Joshua B. Hoe interviews Celia Ouellette about how businesses can help lead the charge for meaningful reform.
Full Episode
My Guest: Celia Ouellette
Celia Ouellette is licensed to practice law in New York, California, and in several federal jurisdictions. Celia is also a qualified Solicitor in the United Kingdom and attended Oxford.
In 2015, she founded The Powell Project, an organization dedicated to empowering and equipping capital defense teams with the knowledge and skills to level the playing field in death penalty cases.
Celia founded the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice in 2017. Prior to this, Celia was a human rights lawyer, dedicating her career to representing and fighting for those most disadvantaged by broken criminal justice systems.
Notes from Episode 97 Celia Ouellette
You can learn more about the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice from their website.
You can learn more about the Powell Project from their website.
The books Celia suggested were: Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King and The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America’s Courtrooms by Kevin Davis.
Full Transcript
Josh Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 97 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 Policy Analyst at Safe & Just Michigan; a criminal justice reform advocate; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Celia Ouellette about how businesses can be part of the solution to mass incarceration.
Celia Ouellette is licensed to practice law in New York, in California, and in several federal jurisdictions. Celia is also a qualified solicitor in the United Kingdom and attended Oxford University. In 2015, she founded the Powell Project, an organization dedicated to empowering and equipping capital defense teams with the knowledge and skills to level the playing field in death penalty cases. Celia founded the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice in 2017. Prior to this, Celia was a human rights lawyer, dedicating her career to representing and fighting for those most disadvantaged by broken criminal justice systems.
Welcome to the Decarceration Nation podcast Celia Ouellette.
Celia Ouellette
Thanks, Josh; thanks for having me.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same first question. How did you get from wherever you started out in life to where you are now, working with businesses to help fix our criminal punishment system?
Celia Ouellette
I think that the big jump was from law to businesses, exactly as you said. I started off as a lawyer, I worked as a lawyer for a long time, and then moved into the role that I have now, which is working with businesses, and that was really out of need, that was kind of to scratch an itch. You work in the same space that I do, Josh, and there was this growing need for an organization to exist that could really support campaign organizations and community organizers to get the best from businesses; to get good allies in businesses; for businesses to be effective in creating change. And, you know, I think it’s not really a surprise that the organization was founded in 2017, right around the time when businesses were really kind of stretching out, and saying that they wanted to be effective allies, and they wanted to be authentic allies. And obviously, that’s something we’ve seen accelerate in leaps and bounds in this year in particular. So that was how I got here, literally sitting with colleagues in the campaign movement. And creating an organization that filled that need, that scratched that itch, I suppose.
Josh Hoe
Sure. But that doesn’t necessarily tell us how you started your journey. This is actually the origin stories question. What was the actual start? Where did you start on your journey? Where do you go from the very beginning?
Celia Ouellette
So I came home from school at the age of 12 from a careers fair and said to my mum, I want to be a lawyer. And she said – I came from a family where no one had gone to university – and she said you’ve got to be really clever to do that, Celia. You’ve got to go to Oxford. You know, she was trying to tell me what level – I grew up in the UK – trying to tell me what the mark was that I was heading for with this crazy idea that I’d come home with. By the way, the school’s – this was like back in the 90s, – the school’s computer system, you know you answer a bunch of questions and it tells you what your career is – did not come out as lawyer, no matter how many times they tried, it came out as Water Bailiff. And I have still no idea what a Water Bailiff is, but that set my sights, that was a little bit more realistic. So my mom said to me, you’ve got to go to Oxford if you want to be a lawyer, and this precocious little 12-year-old that I was, wrote off to Oxford University and asked for a copy of the prospectus and I tore out the law page and blue tacked, party tacked it to my wall.
Josh Hoe
A Water Bailiff? I haven’t really heard of that one before!
Celia Ouellette
They probably really like rules; I like rules. But maybe I have a completely lost career as a Water Bailiff. You know, maybe that’s it. But until then, I still really like being a lawyer. And the goal with law always was to fix stuff. That’s how I saw it. And I always saw it as very people-oriented.
Josh Hoe
And how did you end up in the States?
