Joshua B. Hoe interviews Hannah Riley about the crisis in Georgia’s prison system.
Full Episode
My Guest: Hannah Riley
Hannah Riley is a writer and organizer based in Atlanta. She works as the Communications Director for the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit law office working on behalf of people impacted by the criminal legal system in the Deep South, and organizes with Georgia Freedom Letters, an abolitionist collective working to build relationships with incarcerated people in Georgia through letter writing.
Watch the Interview on YouTube
You can watch Episode 121 of the Decarceration Nation Podcast on YouTube.
Notes from Episode 121 Hannah Riley – Georgia Crisis
Read Hannah’s article in Inquest about Georgia prisons.
The Southern Center for human rights petitioned the Department of Justice to intervene.
The Southern Center also pushed for action on the women’s prisons in Georgia.
The book Hannah suggested was Until We Reckon by Danielle Sered.
Full Transcript
Joshua Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 121 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Hannah Riley, about the ongoing human rights crisis in Georgia prisons. Hannah Riley is a writer and organizer based in Atlanta. She works as the Communications Director for the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit law office working on behalf of people impacted by the criminal legal system in the Deep South – and that’s a lot of work – and organizes with Georgia Freedom Letters, an abolitionist collective working to build relationships with incarcerated people in Georgia through letter writing. Welcome to the Decarceration Nation podcast, Hannah.
Hannah Riley
Thanks for having me, Josh. Happy to be here.
Josh Hoe
My pleasure. I always ask the same first question. How did you get from wherever you started in life, to being a communications director at the Southern Center for Human Rights?
Oh no, this is such a boring answer. I’m so sorry. I studied psychology as an undergraduate. And I started to get very interested in false confessions my sophomore year, and that led me down many a rabbit hole. It’s hard to study psychology without clearly bumping into the reality that prisons are incredibly damaging, and horrifying on many levels.
Josh Hoe
Strangely not good for mental health.
Hannah Riley
Who would have thunk that putting people in cages would be detrimental to their mental health? So yeah, I was a psychology major. I got very, very interested in prisons in college. And then I went to the Innocence Project, after graduation, and started working in communications there. And I think wrongful convictions are a good lens to sort of look at these broader issues within the criminal legal system, the more you learn about that, the more you can sort of start to unravel the thread. So I was at the Innocence Project for a number of years. I have a lot of fondness for that work and for the people doing it. But it became apparent to me that I really wanted to broaden away from just wrongful convictions, you know, cases of actual innocence. And in 2017, after two years of not living in the United States, taking something of a break from this, I saw a listing for this job at the Southern Center, which had been on my radar for a very long time, as a place doing really, really principled work in this area. Got the job, moved to Atlanta. It was the first time I had been to Georgia, aside from going there for one day for my interview. So a very steep learning curve. But I’ve been there since September 2017 and I love it. So that’s the very boring answer to that question. I’m sorry.
Joshua Hoe
Not sure it’s boring. I guess it depends on who’s listening. It wasn’t boring to me. I don’t know. It’s definitely subjective. But how did you get – to dig a little deeper into what could or could not be a boring answer – how did starting in psychology get you to communications?
Hannah Riley
Well, more fleshing out. So I originally had thought that sort of the only way to do meaningful change-work around prisons and decarceration and abolition was to become a lawyer. So that had sort of been my initial plan. I think a lot of folks who go and work at law firms, these nonprofit law offices, especially right after college, are kind of doing that for a couple of years, and then inevitably going to law school. And my time there made it very clear that I did not want to be a lawyer. And it also made it very clear that public education, in addition to giving incarcerated people the microphone is, I think, just as important as the very, very crucial legal work and litigation and other liberatory things that attorneys are doing. I just wanted to write and I wanted to help people tell their stories. Because I felt very strongly that it would be impossible to hear these things, to listen to these stories and not to be moved by them. That is not entirely true. I think that the years of my career have shown me that plenty of people can be exposed to the horrors of incarceration and remain unmoved by it. But yeah, I thought I was going to be a lawyer. And then I saw that narrative work and public education in this way felt like the thing that I was most comfortable doing. And I don’t think we need more lawyers. Controversial take, but I think we have enough.
Joshua Hoe
I definitely don’t think that’s a controversial take, although I do have a lot of friends who are on the defense side of the law work. So there’s a book the far right uses a lot called Confrontational Politics. And that book, one of its major premises is that public education is basically irrelevant. And what we really need to be doing is riling people up. You said one of your big takes is that you wanted to be more part of public education. I’m just springing that on you. So I know you probably don’t have a way to bridge that necessarily. I am just wondering what you think – as someone who also engages quite a bit in public education – what you think of both that take on, on how you move the public, and how more principled and educational takes can compete in that environment?
Hannah Riley
I sort of think public education is riling people up. Like they’re kind of one thing in my mind. You know, I could talk for hours about whether or not visibility alone and public education alone actually moves the needle on these issues. Like I said, I don’t think that history has shown that to be true. That doesn’t mean that they’re not incredibly important and part of a larger strategy organizing for liberation. But yeah, I think public education has to have a little element of riling people up. Although I guess that depends on how you’re defining riling people up. Radical public education is what I’m trying to go for. And I should say that this is, I’m speaking as my position at the Southern Center for Human Rights, but also as an advocate and organizer on my own. And there are slight, slight modulations to what I would say depending on the audience, and that is that is also true of who something is coming from. So, Southern Center is in a very different position as an organization than I am as an individual, and sometimes those lines are blurry.
Joshua Hoe
So I decided to ask you to come on after reading an article that you wrote about Georgia’s prison system. I will start with a quote that immediately – well, partial quote – that immediately stood out to me, and which I would assume should have started, in my opinion, a national inquiry. You said that 450 people had died in Georgia’s prisons between January of 2020 and September of 2021. I want to say that again because I still can’t get my head around this. You said that 450 people had died in Georgia’s prisons, between January of 2020 and September of 2021, 450 human beings dead, in a little over a year and a half. Tell me a little bit. How is this not a national story? I don’t understand why. The first I’d heard that number was from you in an article.
