The Girlfriends S3/Bonus Ep 3: Is Abolition the Answer?

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Hey girlfriends, it's Anna.

Welcome to bonus episode 3.

You're going to hear a lot of discussion about the prison and justice system, which probably won't be a surprise if you've made it this far into the series.

There's also going to be references to domestic violence, as well as other tough subjects like sexual abuse and addiction.

But it's also a really vital conversation about what we can all do to change the system for the better.

In the last episode, I introduced you to a woman we called Tina.

Following a lifetime of abuse from family and others, one night she violently attacked her boyfriend, nearly killing him.

It was fueled by a drug-induced psychosis, but there's no doubt that Tina did it.

She admitted it right away.

She got 16 years, but only served seven and a half after receiving clemency from the governor.

Clearly, at some point, it was understood that locking her behind bars for any longer didn't serve anyone.

At the end of the episode, I asked the question, what is the actual best recourse for someone like Tina?

How can we reconcile between her crimes and her experience as a victim?

And if the current justice system isn't serving women like her, what is the best solution?

All the way through making Jailhouse Lawyer, I kept asking myself that same question and panicking because I wasn't coming up with an answer.

So I called up Lee Goodmark.

She's the author of a book called Imperfect Victims, Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism.

This conversation profoundly changed the way I think about the prison system.

And today, I'm going to let you eavesdrop on that call.

I'm Anna Sinfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts.

This is The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer.

Bonus episode three.

Is abolition the answer?

So tell me about that journey that you took in order to get to writing Imperfect Victims.

I came out of law school in 1994 and knew that I wanted to work with children.

Very quickly learned that children had families.

And then equally as quickly learned that no one in Washington, D.C., which is where I was a legal services lawyer, was systematically providing legal services to women.

And at that time, we really only talked about women who had experienced intimate partner violence.

And at that time, when I came out, we had been taught that the way that you dealt with intimate partner violence was to lock people up.

That these guys, and at the time we were only talking about guys and we were generally only talking about straight relationships, were monsters, that they couldn't be helped, and that the criminal legal system was the best way to address this problem, that the problem had been that we had failed to look at intimate partner violence as a crime like any other crime, and the solution was to do exactly that.

The more I practiced, the more clients I had, the more I came to understand that the legal system, and particularly the criminal legal system was not a good option for many of them.

And what the research was telling me was lots of people never come into the criminal legal system.

About half of people never call anyone about the violence that they're experiencing.

And when people do come into the system, what they learn is that the system actually doesn't stop the violence.

It might stop it in the moment.

right, in the separation of the two people, but it doesn't change the underlying correlates and behaviors that are leading to the violence in the first place.

About 11 years ago, I came to the University of Maryland, Kerry School of Law, where I started representing criminalized survivors for the first time.

So just for kind of a basic definition, what is a criminalized survivor as you see it and who would qualify as one?

A criminalized survivor is someone whose criminal conviction is directly tied to their own experience of victimization.

So in the classic case, that looks like a person who's been subjected to abuse who fights back against their abusive partner, maybe kills their abusive partner.

Think Vera Fawcett in the burning bed back in the 80s.

But it can also look some different ways as well.

So it can be somebody who acted under the duress of an abusive partner, who would not have been involved in a crime but for being forced by an abusive partner, or somebody who happens to be present when an abusive partner commits a crime and finds themselves as a result of things like felony murder laws, which hold everyone who is involved in any felony felony responsible for a death that occurs during the commission of that felony.

It can look like being held responsible for someone else's actions in other contexts as well.

We have clients who have been convicted of failing to protect their children from their abusive partners.

And then it can also look like people who are self-medicating, who are using drugs or other illicit substances, and who are doing things to support their drug habit and who end up incarcerated as a result of that.

And because almost every woman and frankly, most people I've ever met who are incarcerated have experienced some form of trauma or some form of gender-based harm, one could argue that the vast majority of particularly women who are in prison are criminalized survivors.

I had written about criminalized survivors.

I had been involved in the margins of people's clemency campaigns, but I hadn't really done the work.

When I started doing the work, something for me just snapped into place.

This was the work that I was meant to be doing.

And it brought me face to face with the carceral system, with the prison system, in a way that I had never been before.

I was now going into the prison on a regular basis.