Celia Ouellette
Yeah, so I came out to the US straight after university; in the UK, we do a three-year law degree as an undergrad, which is kind of crazy looking back at it. And so I got offered a job with a Los Angeles-based law firm, working on a mixture of stuff, but primarily they actually had researchers for Guantanamo, a human rights training program, a college training program. So they hired me for that. And then I was a law clerk, too, but they offered me a job straight out of university. And anyone listening to this, who has gone through university finals, – another thing in the UK, they make you do all your exams at the end. So your entire degree classification, everything, the culmination of all of that work, rests on 10 exams on nine consecutive days. And so if somebody offers you a job, while you are in the process of preparing for those exams, you take it, because you don’t want to have to be also trying to apply for jobs. And so this was great. I got offered this job. And I finished law school and a matter of weeks later, I was on a flight to LA. And I fell in love with practicing in the US. And I think that is really because in the UK, there is a separated system, where if you work with a client, you’re one kind of lawyer and you don’t stand up in court. And if you stand up in court, you don’t work with the client, it’s very bizarre. And the US was this kind of Shangri La; you met your client on day one, and you worked with them all the way until the end. And I think that that’s how I increasingly got involved in capital cases, too. I’d always wanted to practice criminal law, but capital cases were that kind of crossing point of human rights, you know, that’s a major human rights issue and criminal justice. And also, an absolute essential component of capital cases is that you are real, a real person and likeable and trustworthy and reliable to your client. And I think that’s something that I really loved and was good at and kind of leaned into. And that’s how that all happened. So yeah, I’ve managed to make it despite my mum’s misgivings.
Josh Hoe
Yes, you seem to have landed pretty well.
So what led you to the Powell Project? Was it the death penalty work you’d done before? And what exactly was the Powell Project? And what happened with that project?
Celia Ouellette
I think a lot of this lead to the Powell Project; you know, my first capital case I worked on, we lost.
And that’s also the last case that I’ve lost, a death penalty case where a client has ended up on death row. And looking back at it, it was destined to fail, just a myriad of problems associated with that case, which were largely to do with an extremely aggressive prosecutor who’s just been voted out of office in LA County, and a defense bar that didn’t really know what they were doing. And they weren’t really being paid enough to care enough about a case where somebody would die at the end of it. And, you know, that was the genesis of the Powell Project; it was an organization designed to support lawyers in exactly that situation for free. You know, increasingly, as I worked on more and more cases, in a sort of member of the team capacity, there were a lot of places across the US – Alabama being a great example – where capital defense teams are paid very little, and they can only allocate a small amount of their time to working on a case, and especially if there’s a conflicted case, where you have multiple co-defendants, and one or more of the co-defendants is assigned conflict counsel, a lawyer that is not part of the public defender’s office, but is out in the private bar. In remote and rural areas, those conflict lawyers quite often have never worked on a capital case, or even potentially a criminal case. And of the cases that I worked on, in my capacity at the Powell Project, I worked with a good number of lawyers who were also farmers; I would go and meet them at their house, and they would say, yeah, I’ve got to go get the cows in, at a certain time. And that’s because they were kind of spreading the legal practice, trying to sort of make ends meet with their legal practice, as well as a little bit of agriculture or something else on the side. And so the goal behind the Powell Project was to make it that not for a lack of support would those teams fail; if those teams, if even just small things are being plugged into a national network of defense lawyers that they could ask questions to, or get help with drafting motions that would secure them funding for expert witnesses, or medical professionals who could help them assess the client’s psychological conditions or needs. And that takes time, and a lot of cases, to learn how to do that, and how to do that well. And to give, a lawyer whose primary work is in writing wills $10,000 to take a case from nothing to trial, a death penalty case from nothing to trial, without equipping them with any of that information or that kind of experience, it’s just truly setting people up to fail. And so you know, as we as a movement looked at cases, especially in smaller, rural jurisdictions that were going to trial and getting death. And when we looked at why, what was up with those cases, like why were those cases getting the death penalty? A lot of the time these cases were not particularly remarkable in their facts. But what was remarkable was the quality of representation those people were getting. And I say that in a deeply respectful way. Just coming to mind as I say this, one of the legal teams that I worked with, one of the groups of lawyers, I remember them, we were desperately trying to help them get a trial continuance just a week before trial. And they were genuinely terrified, knowing that the trial continuance was probably going to get denied, and that they were going to have to go to trial knowing how ill-prepared they were. And I remember this lawyer, a really senior lawyer, great guy, who’d not handled many capital cases, said to me, we’re going to battle and they’ve got guns, and we’ve got knives. And then he said, No, we don’t have knives. We have butter knives, and we know it. And he was referring to the prosecution’s sophistication and resources, that the prosecution had just so dwarfed the defense team that they were screwed long before they even walked into the first day of trial.
Josh Hoe
Lots of problems with long and indeterminate sentences for sure.
Celia Ouellette
I agree completely. I agree. I think the death cases are the cases that I gravitated towards, because the outcome was so severe, but, life without parole is very severe, and 50-year stacked sentences is very severe; you know, in America, we have this Molotov cocktail of underfunding the things that should be funded and over-incarcerating, and coming up with extreme sentences that are sort of baffling I think, to people outside America. I have worked quite a lot with foreign governments advising them on how to support and look after their nationals facing punishment in America for criminal convictions. And sometimes those individuals will apply for a prison transfer back to their home country, after they’ve been sentenced, to serve their sentence in their home country. And I mean, trying to explain to a French diplomat the concept of 110 years stacked; life without the possibility of parole plus 110 years, it’s just mind-blowing; no one can understand it outside America, how you could even give somebody that much time.