Hannah Riley
I should say that this is not a national story. And frankly, it’s barely a story in the state of Georgia. There are lots of reasons for that. Chief among them, and this is fresh in my mind, because I’ve been spending hours in the newspaper.com archives going through pieces about the Georgia prison system from 1940 until now, and it’s not hyperbolic for me to say, we have been saying the same thing since 1940. The same headlines have been splashed across our newspapers since 1940. It’s just this consistent, Georgia prisons are in crisis, what are we going to do about it? Here are some very good ideas. And then we kind of move on, and sometimes there’s legislative proposals that go nowhere. Sometimes this means the GDC gets a budget increase. Sometimes this means some sort of federal intervention, you know, federal litigation. But I really think the answer is that this has been going on for as long as many of us can remember. I think absent real action, people grow tired of hearing about it, they glaze over.
Joshua Hoe
I just know that a couple years ago, I was getting pretty fired up about 31 people dying in Mississippi prisons over a year, and I was very fired up about 144 people dying from COVID in Michigan prisons. The 450 is a whole different level of crazy. And I mean, I still every time I see that it makes my eyes just, I just can’t even believe that I’m reading that number.
Hannah Riley
It’s astounding. I really appreciate your response to it, because that is not everyone’s response. And if there were any other state agency that was presiding over this much death, there would have been countless hearings and angry legislators and think pieces . . .
Joshua Hoe
Think about it by percentage of the population in prisons, how gigantic, I mean, that’s just an unheard-of number. That means someone is doing an unbelievably bad job at managing their prison system. And that’s from someone – we were saying don’t be hyperbolic – but I think I probably have a decent understanding of America’s prisons, probably more than the normal person, and that one made my eyes just bug out of my head.
Hannah Riley
I truly cannot . . . again, I’m not being hyperbolic. I hear at least once a day an absolute horror story from family members loved ones, and incarcerated folks in Georgia. It is truly hard to wrap your mind around how heinous and cruel and torturous it is for people living in those facilities; I cannot believe that there are some of them are mere miles from me, and there isn’t mass action to go to the prison. And you know, it’s just, it’s astounding, and I don’t think it lands with others that way, maybe they don’t have the necessary context. Maybe it just feels so overwhelmingly bad. And how do you begin to touch a system like that? But it’s, it’s astounding, I just want to keep saying that; that number is astounding and unbelievably shameful.
Joshua Hoe
You know, there’s a lot of times when I get furious about Michigan’s prison conditions, and I see something like that, and I have to say, well, at least we’re not Georgia. I feel terrible for y’all. This is a good bridge, your organization, as you just mentioned, collected a lot of stories from directly affected people about this crisis. Can you share that process? And what you all learned from this testimony in a short form? Because we’ll go into details in just a second. But I just want to get kind of a feel for what people inside are saying there.
Hannah Riley
Yeah, that’s a great question. So again, I am interacting with this in two ways: one, as an employee of the Southern Center, and the other as an organizer in Georgia, who has, you know, multiple loved ones in prisons. At Southern Center, we have an intake process, which has been around for basically as long as the organization, and you know, we’re a fairly small outfit. So we are often unable to actually act on the calls that we get, but we feel that it’s important to listen, to hear out every person who calls, often I think we’re probably the fifth or sixth place that they’ve called and [been] told that they can’t be helped. So we get a lot of intake of various horrifying stories. We’re going to talk about this more in-depth, obviously, but understaffing is at a true crisis point. And there are multiple facilities that are.
Joshua Hoe
Which is true all over the country. I mean, again, like we said, we were joking earlier about how prisons don’t help mental health. Apparently, they’re not a very good place to work, either. Yeah, shocking.
Hannah Riley
Utterly shocking. So a lot of the things that we were hearing are a result of, there’s always bad understaffing at the GDC. Again, these are horrible jobs that no one wants, so it’s understandable. The pandemic has made this much, much, much worse. And, you know, I struggle with talking about understaffing issues, because I want to make it very clear that COs are not a source of safety for incarcerated people. In most cases, they’re a source of harm. However, it’s math, right? The ratio can’t be that you have 100% of your incarcerated population there and 30% of the staff, because what we start to see is things like folks being put into, you know, telephone booth sized holding pens that are meant to keep someone for, you know, under an hour. There’s two staff on call, someone gets called into another building or there’s an emergency happening. And maybe they don’t come back in and get this person for 24 hours in which you know they’ve gone to the bathroom on themselves because they have nowhere to go. They can’t even sit down or lie down. Toilets that are controlled by the guards are not flushed for days or weeks on end. We’ve had folks who were put into showers where the water temperature was controlled by the guards who again get pulled away because they’re so understaffed and people are suffering from burns and vomiting from heat exhaustion. Obviously, medical care has never been anything close to sufficient in Georgia prisons. But with the understaffing issues, that is getting considerably worse. So we’re hearing about, you know, really preventable medical issues causing deaths. And then also, outside of my work at Southern Center, hearing from folks in the same way, you know, often family members who have contacted the prison for more information about a loved one, the GDC is a black box right now. We’ve kind of moved from a position of begrudging, limited transparency to total opacity. And often loved ones are, you know, going to Facebook groups and asking questions there because they’re being completely ignored by the GDC. Facebook groups are actually a pretty important part of the ecosystem of advocates and folks with loved ones incarcerated, you know, just trying to stay abreast of what’s going on, because it’s so hard to get in touch with their loved ones. And it’s so impossible to get any kind of meaningful answers from the GDC.
Joshua Hoe
So there’s obviously a number of things happening, let’s see if we can break it down a little bit. We know a lot of people died from COVID. How bad was that, at least what they’re telling you? And how bad is that situation now with Omicron in Georgia?
