first wave of COVID. And then we got vaccinations, and basically, no one died until this month. And now we’ve had six more deaths. You’ve written about Omicron being a new real and present danger. Do you want to talk a little bit about that before we get to solutions, just so people get a feeling of the public health picture on why Omicron is, again, ramping this up? And like I said, we’re already seeing the effects of it where I live.
Eric Reinhart
Well, one thing to say is that whatever numbers we hear, you can look up, and UCLA COVID Behind Bars is a great resource for that and the New York Times, until they stopped aggregating information because it wasn’t reliable anymore. It was already limited. They stopped at the end of March 2021. All the numbers that we can get, I’m glad that people are pulling together the numbers, [but they] dramatically under-represent the scale of the problem. So the New York Times, which had the most comprehensive database for cases and deaths inside jails, prisons, and ICE facilities, they were only able to get information on about half of those facilities in the US.
Josh Hoe
And is that mostly because of a lack of transparency from the DOCs and the jails?
Eric Reinhart
Yeah. And there’s no reporting mechanism. There’s no regulatory infrastructure to demand reporting, even that which is reported is not necessarily reliable. There’s no supervisory structures to ensure that, there’s no auditing and structure in most cases.
Josh Hoe
Well, and when you get to jails, you’re talking about counties. And so you know, in Michigan, there’s 83 counties, that’s, you know, 80-something jails. And I honestly couldn’t tell you, I have a very good idea of what’s happening at the state level, but I have very little idea of how many people died at the county level.
Eric Reinhart
It’s so disaggregated, and there’s a lot of power that’s wielded by the individual administrators and counties, that’s typical. In 80% of county jails in the US, the county jails are run by the sheriff, the sheriff is an elected politician in most instances. They have significant personal investment in not exposing bad things happening in their facilities for which they are then held responsible and stand to lose electorally, they are politicians, they have political interest. And they’re given almost total autonomy over the system and what’s disclosed or not. You know you have prison administrators – the incentives are not quite the same, but they also have incentives to minimize what’s happening, to not test adequately so as to discover what’s happening, to record cause of death in a different kind of way, to release somebody to a hospital, so they’re no longer in custody, and they die there rather than in their facility. We’ve seen this; this has been documented at the New York Times and STAT news and others. And this is happening all over in ways that are never documented, that no journalist ever gets a whiff of, and we don’t know. So the numbers are huge. According to the New York Times, their last data point at the end of March was 661,000 cases inside US jails, prisons, and ICE facilities, but the number of real . . . but that’s half, half of our facilities have reported. And then also within those half facilities, the vast majority were not testing to a remotely adequate degree. So we have no idea how many cases and deaths have been inside these facilities. There have been, I’m confident, well over a million cases, certainly now, because that 661,000 was before the Delta and Omicron variants which had huge surges. So definitely well over a million cases, I don’t know how many deaths, many 1000s. But each of those cases and deaths on the inside of these facilities translates to a much larger number on the outside. This is what the research that you’re going to speak about, I think showed, which we started in Cook County in Chicago, and showed that when we had a big outbreak there in March of 2020, March/April 2020, about three weeks later, so April 19, that 16% of all cases statewide, and coincidentally, in Chicago, 16% – also were attributable to, independently attributable to spread from the jail. So 54% of cases that were linked to the jail once you do a multivariate regression, and you control for these other factors that we know are associated the spread of Covid at that time, which is population density, racial demographics, and you isolate just the independent association with the jails, 16% of cases. And at that time, there were 1000s of cases across Illinois. So in a short period of time, you have the jail spinning out an enormous number of cases. How does this happen? People come through the jail, they often stay there only a number of days, they’re exposed to a very high-risk space for infection, they get an infection – not everyone, but many – they are then discharged from the jail, in many cases they’ve never been tested, if they have been tested may not have come out positive on the test, because they haven’t had sufficient incubation period to turn positive, they’ve been exposed, but they do not yet turn positive. They go back to their communities thinking that they are, you know, totally fine, virus-free. They may be symptomatic, or may not be, and end up spreading to other people around them, unaware of what’s happening. And you have multiplication of cases in this way. So as I mentioned earlier, 11 million separate admission release cycles through US jails every single year. That’s just local jails. That’s a lot of opportunities for people to go and get infected, go back out and infect other people. You have enormous proportions of incarcerated populations in the US who have been exposed to the virus and become infected. So you have to expect that a large proportion of people recycled through jails are going to be infected, they are going to spread it. So we had a later national study. Daniel Chen and I, my colleague at the World Bank, is also an economist and legal scholar in Toulouse in France. We later had a national study that tried to look at this at the national level.