And then I was looking at what prison was doing to these people that I cared about so deeply.

And that's when it kind of made a real shift for me.

I'm going into prisons, I'm thinking, this can't be a way to make people less violent.

Prison doesn't make people less violent.

Prison exacerbates all the things that tend to make people use violence.

And then I think for me, like a lot of white people, 2020 was a real time of reckoning to make us see that the system wasn't going to change because the system was doing exactly what it was meant to do and that this was not a system that you could reform.

And so between seeing how the system reacted to the murder of George Floyd,

and some of the abolitionist literature that was being published at that time, most notably for me, Maryam Kaba's We Do This Till We Free Us,

I came to see that I didn't think this system was ever going to do the work that we were saying that it could do back in 1994.

And that, in fact, it was an impediment to stopping violence.

And that's when I started to identify as an abolitionist.

My Twitter, formerly Twitter, I guess, my blue sky handle, my blue sky handle now is recovering carceral feminist Ask Me How.

Some people see carceral feminism as an insult.

I just see it as a descriptor.

A carceral feminist is somebody who believes in using the police power of the state to change people's behavior.

And that was me in 1994 and for some years thereafter.

It's certainly not me now.

And I think it's important to talk about that arc

because people are so afraid to admit that they've made mistakes or that they've seen differently.

And I know better now, having been face to face with the carceral system for the last 11 years.

Wow, amazing.

I mean, yeah, I think that could be a bit of an arc for this feed of, you know, it's bought into the carceral system, and this series, I hope, is going to be us kind of exploring that it's actually more complicated than that idea of bad guy goes away and everything's solved.

Yeah, I was listening to the first season and I was yelling at the

at the radio.

I'm enjoying, I like the idea of you yelling at the radio at the work that I did.

I think that's great.

I do want to be, you know, a former castor or feminist, if that's what it takes.

I can wear that loudly and proudly.

So the stuff that you're talking about in your journey, it makes so much sense for you, but I think for a lot of people, getting to the point of being an abolitionist, there's so many hurdles before that.

What I would say is that it's worth asking ourselves, why is it that we think people need to be incarcerated?

What is it that we think incarceration is doing?

If we think that it's to incapacitate people because they're likely to do harm, we should ask ourselves, are there ways to remedy the harm that these people have already experienced, to deal with the trauma that's leading them to act in ways that may cause harm to others, rather than just locking them up in places where they will absolutely have trauma inflicted upon them, where they are likely to be the victims of further physical or sexual trauma, and where nobody is giving them any kind of counseling or support to mitigate the effects of that trauma so that when they are released into society, they're not likely to do it again.

If we think that punishment is about deterrence, do we really think that continuing to pile on to people who've already experienced so much harm is going to deter the person whose fight or flight response is triggered in that moment?

Is that a real possibility that someone who gets triggered like that stops and goes, but wait.

I might get criminally punished.

I should stop right now.

All the research shows us that deterrence is not actually deterring anybody.

And so if you think about the theories of punishment, punishment, the reasons why we punish people, none of them holds up particularly well in the case of criminalized survivors.

We don't believe prisons are rehabilitating anybody.

We know they're not doing that kind of work.

And so really the only justification for punishment that holds water is retribution.

And I don't want to live in that kind of society.

That's part of what gets me to abolition is I don't need.

to have my just desserts against people who've already experienced so much harm coming into the system.

So what do you do if someone's just committed a really serious, potentially lethal crime?

The thing about abolition is that first and foremost, abolition has to be about building.

We don't live in a society right now where we have the what do we do next answer.

And that keeps a lot of people from being able to say, well, then I can espouse abolition.

I feel comfortable with that.

And so we don't know that yet.

I don't have to have that answer yet because we don't know.

We don't know what the scope of the problem is going to be unless and until we do the kind of investment that is necessary to build to get us to a place where abolition can be a reality.

That means ensuring that everybody has physical health care and mental health care and safe places to live and enough to eat and green spaces and all of the things that we want people to have to thrive.

And then when they're not coming in with all of this trauma, with all of this abuse, we know what the problem looks like.

And then we can make a determination about what we do with someone who does serious harm.

At the very least, right now, we could be making calculations about whether we think people are genuinely a risk to others or whether they've acted in a situation in which they felt trapped or felt like they had no other alternative.