Hannah Riley
We would have almost no idea because again, the GDC has moved to this position of opacity. At the beginning of the pandemic – I will say they have never done this well – so the bar was always very low. But at the beginning of the pandemic, with some gentle pushing from advocates, they had a COVID Tracker, which at one point had, you know, facility by facility cases, deaths, I believe they were even tracking vaccinations. And over the summer, this past summer 2021, at the height of the Delta surge, the GDC put out a press release that basically said, you know, we’re no longer going to be keeping the COVID Tracker up. Cases are so low, you know, we have a 97% survival rate or something very heinous like that. And we haven’t seen anything since then. So, again, sort of trying to cobble together information from hearing from folks inside hearing from family members and loved ones trying to suss out what the situation is in each prison but yeah, but the honest answer is that we know very little because the GDC is not reporting any of this.
Joshua Hoe
So it sounded like maybe . . .were they offering vaccinations and boosters in Georgia?
Hannah Riley
Yes, yes. I have heard from my incarcerated comrades that they were offered boosters. They’re not trying very hard to do good education around the vaccines and boosters, but it is being offered and people are certainly taking them. But I mean, given Georgia had its worst numbers by far during the Omicron surge, and we know that prisons are not separate from society in any way. So I feel confident in saying that there was a very bad surge. But we just know so little, we have so little data and that’s a huge problem.
Joshua Hoe
And you may again, not have the answer to this, but what is their policy on testing and vaccinating officers?
Hannah Riley
No idea. No idea.
Joshua Hoe
I’m feeling very lucky to be in Michigan. I can literally just write them in the answer to my questions. It’s kind of crazy.
Hannah Riley
I don’t relate to that at all.
Joshua Hoe
So next, I don’t know if you’ll have the answer to this one either. We have homicides, you noted that there were a lot of people who’ve been killed in Georgia prisons over that same period of time. What factors do you attribute the high levels of violence to? We already talked about [under]staffing.
Hannah Riley
Yep. Well, I should start by saying a very obvious point, which is that the conditions that create the greatest risk of violence and harm are all within prisons: unsafe living conditions, constant exposure to violence, no access to medical care, no access to mental health care, institutional racism, all of this, all of the things that we know contribute to violence on the outside, are rife throughout prisons. So that’s sort of a baseline. Of course they are places of violence because they are places of great danger, through both medical neglect, that people who are allegedly in charge of keeping you safe, are often a source of great danger. We also know that violence is contagious. It’s rare for someone to enter into violence by committing it, usually, someone has been a victim of it first. And if we sort of apply that public health lens to it, it makes a lot of sense that there are there are murderers within prisons. That said, obviously, all of the stressors of the pandemic have contributed to that hugely. Understaffing has contributed to that. And George’s rampant use of solitary confinement, which just causes everyone to decompensate; all of these factors, which, you know, are worsened right now – but I want to be clear – are just a part of incarceration. I think it’s unsurprising that there are such high rates of violence right now.
Joshua Hoe
And we talked about staffing, we’ll probably talk about it a little more in a second. But another problem seems to be related to mental health treatment, or the lack of mental health treatment. And the high number of suicides. When I first went to jail before I even went to prison – I’ve told this story before – but I had no experience at all, I’d never been arrested for anything. And they asked me the screening questions. And I said, Yeah, I’m a little depressed because it had been, it had been a pretty bad day. And next thing I knew I was in a 24-hour observation cell, and then put in solitary for like a week, which, as I’m sure you can guess made my depression much better. Problem solved. So part of the reason many people go to prison is that they’re dealing with trauma and mental illness, and prison then adds whole new levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and helplessness. I’m guessing the answer is not going to be very good. But how are they handling mental illness and Georgia’s prisons?
Hannah Riley
Yeah, very poorly, very poorly. I’ll give the example of Georgia State Prison, which has actually been slated to close; we can talk about that a bit more later. But it is the prison in Georgia where often if incarcerated people are facing really serious mental health challenges that the prison that they’re in doesn’t feel equipped to address, they will be transferred to GSP. The reason that we filed – the Southern Senator filed – this lawsuit against GSP was because people were being transferred there as a result of their mental illness and then being placed into solitary confinement immediately. In a lot of cases, never seeing a mental health counselor, never being offered medication. No therapeutic programming, just, you know, sitting in these unbelievably decrepit, disgusting cells, staring at cinder block walls for days, weeks, months on end. There’s just no, even the prisons with the best medical staffing are not going to be able to do good work because you cannot heal someone in a carceral setting. Those are concepts that butt up against each other. And I would say that it’s pretty rare to be offered anything resembling meaningful health care in any carceral setting in Georgia. So I wish I had one good anecdote to share about that, but I really don’t.
Joshua Hoe
Obviously, there’s a lot of really bad conditions in these prisons, there’s lack of medical care, there’s all kinds of problems. But really that’s endemic in every prison system in the United States. And something is making Georgia uniquely deadly right now, and there’s some pretty bad prison systems across the country. So do you have any feel for why it’s uniquely so bad in Georgia right now? Is there anything that you could even put your mind around that says this might be it?
Hannah Riley
Well, I think the first thing I want to say is that things have never been good in Georgia’s prisons. And you know, like you said, that’s a blanket statement. That’s true of every prison system everywhere because of what prisons are and what they do to people. But Georgia has been a state that has, we’re addicted to incarcerating people, the levels of people, both incarcerated or under some kind of correctional control in Georgia make us exceptional in a very bad way. And I think that addiction to incarceration, and this knee-jerk response, that punishment, and caging is the right way to respond to any kind of harm. We’re seeing the results of decades of those policies. And it seems a little simplistic, but, you know, the first thing that I think of as an answer to that question is just the sheer number of people who are in the system. And even that has been, it fluctuates, but it’s at a lower number than it has been in recent years, and is still far, far, far, far too many people. So just, initially, looking at the number of incarcerated people versus staff is telling. I don’t think that the numbers we’re seeing are consistent with other states, there are multiple prisons that are operating with vacancy rates of 70%. I don’t know the data from other states. But I would guess that Georgia . . .
Joshua Hoe
With rare exceptions, I mean, we had a recent crisis at our women’s prison, and it was probably the first time they’d been at a 60% deficit, mostly because of COVID. So, you know, if that’s a normal figure for them, that’s pretty, pretty bad.