Eric Reinhart
And there we found, what that study really was looking at, was the effect of decarceration on reductions in COVID case counts and COVID case growth rates in communities. And we found that decarceration was associated with significant reductions in the daily COVID case growth rate. By extrapolation, you can conclude that 10s of millions of cases, sorry, millions of cases, and 10s of 1000s of deaths around the US are attributable to jail-related spread. But that study, none of the work I’ve been able to do so far actually, has been able to account for staff. So you have people released every day who have been incarcerated, you have over 400,000 guards at jails and prisons in the US who go in and out every single day. They have extraordinary potential to spread the virus, and not just once. Now we see with Omicron, or with Delta, many people are becoming infected multiple times; each one of those times they become an infectious vector for others. So the public health conclusion here is very simple. These are epidemic engines. These are multipliers of infection that then spread disease, so that the whole of American communities, also we’re in a pandemic, the US leads case counts across the world. A pandemic means that this is not isolated to one place or constrained by borders, it spreads everywhere. So the number of cases that have been spread internationally, by the US carceral system is large. I have no idea what it is. Nobody can say, but it’s significant. So this is not just about US public health. This is about global public health. The US carceral system, the largest in the world by far, is a massive global biosecurity hazard. And there should be international pressure. There hasn’t been so far as I know. But there should be international pressure to say, for reasons of global public health and biosecurity, this system has to be changed.
Josh Hoe
So one of the solutions you’re just referring to is this notion that correctional officers should be vaccinated, and should be responsible in a number of ways. I think most states would suggest that they currently can barely staff their facilities. They’re worried that more correctional officers will quit or not show up for work if they mandate vaccines. And in many states, it’s also a collective bargaining issue. I know you’ve suggested that the CDC might be a mechanism by which this could be checked. Do you have any thoughts about how … as much as I’d like to just bash the states and the systems because I’m obviously no fan, they do have, there are some problems they’re dealing with here. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Eric Reinhart
Well, retrospective critical thoughts that are not so helpful for now, and then maybe some other thoughts for now. So I mean, if we’re talking about the CDC, what was really upsetting to me and to a lot of people, I know you also, was that when the CDC was coming up with their guidelines for the initial distribution of vaccines, which as many will recall, where it’s short supply, initially, they came up with a system of prioritization. Healthcare workers are prioritized, often inappropriately, people were actually at low risk of exposure, health care workers who are not directly involved in Covid care were prioritized. People in nursing homes were prioritized as they should have been, that was appropriate; staff, at jails and prisons and ICE facilities were prioritized, but not incarcerated people. And at that time, there was clear evidence that was available to the CDC, they were very well aware of it, that people who are incarcerated in the US were at higher risk of exposure than any other group in the country, for basic epidemiological reasons, for basic bioethical reasons, which, that is the mandate of this, the ACIP group that decides prioritization schema, is to follow bioethical and epidemiological principles, they completely push that to the side and ignore this population. They refuse to prioritize them. That’s a massive abdication of responsibility, basic public health responsibility, bioethical, just whatever, it is basic responsibility, I don’t care about the qualifiers. And that harms everybody. Of course, it harms incarcerated people most, and then the families and their communities with the whole country. So that was very frustrating. You saw it repeated with boosters, there has been no deliberate campaign by the CDC, which again, is responsible for prioritizing booster allocation, to get boosters to incarcerated people, even though they remain at highest risk of exposure. And also, I don’t know about highest, but one of the highest risk categories for severe outcomes, the risk of mortality, and a significant morbidity for people who are incarcerated, who are denied proper health care in most instances, even though that’s a violation of their constitutional rights, legal rights.