Josh Hoe
And so the Powell Project is still going strong.
Celia Ouellette
Oh, yeah it’s amazing. It’s an amazing organization. It’s female-founded and female-run. My replacement in the organization is an amazing lawyer, Kristen Nelson, who represented James Holmes, the Aurora movie theater case in Colorado. You know, sometimes I joke that the best thing I’ve ever done for the Powell Project was leave and leave it in Kristen’s incredible, incredible, brilliant hands. So yeah, it’s still going. They work in 13 states, supporting defense teams in a pre-trial posture.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, but are they still keeping up your incredible winning percentage?
Celia Ouellette
They still have an amazing batting average, I think of all the cases they’ve worked on, they have a sort of like 0.05% fail rate, which just speaks volumes of how amazing those women are.
Josh Hoe
We have seen more federal executions in the last year than we’ve seen in the last 50 years. And the current Attorney General is rushing to execute five more people before the change of administrations. What are your thoughts about what’s been going on with the federal death penalty?
Celia Ouellette
So many thoughts. Yeah.
Josh Hoe
Crazy.
Celia Ouellette
Where to even begin? I think that there are some things we can draw from this that are true of the death penalty. That it’s political, right, and has always been. When we think about Bill Clinton’s run for president, you know, all the way to today, it is sort of a political tool, which is – I don’t even want to say the word bananas, because bananas doesn’t even do it justice. There’s probably some blue language that we could use to describe it better. But this is a podcast, so we won’t.
Josh Hoe
Oddly enough, only one person has ever used curse words on the podcast; [he] was a sitting district attorney, oddly enough.
Celia Ouellette
Well, give me time, Josh, because I’ve had clients say to me, Celia, please, can you tighten down the language? So I’m just very, very, yeah, I think sometimes they’re the best words to use.
Josh Hoe
Agreed, but what about this rush to execute at the end of the Trump term?
Celia Ouellette
Yeah, I mean, we knew this could happen. Setting more, all the way up through the lame duck is just mind- blowing. I think what’s one thing that is interesting, I mean one thing that is kind of notable, is actually how out of step this move is with popular opinion across America; the most recent Gallup poll on the death penalty actually had the lowest level of support for the death penalty ever. And support for the death penalty, the biggest, the steepest drop in decline in support for the death penalty has been amongst conservatives in recent years. And, you know, another kind of major notable thought on it is, looking at some of the cases and looking at some of these upcoming executions: Lisa Montgomery, a severely severely mentally ill woman who’s reliant upon a cocktail of drugs in order to keep her even vaguely connected to reality. Orlando Hall, prosecuted by a prosecutor who had a record for black strikes, for striking members of the jury on the basis of race. So, you know, I think what we see so often with death penalty cases in America is that they go on for such a long time that actually, when they come up for execution, we’re really looking at cases that are fairly old, sometimes as much as 30 years old. And I think they don’t always square with what we would even do with those same cases today. You know, we mentioned Kristen Nelson and her work on James Holmes’ case. James Holmes is a person who opened fire in a movie theater – horrific by anyone’s standards – and he did not get the death penalty. And so I think, perhaps some people would say it’s classic of Donald Trump that he is so mis-stepped with what people actually want, but it is interesting, it seems totally unnecessary and not really a political win to rush and schedule these executions. But I’m sure that that is the spirit of it, that he wants to be the president that executed more people than any other president in the last 57 years combined, which is a sad legacy to be honest.
Josh Hoe
The Supreme Court also has spent much the last two terms showing a decent amount of hostility towards people fighting against the death penalty. I can’t imagine the addition of Amy Coney Barrett to the court has been helpful in this regard.
Celia Ouellette
You know, it’s been a while since I was involved in Supreme Court practice. But, I imagine my colleagues that are looking at the Supreme Court are probably trying to avoid any backstepping. You know, when I think of a justice like Justice Kennedy, – who, while he could never get on board with Justice Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor arguments in favor or advocacy, in favor of taking on an Eighth Amendment challenge to the death penalty, and having the Supreme Court find it unconstitutional once and for all – Kennedy kind of never went that far. But he did pen opinions, which did things like end the use of the death penalty for those under the age of 18, and Roper versus Simmons. So, there was a sort of slow plod towards reducing the scope of the death penalty. And certainly Justice Breyer has repeatedly looked at the use of the death penalty in the US and said, Look, these are states that are abolitionist in practice, because it’s been a decade or more since they’ve had an execution and we should put them on the abolitionist side of the ledger. And really look at the numbers. And you know, we are at a place right now in America where 25 states have a formal moratorium or have abolished the death penalty, and 25 haven’t. And of those 25, around 12 haven’t really used the death penalty in recent years. Breyer’s got a point there. But, you know, if I were a practitioner, looking at Supreme Court composition right now, I think I would be more worried about losing ground, then gaining ground. And that’s kind of sad, when we have increased consensus that we should not execute people who are mentally ill, and we should not execute people who have strong innocence claims and a lack of ability to present that evidence. You know, a good example is Pervis Payne in Tennessee right now; a man who has a really strong innocence claim, but can’t present evidence of it, because the DNA that he would test, his legal team would test, has been destroyed. And he also has severe mental illness but can’t introduce evidence of that mental illness/intellectual disability as a result of his procedural place, his procedural status. So, could he go to the Supreme Court? Perhaps; will cert be granted? Probably not. And so perhaps with the Supreme Court, there’s going to be an increased role for governors to use the executive prerogative of mercy, of clemency, to fix procedural problems that are resulting in some absurd outcomes, or not seek executions, because they don’t want to have to expose or talk about or figure out what to do with these cases.