Hannah Riley
And according to the GDCs own data, I think in 2019, so this is pre- COVID, 71% of correctional officers quit in the same year that they were hired. So it’s, it’s just always been an awful job to have. And it’s gotten considerably worse during the pandemic. And again, we run into these tricky questions of how much do we want to lift up COs as the answer to this because they’re not the answer. Violence is still endemic to incarceration, there will still be these levels of suicides and homicides, but in a lot of cases, you just need people there.
Joshua Hoe
Having done time, myself, there are times, and there are officers who are professional, I’m not going to say that they do the best job in the world or make the place a rosy place. But there are definitely officers who, you know, actually do what they’re supposed to do and help folks. And then there are a lot of officers who don’t. I remember we’d have what are called unit officers. And usually, the way you get decided, if you’re a unit officer, is if you weren’t someone who got in a lot of trouble all the time, or got in a lot of fights or gotten a lot of incidents as an officer and the officers that had the most trouble would get put in the yard, but at certain times when they could, they wouldn’t usually be unit officers. And if you have a shortage, you’re probably not going to have the opportunity to make sure that the people who are the best officers are in the places where they can actually do the right, the best job. And I’m not saying that the answer to anything is officers, but you know, they built a prison-based around that model. And so, we may not think that model could ever be successful, but it certainly can’t be successful if it isn’t operating in a safe manner. 2
Hannah Riley
And talking about deaths by suicide is a good example of . . . we’ve heard multiple stories from folks who are in a dorm where there was a suicide and there was, you know, people climbing on the bars trying really, really hard to get the COs attention, and there just simply aren’t people there to come and check and there are just going to be more deaths if there are fewer correctional officers.
Joshua Hoe
And like you’ve said, they’ve set the mousetrap up in a lot of ways. So that they have immediate control over things that are necessary to the running of the prison, people being able to move on their basic functions. So if they’re not there, I mean, it’s almost like the Stephen King book, The Stand, where the pandemic that comes in the prison knocks everybody out, except for the people who are immune. So there’s like five people, and they’re still locked in their cells and can’t get out, I mean, they’re just sitting there. You know, I imagine that’s sort of when it’s like when you don’t have enough officers to do the job, sometimes you’re just stuck in pretty bad situations.
Hannah Riley
Yep. So I think Georgia prisons have been dangerous since their inception, they have never been safe. But I think that these unseen levels of staffing shortages – and again, just going back to that ratio if the ratio is that off, there are going to be countless preventable deaths that wouldn’t have happened if there had been staff there to intervene.
Joshua Hoe
You know, one of the mistakes I don’t want to replicate today is kind of creating this notion that there’s a generic prison. And because most people assume that a generic prison is probably men, and there’s also a lot of problems that are uniquely going on right now with the women’s prisons in Georgia. Is that fair?
Hannah Riley
Yes. Yes, absolutely. There are truly, truly heinous conditions at Lee Arrendale State Prison. The Southern Center sent two letters to the warden there last year, outlining the horrific conditions that are persisting. And again, like we’ve talked about some of this as conditions, really disgusting cells with defective plumbing and electricity, very, very little access to hygiene supplies, chronic mold infestations that have very serious health impacts in edible food. You know, all of these things that are the result of the state not caring about the facilities at all. So at Arrendale women in the immediate postpartum period, which I don’t think I need to explain is one of the more vulnerable and dangerous times in a mother’s life, have been subjected to egregious conditions. You know, days after giving birth, sometimes still wearing clothes with blood on it, and then put into solitary confinement. We detail the story of one mother, in this letter to the warden, who was asking for days for some kind of medical intervention for infected stitches and just received absolutely nothing; she had to remove her own stitches with a toenail clipper because she was being ignored. Another new mom had to wait, I think close to a month, to get iron for her anemia. She wasn’t given ibuprofen for cramping; just utterly, utterly heinous conditions, that are also, you know, very illegal, although we can talk a bit more about that later on. Again, this is Lee Arrendale Prison, one of the more understaffed prisons in the state as well.
Joshua Hoe
I was gonna say there’s a unique problem with women’s prisons, because they usually require a higher level of staff training, and often require gender-specific officers. I don’t know if that’s true in Georgia, but it’s definitely true in Michigan.
Hannah Riley
I’m not sure about the additional training. But that’s, yeah, that sounds believable.
Joshua Hoe
So one of the solutions you see for all this, at least in the article you wrote, is not surprisingly, letting a bunch more people out of prison. Again, we’re getting back to me – I’m not asking the tough questions today, just rolling with what you think would be common-sense solutions. George’s commutation process is different than most states I’ve heard of; it actually is run by the parole board. Is that right?
Hannah Riley
Yes, the parole board has an incredible amount of power in Georgia. So they have exclusive authority over basically all executive clemency.
Joshua Hoe
So the governor can’t do anything. It’s just the parole board.
Hannah Riley
That’s right.
Joshua Hoe
Wow. Do you have any idea why? I’ve never heard of that before. What is that one of those things where the governor commuted someone and the legislator got mad and took away all the governor’s power or. . . ?
Hannah Riley
I don’t think so. I don’t think that the Governor ever had that power in Georgia.
Joshua Hoe
It’s so weird. I’ve even gone back to the Federalist Papers and read about the creation of commutation that it’s always been a sole executive power for a governor or president. That’s interesting.
Hannah Riley
Yeah. So the parole board is – the governor has their hands on this in some ways, in that they appoint the members of the parole board. But yeah, it’s five people who shift on, I believe, seven-year terms. They’re incredibly, incredibly powerful. And also incredibly unknown. You know, the folks who are on the current board are not household names by any stretch of the imagination.
Joshua Hoe
I sounded like all law enforcement and prosecutorial background.
Hannah Riley
That is true of the current makeup of the board. And I would be willing to venture to say that that’s always been true of the board. Yeah, various, you know, one was a district attorney, various folks with experience, I think a former state trooper, some people who’ve worked within prisons, they are incredibly powerful. Truly, they alone determine when incarcerated people can be released. and when they get their rights restored. And they issue pardons, they commute death sentences. They’re incredibly powerful. And they face very little scrutiny.