Josh Hoe
Not that the Eighth Amendment seems to have much meaning with the courts anymore.
Eric Reinhart
So this is repeatedly incredibly frustrating. You see states follow suit, if the CDC does not give us guidelines, many states refuse to prioritize, although it is within their right to do so, they generally refuse to do so.
Josh Hoe
And you also mentioned that it’s an accelerant for community spread. It’s not only that it is incredibly dangerous to folks inside, including correctional officers, but ….
Eric Reinhart
Who die at pretty high rates and many have died. So that’s very frustrating. So yes, the CDC could have done much better. Can they do something better now? Yes, they could launch a campaign, an educational campaign for states, they could work with the White [House], I mean the CDC has limited power to institute policy, but they can issue guidelines and with their guidelines, they can influence policy to a very significant degree. So yes, they should do that. But it’s I mean, now at this stage, it’s about mandates. Not for incarcerated people, who in general have actually had much higher rates of uptake than their guards.
Josh Hoe
We actually had an 80% uptake which is higher than the general population.
Eric Reinhart
Yeah. So I mean, I think it’s unethical, and inappropriate to mandate vaccination for people who are incarcerated, to have their rights, bodily autonomy, stripped from them generally, [they] are extremely vulnerable and have good historical reasons to distrust medical interventions. I’m not at the point where I’m comfortable with saying forced mandates for incarcerated people . . . if you mandate for a staff member, a guard, you say as a condition of keeping your job, where you are charged with protecting people who are in this facility, part of your responsibility is to get vaccinated. If they don’t want to get vaccinated, they can quit.
Josh Hoe
That gets us back to the problem, though, which is that in many, especially southern states, they’ve under-hired or underpaid for so long that they’re at risk of almost total system collapse, because they’re at such risk, from correctional officers. And like I said, it’s also in a lot of cases, it’s a collective bargaining issue. So unless there’s a public health mandate . . .
Eric Reinhart
But you don’t solve the staffing problem, which is real in some places, and imaginary in others. It’s an imaginary problem at Rikers, it’s a real problem in Georgia and Alabama and Florida, and other places as well. But you don’t solve a staffing problem by saying, Okay, you are choosing to be a disease vector that can bring in epidemic outbreaks in this facility, so we’ll just go with that. That’s not a rational decision-making process. So to me, that’s not a good argument for opposing mandating vaccines for guards.
Josh Hoe
That’s definitely the right answer, which is you’re basically protecting your employees by letting them spread the virus everywhere.
Eric Reinhart
And ultimately harm themselves and their co-workers and the people who are most vulnerable, which are incarcerated people. So I mean, the real problem with the so-called staffing problem is that we have far too many people inside these facilities, we incarcerate at completely indefensible rates. So if you cannot staff the facilities that have a legal obligation to provide safe environments, because you cannot staff them, they are more unsafe than they ordinarily are, which is already illegally unsafe. These are incredibly dangerous facilities that are your future rapid human rights abuses in normal times, then clearly the rational response is we have to decarcerate, especially when it’s clear that a very large proportion of people who are incarcerated in these facilities, their incarceration does not by any stretch of the imagination serve public safety, it does not improve safety for people in the general population. In fact, during a pandemic, it very clearly undermines it.
