The issue of mass incarceration has been far less central to the 2024 election thus far in comparison to the 2020 presidential race. However, that doesn’t make the matter any less pressing for incarcerated people, their loved ones, or the activists fighting tirelessly to free prisoners. There are a range of ways presidential candidates could commit to ending mass incarceration, but one tool stands out as a quick fix that can be implemented through presidential prerogative alone: the power of clemency. For months, activists with the FreeHer campaign have been building pressure for the next president to wield their clemency powers to swiftly release women serving extended sentences. Andrea James, founder and executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and Families for Justice as Healing, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss the importance of clemency.
Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bar. I’m your host, Mance Mosley. Today, we’re continuing our conversation about elections and how poor working class and oppressed people can navigate a system that wasn’t built to serve our needs. What does it mean to vote and mobilize for key policy issues rather than for a political party? And what are the issues that people impacted by the prison industrial complex are mobilizing around? When I was reporting for the Real News at the FreeHer March in Washington DC in April, I saw a lot of folks wearing stickers saying, “I’m a clemency voter.” What does it mean to be a clemency voter? Here to talk about this today is Andrea James. She’s the founder and executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. She’s the founder of Families for Justice as Healing, and she’s the author of Upper Bunkies Unite: And Other Thoughts On the Politics of Mass Incarceration. Welcome Andrea to Rattling the Bars. How you doing today?
Andrea James:
Doing okay. Doing all right.
Mansa Musa:
All right, so let’s get right into the gist of things. When we was at the march in April, the FreeHer Rally March, we recognized a lot of signs and a lot of the slogans and a lot of the shouts and a lot of the information coming from the podium was a hundred women get clemency in a hundred days. This being indicative of President Biden’s first 100 days of administration. But more importantly, the more salient point was that the clemency should be used as a mechanism to release women that are being held captive on these plantations known as prisons.
First of all, talk about why y’all went in that direction first, the clemency, why did y’all focus? Because y’all done did a lot of things. Y’all got a lot of things on y’all platform, but this right here is the more strategic and more direct approach that when you look at the results, the results will be either the person get out and we’d be celebrating the release, but more importantly, the momentum is going to come out. We’ll talk about some of the things that y’all doing to get it, but talk about how, why are y’all getting that space right there?
Andrea James:
We were incarcerated in the federal system. We were in prison with sisters who are never coming home unless their sentences are commuted. So it’s kind of different when you determine what space you’re going to work out of when you haven’t had the full experience of what we’re talking about here. But if you were like us, if you were women that were incarcerated in the federal system, who were mothers, who were wives, who were aunties, and grandmothers and sisters, and moms in particular, we have been separated from our children, but some of us had the opportunity to go to prison and come home. So we’re fighting for sisters that unless we get clemency for them, they’ll never come home. And we’ve got to really understand that. We’re talking about is the liberation of our people, and we want to bring attention to the intentionality of incarceration of our people and the policies that led up to that. Now, we started our work after, we started organizing in the federal prison for women in Danbury, Connecticut in 2010, and brought the work-out with us starting in 2011. And then other sisters inside Justine Moore, Virginia Douglas, Big Shay, they started to come home. So it wasn’t rocket science for us, but in the federal prison, you would see this from all over the country, sometimes from different Black communities around the world.
And so it wasn’t rocket science for us to stop this work. But we started in the prison realizing not really totally clear about what clemency was as a tool. But after coming home in 2011, that became crystal clear to us. We met Amy Povah at CAN-DO Clemency. She taught us a lot about clemency as a tool. And then of course, President Obama, who we got in front of and who centered women and brought us to the White House. But also we should not be going backwards from what President Obama did with clemency.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, let’s pick up on right there because, all right, now for the benefit of our audience, clemency is a federal mandate and it’s top heavy in its bureaucracy. Honest you know-
Andrea James:
It’s a tool, it’s a privilege bestowed upon. It’s not a mandate, it’s a tool. It’s bestowed upon the President of the United States to grant relief to people from their sentences. And that takes many forms. It could be freedom, immediate freedom, commuting your sentence, meaning it only stops the sentence that you are serving from within a casserole place, a prison. It doesn’t mean that you’re off of, you are still convicted, you still can leave there and be on federal parole, what they want to call supervised release with all shenanigans, with semantics of language. You’re still under the auspices of the Federal Bureau of Prisons or sentence. But you are no longer required to serve that from within the prison. Now, that takes all different levels depending on what the clemency is that you are given. Some people are given full clemency ban. You hear them come down the hall telling you to pack out. You’re like, “Where am I going?” They’re like, “You’re going home.”
