Episode 95

From Preschool to Prison Walls and Beyond: A Friendship That Sparked a Fight for Justice

Hosted by Matt Adams

“I found that the United States treats crime and treats punishment in ways that are so degrading and dehumanizing, and that frankly are so ineffective, that do the opposite of what they're intended, that actually increase crime, increase suffering, increase just overall societal disarray.”

The friendship between Marc Howard and Marty Tankleff began in preschool on the North Shore of Long Island. On the first day of their senior year of high school, Marty woke up to find his parents brutally murdered. He was sentenced to 50 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

Marc went on to Yale and built a successful academic career at Georgetown. But he never forgot his childhood friend and decided to go to law school to help free him. For Marc, Marty’s wrongful conviction and experience with the criminal justice system opened his eyes to entrenched injustices from which he couldn’t turn away.

In this riveting episode, host Matt Adams sits down with Professor Howard, a leading voice for criminal justice and prison reform and author of “Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishments, and the Real American Exceptionalism.” They trace Professor Howard's journey from academic to advocate, including his founding of the Prisons and Justice Initiative at Georgetown and the “Making an Exoneree" course he cofounded with Marty, in which undergraduates reinvestigate wrongful conviction cases. The program has expanded to other universities and helped free 14 wrongfully convicted people.

You’ll also hear about other groundbreaking prison education programs Professor Howard has developed, such as the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, a nonprofit that brings members of the public inside prisons, where they sit down face-to-face with incarcerated individuals and connect with them as fellow human beings.

As this powerful conversation makes clear, injecting humanity into every part of the criminal justice system can transform lives.

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and should not be considered the views of Fox Rothschild LLP or its attorneys. This podcast is for informational purposes only, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.

Marc is a professor at Georgetown University Law, and is the founding director of Georgetown's Prisons and Justice Initiative, which he launched in 2016. He holds a BA in ethics, politics, and economics from Yale University, a master's and PhD in political science from UC Berkeley, and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.

He brings a rare combination of academic rigor, legal training, and practical advocacy that brings him an extraordinarily informed perspective on everything we're going to talk about today. Marc is the author of three books, including Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishments, and the Real American Exceptionalism.

It's a searing examination of how the American incarceration system compares to systems of every other democracy on Earth. He's also the founder and president of the federal the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering human connection between incarcerated people and members of our free society.

Under Marc's leadership, the Prisons and Justice Initiative has launched ground-bake-breaking programs, the Pivot program for formerly incarcerated entrepreneurs, the paralegal program that trains returning citizens for employment at major DC law firms, and the Prison Scholars program, offering college courses at the DC jail.

And through his legendary Making of an Exoneree course at Georgetown, co-taught with his childhood friend and an exoneree himself, Marty Tankleff, Marc has with his students contributed to the exon- exonerations of multiple individuals who have collectively served over a century in prison for crimes that they did not commit.

Marc is a prolific writer, having written op- op-eds for The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and others, and he's appeared alongside many famous people and advocates for prison and criminal justice reform, and is recognized with the American Political Sciences Association Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement, among a, a sundry of other awards.

The awards and accolades are prolific. But Marc, I'll put it simply, welcome to “The Presumption of Innocence, and I am really, really excited to unpack a bunch of your work and, and give our audience a real feel for what you're up to.

So, I appreciate the introduction. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and your audience here on this podcast.

Your, your work in criminal justice reform has this deeply personal connection to a childhood friend. As I mentioned in, in the out- at the outset, Marty Tankleff was wrongfully convicted. He was a childhood friend of yours. He's now your co-professor a- at Georgetown and teaching the famous course about Making of an Exoneree.

But your, your work in criminal justice almost in a tongue-in-cheek, somewhat memorable line began where... w- with the notion that Marc went to Yale and Marty went to jail. How did you get involved with the injustice perpetrated on your childhood friend, and how did that shape sort of your career path and trajectory to where you are today?

We actually went to Lovey Dovey Preschool together and then grew up in the same schools. And on the first day of our senior year of high school, Marty woke up to a horrific crime scene and found his parents brutally murdered, and then was accused, charged, ultimately convicted of killing his parents and sentenced to fifty years to life in prison.

I believed at the time that Marty was innocent, not just based on some faith that my friend couldn't have done it, but rather based on evidence that already at the time pointed in the direction of his father's business partner. I wrote about it in our high school newspaper. I, I advocated for him, you know, internally in our little community, but no one listened to me.

No one read The Purple Parrot, our newspaper, and certainly no one overrode the headlines that The New York Times and Newsday and all the New York publications had, which were really quoting the prosecutor's lies that Marty had somehow killed his parents in a, in a, what they called a deadly temper tantrum of a spoiled kid killing his parents for, for money and because of being upset about regular teenage things.