Josh Hoe
Here in Michigan and across the country, despite two recent Supreme Court decisions, many people who are sentenced to life without parole as juveniles have yet to be re-sentenced. Can you talk about the work you’ve been involved with – in the state of Ohio?
Celia Ouellette
Yes. So the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice – our role is to support campaign organizers, the campaign movement, in bringing businesses to the table and kind of getting businesses to be effective allies in that. And so the work that we did in Ohio was with businesses. There’s an amazing movement on the ground to introduce legislation to end juvenile life without possibility of parole in Ohio, and the business community were really geared up about this, you know, the work that we did was largely going to businesses and saying, did you know that Ohio still has juvenile life without possibility of parole? Whereupon most businesses say like, what is juvenile life without possibility of parole? And we say it is exactly what it sounds like; it is putting children into a prison and never giving them the opportunity to even argue that they should be released. So not releasing them? No, never releasing them and never even allowing them to be released. And then the line goes really quiet. People are like that’s nuts. We still have that? And you’re like, Yeah, you do. Would you like to be involved in trying to help us get rid of it? And they say, yeah!
Josh Hoe
That’s totally true.
Celia Ouellette
And I think Michigan in 2021, the Michigan business community is lit up around the Clean Slate legislation this year; we’re successful at being real allies and advocates and supporters for that. I think a lot of businesses that are second chance hirers that have members – well-respected and appreciated members of their team who’ve served time and have been forgiven and have gone into the workforce and been great colleagues. And, there’s this very clear, moral and values understanding for those businesses, that people should never get written off for life. And for juvenile life, especially not children. You know, it’s this very clear, binary approach, which I really appreciate working with the Ohio businesses on that. And they wrote letters, and they wrote op-eds, and they spoke publicly, and they spoke privately. And they created change, you know, they were part of a group of people that were really effective allies, and pushed for change. The bill is currently in the House. But the Senate voted in support of abolishing juvenile life without parole with only two votes against, which is the kind of sweeping majority that any piece of legislation would be happy to have, let alone a criminal justice reform one. I would love to collaborate in Michigan, because come on Michigan, you can’t still have juvenile life without parole!
Josh Hoe
I kind of jumped the gun a bit. You moved to the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice after the Powell Project, and what was the intersection of opportunity you saw between businesses, responsible businesses and our justice system?
Celia Ouellette
I mean, number one, there was definitely an opportunity. And, we as a sort of movement, particularly at the death penalty level, would see businesses increasingly holding up their hand and saying, we care about human rights, we care about social justice, we care about racism. And we would all say, Well, why wouldn’t they care about our issue? You know, why don’t they care about criminal justice? Why don’t they understand that if you want to eradicate racism, then you need to tackle the justice system, which is one of the biggest pumps, one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest components of creating inequality in our communities. If they want to be involved in alleviating poverty, why do they not know about the US system of fines and fees? And, and bail? It was really created out of need. And it there was actually one case that kind of tipped it for me. But before I talk about that . . . I had worked quite a bit with foreign governments. And in that context, I had seen foreign governments come down to the local jail with me, meet with their client, meet with their nationals and discuss the case. And I’m sure this is an experience of a lot of defense lawyers, but you’re not really loved; a defense lawyer in a county jail when you visit your client. And the foreign government would get a little bit of that with me, and we’d see that like, we wouldn’t be like we’d slope in, but there was always a little bit of a sense that we weren’t terribly welcome. And we were kind of causing trouble by zealously representing our client. And then you know, in the afternoon, they would go off to the mayor’s office or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Bureau, or the Tourism Board, or the Chamber of Commerce, and the red carpet would get rolled out, and even in those early days – and this is probably going back to 2010-12 – there was an obvious need for me to connect those dots. Right? Why was Goliath not standing up for David when they had the opportunity to do so? And then increasingly, we saw businesses talking about and caring about human rights and racism and social justice and the alleviation of poverty. You know, my colleagues and I would say, Why don’t they care about our stuff? Do they not understand that juvenile life without parole and the death penalty are human rights violations? Do they not understand how a system of cash bail and fines and fees is literally criminalizing poverty? Do they not understand that if you disproportionately imprison and connect people of color to the justice system, then it becomes impossible for them to – it becomes impossible for any of us – to really build diverse and equal communities. And the answer is, of course they did. But there hadn’t really been a concerted effort or a single organization that went to work and made the business case for businesses to be involved in the criminal justice system. And returning to that case, that kind of moment. I love being a lawyer. And I didn’t really know anything about businesses. No, I knew actually nothing about businesses, let’s be really, really honest. You know, I spent a lot of time in jail, I spent a lot of time in prison, and had a lot of like, very washable workwear, and I didn’t have an MBA, I had not spent much time in the business community. But I remember working on this one particular case, with a very young client, and we got him a pretty good plea for a death penalty case, which was I think it was a 20-year plea. And I would never want to have my client take a plea and then just leave because it’s both one of the most relieving, and, you know, good in some ways, experiences of their life, because they’ve avoided the death penalty, but a 20-year sentence for an 18-year-old is the worst day of their life, too. And so my practice, always as a lawyer, was to spend a day or two with my client after a plea has been entered in order to kind of just hang out with them, make sure they’re okay. And so I was hanging out with my client. This is when we’re not talking about the case, and we’re not worrying about anything. We’re actually eating Oreos, because it was a tiny county jail, and they’d let me bring a bunch of Oreos.