We could have more robust self-defense law.

There are lots and lots of things we could do short of abolition to deal with a lot of the harm that we're seeing.

But I can't give you the answer to what it looks like on the other side because I don't even know what the scope of the problem is going to be.

I hadn't thought about it that way: of abolition being, it's more of a belief system that this just isn't working.

And a process, because it translates directly into policy.

So rather than continuing to put roughly $180 billion

into policing and prisons every year, imagine what would happen if we put $180 billion into safe and affordable housing, mental health services, and physical health services and all of the things that people actually need.

I guess people are just so hungry for a solution because it feels like a solution to put people away in a cage.

You know, it's doing something.

It's taking them away from society, you know.

And it's scary not to have a solution.

The thing is, we let the criminal system fail every single day.

It fails over and over and over again.

People continue to get hurt in that system.

People come out of that system deeply damaged.

People come out of that system economically disadvantaged, which is a driver of violence.

People come out of that system further traumatized, another driver of violence.

And we're okay with letting it fail over and over and over because it's the system that we have and because we can't see anything else.

When it comes to the survivors that kind of get caught in between, one thing I'm kind of wondering and grappling with when it comes to how to put them across to my listeners is like, what should they make of them?

How do we describe these people?

So often my clients are people who

have something happen in a split second that changes their lives irrevocably, that they didn't intend to have happen, and that they never would have rationally sat there and thought, this is a good course of action.

That's not true of everyone.

I have a spectrum of clients.

I have clients who I genuinely believe are innocent, who have done nothing wrong and have been wrongfully convicted.

I have clients who've done things that are technically criminal, like failing to protect their children from their abusers' harm, but who didn't do anything to anyone.

Similarly, clients who've been convicted of felony murder, who never killed anyone.

I have clients who've done something really wrong, but for reasons.

And then I have clients who just did really bad stuff.

and who now are remorseful about it, who've atoned for it, who really want to have the opportunity to go back into society.

And that's a pretty wide spectrum of people.

Something that I thought was interesting in your book, or at least it chimed with me because of working with Kelly over the past few months, was this idea of an imperfect victim.

There's obviously a lot of variables to that, but there was one particular section that was about

just victims not behaving victimy enough.

We want victims to be weak and meek and passive.

We want them to be

white and straight and middle class and cisgender and able-bodied.

We want them never to use substances that are illegal.

We want them not to have mental health issues.

We want them never to use foul language.

And even if you do manage to stay on that very, very narrow path, you might still do something that leads a prosecutor or someone else to suggest that you're not a perfect victim.

You do sex work.

You're loud.

You're boisterous.

You do all these things that make people say, well, that's not how a victim acts.

And the reality is there isn't a way that a victim acts.

There are stereotypes.

And for women of color, all of this is exponentially worse, particularly for black women.

All of the stereotypes about black women, the angry, loud black woman, fight against this idea of the perfect victim.

It makes it very, very hard for anybody to be legible legible as a victim at all, let alone once they've been charged with a crime.

And once you've been charged with a crime, it's like a switch flips for prosecutors and police and judges.

Because every case has a victim and an offender.

And if you're the offender, you can't possibly be a victim.

And of course, what we know is that most people have been both at some point in their lives, that very few people come to use violence for the first time as perpetrators of violence.

Most people come to violence for the first time as victims of violence.

It changes fundamentally how you look at the world when your belief systems are challenged by what actually is in a prison.

Just so people understand, My clients aren't getting mental health services in prison.

The vast majority of women in prison have some kind of mental health issue.

People are getting some drugs, not always the drugs that they need, but they're certainly not getting therapy, at least not my clients.

They're not getting access to any kinds of supportive services that would change what that looks like if and when they're released.

And I think you have to ask yourself: is this really justice?

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In your book, I know that you break it down via survivors' interaction with the legal system.

And I was wondering if you could kind of explain why you did that and also like why things like arrests are particularly bad.

I wanted people to understand how victims come to get enmeshed in the system and then what it looks like as victims move their way through the system.

So some people come in when they are victims of crimes, right?

They call the police and the police say, nope, not going to arrest him, but I am going to arrest you because you mouthed off to me, because he has defensive injuries for whatever reason.

People come into the system as witnesses to crimes.

And then obviously people come in as defendants.

