The Humans of 13th by Kate Fester

(Example)Bryan Stevenson

kfester1 — 2018-04-17 15:12:55 UTC

BRYAN STEVENSON is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. Most recently, Stevenson (and the EJI) opened the Legacy Museum in Birmingham, Alabama.

Quote from 13th: "We make them their crime. That’s how we introduce them. “That’s a rapist.” “That’s a murderer.” “That’s a robber.” “That’s a sex offender.” “That’s a burgler.” “That’s a gang leader.” And through that lens, it becomes so much easier to accept that they’re guilty, and that they should go to prison."

Link to the Equal Justice Initiative: http://eji.org/bryan-stevenson

Melina Abdullah

2018-05-01 17:41:06 UTC

MELINDA ABDULLAH was among the original group of organizers that formed Black Lives Matter. She was appointed to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission in 2014 and is recognized as an expert on race, gender, class, and social movements. She is also a womanist scholar activist who is fighting for liberation of oppressed people

Quotes from 13th: "Ferguson was not simply about Mike Brown. It was also this pattern of mass criminalization and mass incarceration. There was an average of three warrants per household in Ferguson. And so people rose up, because they understood that they were also enemies of the state, seen as enemies of the state."

Link:
http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/pas/Abdullah.php

Craig DeRoche

2018-05-01 17:41:37 UTC

was a republican state congressman and speaker of the Michigan state House of Representatives. He now is works with the Justice Fellowship to help those in ned. While DeRoche was the youngest statewide republican leader in 2004, he now uses his experience to help those fight addiction and reform the criminal justice system.

Quote from 13th, "What President Clinton did in 1994 is actually far more harmful that his predecessors because he actually built that infrastructure that we see today, the militarization all the way down to small, rural police departments that ahve SWAT teams."

Link to his website: http://craigderoche.com/craig-deroche/

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

2018-05-01 17:41:58 UTC

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University.

Quotes:
"What Reagan ultimately does is takes the problem of economic inequality, of hyper-segregation in American cities, and the problem of drug abuse, and criminalizes all of that in the form of the war on drugs."
"There’s really no understanding of our American political culture without race at the center of it."

Link from where he is a professor: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/khalil-muhammad

Glenn E. Martin

1806581 — 2018-05-01 17:42:53 UTC

GLENN E. MARTIN is a criminal justice reform advocate who spent 6 years in a New York state prison. He is currently working on the campaign, Education from the Inside Out Coalition, a national campaign which works to remove barriers to higher education facing students while they are in prison and once they're released. When Martin was released from prison the correctional officer said "My being there helped pay for his boat, and that when my son came there, he would help pay for his son's boat."

Quotes:

"When I think of systems of oppression, historically in this country and elsewhere, they’re durable, and they tend to reinvent themselves, and they do it right under your nose."

Links:

https://www.idealist.org/en/nonprofit/0ab1a5061f5f4de3aa58f7c0a2bb603e-education-from-the-inside-out-coalition-new-york?

https://www.heartsonfire.org/glenn-e-martin-justleadershipusa/

Newt Ginrgich

2018-05-01 17:42:55 UTC

Newt Ginrgich is a former Republican speaker of the house from 1995-1999. Today, he is a strategic planner in the private sector.

Quotes:
We absolutely should have treated crack and cocaine as exactly the same thing. I think it was an enormous burden on the black community, but it also fundamentally violated a sense of core fairness.

The objective reality is that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America.

Cory Booker

2018-05-01 17:43:08 UTC

He is currently a politician from New Jersey and holds a place in the senate. He is a democrat and started a non-profit for low income families.
https://www.booker.senate.gov/?p=about_senator
"We are a nation that professes freedom, and yet we have this mass incarceration, this hyper-incarceration that is trolling into it, grinding into it our most vulnerable citizenry and is overwhelmingly biased toward people of color."

Marie Gottschalk

2018-05-01 17:43:54 UTC

A professor with the University of Pennsylvania, she teaches several classes on mass incarceration along with being a well published author on the subject. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science.