Mansa Musa:
You ain’t going to pay for nothing. You gone.
Andrea James:
You going home. Our director of clemency, Danielle Metz, young woman, sentenced to triple life sentence plus 20 years for being Glenn Metz’s wife, basically and took her away from her 7-year-old and months old babies to put her in a prison for triple life sentences plus 20 years.
Mansa Musa:
And we going to get into some of the crimes they alleged committed. Yeah.
Andrea James:
But it could be a president could commute your sentence, but tell you, instead of life, you’re going to do 30 years or anything in between that. It’s not always a guaranteed immediate release. So what President Obama did was to connect the power of the tool of clemency that the President of the United States and only the President of the United States or the governor of individual states, that’s the power. No questions asked. His or her only power to commute a person’s sentence. Okay? So that’s what clemency is.
Mansa Musa:
Let’s talk about this here. Okay. Now, so we got that [inaudible 00:07:54]. And in terms of y’all introduced a bill called the Fixed Clemency Act and I-
Andrea James:
Well, we didn’t introduce it. It was introduced by, we supported it, we poured a lot of information into it. It was our Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s bill, because we need to fix women.
Mansa Musa:
I wasn’t able to track the stand. So what happened with it? Where did that stand by you?
Andrea James:
Nothing happened with it. Nothing happened with it.
Mansa Musa:
So it’s dormant?
Andrea James:
I mean, it’s a valiant effort to keep and we have to do that, but we also have to have people who are elected to office like Ayanna Pressley, she’s my congresswoman out of Massachusetts, to we need people like her that are willing to push the parameters of what we hear every day now, people talking about democracy, right? What is democracy? Well, so far in this country, democracy isn’t inclusive. It is a white male dominated vision of democracy and the parameters of what democracy and what needs to be discussed as democratic values, it’s defined to be not inclusive still of the majority of people who find themselves caught and entangled in the criminal law system, which in this country is Black people. The majority, disproportionality we’re talking about. And so we have to take this very seriously because we’re in a state in this country right now where we got this selection going on. There’s all kinds of language being thrown around, but we’re also talking about candidates and we’re still talking about it under the Biden administration with President Biden, who was one of the catalysts of the drafters of the 1994 Crime Act.
Mansa Musa:
That’s right. Come on.
Andrea James:
The drafters of the Adoption Safe Family Act. Those two things were targeted at us intentionally. The drug war started under the Nixon administration, intentionally targeted towards us to oppress and control Black communities. And so if democracy, when we’re using that term now like we’ve got a state democracy, what exactly are we talking about saving?
Mansa Musa:
That’s like Frederick Douglass saying like, “What’s your 4th of July mean to me?”
Andrea James:
Well, yeah.
Mansa Musa:
I’m on plantation.
Andrea James:
It’s still holding in place these two parties that are elitist and capitalist in ways that still do not include everyday Black folks who are entangled in the criminal law system at a disproportionate number in this country from every state and every federal prison around the country. So until we grapple with that, until we’re not afraid to talk about, well, what does democracy in this country really mean? And really have candidates and legislators, state, federal, president, governors who are willing to actually engage in that conversation about, “Yeah, we fighting to save democracy, I guess.” But how is that being defined in this country?
Mansa Musa:
Let me ask you this here, Andrea, on the clemency thing. Now, as it stand right now, it’s top heavy in dealing with bureaucracy because everything goes through the Justice Department. Justice Department is the front line in terms of getting an application.