Josh Hoe
They let you bring Oreos in?
Celia Ouellette
I know, I know. So I think the deal was that I had to bring them for the officers. So I probably got a ton of them. So stuffing down Oreos, you know, he’s saying to me, why are you here? You know, you’ve got this fancy law degree. Why are you here, helping me, and helping people like me, one at a time? You know, why don’t you? We talked a lot about how unfair his choices were. And this was, you know, one of the big obstacles with this particular client was he just, he couldn’t really get past how unfair it was. He was the lookout guy. Why was he facing the death penalty? But as we know, under felony murder in America, you can get the death penalty for being the lookout guy. And so, the work that I was really trying to do was kind of saying to him, I know, these are crappy choices. But they are the choices; this is the universe of fact that we need to make a decision upon. And we got there in the end, and he got it, he got it. But you know, fair enough, he was still really ruminating about how unfair it was. And he was saying, this is super-unfair because no one gives a…. No one cares about me. Like no one cares about me; if a big business cared about me, if someone cared about this, they would in a flash, fix this; if someone cared about how unfair this was, somebody really important cared about how unfair this was, they would call the governor, they would tell the legislators, that this needed to change. And he was right, he was right, that there was a sort of power. I mean, at the base of what he was saying was, this is unfair, and it’s not going to get fixed unless we shift the power balance that we have right now. And we make it so that it’s not people like my family hollering at lawmakers; we need something different and we need more people not getting rid of those people at all, but we need to add power to our side of the table. And I fundamentally agree with that; businesses have this oversize role in changing narratives. And that is largely based on when Goliath does step up for David, I think we get a completely different narrative around the same issues. And businesses are really important and powerful in creating change. You know, when we think about that narrative – and I know that you and I have a friend in common with Jeff Kozenik from Fifth Third Bank – this is something that Jeff talks about a lot. And he says if we say, we as businesses say the same things that the advocates and campaigners and activists say a lot of time, but you know, we can kind of say it with a different voice. And what we’re really saying is, mass incarceration and extreme sentencing has an impact on our workforce, right? If we have 75% of people with a criminal conviction unemployed after one year, we are underemploying or unemploying a ridiculously large percentage of our population, especially when you consider how many people are incarcerated, and/or have a criminal conviction in America. And the cost of that, to our communities – it’s hard to even estimate this, some people put it in the trillions – but at the very most conservative estimate, this is like 80 billion in lost GDP, of having entire sections of the community locked out of the workforce. And the whole thing is an exercise in futility. Because 95% of people in America will leave prison at some point. And if we don’t have a plan to get them back onto their feet – and a lot of the time they do want to get back on their feet – we’re looking at our recidivism or re-arrest rates at upwards of 80%, within 9-10 years of leaving prison, and two-thirds of people go back within three. So we’re failing, and it’s costing a lot of money. And it’s not doing businesses any good, is the really simple version of that narrative. And I think that’s a narrative we need to hear a lot more in America.
Josh Hoe
Race seems to be highly determinative of if and when people come into contact with the criminal justice system. Businesses have often been much more active than governments in diversity campaigns. How does this extend – or how will this extend – to criminal justice reform?