Quotes From 13th

We're having what some people are saying
is a creation of a "crimmigration" system.
That there's the merger
of our immigration enforcement
and our law enforcement system.
And so, that's some of the same things
that were used in the war on drugs,
are now migrating to other populations.

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=13th

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/people/standing-faculty/marie-gottschalk-0

Malkia Cyril

2018-05-01 17:44:02 UTC

Malkia is a poet and media activist best known for spearheading national grassroots efforts of the Net Neutrality campaign, her activism shows up in Politico and the Huffington Post. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice.
http://centerformediajustice.org/

Quote from the 13th:
"Black people, black men, and black people in general are over represented in news as criminals. When I say over represented, that means that they are shown as criminals more times than is accurate, that they are actually criminals, based on FBI statistics."

Baz Dreisinger

2018-05-01 17:44:30 UTC

Baz Dreisinger is an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the founder and Academic Director of John Jay College’s Prison-to-College Pipeline program. . The programoffers incarcerated men throughout New York State a way to increase their higher education options. She is the author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture and Incarceration Nations. She writes about Caribbean culture, race-related issues, music, pop culture and travel for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Forbes Life. She also writes pieces for NPR’s All Things Considered. She wrote and produced the documentaries “Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop” and “Rhyme & Punishment.” She is the recipient of the 2014 Marcia Vickery-Wallace award. I’m a big believer in the power of media, full of these clichés that basically present mostly black and brown folks who seem like animals in cages, and then someone can turn of the TV thinking, “it’s a good thing for prisons, because otherwise those crazy people would be walking on my block.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baz_Dreisinger

Cory Greene

2018-05-01 17:44:34 UTC

Cory Greene is the founder of How Our Lives Link Altogether! (H.O.L.L.A!) H.O.L.L.A! works to enhance youth community leadership by radically investing in the most marginalized youth of color from a framework of healing, political education, social justice trainings, and youth organizing.
Official Website:
https://www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/cory-greene

"Create a context where people are afraid, and when you make people afraid, you can always justify putting people in the garbage can.

Van Jones

2018-05-01 17:44:57 UTC

Van Jones is a political commentator for CNN and a social and environmental activist. He has created and/or participated in several organizations advocating for social change, such as criminal justice reform. He went to Yale for law school, and was an environmental advisor for Barack Obama in 2009.
Quote from 13th
Official Website: https://www.vanjones.net/about

Ken Thompson

2018-05-01 17:45:22 UTC

First black district attorney for Brooklyn and a voice for racial justice. His private law practice was one of the most progressive district attorneys establishing a policy of not prosecuting most low level marijuana arrests.

"95% of the elected prosecutors throughout the United States are white"

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/nyregion/ken-thompson-brooklyns-first-black-district-attorney-dies-at-50.html

Bob Sloan

2018-05-01 17:45:23 UTC

Bob Sloan is a former offender, Stop ALEC organizer and blogger who has spent the past decade researching the PIE program and its impact on civilian and public sector jobs. He is currently writing a book on prison labor in the United States.
Quote from 13: "Prison industries had gotten so big that it’s so difficult now to try and do away with them. Too much money out there, too many lawmakers support it because they’re being lobbied. So, the public’s got to stand up and take it back."

You can fin Bob Sloans writing at http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Bob%20Sloan/

Michael Hough

2018-05-01 17:46:26 UTC

Serves in the Maryland Senate representing District 4, which covers portions of Frederick and Carroll Counties. He was formerly a Delegate and chairman and of the Frederick County Republican Central Committee. Hough is also the former president of the Maryland Republican Assembly. He is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), serving as Maryland state leader.
Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hough_(politician)

Quote:
"I think this accusation is, quite frankly, just false, that somehow ALEC was in favor was in favor of imprisoning a bunch of people because of private prisons. I think that’s just unfortunately one of these attack type tactics they do on ALEC."