Andrea James:
They’re prosecutors so [inaudible 00:11:51]
Mansa Musa:
Right. And now I’ve seen what y’all were saying. So this is what I wanted to unpack for our audience benefit so going forward they can understand y’all strategy. Now, when I was locked up, in the state of Maryland, they had a thing where the only way life could get paroled, it had to be signed by the governor. It had to go through the governor. So what happened is the parole board recommend you for parole and it would sit on the governor’s desk three or four years before he say no. So what we did, we lobbied and got a bill passed to take it out the hands of the governor. Now I seen, like you say, in this bill that was introduced, but one of the things that y’all was saying, in y’all position was that what clemency would do is take it out the hand of the prosecutor, the Department of Justice. So how do y’all mobilize or where are y’all at in terms of mobilizing around getting the autonomy that’s going to be needed in order to get some type of equity towards the women that deserve to be released?
Andrea James:
Yeah, I mean, we decided at some point you can only go so far with what’s happening in Congress right now, who’s controlling Congress, what they’re paying attention to. We fought so hard against the passage of the First Step Act, the way it was presented, because it’s been a big smoke screen. And we knew when Congress passed First Step that it really wasn’t what we needed. It didn’t address the people who needed to get out. It called out the very people that needed the most relief and so how could we ever support a bill like that. And we never crossed over in support of it, even though we fought valiantly to try and add retroactivity and other things to the first step. And then it was put into the hands of the most vile regime of a think tank called the Heritage Foundation also responsible now for project 2025 to implement the First Step Act. And it’s just, we are one of the few, I don’t know if any other organizations have done it, but our legal division led by our senior council, Catherine Sevcenko, has followed the implementation of the First Step Act. And it’s been just a sham. It’s been a [inaudible 00:13:59], but the PR on it would make anybody think that everybody who’s come like 30,000 people got released because of First Step Act. That’s not true. But I digress.
So when we talk about the [inaudible 00:14:16] Act, at some point, yes, we have to weigh in. We need legislators who are directly affected like Congresswoman Ayanna, Pressley, to carry these bills forward for us and to at least put them into existence knowing that we got a big struggle to get them to go anywhere because the members of Congress were satisfied with the First Step Act. As abysmal as it is, they weren’t going to center criminal justice reform in any significant following that for years, we knew that. That’s the path of how things go. We haven’t heard a peep about criminal justice reform other than Trump wanting to bring the death penalty back for drug dealers. We haven’t even heard. It’s not even on the current candidates platforms.
And so we had to shift our energy to, and it’s not really a shift, it’s just, what are we picking up now to being present and to make sure that the concept of liberation of our people isn’t just left to hope somebody’s going to keep it at the forefront? That’s our job. Nobody’s coming to save us. If nobody gives a shit about our issue. If you’re going to do this work, you have to be consistent in finding ways of staying in the public eye, of showing up, of taking up space, of getting in the street. And so that’s what we did with the 10th anniversary.
We did this, did this 10 years ago in 2014, and that’s how we got the attention, because of the work of civil rights lawyer, Nkechi Taifa who brought the National Council and the sisterhood to the attention of President Obama and Valerie Jarrett to say, “Yo Prez, we see you. We see you equating. We see you connecting clemency to racial justice. That clemency is racial justice. We see you going into the federal prisons.” How could it be that he was the first President of the United States to go to visit a federal prison? How could that be?
Mansa Musa:
Yeah.
Andrea James:
Right? But at the same time, Prez, we don’t see you talking about women.
Mansa Musa:
That’s right. Exactly. Come on, talk about that.
Andrea James:
He did. He brought us into that White House with the help of Nkechi Taifa, Sakira Cook, Jesselyn McCurdy, these Black women lawyers, civil rights lawyers in the district, and we were able to come in and talk about it, did a whole forum about women and incarceration, an armchair discussion with Valerie Jarrett. So we have to always find ways to center ourselves. Now, since 2014, we were able to work with CAN-DO Clemency, Amy Povah. We were instrumental in using our voices and experiences that helped more than 50 women come out of the federal system. President Obama did that. Now we certainly should not stand to go backwards in any way. Trump made a complete mockery of pardons and clemency and good for the people who got them. It was his cronies and people who supported him, and they were good. It was great. You got a pardon, I’m happy for any formerly-
Mansa Musa:
Anybody getting out the dungeon.