Josh Hoe
Well, this gets us to the last important, weighty question I think we’ll probably be dealing with. You were saying you like my podcast name. On the subject of decarceration, which, you know, I obviously am very much for, here’s the problem, though; our movement is probably stronger than it’s ever been, in a lot of ways. It’s, we’ve got more people involved than we ever had before, we’ve had a lot of success at a certain level more than we have before. But here’s the thing, it doesn’t seem like the vast majority of the people in this country believe decarceration is a good idea. You know, it’s an ever-increasing number of people who are with us, but obviously, there’s still an awful lot of people who are against us. So, you know, it’s one thing to say decarcerate; do you have any kind of a political strategy for how decarceration is possible? And I know, that’s a big question, you may not have an answer. It’s something I struggle with every day. How do we get from here to there?
Eric Reinhart
There are different levels at which to answer the question, I think we have to answer at multiple levels all the time. One is mechanistic. Maybe I’ll put that on the backburner for the moment. The first one that I think is really important is we need a vision. I mean, you saw Trump be incredibly successful with manipulating masses, with producing political force, non-productive policy, but for whatever he wanted. You saw Bernie Sanders generate an affective investment. People cared about the Bernie Sanders campaign. They, a lot of people who didn’t have a lot of money gave money to it, they’re going to rallies, there was a narrative that he crafted around the campaign that was effective. The Democratic Party historically has really shied away from affective politics, aesthetic politics, like the politics of feeling. And I think for a big project, like mass decarceration in the US, which is going to take massive monetary investments, is going to take a shift in the ethical paradigms that dictate policy and attitudes and behaviors in the US, we need a politics of mass feeling, we have to generate an effective narrative paradigm. So you know, Trump has his Make America Great Again, nobody knows quite what that means. But we need something like an organizing paradigm.
Josh Hoe
I think it means making America white again, but it’s a 1950s callback, right.
Eric Reinhart
But I mean, in terms of policy, you know, if you ask, what is the policy that is behind that, exactly, you know, a lot of people wouldn’t have a very good answer for you. But he produced a rhetorical framework that generated this. We need to produce a similarly effective – and I don’t mean similar in Trump’s in Trump’s reactionary sense – but in the sense of generating mass feeling, of mass buy-in, a similar kind of aesthetically-charged movement that is backed by concrete policy demands that people can recognize and that people rally behind. So I think piecemeal decarceration is really important, but it’s very limited in its capacity to generate massive buy-in. So you know, you have like the New Deal. You have now the Green New Deal. We need something parallel to the Green New Deal; you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone in America who doesn’t have some sense of what that is, and probably a strong feeling towards it, a lot of people negative, a lot of people positive. But without a grand narrative or grand ambition like that, I think it’s gonna be hard to generate the momentum we need for a real de-carceral movement. Now, I think even the marginal gains are important, the marginal gains represent people’s lives who are no longer in cages. So I don’t mean to denigrate that at all, I will do everything I can for any marginal gain. At the same time, I want to think about how we can produce a collective organizing framework where every politician in the US is held accountable to say, what is your stance on America’s national decarceration program? on this specific proposal? on the target of reducing in the next five years the incarcerated population in the US by over half? these kinds of ambitious – as a provisional step – these kinds of ambitious proposals. I don’t see that right now. We talked about people condemning mass incarceration. So Biden condemns mass incarceration on the campaign trail, gets in office and increases the incarcerated population. So we don’t have a framework by which to hold politicians and representatives accountable. I think that’s one part. The other part is that we need to work at the very nitty gritty – [with the] logistical leaders that are available to us. So um, the lowest hanging fruit because it’s most obvious, and also probably politically practical, is Biden’s pardon power, Governors’ pardon power. You know, in Colorado, you just had this exercise to a significant degree. Is it adequate? not remotely, but it’s something. Biden has, you know, 18,300 pardon petitions on his desk.
Josh Hoe
Yeah sitting on his desk.