Celia Ouellette
I think a lot of that work has been enormously accelerated by the consumer in America, and by the consumer, I mean, everybody who protested the summer after the murder of George Floyd. I mean, we can go through sort of individually talking to businesses about how this fits within their sustainability portfolio, or how this fits within their human rights work, or how this fits within a nuanced approach to racism. And those things are all true. But the big prod has been brand, and Americans in particular, but I think globally, we’ve seen consumers and employees ask for businesses to do something about the justice system in a way that has never happened before. And they’re asking businesses to do two things: to stand up and take a leadership role where there’s a leadership vacuum; and to actually listen to community members and get this right, and not just engage in what we call performative ally-ship, which is just sort of putting on a show, in order to keep people happy. This needs to actually have impact. And I think that a lot of businesses, you know, it’s interesting, I’m speaking at an event tomorrow which is with investors, and asset managers, and they’re kind of a little bit ahead of the curve, always, because that’s their job. And they’re actually seeing a failure of businesses to engage in these issues as a sort of risk to investing in that company, because of the potential brand impact. And they’re also very interested in learning about businesses that support the prison industrial complex. They’re interested in learning about the issuance of municipal bonds to support the building of new prisons; they’re interested in businesses that are involved in the supply chain to prisons, even service providers; private probation and parole services; businesses that are involved in bail, issuance of cash bail, like insurance companies. And so I think what that tells me is that, as an investor looks at a business and wonders whether it’s a good investment or not, they are worried about the brand implication of being associated with something connected to the justice system, and they see that as a risk of investment. And that’s kind of prodding businesses into action too, I think.
Josh Hoe
And how do businesses interact with these larger questions, the George Floyd, post-George Floyd questions like police reform; have they been on the side of picking one of the larger political narratives? Or, you know, just reform in general?
Celia Ouellette
Yeah, what we’ve seen, even today, with pushback against the defund the police narrative; that’s not something that I’m seeing businesses particularly picking up on, businesses are asking questions about police reform, and reallocation of funding, and investing in traditionally underserved communities, and understanding the causes of police violence, and understanding how to make communities safer. So question one, one part of this is are businesses jumping on a particular formatting or a particular messaging of this issue? Mmmm . . to varying degrees; are businesses seeing what’s coming down the pike, and making sure that they have internally and externally their ducks in a row in order to actually be stakeholders in solving the underlying problems? Yes, more so I think. They’re trying to think about it without so much heat in the messaging around it and work out what their role is, and what is expected of them.
Josh Hoe
One of my big concerns over the last few years has been the crisis in Alabama prisons. Rather than address most of the concerns the Department of Justice raised in two reports about her prisons, Governor Ivey has decided to contract with private prison companies to build multiple new prisons; what can businesses do to ensure real and meaningful prison reforms in Alabama?
Celia Ouellette
The concept that building new prisons is a solution to a crisis of prison conditions in 2020 . . . you kind of want to say: seriously, Kay Ivey? That’s what you want Alabama to look like? You know, that’s what you want people to think is the reputation of Alabama? And it is interesting that actually, primarily, our work surrounding Alabama has been asset managers and investors wanting to know what’s going on, how this is working, how they can avoid it. So wanting to know the format of that, how the prisons are being built, where’s the money coming from, and making sure that they’re not connected to it. I think that might be one of the primary responses of business around these issues; businesses are finding their voice on these matters. But I think turning off the faucet at the source is actually going to probably be the most powerful force that can happen with prison expansion. Not in time for Alabama is the truth. But Alabama, and Alabama’s response to a report on prison conditions that violate anything that we understand as being an acceptable way to treat people, has motivated a new group of stakeholders to take notice. And I think that’s work that we’re rapidly expanding in response to demand; an understanding of how the prison industrial complex is financed. And is there a way to turn off that funding stream, which is quite a sort of surgical tool and quite interesting.
Josh Hoe
COVID has been a really tough time for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and also for businesses. Are there mutually beneficial possibilities? For instance, I know of a group called Cornbread Hustle that started a whole entire separate business, where formerly incarcerated folks became a sanitizing and cleaning force throughout Texas, so that other businesses could stay safe. You’ve been involved in efforts to decarcerate in response to COVID. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many governors engage in decarceration as a public health strategy. But what about the larger COVID questions? Do you have any thoughts here?