Andrea James:
And convicted person, right?
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, anybody getting out the dun?
Andrea James:
But it also derailed the momentum around clemency that President Obama had built up. So we anticipated going forward when Biden got back in that seat. We met Vice President Biden. We were in the White House. You know who we are, who the women are of the National Council, women from across this country who were buried in prisons, who are using their voice to create significant and meaningful change. You know what this is and you also know what happened and who came out under President Obama with just impeccable stellar records of what they’ve done with their lives since then. What are you afraid of? We’ve got women who are elderly, who are sick, who are long-timers. Michelle West just exceeded her 31st year, going on her 32nd year of incarceration. What a [inaudible 00:18:56], you’re talking about three decades ain’t enough for drug war sentencing. But what [inaudible 00:19:02]
Mansa Musa:
Let me ask you this here. Okay, because I seen the video that y’all did on the clemency and we be pressed for time. All right, so map out, because this right now for like you say, for most women that got triple life, that got death by a thousand cuts, that’s locked up in prison right now, for most of them clemency is some type of change in the judicial system where a case come out that affect them. Clemency is probably the only way they going to get out.
Andrea James:
Only way.
Mansa Musa:
Going forward, what do you want to say to our audience about how do they get involved in this issue? Because this is, like you say, this is a human rights. It’s not a civil rights. This is a human rights issue. You lock people up for drug offenses, no violence involved other than the fact that they was connected with somebody that did something and they get the bulk of the sentence. So how do we deal with people going forward? What do you want our people to understand going forward? How do they get involved with this fight? The free women.
Andrea James:
All you got to do is follow the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. The nationalcouncil.us. It’s easy. You can reach out to us, but you can do very simple things. Go onto the White House website and you can send a message on the White House website, anybody, anytime, any day, and just say, we vote clemency. We’ve got a campaign that is making it very clear. Listen, you’ve got to be using your clemency power. This is an extraordinary opportunity for President Biden to correct the wrongs of the 1994 Crime Act of the drug sentencing policies. Just understand and be strong about it. Yeah, clemency is racial justice. I am creating some injustices that were directly targeted to Black people in this country who are buried in prisons, who will never come home unless I bring them home.
And we’ve given him, when we created the list of a hundred women, it’s 99 now because Martha Ivanov died. If we’ve given him the lowest hanging fruit that exists, who’s going to deny elderly women that have served decades in a prison who are sick, have dementia, don’t know who they are, don’t know why they’re in prison. I have terminal conditions. How are you going to put a mom in prison like Michelle West and leave her there for 30 plus years and say you still aren’t going to get any relief from the legislation that was passed. So President Biden, this is the only chance these sisters have and they’ve got skin in the game. You got decades in a prison and the atrocity of rape of women. That has happened in 19 of the 29. Now, we say it’s every single of the 29 federal women’s prisons, but they have, the Justice Department has determined that in 19 of the 29 prisons, the most egregious case coming out of Dublin that we did fight to get closed, but not in the manner they closed it. They literally shut it down in a week after… they had a brothel running out of there. The warden, the chaplain was raping women in that prison for years this went on and they finally closed it. And guess what, we said, give clemency to all of those women.
Give clemency to every single one of those women that was raped in that prison. And let’s look at who else across the federal system should be released because of the atrocities that they have been subjected to. You know what they did instead? They attacked them. They sent them to other prisons where the gods used all kinds of punishment and told women when they arrived. “Don’t think you’re going to pull that shit here at this prison because we’re not having it.” They sent women to prisons where women who were unpoliticized and had been buried in a prison and just don’t know and are underneath the control of male prison administration and gods who told them, junk these women, beat up these women because they have disrupted everybody, all of you in the federal system now. And sent them to prisons also that were some of the 19 prisons where they are currently raping women in those right now.