Eric Reinhart
He hasn’t touched a single one. That should be like, everybody in the nation should know that and think that that’s obscene. Especially – it’s at least duplicitous. Even if you aren’t a big fan of mass decarceration, this guy said he was going to do it, he’s doing the exact opposite. You know, that should not be a defensible position. But most people aren’t aware of this. How do we raise awareness around that and enforce that kind of…. But then once you actually have people in power, who are invested in this, we have a lot of mechanisms. So in the Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division, there’s a lot of civil rights legislation that can be creatively used to force state DOCs to change policies, to force police departments to change policies. Local judges have power to release people, sheriffs have power to release people and to change also the conditions under which people are jailed or conditions for which they’re jailed, so that minor offenses or alleged offenses don’t result in completely unnecessary jailing, we need to invest . . . go ahead.
Josh Hoe
But that’s sort of the tail wagging the dog. In a sense, it gets back to the original problem, which is that politicians, to some extent, do what they do, because they believe that the public is for or against what they’re doing. It’s very rare that a politician goes out on a limb. As you said, there’s only one or two states where they’ve even made any kind of attempt at this because it’s very hard to get people to go out on a limb and do something they think is generally unpopular.
Eric Reinhart
They see it as a liability.
Josh Hoe
It’s why since Ford, you see Governors and Presidents only pardon people and use clemency powers in their second terms, because they’re term-limited out after that.
Eric Reinhart
This is why I think we have to pair these two things. The first one, which is like this, this ambitious aesthetic paradigm, which generates not just the rational arguments that you and I could talk about, about the public health benefits, the public safety benefits, all these kinds of things that would come from mass decarceration, because I mean that is abundantly clear, if anybody cares to look at evidence. But what we’re lacking is a mass mobilization of feeling in affirmation of this kind of an agenda, that we see this as an ethical demand collectively, as a nation. This doesn’t really have a “whole” in the way that it needs to, how do we generate that at a mass level, not just within academic seminars, not just within each podcast, not just within the circles that you and I . . . . but the average person on Michigan Avenue when I walk out there today, that they know of this, and they have a feeling towards it one way or the other. This doesn’t happen right now. So I think in order to shift this impression the politicians have, correctly, that mass decarceration, or even just opposing the criminal legal system, as it exists, is electoral liability, we have to shift public attitudes, and we have to invest in effective narratives to do that.
Josh Hoe
Oddly enough, one of the closest we came to there at least being a national discussion was when Bernie Sanders talked about voting for people who are incarcerated. That actually did start a lot of discussions and then it kind of died off. But that was an example I think where the traditional tough on crime narratives wasn’t the only voice being heard in the room and there was actually a discussion going on across the larger social sphere or whatever.
Eric Reinhart
In his first campaign against Hillary Clinton, Bernie had this campaign video from a . . . in Florida, agricultural workers, you can look it up on YouTube, it was incredibly powerful – I might be a little biased in a sense in support of this, in support of workers, rights for migrant workers, but it is an incredibly powerful, aesthetically-charged production. I haven’t seen something like that – maybe it’s just because I’m not aware – that focuses on incarcerated people, the families of incarcerated people. There are a lot of – and I don’t mean to be so crudely instrumentalizing, except for I think it’s important that we tell stories, we do not have effective politics, unless we generate narrative paradigms around which to organize them.
Josh Hoe
We do have tons of those stories out there. The problem is they get used campaign by campaign, not as an overarching ….
Eric Reinhart
Yeah, or I want to see them used campaign by campaign in support of a common cause, in support of a common policy paradigm that has been put forward. So that a platform of an electoral campaign is: we are going to reduce in our state or nationally, or in our county, the incarceration rate by this proportion; we’re going to do it by changing these policies, by not incarcerating people for all of these completely irrational reasons; I don’t see that kind of organized connection of aesthetically appealing narratives.
