Everyday Injustice

“In 2002, two men burglarized a house; the resident killed them both. I was neither the resident nor one of the burglars, but I was sent to prison for 18 years before the state finally unraveled it all and set me free,” Benjamin Frandsen explains.

Listen as Benjamin Frandsen tells his remarkable story first narrowly avoiding the death penalty, then his conviction overturned and finally success going to UCLA and his podcast, Ben Free Podcast, where he “leads listeners on weekly interviews through the emotions, thoughts and processes of those who have survived their heavy handed sentences.”

On October 19, the Vanguard will Honor Phil Melendez for his work as a formerly incarcerated person. He is currently working with Smart Justice California to help reform the criminal legal system as well as help those who are system impacted.

He joined Everyday Injustice this week to discuss his remarkable story. With a difficult life growing up, his father stabbed, and he ended up killing two innocent people who had nothing to do with the attack on his father.

He was arrested on Oct. 25, 1997, and faced the possibility of the death penalty. He ultimately ended up at San Quentin and it was there through the rehabilitative culture that it helped to turn his life around.

He was finally granted parole due to changes in California State laws for youthful offenders and he is taking full opportunity of his second chance.

Listen as Phil Melendez tells his remarkable story of rehabilitation and redemption.

Join us as we honor Melendez and others for their work on behalf of justice and justice reform.

Tickets start at $100 per plate. Sponsors at $250. To sponsor this event and support this incredibly important cause - visit this website: http://tinyurl.com/Vanguard2023.

This week on Everyday Injustice is former public defender LaToya Bell who is now working at the Ohio Justice and Policy Center (OJPC).

Bell discusses the need for second chance legislation and how this is critical for public safety.

OJPC has two big projects.

The Beyond guilt Project: “Beyond Guilt will see to do for over-punished prisoners who admit guilt what innocence projects have done for wrongfully convicted persons who claim actual innocence.”

The Second Chance: “OJPC runs free legal clinic focusing on criminal record sealing and expungement for people who qualify.”

We end up creating a system where 95 percent of all people incarcerated will one day be released, but once released we restrict their opportunities to jobs, education and housing leaving them vulnerable to recidivism and leaving public safety at risk.

Raymond E. Strawn III is starting law school in San Francisco this fall. It’s a far cry from where he was at the end of high school.

Just after 9/11 he had just moved to NY in high school – the only Asian student, and stood out, wearing all black with a shaved head.

One day, while talking to some girls, he showed them his notebook. His messages of despair and criticism of the school were twisted into plots to attack the school.

This leads to his arrest, his interrogation, and his 48 day detention as a juvenile. The judge does not set bail. His public defender was a divorce attorney, defending his first case, and he was pushed to take a plea deal because of lack of confidence.

However, Strawn refuses a plea deal and the judge eventually finds him not guilty at a bench trial.

Internal Affairs investigation but the statute of limitations passed. Strawn is continued to be harassed by law enforcement and suffers from PTSD.

Listen as he describes his ordeal and the steps to going to law school.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we are joined by former federal prosecutor Jared Fishman who is now the founder of Justice Innovation Lab.

He tells the remarkable story of Henry Glover’s murder in Hurricane Katrina–era New Orleans. Glover was killed by police officers following the hurricane, and his killing was thoroughly covered up.

According to the book description, “In 2009, Jared Fishman was a young prosecutor working on low-level civil rights cases in the Justice Department when a file landed on his desk.

“That folder contained two items: a story from The Nation magazine examining a mysterious death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an autopsy report for a man named Henry Glover, whose charred remains were found in a burned-out car two weeks after the storm. The autopsy report, bafflingly, listed no cause of death. But according to The Nation story, a gravely wounded Glover had last been seen in a car driven by a New Orleans police officer.”

Fishman eventually flies to New Orleans to learn about what happened, and teams up with a rookie FBI agent, and together they started to track down anyone with information about what had happened to Glover on that day.

This week on Everyday Injustice we talk with Vincent Atchity. He is the CEO of Mental Health Colorado and a member of Colorado Jail Standards Commission.

One of the biggest problems facing the criminal legal system is that in many locations, the largest mental health facility is the county jail which is ill-equipped to properly treat and handle people suffering from a variety of trauma and mental illness.

Listen as Vincent Atchity discusses his work with the Commission, the Care Not Cuffs Campaign, and the impact of solitary confinement on people suffering already from mental illness.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we are joined by Kardell Sims, formerly incarcerated who has now become an expert on prisons and helps to coach incarcerated people in hopes of helping them avoid the recidivism trap.

Kardell Sims describes his journey through the criminal legal system, but also his way out and his program helping those attempting to exit prison avoid the barriers to reentry after incarceration.

The system so often sets formerly incarcerated people up for failure by restricting their job opportunities, education, and even housing.

Sims program helps to train people and put them onto a path for success.

This week on Everyday Injustice we are joined by Christi Smith of R Street, who argues that clean slate legislation both enhances public safety and helps to stimulate the economy.

One of the problems with mass incarceration is that large numbers of people are churned in and out of the criminal legal system, incarcerated, then they are released but their criminal records prevent them from getting access to the things they need to succeed – jobs, services, housing and education.

Clean slate legislation allows for people convicted of certain offenses to have their records sealed, so they can qualify for things like jobs, education and housing.

As Smith puts it in one of her published reports, “One in three Americans, roughly 70 to 100 million, have a criminal record that limits their earning capacity and options for suitable housing, as well as makes it more challenging to remain law-abiding.”

In a lot of cases, we are not talking about serious or violent crime, “but rather due to the ever-widening net of ‘tough-on-crime’ legislation that criminalizes poverty, substance use and mental illness.”

Listen as Christie Smith talks about the problem and how clean slate legislation helps to solve that problem and the success they have had so far.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we spoke with Emma Ruth, who recently wrote a piece with the Prison Policy Initiative on the little known and often misunderstood practice of civil commitment.

The 20 states include California and Illinois.

She noted that 20 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons “detain over 6,000 people, mostly men, who have been convicted of sex offenses in prison-like “civil commitment” facilities beyond the terms of their criminal sentence.”

Some of these commitments are indefinite.

While there are questions about the constitutionality of the practice, in 2017, the US Supreme Court “declined to hear a case from Minnesota after a federal judge deemed the practice unconstitutional.”

Among the concerns raised in the segment – the lack of safeguards, the fact that these are “shadow prions” without full due process of law, questionable evidence-based practices, and the overall deplorable conditions of the facilities themselves.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we talked with Charles Bell, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Illinois State University, whose work focuses on school discipline, suspensions and the school-to-prison pipeline.

As Bell explains, his work focuses on how Black students and parents view school punishment, the disproportionate use of suspensions and criminal legal system solutions when dealing with Black and brown youth.

Bell’s book, Suspended: Punishment, Violence, and the Failure of School Safety, found that Black students made up 15% of the student population across the country, while being 39% of those who received one or more suspensions.

The school-to-prison pipeline as Bell explains, “see a pipeline in which students enter school, and then school criminalizes their behavior. Increasingly, what we see is schools become a carceral space in which you have all these criminal justice elements.”

The term, refers to the trend amongst school districts to enforce severe discipline policies that push students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system.

And as we discuss, this has a huge impact on the future of children of color.