Mansa Musa:
All right, Andrea. So as we close out, first all, we want to acknowledge that this is like a human rights issue. That the abuse of women in the criminal injustice system on these plantations is beyond anybody’s imagination and conscience. They get treated way worse than men could ever be treated. But going forward, and we know about the clemency, what’s the next thing on y’all platform? And we’ve got two minutes.
Andrea James:
Doing a 11 city tour, it’s called Nobody’s Coming to Save Us. It’s a photographic exhibit in 11 cities across the country that were photographs taken by formerly incarcerated brothers, Malik and Johnny Perez, and also a very professional photographer, David who was there who took some incredible pictures for us. We are screening that video that your group did for us that people will see with y’all’s permission, but it’s on the table to be screened as people come into this exhibit. We’re doing a community forum in each of these cities that we’re going to 11 cities, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, you name it. We’re going there and holding the conversation about this issue.
They’re building 11 prisons as we’re talking about this, women’s prisons across the country as we speak. And so when we talk about these issues, we’ve got to help the public understand that we need to not be building prisons, we need to be decarcerating people, not just women but women, we unapologetically advocate on behalf of women, but free them all and stop with decarceration. Not one prison should be being built in this country. The problems and the ineffectiveness, police in prisons don’t create healthy, thriving communities. Healthy, thriving people do. So talk about democracy when we call out democracy like it’s some sort of savior for this country. And if you’re for one candidate, you’re not for democracy. If you’re for another, you are. Well, for us, for our people, democracy has not expanded to cover us. And so what does that mean?
We are creating the abolitionist think tank called the Free Her Institute. And we are not doing it with any kind of C3 grant money. We are doing it by selling T-shirts and a cup of coffee. We want people to commit, buy a T-shirt or for one year commit to donating to the FreeHer Institute the cost of one cup of $5 a week for a year. You can go to freeherinstitute.com and you can click a button and you can make that commitment for one year. And if you decide after a few months, I can’t do this anymore, just call us and we’ll stop it. But help us. We are building the abolitionist FreeHer Institute think tank so that we can amplify and elevate these issues the same way that the Coke brothers, that the Heritage Foundation, that Project 2025, that these people that get flooded with all of these billionaires dollars that we don’t have.
We are formerly incarcerated, predominantly Black women that have to get out there and beat the bushes to raise every dime. And to be an independent voice, we can’t take grant money in the same way that we run our programming through for the think tank because we have to have the space to say what needs to be said without the threat of funders feeling like we’re encroaching upon what they think we should say. So we’re asking people, “Go to freeherinstitute.com, help us. We need it. We’re building this abolitionist think tank.” And it’s the work that I’m focused on right now. We’ve got to get these sisters out, send an email to the White House and the Justice Department encouraging clemency, and let’s elevate and amplify the voices of these sisters who are doing this incredible work.
Mansa Musa:
That you have it. The Real News Rattling the Bar. Andrea, you rattle the bars today. You could hear it and we ask everybody’s support, the Real News and Rattling the bar. But more importantly, look at this podcast and make a decision. Do you think one cup of coffee is worth the lives of people? Do you think one cup of coffee, just one cup of coffee, that’s it. This ain’t just, we simplify it to the most simplest term. I’m buying one cup of coffee. I do it every day anyway. So instead of me buying, I’m putting my money where I know that the result is going to be somebody going to be free. Thank you Andrea.
Andrea James:
Thank you.
Mansa Musa:
And we salute you. It’s…
Andrea James:
One cup of coffee-
Mansa Musa:
This is Black August month. We salute you in your struggle and continue work.
Andrea James:
One cup of coffee for true democracy.
Mansa Musa:
That’s right. That’s right.
Andrea James:
Let’s redefine what it looks like. So thank you so much. Thank you for always supporting us, and we’re grateful for helping us to amplify and elevate our voices. Thank you.
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