One of the big drivers in the context of intimate partner violence for bringing survivors into the system has been mandatory arrest laws.

Mandatory arrest laws require police to make an arrest in a case of intimate partner violence whenever they have probable cause to do so, regardless of what the people who are involved in it want.

So if they want to press charges, they don't want to press charges, doesn't matter.

After the inception of mandatory arrest laws, arrest rates, not surprisingly, went up.

And they went up for one group of people more than anyone else, and that was women.

Not because women had all of the sudden become more violent, but because of the way that police were implementing the laws.

So it's what the criminologist Mettachesney Lin calls the vengeful equity story.

Kind of you want to be treated equally.

You want us to treat intimate partner violence equally.

Well, look, this is what it's going to look like.

We're just going to arrest you.

And those arrests happen because police can't figure out who the primary aggressor is.

You also see dual arrests where police say, well, you say this and he says that.

I don't know who did what.

I'm taking you both in.

We'll let the courts sort it out.

And arrest has really profound implications for survivors of violence, both in terms of the trauma that it inflicts and the idea that after enduring a tremendous amount of abuse, all of a sudden you've been labeled somebody who uses violence, that's psychically really damaging.

But it's also costly.

So there's the cost of bail, there's the cost of lawyers, there's electronic monitoring costs if you're let out, but you're monitored that costs.

Your arrest can show up in the public record.

It can be a reason why you lose your job, you lose your apartment, you lose custody.

It can be a reason why your kids are taken into what some of us call the family policing system and other people call the child welfare system.

So the knock-on effects of arrest are really quite serious.

And as I said, once a victim is arrested for a crime, it's as though that history of victimization is just wiped out as far as prosecutors are concerned.

Because in order to make a decision about charging, what prosecutors are doing is they're making kind of a case theory.

They're seeing the world in a particular way and they're bending the facts.

I'm not suggesting this is nefarious in some way, but they are using the facts to support their view of the world.

And once you've committed to that case theory as a prosecutor, it's really hard to be shaken from it.

So once you've decided this wasn't self-defense, in fact, she was acting aggressively, she was angry, she wasn't afraid, she was jealous, it's hard to come off of that narrative.

And because prosecutors have so much power in the system, Once a prosecutor has decided to charge you, there's a whole host of things that happen that you have very little control over.

Prosecutors decide about whether they're going to oppose bail.

They decide who the witnesses are going to be.

They decide what you're going to be charged with.

And in that charging decision, can actually dictate what the punishment will be if what they decide to charge you with is something with a long mandatory minimum sentence.

So prosecutors have enormous amounts of power in the system.

and a commitment to getting prosecutions, to getting convictions.

And so while the job of the prosecutor is supposed to be to do justice, and while many prosecutors believe that they are doing justice, they also are concerned about their conviction rates.

They're concerned about their elections.

They're concerned about being able to say to the public, we're tough on crime, because we're sold this narrative that says crime is out of control when in fact crime is lower than it has been in decades.

But prosecutors are married to that narrative.

Wow, there's so much in that that I found amazing reading in your book the first time around, especially the mandatory arrest rule.

I get it.

I like follow the arc.

Like I can see how when you first hear about that, it sounds like a sensible solution, but it feels like the perfect way of exposing how the system is broken that that gets introduced with all of this goodwill.

But then actually, because of so much inherent bias, women still end up suffering the most because of it.

I feel like one of the things that we, and I say we advisedly, I am very much part of the anti-violence movement.

One of the things we as a movement haven't done well

is to stop and think about what the unintended or just the consequences of our choices might be.

The arrest rates immediately went up for women.

They've stayed high.

I was thinking about the

arrest portion of what you spoke about in your book.

and thinking about applying it to Kelly.

Things really started to look bad for her quite quickly when she was first arrested.

Of course, this is what she says, but she was treated like really poorly to the extent of like she started menstruating and they stripped her and made her wear a white suit and didn't give her any sanitary products.

She really needed medication that they wouldn't give her, which included.

a huge methadone dose that she was on, as well as seizure medications, which she says that they withheld from her until she gave a written statement.

So she had seizures.

It seems like the treatment that she experienced there was just kind of absolutely abhorrent.

From what I read, it seems that's not totally unusual.

But does that chime as true to you?