Celia Ouellette
What we’re seeing is – not that it doesn’t exist – but less of the entrepreneurship, which is always happening, in COVID times and not by people who are formerly incarcerated, who often . . . we have on our team an amazing formerly incarcerated team member who said, he wrote his business plan in prison. So I think your question one is, have we seen new entrepreneurship by people who have criminal convictions? Not more than normal, I don’t think, but the normal amount is a lot. I think what businesses are engaging with in COVID, with COVID spread through prisons and jails here, number one, businesses got on board with calling for decarceration; there were a large number of pieces of content that businesses put out, that we supported businesses in putting out, a communications campaign, calling for the rapid decarceration of prisons and jails in March, April of this year. We also work in the UK, and a number of businesses signed a letter to the Justice Minister here calling for the rapid decarceration of prisons and jails. And, and the outcome of that letter actually was the Justice Minister did what we call a U-turn; he reversed his position 24 hours after he received this letter, and he actually agreed to begin to reduce the prison population. And I think there’s been good coverage of what is happening in prisons and jails, in terms of the spread of COVID. And that’s been highlighting those problems that have been there since the beginning, which are we have too many people in prisons and jails; California’s a prison system that was at 130% capacity in March going into COVID; social distancing is completely impossible. Hygiene products are not always available, sometimes they come off commissary, and you have to pay for them. And doctor visits, you often have to pay for. A state like Arkansas, which had a prison infection rate 20 times that of the rest of the state, was largely because of a fail in addressing the spread of COVID in one particular facility, and then a second one, which actually just sort of ran rampage through these facilities. I think race is a factor too. And underlying health conditions. You know, we have seen that COVID is not the kind of great equalizer, that people of color are particularly susceptible to falling ill to COVID symptoms. And when we look at the racial composition of prisons and jails in America, we see disproportionate numbers of African-American men, in particular, in them. So you know, it’s not really surprising that COVID spread. And I think what happened was, the lid got lifted, and people took a look at who was in prisons and jails. Why did we have so many pregnant women and elderly people in jails? Why were they there? How come we have so many people in Rikers Island for technical parole violations? And then really, interestingly, is, what happens if you take them out? Like what happens if you don’t have a prison at 100%, 130% capacity? And the answer was: you do not have a huge surge in crime and criminality. So this experiment was forced through the spread of COVID, and the efforts in some states, somewhat successfully, to decarcerate in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus, has been a kind of beta test of the value of reducing incarceration in the country. And I think businesses have taken notice of that; they’ve been involved in finding their voice in calling for increased, increased decarceration efforts. And then the final point on this is prison labor, which I think is something we need to talk about, and the use of private services in prisons here. When we think about the commons unit in Arkansas where there were a large number of deaths, a huge infection rate – the health services in that prison are all contracted out to a private company, which has one doctor for 2000 inmates. And by all accounts from the interviews with journalists – I can’t vouch for their veracity – nurses are complaining that they’re consistently told to cut corners. Josh, you know, you experienced incarceration yourself.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, sounds familiar.
Celia Ouellette
I mean, I have had clients who are like Celia, I don’t even want to talk about my case, I have had 10 kites out to try and get allergy medication because I can’t stop sneezing and I can’t read my paper, my legal paperwork, because my eyes are so red and stuffy. And I just cannot get a basic antihistamine to save my life, you know, literally, in this prison or jail. And so, that frustrating process of going to the kiosk and making a request, and then you told it’s the wrong way, and then you send a kite and you get some question on it. And it’s just like, you can’t get to the point of actually seeing a doctor to ask a question.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, totally impossible. Almost impossible to see a doctor.
Josh Hoe
One of the biggest challenges we face is confronting what has been called “Willie Horton” politics. Do you have any ideas for how businesses can help change the narrative in criminal justice politics?
Celia Ouellette
The work that I’ve been loving doing, and really see change happening when we do it, is when you get those Second Chance hiring business owners, and they’re CEOs, they’re not the guys that are “soft on crime” or left-leaning or coast, representing the coastal state; Ohio is a great example. These are powder wood manufacturers, or, one of them manufactures wet wipes; this is a wet wipe manufacturer, and they have hired people who have criminal convictions and can speak to their own first-hand experience of what happens when you give those people a second chance, and they go back into the community and they work. And the answer is, they’re great. They’re fine. You know, if you extend some trust, you get something completely different in return, then perhaps, this 90s or 80s – in the case of Willie Horton – politics narrative, which would have us believe that people are sort of “bad for life”, and they can’t be reformed, and the idea of children as super-predators. And then you have a CEO of a manufacturing company, like Dan Meyer, of Nehemiah Manufacturing in Ohio, saying, It’s not my experience, not what I’ve seen. And I think those are the kind of unusual allies that can really shift the narrative, that can really change the narrative, by speaking to a different experience, and speaking with authenticity. How does Dan Meyer of Nehemiah Manufacturing know that children aren’t super-predators? Because he’s got a Line Manager called Rayshawn who went to prison as a child. And he knows him. And he’s not a super-predator.
Josh Hoe
But then one person recidivates, and a lot of the progress can be hurt. How do we get the business community voices to overwhelm these scare tactics, to push back against the media’s fear-based narratives?
Celia Ouellette
I think to combat that, we need as many stakeholders in the community speaking from all different perspectives, saying this is not the truth of it; and one of the things that’s so weird about criminal justice politics and criminal justice policy in America is how it is so based on emotion, and so not based on data or cost or fact.