Tragically Marty was convicted. We ... Our lives went in very different directions, as you mentioned, and I never forgot about Marty, but I did move on with my life and I thought, "You know what? I can't do anything. I'm powerless." But about a decade into his sentence, we reconnected, and we'd lost touch for all these years, but I started getting very involved and started visiting him in prison and meeting with his legal team and just becoming a part of a team effort to try to free Marty.

I even made the decision that although I'd been hired at Georgetown as a professor of government and had a PhD and was teaching and doing research in that field, but that I wasgoing to go to law school in order to try to help free my friend from prison. And I made that decision, and right before I started law at Georgetown, which I was able to do for free actually with a wonderful benefits package for existing faculty and staff, and I think I'm the only faculty member ever to have gotten a law degree, the only one crazy or stupid enough to have done something like that.

I'm sure we can talk more about it. But for me all this work is- Oh, yeah, I want to get there ... it's deeply, deeply personal because of what they did to my childhood friend, and that's where I saw firsthand how prosecutorial overreach, how abuse of power, how misconduct takes place, and it affected me very deeply and it's led to a commitment to try to fight against that and to try to achieve justice, not just for Marty, but for the, the hundreds and ultimately many thousands of other Martys who are still in prison today wrongfully convicted for crimes they didn't commit.

You, you, you didn't need to go to law school. It, it... But, but you, you chose to do that, and, and I'm wondering if that was intended to try to expose a system that was permitting innocent people to get convicted of crimes that they didn't commit.

But then the further I went, the more I realized how systemic the problem is and how many other people are affected by it. So when Marty was exonerated, a lot of people who I knew, friends, family, colleagues, thought, "Okay, well, mission accomplished. Marty's home now, and you can move on with your life and go back to writing about European politics."

And at that point, I'd published two books and many articles and gotten tenure and was, you know, very active in that field that was scholarly, academic, research-based. But the way I think of it is that my eyes were opened to injustice through Marty's case, and I couldn't close them again. I couldn't say, "Oh, Marty's home, so we have no problems now.

Everything's good." Rather, I'd seen how deep those problems are, how systemic they are, and it motivated me to go further to the point where I completely rededicated my professional life and really my entire life to helping not just free Marty, but free the other Martys, as I call them. But also, and I hope we'll go there in this interview, to do something much deeper, which is to see the humanity of all incarcerated people, regardless of innocence or guilt, and that's what I do through the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice and some of the other Georgetown programs that you mentioned in the intro.

You know, how did this, how did this grave injustice occur? Just because it is so impactful on your trajectory. So what, what allowed that to happen? How, how does a gruesome chi- a child discovering what is a hugely traumatic event, which is their parents being murdered, turn into- atwo-decade ordeal of wrongful conviction

It's an absolute nightmare what happened to him personally, and it's an absolute catastrophe that our country and our justice system, so-called justice system, let it happen. So Marty found his parents' bodies, a brutal, gruesome crime scene. His mother stabbed over 50 times, almost decapitated. His father was still breathing, still alive, barely, but never came out of a coma unfortunately, and died about a week later.

And so, Marty was taken immediately by what we later learned to be very corrupt and problematic police detectives into an interrogation room where he was tricked, he was manipulated, he was psychologically abused, and ultimately gave a, quote-unquote, and I have to put it in quotes, "confession." And the reason why I put it in quotes is because it's treated by experts on false confessions as a textbook case of a false confession, both in terms of the conditions under which it was obtained, the tricks that were used to obtain it, and also the fact that nothing in the so-called confession actually matches anything about the crime scene.

And so, I don't want to go into too much detail because it's a lot of time to recount it. But basically the police tricked Marty into thinking that he had actually committed the crime and blacked out and done it. They convinced him that he had no memory, and they tried to walk him through a hypothetical of how he could have done it, which led to the so-called murder weapons of a watermelon knife that was then later tested microscopically for blood and had nothing other than watermelon, and barbells that were also taken apart and tested microscopically and had nothing in it, and he had no blood on him, no nothing.

In fact, in front of Marty's father's body where he was found, there was a promissory note from Marty's father to the business partner demanding repayment of the debt that the business partner owed him, and that literally had blood splatter on it. Yeah. And yet he was never treated as a suspect, and the reason why is we'd later learn, and that business partner, who by the way, is still alive today, living in a, in a gated community in Boca Raton, Florida, being protected and, and having never been charged very likely paid off the homicide detective who took over the crime scene and then tricked, manipulated, and forced this false confession out of Marty that has been completely discredited.

I really want to read, I really want to read it. But I, I, I want to shift slightly to y- your work on mass incarceration. and your book, Unusually Cruel. It is a direct invocation of the Eighth Amendment or the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. And what was the core argument that you wanted to make to readers about this American criminal justice system by invoking one of the very foundational principles of punishment that exists since the founding of our nation 250 years ago?

In fact, many of the chapters of the book Unusually Cruel were first written as seminar papers for Georgetown Law classes. There's a requirement at Georgetown Law that you do one course that has a major piece of writing called a WR with a, a writing requirement class, and I did, I believe, either six or seven of those classes.