Josh Hoe
Well, I think another problem that we see is that these things get fed through a media machine that in a lot of cases, is dominated by prosecutors, police, and former prosecutors and police. You know, I mean, you see what Alvin Bragg came out with the other day, let’s stop putting people in prison for all these reasons. And everyone was, you’ve got to be crazy. We’re having a hard time getting to the microphone in the same way, I think, or having our ducks in a row in terms of how we talk about why that’s a good idea.
Eric Reinhart
Well, we also need to make new microphones, you know, if you’re expecting to win over the New York Post, when you’re making your decarceral arguments, you’re not gonna win. Maybe we need to have a different strategy.
Josh Hoe
They’re bad-faith actors, so you’re not going to convince them to do anything.
Eric Reinhart
But it’s just good media practice to run a newspaper like the New York Post, or like the Atlantic, you know, you publish stuff all over, including reactionary crazy stuff. You know, that’s just what you do. You make money that way, as a media organization. If we’re relying on persuading existing media apparatuses to take rational stances, to run these, it’s not going to work. They are not, you know, ethical, political campaigns. That’s not how they operate. We need to produce microphones for ourselves. I mean, you’re doing it right now. But we also need to do this at a mass scale. That has to be, you know, a real focus of an effective political campaign. I mean, people know this, of course, and you see all these people investing, from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, and many others, investing in their social media efforts, all these kinds of things. But I think we still have a way to go, I think there’s a bit of a mimetic impulse in that, oh, this works, let’s do this, rather than an inventive impulse. And I think we need to invent a lot more in terms of how we use media narrative and grand narratives ourselves, what we could be collectively, in order to push the kind of policy changes we need. I feel like I talked earlier about what I care about is effect. And then all I’ve said are these vague, general things without kind of real . . .
Josh Hoe
It’s tough man, we’re all wrestling with a lot of . . .
Eric Reinhart
I’m trying to swim around kind of in frustration, wanting to find some way to kind of push forward. And I feel like the work that I’ve done, which I worked on as hard as I, as I humanly could, hasn’t done what I hoped it would do.
Josh Hoe
I mean, I stand on the shoulders of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds – mostly people of color – who have done this work for a long time. And I’ve probably been part of as many wins as anybody. And I’m still incredibly frustrated because it’s just not what’s needed. We need, we need so much more and the need is so obvious. So people really liked that I asked this last year, so I’m going to ask it again. Are there any criminal justice-related books that you’ve read that you might recommend to others? And if you don’t have one right off the top of your head, that’s fine, too.
Eric Reinhart
Well, Elizabeth Hinton’s two books, I think, are incredibly important. But probably Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness, I think, might be the most important book for me in this in this area. You know, probably because you said you haven’t had Lacan appear on the podcast before, probably some psychoanalytic texts I think are important too, to think about the structure of sadomasochism, to think about aesthetics, pleasure, desire, feeling, and how that’s operating within this very violent system and how we have to not just suppress feeling, not just to kind of deny that the sadomasochistic impulse is there, but how do we effectively transform it into something productive to end these systems? So although it’s not on the current legal system in the US specifically, I’d say maybe generally psychoanalytic literature on sadomasochism and affect is quite important.
Josh Hoe
I always asked the same last question, what did I mess up? What questions should I have asked but did not? I just want to say this, of all the 117 previous episodes, this is the most off of my script I’ve ever gotten. We had actually a lot of dialogue that was back and forth.
Eric Reinhart
I think you’re proving my point that you chose the wrong interviewee. But that was your first mistake.
Josh Hoe
I think that’s good. I like when there’s a lot of back and forth. I prefer to have discussions but I still do a lot of prep. 2
Eric Reinhart
That’s a very good question for an interview. I am working as a psychiatrist for the moment. I never ask patients that. We don’t ask patients that. I’d really be interested to hear their answers.
Josh Hoe
At the church I go to, the pastor always, after his sermon, turns the mic over to the crowd to say, what are your thoughts? And ever since then, I’ve really appreciated the humility of that. And so that’s kind of what I modeled this after, it’s always asking a humility question to end up with.