If we think about the healthcare system or repairing our roads, how does an infrastructure decision get made at a political level? What does the appropriations process look at? Do we want to spend more money on repairing roads in Columbus, Ohio? Well, they’ll look at the current condition of the roads, and they’ll work out how much it costs, and they’ll figure out this disruption to people, but when it comes to criminal justice, it’s just like, no, no bad people. It’s very, it’s a very emotional response to it. And I think that we as a sort of reform community need to keep, keep, keep showing not only that that is not true, but having different voices say, not my experience, not what I have seen, this is not true from my perspective. And little by little by little, you kind of inch closer to people taking a look at this with objective eyes, rather than having this sort of knee-jerk emotional reaction. And I think – going all the way back to the start – when we think about something like the federal government’s use of executions, and the fact that a Gallup poll has support for executions at a historic low, this tough on crime approach, surely can’t . . no one can say any longer that this is a reaction to what the electorate, what constituents want, because it empirically isn’t anymore. And so, it’s emotional, and how do you get around the emotion? Well, you consistently show people the sort of neutral, factual, truth behind it, and you have that come from voices that they’re not expecting – you know, legislators, lawmakers, decision-makers, change-makers, are not expecting that to come from, I think, you know, a really good example of this outside the business community is Republican lawmakers. When I think about a bill like the Juvenile Life without Parole Abolition bill in the state of Ohio, it is a very, very, very strongly bipartisan bill. You know, that was not a Dem bill or Republican bill. There was enormous support across the aisle. And I think that that has begun to kind of diffuse some of the knee-jerk emotional reaction to criminal justice reform and is sort of moving us away from things like Willie Horton politics.
Josh Hoe
This year, I’m asking people if there are any criminal justice-related books they might recommend to others; do you have any favorites?
Celia Ouellette
Oh, my top book that I always recommend people read is a book called Devil in the Grove by something Gilbert [Gilbert King]; I forgot his first name. And it’s excellent. And I’m not gonna . . . just read it; it’s a way to feel it, rather than learn about the reality of it. I love that I’m saying this right after saying let’s eliminate some of the emotion – to get emotional about the reality of it. It’s about the experience of . . . just read it. Yeah, no, I don’t want to give too much away. It’s an excellent book called Devil in the Grove. And if people want something a little bit more factual, there’s a great book called The Brain Defense – I’m actually looking at it on my bookshelf behind me, by Kevin Davis – which talks about brain development, and I think, again, ties us back to juvenile life without parole. So juveniles in the justice system is something that I personally, really, really, really care about. A lot of the cases that I worked on, even the death penalty cases, were 18,19, 20, and 21-year olds, so the youngest people to face the death penalty, and the really interesting nuts and bolts behind that. And the reason why I think we should extend the Roper v. Simmons decision to include more people, all the way up to the age of 21, maybe 25 even, in that exemption from extreme punishment, is because of how brains develop. It’s also a great way of telling your brother or your husband that they have less frontal lobe development. So they don’t have the same. No, I mean, one truth is that men’s frontal lobes do develop a little slower than girls, which is why I think teenage girls are less impulsive. But it is interesting when we look at our jail populations how many young men are in jails and prisons across America. And it is a fascinating book for explaining the sort of phenomenon of brain development and how brains develop over time. Anyone listening to this who has teenage children probably doesn’t need to read this book because they know exactly . . . they live the frontal lobe development and impulsivity. And that’s a fantastic book for digging in and behind that. I’m sure everybody’s mentioned all of the Just Mercy’s and the big books, but those are two that I think are a little bit less well-known.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question: What did I mess up? What questions should I have asked but did not?
Celia Ouellette
Oh, no, I think we covered it.
Josh Hoe
No, no, it’s okay. I’m alright with missing nothing.
Celia Ouellette
What did we miss? I think you get an A plus plus; I think you’ve not missed a single thing. If we’re gonna have a sign-off, should we do a rally cry for businesses to get involved in juvenile life without parole abolition in the state of Michigan? Let’s tell them that that’s the thing they need to do. They need to get in touch with us and we’ll help them put that into motion.
Josh Hoe
Sounds like a great idea. Thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Celia Ouellette
Thanks, Josh. It’s been absolutely my pleasure.
Josh Hoe
Okay, talk to you soon.
And now my take.
Two weeks ago, I talked with Jeffrey Rozenik about the business case for second chance hiring. And in his book Untapped Talent, he suggested that the path to a more equitable society must be paved by the business community. In my experience, businesses can do much more than just be agents for fair or second chance hiring. They can also be at the forefront, at the vanguard, of the push for a better and more equitable system that emphasizes reintegration, and communities instead of a system that only has time for punishment and incarceration. The work Celia and Jeffrey do is showing what becomes possible when the business community works with advocates to create meaningful and lasting change. Businesses have a real and powerful influence in state and local government. And in a period where the employment of directly-impacted people will become critical to ongoing economic growth, we should find ways to partner with businesses to ensure our system starts actually becoming a justice system, and not simply a punishment system.
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