Kyung-Ji Rhee

2018-05-01 17:46:57 UTC

Kyung-Ji Kate Rhee serves as the juvenile justice director of the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, an independent research, training and advocacy Human Justice think tank, formerly at Medgar Evers College in the City University of New York, founded and developed by academic professionals with prior experience within the criminal punishment system. Ms. Rhee oversees the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform & Alternatives (IJJRA), the Center’s youth justice division. http://www.embracerace.org/kyung-ji-kate-rhee.html
" All the legislation you could think of that we fight so hard against; “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” “Mandatory Minimum Sentencing” laws, were the ones they’re putting out there like a premier pre-fixed dinner menu, a steady influx of bodies to generate the profit that would go to the shareholders."

Gina Clayton

2018-05-01 17:47:14 UTC

GINA CLAYTON is the executive director and founder of the Essie Justice Group, a group made to harness the collective power of women with incarcerated loved ones to end mass incarceration's harm to women. She became a youth organizer for the NAACP and led campaigns that addressed campus policing, voter registration and state sentencing laws.

https://essiejusticegroup.org/team/gina-clayton/

"This industry knows that it’s dying, and, is actually preparing for the next thing. And the animating factors that have led to a system like bail; we’re always going to see new permutations of a cancer, right? And that’s what this is."

Liza Jessie Peterson

2018-05-01 17:47:53 UTC

A playwright, actor on her own one woman show, activist, and educator. She attended Georgetown University majored in International Relations. Yet, after three years she moved to Paris due to her dream of being a model. Then, started teaching at Rikers Academy.
http://www.mappinternational.org/artists/view/3472

David Keene

2018-05-01 17:48:34 UTC

David Keene is an American political consultant and former Presidential advisor. He said ""We've done away with parole. So in the federal system, when you get 20 or 30 years, that's what you got". Keene is trying to show that modern mass incarceration is getting similar to slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Keene

Shaka Senghor

1805731 — 2018-05-01 17:48:35 UTC

Shaka Senghor is a convicted murderer, and now spends his days writing, lecturing at colleges, and working at MIT's Media Lab as a director fellow. His one book, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death and Redemption in an American Prison, is about him surviving through prison, and having a chance to make a difference, and learn from his mistakes.

Link:
http://www.shakasenghor.com/?page_id=134

In the movie he said, "You’re black with crack cocaine, you’re going to prison, for basically the rest of your life. And if you’re white, you pretty much get a slap on the wrist."

Dolores Canales

2018-05-01 17:51:04 UTC

Dolores is the director of talent development for the Bail project. The Bail project helps bail low income citizens out of jail.
https://bailproject.org/why-bail/
"You immediately become numb. That’s what jail does to humans, that immediate dehumanization, and sensory deprivation that nobody can really understand unless they live through it."

Michelle Alexander

2018-05-01 17:51:31 UTC

MICHELLE ALEXANDER is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. She served as a director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California. The project focused on criminal justice reform. It worked to show that the criminal justice system functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control.

Quotes:
"And [it] became very easy for politicians then to say that the Civil Rights movement itself was contributing to rising crime rates, and that if we were to give the negroes their freedom, then we would be repaid as a nation with crime."

Link:
http://newjimcrow.com/about-the-author

Pat Nolan

2018-05-01 17:51:45 UTC

Pat Nolan is the Director of the American Conservative Union Foundation’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform. Nolan is a leading voice on criminal justice reform, highlighting the skyrocketing costs of prison, fiscal responsibility in the criminal justice system and reforms for non-violent offenders.

Quotes:
"All of a sudden a scythe went through our black communities, literally cutting off men from their families, literally huge chunks just disappearing into our prisons, and for really long times."

Link:
http://acufoundation.conservative.org/center-for-criminal-justice-reform/pat-nolan/

John Hagan

2018-05-01 17:53:03 UTC

John Hagan is now a professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University.
Official Website: http://johnhagan.org

"Crime was increasing. And the baby-boom generation that had emerged immediately after WWII, now they were adults. So, just through sheer demographic change we had an increase in the amount of crime."