Eric Reinhart
[There’s] nothing that I can remember now. And I don’t think there was anything that really stuck out to me as I thought that was really the wrong way to ask that question. But I think you know, right now, we do have a lot of . . . we talked in grand terms, or I did, maybe, foolishly in some ways, or naively, but we have a lot of practical questions right now, to deal with right now. I think the vaccine mandates are incredibly important for protecting incarcerated people or protecting staff at these carceral facilities and the community writ large. We’ve seen that mandates are very effective across various sectors of our society. We need mandates, and those can be enforced at the county level, the state level, the federal level, that has to happen. There’s no legitimate argument for that not happening.
Josh Hoe
I’m a little worried that the Supreme Court is about to weigh in on that question, unfortunately.
Eric Reinhart
Well, they’re weighing in on Biden’s capacity to do it. But there are a lot of other mechanisms by which that can be done.
Josh Hoe
Businesses can do it, probably I’m just saying I’m a little nervous.
Eric Reinhart
I mean, all these things feel so dissatisfying. When I turned to vaccines, no; we need to release people. When you put all these little band-aids over a fundamentally broken harmful system, it doesn’t get me going. But we do need to do that also.
Josh Hoe
Like I said, we had 144 people die before vaccines in Michigan prisons; since we got vaccines in Michigan prisons, basically, nobody died until Omicron. That may not be what we want. But that’s something and it shows that vaccines are successful and that they protect our people.
Eric Reinhart
Vaccines are very important. There’s no question about that.
Josh Hoe
I really appreciate you taking the time, especially right after work. It is really nice to talk to you. I could probably talk to you for another, you know, we’ve covered a lot of stuff I’m interested in, including Lacan and Fanon, and a lot of other interesting stuff. So thanks so much.
Eric Reinhart
Thank you. It’s my pleasure. I’ll see you, Josh.
Josh Hoe
And now my take.
Decarceration in the face of COVID makes our communities safer. Even if you do not care about incarcerated people, or the families of incarcerated people, you should care about correctional facilities accelerating COVID and sending COVID back into our communities to affect our families and our loved ones. This happens when correctional officers go back and forth to work. This happens when vendors and other workers go back and forth. This happens when visitors go back and forth. And it happens when people are released and/or re-enter facilities. The public health impacts of this acceleration of the pandemic largely outweigh any public safety impact from releases. What I wonder is why no media figures ask politicians why they are worried about the public perception of releases, but are not worried about the public health impact of continuing to allow correctional facilities to amplify and manufacture and spread COVID across their communities and states.
I also am deeply concerned with all the people suffering inside our prisons and jails. I am so thankful that I got out before this pandemic started. I can only barely comprehend how stressful and challenging it has been to be incarcerated throughout this public health disaster. Waking up every day to see people who you walk with and who you hang out with and who you go to meals with every single day just disappear into COVID segregation, many of them never to be seen again. I wonder why no media figures ask why the death of incarcerated people is acceptable. I am deeply saddened by the loss of life. We have now lost over 150 human beings just in Michigan, and they have mostly died in relative silence. We don’t just need political courage, we need the public to be willing to speak truth to power. We need the media to actually do their jobs and commit to speaking truth to power, as opposed to simply repeating what they think is the most popular and easiest path. And I think Eric was right, we need to create our own media, we need to use whatever microphones we can create and share the truth wherever we can. And we need to work together to ensure that people hear the case for decarceration, hear the reasons why these people matter, and why these deaths are unacceptable. And to hear the evidence that proves that when we remain committed to incarceration, it destroys the health of our communities. I get that everyone is working on different priorities. But there are times when we really need to speak with one voice and speak with that one voice loudly. This has been one of those times. And so far, we have not found that common voice. We have not spoken together with that common voice. And there have been real and tragic consequences. Very few things make me more depressed than watching how this pandemic has broken down, especially in our correctional facilities.
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