Joshua Hoe
And here’s another thing that’s going to make people’s heads spin that’s definitely unique to Georgia, that I’ve seen at least, you don’t have parole hearings, is that correct?
Hannah Riley
That is correct. Yep. We don’t have, it’s not even just that we, that there are closed-door parole hearings the public isn’t privy to, there are not hearings. The way that it works is that the board, each member of the parole board votes on their own, without discussing the case with one another either, and obviously, without discussing the case with the person in question. And then once three of the five members have voted one way or another, case closed, move right along. The incarcerated person is completely shut out of the process. There’s no input from the communities that they’re going to be rejoining. It’s an entirely black box.
Joshua Hoe
I think you quoted the director of the parole board saying that it still allows all stakeholders to participate, then listed the stakeholders and didn’t include the incarcerated people or their families.
Hannah Riley
Very telling who they consider the stakeholders to be.
Joshua Hoe
Yeah. And so you have the pandemic, you have what I would say in any other state would be considered, certainly at the federal level, would be considered a crisis, a human rights crisis. And it sounded like from what you wrote, that really in the years of the pandemic, they’ve released essentially the same amount of people that they would release in any other year. Is that correct?
Hannah Riley
Yep. That’s absolutely right, if not slightly fewer. There was just no, no indication that they were seeing the crisis that we are seeing, although we know that, of course, they are actually aware. Oh, my goodness, a little, a little context to this. So in 2020 . . .
Joshua Hoe
I just want to sort of restate this, they have the power to commute anyone they want to. I’m sure there’s some limitations, but it sounded like the way you were explaining it, they have a pretty wide ability to commute. And then they have the people who are up for parole. And they still paroleless people, despite 450 people dying in the prisons, and COVID.
Hannah Riley
Yep. And they also have a provision of the state’s charter that says that the board can parole any person who is aged 62 or older, no questions asked. They have these tools, and they are choosing not to use them. I’m really trying to reframe how we think about this in this state. Like, this isn’t inaction on the part of the parole board. This is them taking the action to keep people in these incredibly dangerous conditions.
Joshua Hoe
It sounded like you even have something like earned credits, where people can reduce their time, but then the parole board can just ignore them.
Hannah Riley
Yes, PIC (performance incentive credits) points. It’s another entirely arbitrary process. I just spoke with someone a couple of weeks ago, who had been, you know, working incredibly hard for these pic points, doing a lot of courses, checking all the boxes, essentially doing everything that the parole board had said that they needed to do in order to gain their freedom. And then the PIC points were decided, the parole board said they didn’t count. There’s no space for the person to ask why; there’s no explanation given. They just give them this form letter. And that’s that, again, just a black box.
Joshua Hoe
I think you told the story in your article about someone who had been given a parole decision, asked if they could stay in prison for a little longer to accumulate a better reentry plan. And then when they came back up, they got denied. And the board just said, Well, we have new information or something.
Hannah Riley
That’s right, there was a six-month period, this person expressed, wanting a little bit more time to get things in order, figure out where they were going to be living. Again, they had been offered the chance at parole. They said they didn’t feel ready. They went before the board again, six months later, and the board had changed its mind. And crucially, these are all considered state secrets. So again, the person themself, the person whose very freedom they’re deliberating, is not privy to the information that made them change their mind.
Joshua Hoe
So can you not appeal the parole board’s decision? No, there’s no higher power you can go to or anything like that?
Hannah Riley
No, the buck stops there.
Joshua Hoe
There’s not even an Ombuds or anything like that. There’s nothing.
Hannah Riley
In some cases, you know, getting a parole denial could mean you don’t go before the board for years, six more years. These are incredibly serious decisions that are being made flippantly, I think, I feel confident saying, and if the parole board would like to test me on that I would love to see more information. Because without any of that, the public is left to say, Okay, there’s a humanitarian crisis of truly unreal proportions unfolding in our state prisons. And the parole board is not making any kind of affirmative action to get people out. Like I said, they could parole anyone over the age of 62.
Joshua Hoe
Also, the people who are generally the most at risk of COVID. And the ones that cost the prison system the most in different ways. And the ones that are, I’ve seen research that says that people who have done over five years that are over the age of 50, have less than 1% recidivism rate, so probably the least risk.
Hannah Riley
And we have roughly 3700 people over the age of 60, in Georgia prisons, and let’s just start right there, that would be a meaningful thing, to just release those people. And the board is choosing not to do that. It is a conscious action.
Joshua Hoe
So we know, a lot of my friends sometimes refer to me as Eyore because I’m always kind of cynical about the possibility, you know, I fight all the time to change things. And I’ve had a little bit of luck. But you know, on the whole, I think that we are climbing a very large mountain and sometimes that mountain, we’re not as close to the top as we’d like to believe that we are. We know that the Eighth Amendment has been reduced to barely a shell of what it should be by the courts. And we’ve seen, for instance, three DOJ reports in Alabama result in virtually no meaningful relief, but we have seen new prisons getting built. Instead of getting money to get their problems fixed, they’re getting a lot of money to buy fancy new boxes. Is there a path to fixing, is there a feasible path to at least starting to make changes in a very conservative state in crisis in Georgia? 2
Hannah Riley
I have to believe that there is. And you know, there. Yes, Georgia is a conservative state. But even Governor Deal, who was in office prior to Governor Kemp, was less carcerally minded than his predecessors. The bar is still incredibly low, of course, but there was some meaningful reduction in the general prison population under his tenure, and I remain optimistic that a hard look at the history of Georgia’s prisons and a reminder that we have been stuck in this cycle of crises for as long as the Georgia Department of Corrections has existed. I think if we keep reminding ourselves of that and if advocates and organizers are able to remind others in the state of that. It’s obvious that this is not the way to safety. Like we have all of the data. We’ve got it right there, we have the history. It’s a matter of shifting perception away from the idea that punishment and caging is the only response to harm. And I, I feel heartened by the ways in which nationally this dialogue has shifted in ways that even I wouldn’t have anticipated over the last two years. So I choose to remain optimistic that Georgia will continue to learn from its mistakes, that it will start to release people, that it will put money towards front-end initiatives that keep people out of cages. And of course, I could have answered that very differently and had data to back that up too, but this work could be so demoralizing in that way. I am consciously choosing to stay optimistic because I don’t think there’s an option.