James Kilgore

2018-05-01 17:53:35 UTC

James Kilgore is a former student activist who became involved with the Symbionese Liberation Army. He had to go underground after being part of it because he was arrested. He said "Part of what Nixon talked about was a war on crime, but that was one of those code words". He is implying that that Nixon was trying to fight back against the black lives matters, gay and women's rights protests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kilgore

2018-05-01 17:54:12 UTC

Kevin Gannon

2018-05-01 17:54:16 UTC

Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and Professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. I’m a total geek for History, pedagogy, and technology–particularly where the three intersect. I’m in higher education because I believe in its emancipatory and democratizing potential, and I’ll gladly join anyone advocating for those things at the barricades. " The stroke of a pen is not self-enforcing. And so while the 13th Amendment is hailed as this great milestone for freedom and abolition to celebrate and this end of a lifelong quest, the reality is much more problematic. Well, once that clause is inserted in there, it becomes a tool. It’s there. It’s embedded in the structure. And, for those who seek to use this criminality clause as a tool, it can become a pretty powerful one because it’s privileged. It’s in the Constitution. It’s the supreme law of the land. "
http://www.thetattooedprof.com/about/

Grover Norquist

2018-05-01 17:54:21 UTC

Deborah Small

2018-05-01 17:54:51 UTC

Lisa Graves

2018-05-01 17:54:56 UTC

Lisa Graves is an American progressive activist who currently serves as Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy

Jelani Cobb

2018-05-01 17:55:38 UTC

JELANI COBB has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 2012 and became a staff writer in 2015. He writes frequently about race, politics, history and culture. He is also a journalism professor at Columbia University.

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jelani-cobb

"One of the things that people have to bear in mind is that when we think about slavery, it was an economic system and the demise of slavery at the end of the civil war left the southern economy in tatters. So this presented a big question. There are 4 million people who were formerly property, and they were formerly an integral part of the economic production system in the south. And now those people are free. And so what do you do with these people? How do you rebuild your economy? The 13th Amendment loophole was immediately exploited."

David Denkins

2018-05-01 17:56:59 UTC

Denkins is a politician who was the first and only african american person to be the mayor of New York to date. He now works as a professor at Columbia, but throughout his tenure as mayor and to this day he works to help diffuse racial tensions and to make city streets safer for everyone.

Quote from 13th, "Usually black or Hispanic, Latino, they were getting long sentences for possession of crack."

Link to website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dinkins or https://www.biography.com/people/david-dinkins-9275051

Dorsey Nunn

2018-05-01 17:57:53 UTC

Dorsey is a leading expert with over 40 years of professional experience in criminal justice reform. He is the first formerly incarcerated director of a public interest law office in California. Dorsey was sentenced to life in the California Department of Corrections when he was 19 years old. He paroled in 1981 and discharged from parole in 1984. Under his leadership LSPC has made significant advances including the development of the Elder Freeman Policy Fellowship, legal victories including the Ashker lawsuit that ended long term solitary confinement in California, and policy victories including numerous Ban the Box laws passed at the local, state, and federal levels, the end of shackling of pregnant women, and the biggest drug sentencing reform passed by the CA legislature in recent history.
Link: http://www.prisonerswithchildren.org/about/staff-directory/dorsey-nunn/
Quotes:
"Private rentals in regards to housing. It’s that question that appears on life insurance."
"The scarlet letter follows you for the rest of your life in this country."

Charles Rang

2018-05-01 17:58:23 UTC

Born on June 11th, 1930, When Charles was 18, he was going to Korea to fight in the Korean War. Winning multiple medals for bravery. When he came back home, he knew that a degree must be done. He received his bachelor's degree in 1957 and became a lawyer by 1961. Who stood up for black civil right activists. Becoming the first african american chair of the influential house ways and means committee. That is a co- founder of the congressional black caucus.
"The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way".
https://www.biography.com/people/charles-rangel-394538

2018-05-01 18:02:37 UTC

2018-05-01 18:02:43 UTC

Nicolas Turner

2018-05-01 18:04:29 UTC

Angela Davis

2018-05-03 02:31:39 UTC

American political activist, academic, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist in the 1960s as a leader of the Black Panther Party and was highly involved in the Civil Rights Movement. She has worked as a professor and activist who advocates gender equity, prison reform and alliances across color lines. She also helped popularize the prision industrial complex.

Quote from the 13th:
"It’s with the Nixon era, and the “Law & Order” period when crime begins to stand in for race."

2018-12-30 22:54:52 UTC