None of that surprises me even a little bit.

Yeah.

All of that rings completely true to me.

Yeah.

I think one of the things that I've struggled to understand a little bit is that the police had a witness, though later on it seems the witness were kind of confused and was very far away and maybe didn't see all that much.

But at the time, all the information they had was that they saw Tommy committing the crime, but also saw Kelly kick this man.

But it makes it messy.

So remember I said spectrum of cases, right?

Yeah.

Is it possible that Kelly did nothing?

Absolutely.

Is it possible that what the witness saw was Kelly pushing Tommy to try to get him off of this person and that looked like kicking?

Yes.

Is it possible that Tommy said to Kelly, kick him and Kelly thought he's going to kill me if I don't kick him and did?

Yep.

All of those things are possible.

Is it also possible that Kelly's memory is affected by trauma?

Certainly.

Is it possible that in that traumatic memory, she's blocking off the things that she doesn't want to remember?

Absolutely.

Trauma has that impact on memory.

It is also possible that she did a bad thing.

Not the thing that killed the victim in this case, but a bad thing.

Yeah, it's possible.

Does that change whether we think domestic violence was a significant contributing factor to her crime and whether the sentence was disproportionately harsh as a result?

For me, that doesn't change that.

Yeah, I think, well, like the sticking point for me is, you know, in that particular instance with the kicking thing, it's not that it changes anything for me, because like, if she did, it would have been done under duress from her abusive partner.

So, whatever.

It's more what bothers me is that my job as a journalist, like, there's certain rules on podcasts when it comes to how we put things across legally, where I have to say stuff like, Kelly says, and I don't want to say because it can't be substantiated or proved, or it goes against what is actually in kind of legal documents that we have that fact checkers and lawyers are going to rely on.

I can't just say, this is the truth, you know, and I don't like not supporting a victim's narrative because that feels icky to me.

I get that.

And I just don't believe in truth.

You're blowing my mind here, Lee.

Well, I just, you know, we talk about trials as truth-finding expeditions and

judges as finders of fact or juries as finders of fact.

It's just finding one version of the facts.

But there's no objective truth that's out there that we're going to capture that gives us the 360 degree view of whatever it was that happened.

I think it's hard because you're telling a story.

And, you know, one of the things that we want out of our narratives is we want them to be clean and linear and make sense internally and externally.

And right, we have, we know all the storytelling things.

Life is not like that.

And recreating a chaotic and violent incident is really not like that.

Yeah.

And I think that's hard for you.

For lawyers, it's actually a lot easier because we just get to tell our version.

But I know that I'm making choices all the time about what I include and what I exclude, right?

I'm not telling some unvarnished version of the truth.

I'm telling my particular story in a persuasive way.

So

my job's different than yours in that way.

Yeah, I would love to just have your perspective.

It might get you into trouble as a journalist.

Yeah, exactly.

This is the annoying thing.

I'm on the wrong side.

Though it wasn't making me think hearing you say that,

it sounds like there's so many kind of well-worn parts of the legal system that you just don't kind of buy into, you know, but you're still part of it.

Yeah.

How do you cope with that?

So I'm still part of it because I have a set of skills that enables me to do a couple of things.

One is to get people out of prison.

A second is to give students a healthy perspective on the legal system.

We have sold this vision of a system that is infallible, that is just.

Because we've sold that vision, we allow that system to do a lot of harm.

We have to be more thoughtful about what we say about that system.

We have to make every actor in that system recognize how profound the responsibility is to make it work as justly as it possibly can.

Law is an exercise of power both in the laws that get passed and in the laws as they're enforced.

So somebody's got to be there to counter that power.

Yeah.

Might as well be me, I guess.

I mean, I'd rather it be you, for sure.

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Malcolm Gladwell here.

I recently recorded the first episode of Smart Talks with IBM, where I learned how AI agents are joining AI assistants as a major productivity tool.

Let's start with AI agents.

AI agents can reason, plan, and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user.

Brian Bissell, an expert from IBM, gave me an example of how a college freshman might use an AI agent.

As a new student, you may not know, how do I deal with my health and wellness issue?

How many credits am I going to get for this given class?

You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that.

Bissell Bissell told me you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork.

We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive, automate workflows so they're not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again and streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them 24 hours a day.