Joshua Hoe
I’ve told people many times that the main way that I survived my time incarcerated was by constantly lying to myself – not saying that’s what you’re doing – about how good the day was, even when it was a terrible day. Like, I figured if I could mislead myself in bad ways, which is how I got in prison, I could certainly mislead myself . . .
Hannah Riley
There you go. Radical optimism. I will also say that I am heartened by what I see as increased collaboration and community and relationships between folks on the outside and folks on the inside. And I think that is going to be how we get to a more liberatory future. And I’m heartened by what I’m seeing there. So yeah, I have radical optimism. Maybe I’m lying to myself, but ….
Joshua Hoe
Well, I’m just saying, even if you are, if it keeps getting you up every day to fight the fight, that’s worth it. You know, I mean, I don’t know if that’s what I do. But it seems to work for me. And I know, that’s what I did when I was incarcerated. Another problem seems to be that people outside of prison seem to consider whatever happens to people in prisons as “just desserts”. Do you have thoughts about what we need to do, as a communications person, what we need to do to be more effective at changing hearts and minds? I struggle with this question on a daily basis.
Hannah Riley
Yeah, honestly, I struggle with this too, because sometimes, I worry that when we’re leaning on the sort of morality based arguments for keeping people out of prison, you know, stressing that people who are caged aren’t bad people, I worry that we’re just kind of using the language of the oppressive systems. I feel less that moralizing about each person behind bars is the way to go and more that we just need to look at cold hard facts. There has never been data that shows that incarceration makes communities safer. I don’t love using this word, but it is criminogenic. A crime is obviously a social construct, not the same as harm. But we know that putting people in these cages and then releasing them does not make them better neighbors than they were before. So yeah, I think it’s very important that we give platforms to impacted people. Nothing bothers me more than communications strategies and tactics that sort of seem to imply that people inside are voiceless. And that you know, I ….
Joshua Hoe
I really hate it when people say I’m a voice for the voiceless because I know for a fact they have voices.
Hannah Riley
They have voices, they just don’t have microphones.
Joshua Hoe
Yeah, I was gonna say I remember being in a particular … one of the prisons I was in where all night people would serenade you with those voices. They definitely have voices. Certainly
Hannah Riley
And you know, it’s hard to get incarcerated people’s stories out there. I struggle with this and I worry about this with my job all the time. Connecting folks with journalists is sometimes really great and sometimes can result in really horrible retaliation against the person. You know, this calculus of what is it worth it for you to potentially, you know, re-traumatize yourself in telling the story, to open yourself up for retaliation, just to be quoted in a paper where people are going to read it and then immediately gloss over what you have to say. So there’s a lot of factors that go into thinking about how to lift up incarcerated folks’ stories. I honestly forget what the original question you asked me was – something about storytelling.
Joshua Hoe
How can we be more effective at changing hearts and minds?
Hannah Riley
That’s right. Yeah. I think that I am not in a position to be doing that. I would like to be sort of leading from behind here and helping to raise up these stories when it feels right and not pushing people to tell their stories.
Joshua Hoe
I definitely agree that you need to put the spotlight on people who are directly impacted, and people who’ve done time, but I also think it’s an all-hands-on-deck thing. I agree with you that sometimes leading from behind can be very effective. But man, I mean, we got a lot of work to do. I know we need to get the praxis right. And that’s tough, too. But I mean, sometimes we just have to, we just have to do the work, you know, however, it gets done. And as long as we’re not exploiting people.
Hannah Riley
And not exploiting people is the key. And I, I think it’s easier than folks would like to believe to unintentionally exploit folks. Especially, when we’re talking about storytelling.
Joshua Hoe
Wouldn’t it be nice if some of those media folks would anonymize the person so you don’t get them in trouble? Right, like they do with every other kind of story?
Hannah Riley
Yeah, even then there’s the risk of retaliation, if the story is specific enough, the entire dorm will be put on lockdown . . .you know, it’s always a risk. It’s always a risk.
Joshua Hoe
Yeah, it is. That’s for sure. And, you know, this brings us to the question of the media. Obviously, we on the organizing side have a huge disadvantage in that we don’t have, in many cases, the same ready access to media, as do the media arms of law enforcement, including prosecutors. And as a communications person, have you thought about what we can do? Because another thing I think about all the time because we do somewhat similar work – what we can do to counteract this. I mean, most all of our organizations have to spend all their time even getting to the point where something can get done, right. And then it gets done. And then the backlash starts. And we don’t have the capacity built up – a lot of the time – to effectively deal with the backlash or even have access to the people that would allow us to counteract the backlash. So what do you think about the problem of media deficits?
Hannah Riley
Oh, I could talk about this for hours. The thing that I’ll talk about first is that I think this is a very, very hard system to cover. It is incredibly confusing and opaque, and, you know, varies from county to county, sometimes. I think it’s hard, even for lawyers. And we’re expecting folks, especially local news, they’re probably covering multiple different disparate, complicated systems. And like you said when you have more access to police and district attorneys, and maybe officials in the GDC, than you do advocates or incarcerated people, you know, the dominant narrative is going to be the one that comes from folks in positions of power. So I think one thing that can be done, and I’m seeing this starting to happen in multiple places, and really exciting ways, is just educating journalists who cover these systems in multiple ways, one to help them actually understand the legal system and the processes. And that includes understanding how prisons work, understanding how the grievance process works, and the ways in which the PLRA (Prison Litigation Reform Act) is stunting folks’ ability to litigate, and all of these things that don’t really sound sexy or important, but I think, really impact the tone and tenor of coverage. And then I also think having formerly incarcerated people training journalists is incredibly important. And I’m starting to see more of that. And I’m really optimistic that that will continue. Because I, in my experience, often coverage that seems, well coverage that, frankly, is inaccurate, is often because again, you’ve heard from police and they’re stenographers first, and then you go to the DA for a comment or even a local elected official. And they just don’t have a good understanding of how incarceration works in practice. So I feel optimistic about increased training, both in terms of understanding weird legal issues, as well as understanding what it is like to be incarcerated. And once you have those things, I think the coverage will start to be a little bit more reflective of reality. You know, it’s not ideal that it’s very hard to visit prisons and jails. I feel like I’ve said the phrase black box at least 20 times in this conversation, but it’s really, really, really hard to get information. And that has been especially true, obviously, during the pandemic.