So for me, that was something I was seeking out. I was trying to take classes that would allow me to do original research, and of course, I was a tenured professor. I'd written two other books before then. So, that was a, a key learning piece of it. But there was also a, a personal involvement piece that happened when I started volunteer teaching in a maximum-security prison in Maryland.

And I did that because while I'd visited Marty many times in prison and been inside a prison visiting room, I felt like I wanted to understand more about incarceration from the inside. And I started teaching a class at Georgetown that I still teach that's a now become a big institution at Georgetown called Prisons and Punishment, and it's a big lecture class.

And I would bring students on a prison visit, but it was very, at the time it was very artificial. It was led by a warden or senior staff, and they would say things like, "Don't make eye contact with the inmates." And you felt like it was the zoo tour, and it was not- So

[00:16:21] Marc Howard: So dehumanizing. And so I wanted to actually get to know the people, and I am a person who makes a lot of eye contact and likes to see the best in people and likes to connect with people.

So I started teaching as a volunteer within a nonprofit organization that w- at the time was running a program in a maximum-security prison in Maryland. And that led me... And I did that for three straight years until they closed down the program, and they did that because the program was so successful in educating hundreds of incarcerated people to know their rights and to become empowered through reading, writing, learning, becoming educated.

And in doing that, I started to understand much more about the American incarceration experience from people who were living it firsthand. So technically speaking, they were my students, but I was their student for all of them. In fact, they're all listed in my acknowledgments by name because I wanted to really give them my thanks and gratitude for how much they taught me.

And in my teaching at this prison, Jessup Correctional Institution, I actually taught a draft form of my book where they were reading and discussing chapters, but also editing them, correcting me, and educating me on a much more informed view of the American carceral experience. So, and, and one a- one additional element to that was that the book was comparing American incarceration to European incarceration and to criminal punishment in other countries.

And it was very painful for them to realize that their own experience was even more horrific than they had realized, because for many of them, they thought incarceration is incarceration, and what that, they experience... Sorry, we have some sirens here. I'm in Washington, DC. There's always some activity.

[00:18:12] Marc Howard: But they thought that what they experienced was, quote-unquote, normal for incarceration. But what they realized, and so this gets into answering your question about what's distinctive about the US, is that our punishment system in the United States is unusually cruel. It is much more severe, much more punitive, much more degrading than in comparable European or advanced industrialized countries elsewhere in the world.

Yeah. And so that's what I came to realize, they came to realize, and then we had a shared learning experience where we're better able to characterize just how off the charts, and I would say off the rails, punishment in the United States is. And that's where I make the- I wish,

[00:19:03] Marc Howard: But- That's right. And so the Unusually Cruel, the title of the book, is of course a play off the Eighth Amendment. Now, by the way, the Eighth Amendment has no teeth. They're beautiful words and you hear them and you think they make sense and you think that it's a prohibition of something that would be basically excessively cruel or out of the ordinary in sense of unusually cruel.

But in reality, the Eighth Amendment is almost meaningless and has been completely defanged by the US Supreme Court, and it takes, you know, the most blatant overwhelming cases of physical torture to be actually something that can have any limit on prison conditions and abuses by authority. Whereas what I'm finding, one, is that unusually cruel conditions and punishment take place every single day in every single prison in America, and frankly, throughout our criminal legal process as well.

But secondly, and this is the comparative element, is that the United States as a country is unusually cruel. Compared to other comparable countries that have similar levels of economic and political development. And that's where I think the most powerful argument lies, which is we can better understand the US by comparing it to other countries.

And that's where I found that the United States treats crime and treats punishment in ways that are so degrading and dehumanizing, and that frankly are so ineffective, that do the opposite of what they're intended, that actually increase crime, increase suffering, increase just overall societal disarray.

And if we want to have a better way of addressing crime and reducing crime and having a better, more healing society, that we can learn a lot from other countries in the way particularly European countries deal with the crime problem.

What are those striking differences between how the US punishes people and how peer nations do?

That is staggering because these, again, are comparable countries. And if you go back in time, back to the early 1970s when the data first started comparatively, the US was slightly higher, but very similar to the European countries. But something happened in the 1980s, 1990s, even 2000s where it absolutely skyrocketed in the US and in other European countries stayed pretty flat.

So the point I make there is, one, it wasn't always this way in the US. There was a recent change. It was a policy change. It was an intentional change that was made that led the US to completely diverge from an otherwise similar set of countries. So incarceration is off the charts in the United States.

But it goes much deeper than that because if you look at every single stage of what I call in the book the criminal life cycle, starting with crime, which by the way I should say that crime rates themselves are not higher in the United States than they are in other countries. The only exception being homicide and of course has to do with the prevalence of guns, and that's a whole separate discussion.

