People sometimes like to quote that Bible passage about “an eye for an eye” when justifying a punitive criminal justice system focused on retribution and vengeance. Others like to repeat a saying often attributed to Ghandi, that “an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we get philosophical about crime and punishment. Our guest today is Celia Ouellette, a human rights lawyer and CEO of the nonprofit Responsible Business Initiative for Justice. Within the scope of her organization’s campaigns, we take a critical look at the American prison industrial complex and private prisons, the ineffectiveness of the death penalty, and the draconian practice of locking juveniles up for life.

Narrator  0:02  This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Celia Ouellette  0:17  The death penalty in juvenile life without parole or clearly human rights issues the use of juvenile life without parole. juvenile detention without any possibility prop violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. America is the only country in the world to continue to use this practice and has not signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child because of it.

Narrator  0:39  People sometimes like to quote that Bible passage about an eye for an eye when justifying a punitive criminal justice system focused on retribution and vengeance. Others like to repeat a saying often attributed to Gandhi that an eye for an eye will lead the whole world blind. This week on Sea Change Radio, we get philosophical about crime and punishment. Our guest today is Celia Ouellette, a human rights lawyer and CEO of the nonprofit Responsible Business Initiative for Justice. within the scope of our organization’s campaigns, we take a critical look at the American prison industrial complex and private prisons, the ineffectiveness of the death penalty, and the draconian practice of locking juveniles up for life.

Alex Wise  1:45  I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Celia Ouellette. She is the CEO of the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice. Celia, welcome to Sea Change Radio. Thanks so much. So the responsible business initiative for justice, you are personally based in the UK, but most of your work revolves around United States, incarceration and justice issues, correct? That’s right. Why don’t you explain the mission of your organization if you can?

Celia Ouellette 2:16  Yeah, it’s a little bit of a long title for an organization. But it kind of does exactly what it sounds like we work with businesses, on criminal justice issues. So the mission of the organization was really designed to kind of meet a need in the criminal justice reform movement in the US, which is where I come from, despite the accent, but my whole career working in the US as a defense attorney, and we really saw this need to have businesses be effective allies. If you are working on a legislative campaign, having a business, really support your issue, and advocate for why what you’re trying to do it makes good sense is very, very helpful. If you’re looking at big narrative campaigns, you know, the platform and reach of companies and business leaders is really, really helpful. And on things like helping to reduce recidivism rates, companies are really essential in their internal policies and practices, for example, whether they’re willing to hire people who have an arrest or conviction record. And so we really saw businesses as part of the solution and fixing the US Justice System in many different ways. And there was actually no organization doing this. So rbj was built in 2017, to do exactly this.

Alex Wise  3:39  And why don’t you give us an example of your work in action?