Joshua Hoe
I mean, this is gonna sound like I’m being critical, it’s not because people who work in organizations who do the work, be it decarceration, re-entry, whatever, it’s incredibly hard, and a lot of times frustrating work. And people have specific things that they’re trying to get done in a particular year, and they get stuck on their things. And it’s hard to see the forest through the trees a lot of the time, but I feel like, [there are] certain times every single organization in the United States, there should be a universal bat signal. That’s like, all of us just say, hey, Georgia, that that can’t continue. You know,all of us, every single person should be screaming from every place, even if it’s just for a week. You know, to say 450 deaths is not okay. That’s not okay. And all of us believe that. I mean, everyone from, you know, the ACLU to, the re-entry organization, everybody believes that right. But for some reason, because whatever, we’re all stuck in these, in our silos, or whatever, we don’t ever put the bat signal out. And I think, you know, there are certain times when the bad signal really needs to be out. And this is one of those times. Do you have any thoughts on how we can . . . Bat-Signal was probably not the best, you know, but get the Bat Signal out and get everybody screaming? Because I mean, at times like this, this is a real human rights disaster. Yeah, we really should all be screaming to the high heavens about this.
Hannah Riley
Yep. Well, I think I think the equivalent of the bat signal in the legal world is going to the DOJ and requesting intervention. And that is what’s happening right now, that the DOJ Civil Rights Division is doing a sweeping system-wide investigation of the Georgia Department of Corrections as a result of these really unheard-of levels of death and despair. But that’s a very slow process.1
Joshua Hoe
We also have seen that, in Alabama, there were three very scathing reports of Alabama prisons. I’ve read every word of them.
Hannah Riley
And lo and behold they’re building more prisons there.
Joshua Hoe
Obviously, I’m not for prisons, but you know, if that’s the way they want to spend their money, you know, whatever. But you know, t if they’re not fixing any of the problems, and they’re not fixing any of the problems, you know, that like if they were doing both/and I might be able to, but they’re not they’re just building the new shiny boxes. Most of their problems were, you know, violence, a lot of it created by correctional officers. I haven’t seen any initiatives on that. So I mean, I get what you’re saying. But I mean, really even if it was just, you know, once a week, if every organization in the United States just said, Georgia, you suck. I’ve personally, I’m sure you’ve seen, done a couple of Twitter events, just Twitter events, that got nationally trended, got some national press, things like that, just for me. If all of us work together on these things, you know, just even in a small period of time, sometimes I think we could move the needle, because people do actually respond to bad press, if they feel like a lot of people are screaming, you’re doing something wrong, they pay a lot more attention than if nobody’s saying anything.
Hannah Riley
I have not seen that borne out here. The GDC has been getting horrible press for decades. And I mean, frankly, their response over the last 24-ish months has been really telling, like I said, going from issuing regular press releases when someone in their care dies by homicide or suicide, then having these unprecedented spikes and deaths and stopping those press releases, having the Delta surge in the summer and right in the middle of it stopping COVID reporting. What we’re seeing is that the GDC responds to this pressure by retreating further and, this is why I wrote about the parole board because there has been this question over the last two years in Georgia of what do we do? Who is in power here? Who is in a position to be lobbied? What can advocates do? And when you …
Joshua Hoe
Georgia is a tourism state, I mean, and they have a lot of media that work out of there, I just feel like I don’t know what I can do. But I’m going to try to raise some, I don’t know, raise some ruckus at some point.
Hannah Riley
Well, I’m here for that. I think ruckus-raising is absolutely what needs to happen.
Joshua Hoe
Because I mean, I’m sorry. I’m not going to Georgia, as long as this is the case. And I know, maybe my dollars aren’t that big. 2
Hannah Riley
Collective action is necessary. And we’ve seen some really great, you know, there’s infrastructure to do this in Georgia. I also want to say that I think the pandemic has made this harder. But there’s been some incredible work done by mothers whose children were killed or died in GDC custody, who have banded together and have done banner drops outside of these prisons, and are just doing everything in their power to raise awareness about this crisis.
Joshua Hoe
There is nothing more powerful than moms, man. I agree. And parents, you know, I’ve seen parents walking around the Capitol building here in Michigan, with pictures of their kids around their neck who are incarcerated. And it’s just so powerful when they go office to office. And I mean, maybe it’s not the same in Georgia, but it does make a difference. I have to believe it makes a difference when people actually meet someone. And make that connection.
Hannah Riley
I think this hearing that was held in September in Georgia, had testimony from multiple mothers whose sons had been killed. In one instance, this woman got absolutely no information from the prison about her son’s death. Basically, everything she learned was from his friends who shared information through an obviously contraband cell phone. Just to not even have the decency or the obligation to tell a grieving mother what happened to her child while in state care. That, to me, shows you where the bar is, and just just how little they care and how little they care about public opinion, which is shocking to me, but it’s true.
Joshua Hoe
Well, I could probably keep going for another hour and a half, but . . .
People really liked that I asked this last year. I’ve been asking if there’s any criminal justice-related books that you might recommend to others?
Hannah Riley
I’m gonna have to say Until We Reckon, in part, because it’s right behind you. But also, there are maybe five books that I think have fundamentally changed the way that I think about big systems and Until We Reckon is one of them. Just a really clear, cohesive argument against incarceration that is moving and powerful, and I really recommend it to everyone. So I’m going to go with that.
Joshua Hoe
That’s an excellent book. And I’m glad I had it right behind me when you’re talking about it. I always ask the same last question. What did I mess up? What question should I have asked, but did not?
Hannah Riley
And you’re very choppy in my ear, but I can mostly hear you. Can you say that one more time?