But overall crime rates, even violent crime, non-violent crime, property crime white-collar crime, all kinds of drug crimes, they're actually very similar. U- US is right in the middle in terms of levels of crime. But incarceration is much, much higher. But then I think we need to go deeper. So what I look at in the criminal justice life cycle is first of all, plea bargaining.

It's something that's not well known, but over 95% of cases in the US across all the states, and even higher in the federal system, don't even go to trial. Everyone thinks from watching movies that there's, you know, a trial by jury and you have, you know, defense lawyers objecting, and you have this sort of equal fight between prosecution and defense, and then you've got a neutral jury and judge that are trying to help get to the truth.

That couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is, is almost all cases end in plea bargaining. If someone doesn't accept a plea bargain, that's what is offered by the prosecution, they get what's called the trial penalty, which means they're going to get hammered on their sentence. So that's something really, really important, also distinctively American, the fact that under 5% of cases even go to trial.

Most are just accepting pleas, and the pleas are what's offered in a very one-sided process by the prosecution. And then if you do, whether it's a plea bargain or you go to trial, eventually get a sentence, the sentence isgoing to be much, much higher in the United States compared to other countries for comparable crimes.

Even though there's a lot of, of behavioral, psychological, sociological research showing that people age out of crime and that a five or 10-year sentence might be more than sufficient and that somebody getting 30 years is far excessive and doesn't reduce crime and doesn't do any good for people, for families, for societies.

But then when you go into prison, which as you, you know, know that I did at Jessup and have continued to do all around the country, the conditions in prisons are so dehumanizing. The overcrowding, the lack of personal privacy, the lack of ability to connect with your family and with the outside world is so severe.

The lack of programming, educational opportunities, preparation for re-entry after prison is very, very punitive in the United States compared to other countries. Then when you go to Parole processes and chances are much, much harder to get in the United States where there's been a move to cut back parole, to make it harder to even apply, much less receive parole.

Other countries' comparable- Mandatory

[00:25:32] Marc Howard: mandatory minimums are severe. Three strikes laws have led for people to just have very little chance of getting freedom. You have life without parole, which is the fastest-growing sentence in the United States, or you have people with 80-year sentences.

What does that even mean mathematically in terms of one's life cycle and chances of living that long? And so other countries, you have a sentence that's, A, more reasonable, B, where somebody after serving half of their sentence has a right to apply for a sentence reduction. These are all positive incentives for good behavior, for transformation, that lead people to have much better outcomes, where in the US, people stay locked up, warehoused in cages for decades, far beyond what is rational and necessary.

And then finally, on the re-entry side, when you come back in the United States, you've supposedly paid your debt to society, served your time, but you come back with a big letter F for felon on your chest, and you ... Everyone sees it, everyone knows it. It prevents your opportunities for housing, for employment, for all kinds of ways in which you can safely and successfully re-enter.

Now, at Georgetown, at the Prisons and Justice Initiative, we have programs for returning citizens that we'll talk about, I'm sure, in a minute. But there ... It is possible for people to succeed when they come home from prison. It's just that our country typically makes it very, very difficult, and as a result, we have high rates of recidivism.

It's not because people don't want to succeed, it's because we don't give them the tools to be able to succeed. And so as a result, we see this cycle of crime and incarceration. We're not reducing crime, we're actually increasing crime through a system that just warehouses people, basically pokes them in the eye.

I mean, if you put a dog in a cage and poke him in the eye and then they're going to come out, they're going to bite you. Well, we're doing that to people rather than giving them opportunities. But our, our research and our programs have shown that when you give people proper opportunity, support, belief, humanity, that when they come out of prison, they're going to have an opportunity to go in a different life direction that will be more successful.

They'll pay taxes. They'll contribute as opposed to committing crimes and going back to prison

Is this a, is this a phenomenon that transcends the types of criminality that we punish, or is it isolated to one particular segment? Do, do, for example, is, is there any... Do people that are convicted of white-collar crimes get a, a benefit of, of sweetheart kind of punishment, or is this something that is uniformly applied to every type of criminality?

And so, I think that the, the sentences are less extreme and less severe. They also often have resources to go into lower security prisons, often camps or minimum-security prisons that are less dangerous, less dehumanizing. That said, I've been to many of those places, and they're still pretty horrible.

So I would- right ... never want to minimize. I absolutely shudder when people talk about country c- club prisons. There is no such thing as a country club prison. But there are degrees of violence and degrees of dangerousness of prisons, and certainly white-collar criminals or those convicted of white-collar crimes wind up in places that are less dangerous than others.

But don't confuse that with a country club or with some type of, of easy road. All incarceration is incredibly difficult. And the re-entry process is still fraught, but many of them have family resources and opportunities through their networks, educational and, and business and employment, that they can more easily rebuild.

And so I think that the rates of recidivism or certainly the type of despair that I was referring to where people literally can't find housing and a job does not take place as commonly in white-collar situations. But it's still really challenging, and so I never want to give the impression that anybody has it easy.