To learn more about IBM's AI agents and how they can help your business, visit ibm.com slash agents.

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I was wondering if you could just talk to me about the prison system generally.

I heard from your book, it's like the statistics just seem crazy about the numbers of people incarcerated.

And we'll just talk about the United States, obviously.

Like, what has caused that growth?

Why is there like a benefit to somebody?

Can you talk to us about that sort of system as a whole?

You see the jump start to happen in the 1970s and into the 1980s.

The war on drugs is a significant driver of a lot of this, but also tough on crime rhetoric.

The 1994 crime bill ratchets things up.

And so that's when you start to see this huge jump in the prison population, but not just the prison population, the jail population, the detained population, it's kind of everybody.

And, you know, who benefits?

Prosecutors benefit because they can say they're tough on crime and judges and courthouses benefit because we need more of them.

And certainly correctional officers benefit because we need more of them and small towns benefit because we build more jails and prisons to put people in and anytime that you build a jail or a prison you're gonna fill it you gotta fill it yeah because i've had a few people talk to me about how the prison system is for profit but is that just the private prison thing People point a lot to the kind of private prison system as creating the capitalist motive for increasing mass incarceration.

That's true to a some extent, but not much.

Very, very small part of the prison population is actually in private prisons.

It's also about the ways that prisons create economic wealth in a community.

That becomes a significant part of your economy.

In Maryland, which is where I am, the Maryland Correctional Enterprises shops makes furniture for public institutions.

My desk that I am sitting at was made by an incarcerated person.

If I wanted to try to not use products by incarcerated people, I think I could touch my carpet in my office, but I'm pretty clear that I couldn't touch anything else.

Wow.

It's pretty profound.

Do they get paid at all?

The pay is almost nothing, and the commissary costs are much, much, much higher than you would pay for similar kinds of products on the outside.

And so you earn less, but you have to pay more for the same products.

Yeah,

what's the point in that?

Why?

The pain.

the indignity, the harshness, that's the point.

We can say say everything we want to say about prison, but at the end of the day, we are a deeply retributive society.

We think that people deserve to experience pain once they've been convicted of a crime, regardless of where they fall on my spectrum of all of my clients.

And the pain is the point.

Yeah, it's disgusting.

That's what will get you to abolition.

You know, the point of incarceration is not supposed to be the loss of dignity, the loss of health care, the loss of safety, the loss of human connection, the loss of your family.

It's supposed to be the loss of your freedom for a period of time that ensures the safety of the community.

But it's become all these other things.

And once you start to see all of these other things, you can't unsee them.

We were talking about the fact that you were listening to the first series and you were like screaming at the radio at certain bits from where we kind of were really endorsing some parts of the legal system and keeping, in this case, Bob behind bars.

That's actually kind of like, you know, a peek into the production room.

That was something that me and the editor had a really hard time deciding to do and include because we both are quite liberal people.

And so we were never of the mind that somebody who's been in prison that long should necessarily stay there.

But the problem was this wasn't really my story.

It was the story of these women who had been victimized by this guy, and especially the story of Elaine, who has worked incredibly hard to make sure that Bob stays behind bars.

And it just didn't feel right to try and impose my own belief systems onto something that felt so significant for them.

But it's something they're still friends of mine, and I keep up with them.

And Elaine is still fiercely fighting to keep Bob behind bars.

And I'm kind of nervous about her hearing this series and feeling like I'm no longer endorsing something that's so important to her.

You know, what do you say to someone like that?

I

completely understand, having heard a lot of Elaine, why she feels the way that she feels.

And he's, I mean, look, I'm not a psychologist, but he's a sociopath.

You know, there's something deeply like, I get that.

And I don't know what I would tell her about, okay, so what do we do with him then?

Like, I don't know the answer to that yet.

So I get that that impulse that says, you know, this is someone who hurt a lot of women and would have hurt a lot of them worse.

And I, we can't take that chance.

I don't endorse that, but I understand that people do.

And so

one of the things that I'm kind of careful to do in the book is to say, it took me 28 years to get to abolition.

It's not where I started.

I don't expect people to get there overnight.

particularly people who've had people that they love harmed so grievously.

So, we have to give people things that they can do along the way

so that if they're not at abolition, they can say, I can't see this yet.