Joshua Hoe
Sure. I always ask the same last question. What did I mess up? What questions should I have asked but did not, you know, aside from the hearing problem?
Hannah Riley
I don’t think you messed anything up. I think it would be good to talk a little bit more about Kemp’s plan to build new prisons in Georgia since this is coming at quite a coincidental time, you know, the absolute worst crisis in the department’s history and now we’re going to give them $600 million to keep torturing people, despite what we know. Aside from that, I’m trying to think …
Joshua Hoe
Does anything in his $600 million plan suggest that they’re going to address any of the actual problems aside from the boxes?
Hannah Riley
I’ll let you guess.
Joshua Hoe
I’m gonna guess no.
Hannah Riley
No, absolutely nothing. This is, you know, two new prisons because these facilities are old. And again, Georgia State Prison is one of them, but they’re planning now to build another new prison in that same county, a county that already houses two other prisons, Tattnall County, Georgia. And maybe there will be more of a clear campaign about this as, as the budget is more finalized. And that probably won’t be until the end of March. But I think we have quite a fight on our hands here in Georgia. And again, a real allegory to what’s going on in Alabama, both under investigation by the DOJ. Both still in positions, to just be like, nope, the way to deal with this is to pour a lot more money into new prisons, which obviously, never does anything in Georgia. The NAACP is suing one of our newest prisons, the Coffee County Correctional Facility. And a lot of the issues are [the] conditions, water running down the walls at night, and it was renovated in 2009. 1
Joshua Hoe
I kind of have gotten to the point where . . . I had a webinar with John Pfaff a couple months ago, it wasn’t the podcast, it was a webinar we did together. And, you know, he kind of was like, look, we got to stop fighting this battle because it’s just getting us off topic all the time. He’s talking about policing at that point. So why not just say, Yeah, whatever, you’re spending money on police. But are you fixing any of these problems? I kind of feel like they’re going to, I guess they’re going to build their prisons, they’re going to build their prisons. You know, I think there’s other questions we should be asking them. Okay, well, are you retiring some of the prisons now that you’re building the new ones, you know, here are the 10 problems that your prisons had? How will building the new prison make mental health care better? And I hope we someday can stop them from building new prisons, but in the world, where they’re just going to do that, we need to find ways to make them actually solve . . .from someone who has a lot of friends inside. I try to take a harm reduction stance and just be like, you know, but what are you doing to fix the problems?
Hannah Riley
Well, if the General Assembly in this state is committed to remedying the crisis in prisons, by allocating these additional funds to the GDC, then those funds should be used to ensure that medical and mental health needs of incarcerated people are met in a timely manner; it should ensure educational employment, substance abuse treatment programming, which promotes . . .
Joshua Hoe
If you want, go ahead and spend all the money you want on building the box, but then could you also allocate another 500 million for the stuff that actually is the problem?
Hannah Riley
But even then, you know . . .
Joshua Hoe
I just get so frustrated by these nonsensical answers, there’s a gigantic problem, we’ll just pay off someone to build a whole bunch of shit, and then it will all go away. Pardon my French. I usually don’t curse on this.
Hannah Riley
Well, I curse like a sailor. So you’re in good company.
Joshua Hoe
I never do. That’s like one of the only times it just slipped out.
Hannah Riley
Well, the Georgia Department of Corrections will do that to you.
Utterly maddening.
Okay, I really want to think through if there’s any other points that we didn’t hit on.
Joshua Hoe
I’m really glad we got to do this. Because one thing I try to do but don’t get to do enough is talk about different prison systems throughout the country. You know, a lot of people listening probably don’t know anything about the Georgia prison system. And I’ll admit, I didn’t know much about it until . . . .I try to keep up on what’s going on in most of the prison systems. But, you know, this is one like you’re saying it’s enough of a black box. I just haven’t come across enough of this stuff.
Hannah Riley
I really think a lot of people in this state are not aware of what’s going on. But a lot of people are because there are so many people impacted by this. I mean, 46,000 people in prisons, think of the web, the hundreds of 1000s of people who are impacted by this every day. Sometimes when I think about that, I’m just like, how, how are we not all going out and screaming at 7 pm from our terraces you know, I, yeah, I go back to the same place that you’re at, which is a bit of astonishment at how terrifying conditions are and how there isn’t . . . if this happened with any other state agency, it would be a scandal. And it doesn’t seem to be one.
Joshua Hoe
I think it’s a scandal. I don’t know. I agree. 450 people, man . . .
Hannah Riley
And that’s so hard to wrap your head around; it is unconscionable.
Joshua Hoe
It’s terrible. Well on that note I really thank you for doing this. And it’s really good to see you face to face. We’ve talked for a while. But this is the first time we’ve actually looked at each other. It’s nice to get to say hello. So thanks again.
Hannah Riley
Thank you. And I really feel like so many of these are great questions, and I wish I had clear answers to them. The fact that I don’t have clear answers is indicative of the problem, I think.
Joshua Hoe
Yeah, thanks again. I mean, hopefully, we’ll all get to work on building the bat signal, that’s the goal.
Hannah Riley
Let’s do that. That’s good. That’s part of my radical optimism is the collective that is fighting this, that gives me hope. And that powers me to keep going.
Joshua Hoe
Me too. It’s a lot of great people. So thanks again.
Hannah Riley
Thank you.
Joshua Hoe
And now, my take.
450 human beings lost their lives in Georgia prisons in the last two years. I thought about just repeating that 450 times. But I don’t think anybody needs to hear that. It is, however, astounding, and an almost unimaginable number. And it should be a number that gets everyone’s attention, makes people furious, and brings us together to scream loudly that this is not okay. During the interview, I wasn’t at all kidding. I really think that we have to have some kind of bat signal that goes out so that every criminal justice reform-involved organization across the country joins hands to send out uniform messages to bring attention to stuff just like this. We have to come together to shine a loud light on Georgia, on Alabama, on Mississippi, on Texas, on Louisiana, on Florida, but especially on Georgia. 450 human beings are gone. And for what? For what?
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