Anyone who's ensnared by the criminal legal system and the prison system is facing severe challenges. But one thing I've noticed, and I think this is really important, is that even people involved in white-collar crime and white-collar incarceration wind up becoming advocates for reform of all of incarceration in America.

Some of the, the leaders, and frankly from all sides of the political spectrum and all religious faiths and, and levels of reli- religiosity I think of Prison Fellowship founded by Chuck Colson and, and many other organizations that are led by, by people who had resources, were convicted of white-collar crimes, went to prison, and saw the horror show that I'm describing, and then came out and said, "We need to change this."

You could argue that the First Step Act, which was signed into law by President Trump, which was a, in the first term, which was a bipartisan effort led by people on the left and the right, really would not have happened if it hadn't been for Jared Kushner. President Trump's son-in-law's father, Charles Kushner, who had himself been incarcerated and saw what a disgrace that system was.

And there are many other people convicted of white-collar crimes who went to prison, maybe only served a few years, as in his case, and maybe weren't in the most severe places, perhaps were in minimum-security places or in camps, nonetheless came out and said, "This is a absolute shit show, and we need to change this system and make it better."

And so I'm grateful to them because a lot of them have generated media attention, resources, and in some cases even laws that have helped all incarcerated people or helped many incarcerated people get out of prison or succeed in their effort to reenter society.

Good ... your book, Unusually Cruel, published in 2017. We've seen some movement since that time towards criminal justice reform, and the First Step Act is probably the most consequential of that movement. You, you mentioned it was it was a hallmark piece of bipartisan legislation at a time in our country where getting both parties to come around to something that big, that impactful, is unheard of.

It, it, it was truly an anomaly, and y- you did touch on some of the impetus for that. As a Jersey guy, I know that case really well. The First Step Act did have a, a seismic type of change that, at least on paper, it brought to the criminal punishment system. Was it enough to actually move the needle towards a better place, towards, a-a-away from what you describe in the book?

Or was that cosmetic change? And if it was cosmetic change, what do we actually need to, to get us moving on a trajectory away from the horror show or, as you said, the shit show that exists in American prisons, and it's full of examples that you, you have in the, on the pages of the book?

It was the most major piece of federal criminal justice reform legislation of my lifetime. A lot of people, probably some estimates 50 to 80,000 people were freed from prison earlier than they would've been, so it has contributed to a, a, a liberation of sorts of people from cages. So that's all very positive.

On the other hand, it's only on the federal level, which is under 10% of cases are federal, so it doesn't affect states. It, it did probably give a bit of clearance for states, and there have been a number of states, both red states and blue states, by the way. So there's been some significant changes in, on the state level as well.

But the First Step Act only affected federal cases. And what I think is, is unfortunate is that there hasn't been a Second Step Act or a Third Step Act, and there's so much more that needs to be done. So while I applaud it and I'm happy that it took place and, and supported it and still support it, I wish more had followed it.

It seems to have been a one and done, and unfortunately there's a lot more work to do.

because we know that those are needed. Y- you founded the Prison and Justice Initiative at Georgetown in 2016. What was the vision for that program when you started, and how is that now evolving years after almost a decade from its founding to getting the people that can make this influential change?

I mean, when you think about the First Step Act, right, it was remarkable in the people that it brought together. Again, I'm a Jersey guy. Senator Booker was working with President Trump in his first term. You could not find two more diametrically opposed American political figures. Yet, when it came to this very important topic, they worked together.

You mentioned the role of the, the Kushner case and, and, and, and what- the president's son-in-law could bring to bear on that analysis based on the experiences of his father. But how, how have we, h- how does your role as a, a- an academic program focused on research and focused on giving these lawmakers the tools they need, h- how, how is that mission sort of staying current as we see that one and done, hopefully not, but is it something that, that you're working towards bringing those parties back together?

[00:37:33] Matt Adams: the political fray. So do, so do I on this podcast at least.

But I'll say in terms of the Prisons and Justice Initiative, I started it in 2016. At the time I was just an academic, but I had these personal connections through Marty, through teaching at Jessup, and was, was reshaping my professional life in a new direction. And I decided that I wanted to create something that was not just academic, but was actually hands-on and involved in programs that would change people's lives, not just writing about it, but actually doing it.

And I started it with a very small amount of seed funding from the Georgetown president's office for the first three years. I literally hired six undergraduate research assistants, paid them what was at the time was the going rate 10 years ago was $12 an hour And we were kind of sitting in a proverbial garage, like a startup, saying, "Let's do something no university has ever done before, and let's brainstorm and come up with ideas and come up with, with a name and with branding and logo," but also, more importantly, a vision for what we could create using the platform of a great university that has a distinguished reputation, both in terms of, of its scholarship, but also its stature and its connection to people.