I can't see the end of prison, but I can see getting rid of mandatory arrest.

I can see getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences.

I can see getting rid of cash bail.

I can see involving communities in defense of survivors.

I can see doing the preventative work that we need to do to make sure that people have the things that they need.

I can see supporting geriatric parole for people who have simply aged out of crime.

I can see supporting compassionate release so that people don't die in there.

There are all kinds of things that people can get on board for that don't require them to say, but this one guy who killed my sister, he should get out.

And I understand that.

I've actually had this conversation with my family.

to say, if anything ever happened to me, I would not want this.

You need to know that I would not want this.

But would I blame them if they wanted it?

No.

Part of that is about the way in which we've defined justice.

We have told people that when you have been harmed, the way that you get justice is if someone else is incarcerated.

We haven't offered people anything else.

We particularly haven't offered them anything else in the context of intimate partner violence.

So if people want justice,

then what they know to want is punishment.

And unless and until we can offer people something different, we can't expect them not to want that.

That's very profound.

I don't think I'd had it put so plainly before.

It's so gross that that is our idea of what justice is, that it has to be linked to somebody suffering.

It's very eye for an eye.

It is.

I mean, that was going to be one of my final questions is, you know, obviously you're right in the thick of it, but most of the people who are listening to this show are normal people.

What is it that normal people can do to help with the building?

Normal people, normal people,

whoever they are, whoever they are, people should know what's being done in their names.

Go into a prison.

See what's being done with your tax dollars.

Think about whether that's something that you're comfortable with.

If you're not, think about supporting efforts like defund the police that got so maligned.

Think about whether you want to offer a volunteer program in a prison That makes up for some of the deficits that exist.

There's so many different entry points for people who are interested in dismantling this system.

You can find something that speaks to you.

So find what that thing is and do it.

Make a podcast.

Make a podcast.

What you're doing this season is turning some of what you've put out there on its ear in ways that I think is really important.

And I do think you're getting to an audience that I would never get to.

So it's important that journalists are pushing on these narratives.

And, you know, not just for petite, cute white women, but for women who tell fabulous tales and who maybe use language in ways that we're not 100% comfortable with.

That's how Kelly talks, right?

Yeah.

Kelly is not a perfect victim, right?

She very much fits.

And getting that message out to people and letting them know, that's really important.

So I think podcasts are really important in this space.

Well, thank God.

Yeah, I think that I tried so hard to treat victims who were just pure victims with grace.

And then now I'm learning that I'm meeting a lot of victims who are the exact same, but they ended up stepping onto the other side of doing something criminal.

I need to find a way to try and persuade myself and the listeners to treat them with the same empathy that they've treated Gail or Heidi from the first two series.

Yeah, people who've done harm and people who've been harmed, they're the same people.

We treat it as though it's a binary, but it's not.

It's like the Eboris, isn't it?

It's eating its own tail.

It is, exactly.

Or the Venn diagram where the circles are completely overlapping.

Yeah.

This has been like one of the best chats I've done for this whole series.

Thank you so much.

Well, thank you.

And I hope it becomes a series that you don't have to scream at the radio for.

But if I do, I have an email address now and I can just email you and tell you what I'm doing.

Yeah, exactly.

Thanks to Lee Goodmark for keeping me on the right track.

Next week in our final installment of the Girlfriends Jailhouse Lawyer bonus episodes, I'll be popping on my bucket hat and rolling up my jeans because the Girlfriends is heading to its very first festival, Wilderness in Oxfordshire, UK.

Where in front of a live audience, I'll be talking to the prolific true crime writer Kate Summerscale about her book Peep Show and how the role of true crime reporting has changed over time and, crucially, what we're both doing to try and make it better.

Catch you then.

The Girlfriend's Jailhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield, and is written and produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jayco Tayavich and Michael Ginnow.

Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.

The editors are Georgia Moody and me, Anna Sinfield.

Production management from Cherie Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe.

Our fact-checker is Dania Suleiman.

Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.

Music supervision by me, Anna Alice Infield, Lee Meyer, and Nicholas Alexander.

Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson, and Louisa Gerstein.

Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton, creative director of Novel.

Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers for Novel.

And Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etor are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts.

And the marketing lead is Alison Cantor.

Thanks also to Carrie Lieberman and the whole team at WME.

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