As a Jesuit university, Georgetown has an identity that is about caring for others that I was able to bring into these conversations as we created programs within the Prisons of Justice Initiative, or PJI as we call it. And so that led to a series of programs including two re-entry programs. One is the Pivot Program, which is in partnership with our business school, where we have, for 10 months, formerly incarcerated people, cohorts of about 15 to 20 fellows, as we call them, who are paid to study business and entrepreneurship and then get jobs in different areas that are of interest to them.

And through their employment, we're showing that people can be successful in the business field. Some have started their own businesses. Many of them are working for companies very successfully. We also then started a paralegal program, which is in partnership with our law school, where for six months full-time, six days a week, by the way we have our fellows, our paralegal fellows, are basically doing a mini law school, studying everything, civil procedure, contracts, property, torts, and are getting trained so that they can then work at law firms and legal organizations in DC.

We've almost hit 200 graduates of those two programs. They're both certificate programs. And I believe in people who've returned to prison, one, maybe two, single digits for sure. And 91% are employed within three months of graduating. Some of, again, have started their own businesses, and we have, you know, reduced recidivism to almost zero.

And more importantly, we've created beautiful outcomes for people where they're united with families. Some have started families, and they're working and they're contributing, and they're showing through their own lives what a different model of incarceration and re-entry to society can look like. We also- So

[00:41:11] Marc Howard: That's right ...

[00:41:12] Marc Howard: Exactly. And we're also going into prisons and jails to provide Georgetown level education. At the DC Jail for the last eight years we've been offering credit-bearing courses for people while they're incarcerated.

They're wearing orange jumpsuits, but they are Georgetown students enrolled for credit. And you know, not all of them are there for more than, you know, one, two, three semesters because they might get sentenced or might get released but they are while they’re at the DC Jail are in our classes, and they, it's a competitive program and they have to be admitted.

But once they're admitted, they are, are taking classes taught by Georgetown faculty, and we have a weekly lecture series, and they're wonderful students who are embodying the values of Georgetown and of education. And then in a Maryland prison called the Patuxent Institution, for the last four years we've been offering a bachelor's degree program.

We'll have our first Janua- or our first graduation that will take place this January, where we're going to have Georgetown graduates with a bachelor's degree from prison. And that's a beautiful program in showing that education is a lifelong process and that it doesn't just have to be reserved for people, you know, from ages 18 to 22 at the traditional stage of college education, but rather people can acquire it later on after a very different life course, but can be just as smart and just as dedicated to learning.

So we love- I, I'm just- ... that program and all of the programs for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people through Georgetown. I'm

What does the empirical evidence suggest about-

Marc Howard: Oh, the empirical evidence.

Matt Adams: ... the links between recidivism and, and education?

But if we want to look at recidivism, it's overwhelming. The RAND Corporation did a meta study of several hundred studies and showed that even as little as one higher education course while incarcerated reduces recidivism by 43%. People who take multiple credit-bearing courses, it drops to single digits.

Those who get degrees, it goes to virtually zero and basically zero violent crime. So we can actually solve the crime problem through education. We should be creating schools out of prisons. We should be providing incarcerated people... Incarceration, and this is the European model by the way from my book, incarceration should be separation from society for a temporary phase of your life as a punishment for a crime that you committed.

But during that time you should be treated humanely and you should be provided opportunities to change, to transform, to prepare yourself for re-entry, and there's no better way to do that than education. And that's what we do through our programs, and the results are overwhelming, that people's-

lives are changed, our community is changed, and we are reducing crime, reducing recidivism, reducing future incarceration costs through a program that really costs very little. We've been successful with donors, with alumni. Of course we continue to need more in order to expand and deepen our programming.

Everything we do is dependent on philanthropy. As I mentioned, we had some seed funding from the president's office, but since then it's all been about raising money through donors, through foundations, through grants. But a lot of it is Georgetown alumni, Georgetown parents who contribute to our programs.

[00:45:24] Marc Howard: Oh, it's actually... I just did the math. Through the Making Exoneree program, and I'll say a little bit more about it in a minute, but we've helped to free 14 people who had been wrongfully convicted, and they had served a total of 340 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit.

340 years, and they're now free. And that program started with Marty Tankleff and our own personal experience on both sides of a wrongful conviction. He, of course, was on the inside in prison for something he didn't do. I was on the outside advocating for him, supporting him, part of a larger team effort that ultimately contributed to his freedom.

It's been-- It'll be in its fifth year at Princeton, third year at NYU and UC Santa Cruz, and its second year at Rice University, and we're starting soon for the first year at Amherst College. So it's a rapidly growing program that is adding more and more schools and universities and students to its, its community.

But basically, our model is that we have undergraduate students who reinvestigate wrongful conviction cases, who go to the crime scene, who investigate, talk to interview witnesses, talk to the original prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, meet the person in prison, meet their family, try to figure out what happened.

You know, the missing link in these cases as I'm sure you and your listeners know, appellate work treats the original trial as fact. Anything that was admitted at trial is fact. But there's so many mistakes or false evidence that are introduced, and we actually shake the whole thing up, and we try to look at what actually happened.

And we do that through undergraduate students who are, are stealth weapons, you could say, weapons fighting for the truth, who go and figure out what actually happened, and then they create a documentary that tells the story that we believe to be accurate and then advocates for the freedom of our program participant who's still currently languishing in prison.

We, through the five and soon six universities that have taken on the Making Exoneree program, as I mentioned, there are 14 people who are now free, and there's several more coming soon. But there are also dozens that now have pro bono legal representation where they didn't have before. We've worked with a number of law firms and look forward perhaps to working with yours if we can do that with Fox Rothschild sometime in the, in the future.

And there are others, th- dozens that have gotten major media attention and that have new momentum in their case where they were otherwise dead. These are cases that have no DNA. These are cases that have written to the Innocence Project and other organizations and just gotten form rejection letters back.

But we take them on, we reinvestigate, we find new evidence, we advocate for them, and we do everything we can to help bring them into freedom. Sometimes it's a full exoneration, sometimes it's a, a form of clemency or re-sentencing or a plea or something that allows them to be free. Sometimes it's even parole or juvenile sentencing reform laws that have allowed people to have a chance to come to court to still maintain their innocence but also to show that they're ready to reenter society with support of making exoneree or Georgetown or Princeton or the other schools that we work with.

Marc Howard: Yeah, that was our first.

Matt Adams: It got a ton of media attention. Can you tell our listeners that story and what it reveals about how wrongful convictions happen-

Matt Adams: and they continue to be a persistent problem in the system?

But what's extraordinary about Valentino is the larger story that he spent 27 years, most of them in Attica Prison, as an artist who was drawing, and that the... And this is, I assume, what you're getting at, his connection to the sport of golf, that he would draw golf courses, and that led him to be discovered by Golf Digest through his artistic talent.

And they investigated his case and suggested he might well be innocent, and we picked the case up from there and found evidence of his innocence, and that actually led to his freedom and his exoneration. And so it's an extraordinary story, and it's one that gave our program tremendous momentum that we're able to pursue and continue from there.

Because at first, we were just kind of trying, you know, sort of ragtag organization with Marty and myself, no resources, and suddenly to be able to help Valentino get exonerated really opened the floodgates to people in prison writing to us, and now I get hundreds and hundreds of letters of mail, you know, from people in prison every week, and it's just an overwhelming number of people desperate for help supporting their case.

But Valentino was our first. He's a dear friend. We've done many events together. We're regularly in touch. I, you know, consider him family, and, and he does me as well, and I'm just so happy that he's free and to have played a role in helping secure his freedom, but also the support it gave to our program that has helped many other people now since then.

And, and that education from, from somebody in the academic community is really at the core of what it is your life's calling has been. Before we run out of time because there's so much to unpack, I, I want to take another hard pivot because you founded the federal the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice in 2020 against everything else you were doing.

Like, you weren't busy enough, Marc. I mean, come on. Against everything else that you've been doing tell us about what the mission of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice is and, and specifically why is Frederick Douglass its namesake?

And I was realizing there was something magical when people would come together, sit together, connect on a human level. And so while I was running all these programs at Georgetown and teaching in prison and bringing people inside, I realized there was something that I wanted to scale and expand beyond Georgetown, beyond the DC area, to bring to a national level.

They were honestly a humanitarian catastrophe during COVID. But by late 2021, we started, first in Colorado and then expanded to Florida and Louisiana and DC and New York and Ohio and Michigan and all these other states all around the country, where we have regular prison visits where we bring about 15 to 20 members of the community inside to walk through a prison, to see a housing block, to see where incarcerated people live and get a feel for what a prison looks like.

But then most importantly, to sit down with a group of incarcerated men or womenbecause we're also in many women's facilities now, and to sit down and exchange conversation, sometimes to break bread and share fellowship, and connect on a human level. So a Douglass Project visit, and every, any given week there's five to 10 of them taking place, again, all across the country.

And then they have conversation topics, icebreakers, and kind of just exchange laughter and connection. After that, they go into small groups of about six people per group, where they have conversations where they go very deep and they talk about, you know, their families or their mentors or their goals in life.

It's never about their crime. It's never about prison conditions. It's really just about who we are as people. And what people come away with, and, and this is what comes out of the final stage of the visit, the reflections, where we come back to a full circle and, and share about the experience that was just had in the small groups, is people talk about they feel human again.

They feel connected again. The inside participants, as we call them, we don't use the word inmate in our program, but the inside participants say, "You know, I, I feel like there's a future for me. I feel like I can connect with people on the outside. All I've been doing in the inside is just other incarcerated people or correctional officers who treat me in a, in a very harsh, degrading, dehumanizing way.

Suddenly, I feel that I-- that there are people who care about me." And then for outside participants, they walk out saying, "You know what? I want tohire formerly incarcerated people. I want to support them." It's a way to bring, in the most simple and basic way this project everywhere, can look up douglassproject.org, and that's Douglass with two S's, douglassproject.org, and can see and join a prison visit near you and hopefully get to experience the humanity of incarcerated people. And I named the organization-

[00:55:59] historical hero of mine, Frederick Douglass, who's someone who throughout his long, incredible life fought for freedom, for justice, for education, for entrepreneurship.

He walking bipartisan historical figure. And so it was just brought about so much good, and that's something that I tr- I'm trying to emulate through our programs

And I, I can't imagine that the, the, the value of that is, is enormous to, to shine the light, to focus the microscope, if you will toward that ultimate goal of bringing about reform. And that's where I want to go next in our waning moments together, which is, you know, you, you’ve been at this now for, for a long time.

You have, instead of just continued with one thing, you've, you've taken a multifaceted approach to trying to fix this problem, the inside out, the outside in. If you had to change one thing right now and you were king for a day, what would it be?

In fact, I often say to my students there's not just one thing, it's so broadly systemic. And so, you know, most immediately I'd like to see people leaving prison. I think the vast majority of people in prison have served enough time and, and should be able to come home. But I think that what I would say, if it's really one thing, it's to inject humanity in all parts of the system.

It's for courts to see people as human beings, not as monsters, as demons. It's for parole board you know, probation officers. It's for employers to see the best in people and to support people and give them opportunity rather than to see the worst. Because I think that when you see the best in people, they come to embody and reach those standards you set for them.

But if you actually mistreat them and continually and perpetually see them as the worst thing they've ever done, it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So what I'm trying to do in all my programs, and they're very different from one another, right? So, you know, Making Exonerees is about people who are innocent and were wrongfully convicted, but the Frederick Douglass Project is about seeing the humanity in everybody.

And I would like for us to all see the best in each other, to support each other, to give each other opportunities, and that's something that I try to bring in all of my programs and organizations.

[00:58:51] Marc Howard: I'm very hopeful. Although I dowant to say that I get angry. I get pissed off. I mean, there's so much injustice. There's so many times where people I care about get denied, whether it's, you know, on a wrongful conviction appeal or whether it's just on a parole application. And that fuels me. That anger gets me fired up.

But at the same time, I'm also very optimistic and hopeful because I see our programs working. I see these outcomes. I see people's lives improving, and I also see society changing. And a big part of that is through young people. You know, I have a privilege of teaching at a great university where there are extraordinary, just inspiring young people who want to bring about a better future.

And I think that this generation of college-age kids or recent graduates, they get much maligned by people of my generation. I think it's very unfair because I think they actually want to bring about a better world. I think they're prepared to do it, and I want to see them getting opportunities to lead because I think they will create it.

I think that there are better outcomes that are coming right now, and there's more humanity and more justice. We need to just keep pushing towards it and to give that next generation the opportunity. And I'm really lucky to be in a position to help pass the baton and help also prepare them for doing that.

But I see humanity coming. And the last thing I'll say, Sister Helen, who's on the board of the Douglass Project, says, "What the eyes can't see, the heart can't feel." And one thing I try to do through all my programs is to bring people inside or get people connected to incarcerated people, because once they see and feel their humanity, they can't unsee and unfeel it.

And that's, I think, where we need to go, is to get people to care directly and to feel it personally, because once they do, I think they will continue to become advocates, regardless of their politics or background or geography or anything, that they will care in a new way when they've been exposed to it and gotten close to it.

And so that's what I try to do in all my programs.

But that's really what you're saying, is that we have the ability to shape this. It may be long, it may be hard, but there, there is work we can do each and every day. And this has really truly been one of the most important conversations we've had on this program. Your work from the classroom at Georgetown to the cells of prisons and jails, to the pages of your empirically backed book, Unusually Cruel, and others, to the lives you've helped through the Making of an Exoneree program, represents what it means to take the presumption of innocence seriously and not just a legal doctrine, but as a way of seeing the world, a worldview in which the good outweighs the bad, and the justice is not just about taking somebody's liberty and throwing them behind bars even if it's proven they made a mistake.

For our listeners, I encourage you to read Unusually Cruel, to visit the Prisons and Justice Initiative's website at prisonsandjustice.georgetown.edu, and to learn more about the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice at douglassproject.org. And if Professor Howard's words today moved you, consider how you as advocates, as citizens, some of you attorneys and other professionals, can be part of the solution.

That's all the time that we have on this episode of “The Presumption of Innocence,” brought to you by the White Collar Criminal Defense practice at Fox Rothschild. I'm Matt Adams. Until next time, take care, and if you liked what you heard today, leave us a review or give us a mention. It'll help us get our word out and get the word out of Professor Howard's great work.

Thanks so much for being with us. We'll see you next time. Take care.