On this episode of the News World, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Gerard Robinson. He's a professor of practice in public policy and law at the Frank Baton School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. We're discussing his latest peace for the Virginian Pilot, entitled How World War II Became a Fork in the Road
on prison policy. We're going to discuss what he's learned from visiting prisons around the world, how World War Two shaped prison policy in places like Norway, and what lessons we can learn here in the United States. Gerard, welcome and thank you for joining me again in the News World.
Yes, the speaker, always a pleasure to be with you.
You know, you grew up in Los Angeles and you studied philosophy at Howard University, and while there you und local youth and the juvenile justice system. How did your experience as a mentor in the juvenile justice system in DC shape your views on criminal justice reform.
The young men that I worked with were between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, mostly African American and now Salvadorian, and they were involved with a lot of trouble with the law, and it was a forward thinking just you said, tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to put you in a diversion program, and if you go through the program, I'll take care of your record. You can move forward. The one thing all of those young men which they would have had in their lives were
strong literacy skills. And for me, that was aha to say that if I want to help move us close what we call now in the school to prison pipeline, to open up a school to prosperity pipeline, I've got to focus more on literacy. So that decision maybe become a fifth grade school teacher instead of going into the private sector. But it also shaped really early. If there was a link between the likelihood of finding yourself incarcerated and the link between education.
Given your general background and what you were studying at Howard, that's a pretty amazing thing. What was it like to teach fifth grade?
It was great for a couple of reasons. Number one, the students were old enough to still be interested in learning, and yet old enough not to be too cool to care, and so they really thought that history was interesting. I loved it. In fact, one of the greatest compliments I
ever received as a fifth grade school teacher. One of my fifth grade students invited me, my wife, and two of my three daughters to his home for Thanksgiving a year ago, and his mom came to my wedding, and so it just showed the kind of impact I had on his family but also on mind. But I also know, and you probably know this as well as the speaker, seventy percent of the American students who drop out of high school they drop out in the tenth grade. It's
not because there's something magical about the tenth grade. It's because what you didn't master in elementary school, particularly in reading, will catch you. So I was glad to start off as a fifth grade teacher.
When you look at the study about Mecklenburg and the students that they had studied for the entire period from ninety eight to twenty eleven, and they tracked twenty six thousand students, and they concluded the young adolescents who attend school with high suspension rates are a lot more likely to be arrested and jailed as adults. In a sense, the school behavior relates pretty directly to what's going to happen to him.
Later on, when I would meet with other teachers in Los Angeles, both public and private school, and we had conversations about family, about communities, one thing that would always come up in the conversation is Girard or Karen or Susi or La Kwan missing too many days. And we know from research that if you miss more than five days, there's a trickle effect on you falling behind, particularly in mathematics. But we also know that if you're falling behind in
middle school, it's tougher to catch up in high school. Now, we have plenty of examples of people who've been able to overcome, but absenteeism is a major factor that we often do not talk about because it's not something that we think about. What we hear a fight and that leading to out of school suspension, a student not doing
well and maybe having to go to summer school. Well, you know what, sometimes absenteeism are being involved or being away from school involved in outside activities can influence it. So I'm not too shocked about it, but it's one reason why we as a nation, particularly we're going to look at NAPE scores, should talk about absenteeism. And it's long term impact on families.
So the whole issue. If they're not in the classroom, they're not learning. And yet, if I understand it correctly, back in nineteen seventy four, they're about a million, seven hundred thousand students who are suspended from school. By the early nineties that number had jumped like to three point one million. I don't know what the current number is, but in a sense, it's counterproductive to be kicking them out if the net result is they're more likely to end up in prison.
Absolutely, and that's why some reformers in the eighties and the nineties created alternative schools. These were more of a halfway spot. We're not going to send you back home. We know you're probably not going to do well there. We can't keep you in school, and so we'll create an alternative school. And that's one way to address some of the challenges you mentioned. But there were some students who, because of the type of crime or infraction, could not
go to an alternative school. They had to go to a juvenile justice system. And there are some places like Texas and Georgia, which in fact your state, which in fact has a state wide school district made up of juvenile justice age young men and women with the goal of trying to give them a GED or high school diploma to complete. And so we've got some experience with
addressing what we can do with those students. But you're right, if you're not in and you're out, we're going to see you in a caartural system at some point.
I was surprised when I was looking at this study. Fifty two percent of people in prison score below level two on a numerousy test, vastly more than the country at large. And also twenty five percent of the people in prisons came from a household where neither parent had gotten a high school diploma. So is there a problem here of people growing up in a household where nobody's
been educated. Compounds the problem over time and creates sort of a continuous linkage to you don't learn, so you end up as a criminals who end up in jail.
Absolutely, you know, we know that one of the top five determinants on how well is do in school is the education of the mother, something that my wife reminds me with greatly. So one is if you're from a home where neither parent finished high school, the chances of you finishing are tough. Again, there are examples of people who are now holders of a PhD from a home without it, but for too many children, it puts you on a school to suspension pipeline or a school to
drop out pipeline. And so in a place like Virginia where I am right now, just a year ago, we celebrated awarding more than five hundred GEDs to incarcerated people here in the Commonwealth. Well, the reason I celebrate that is because it's great to see our Virginia Department of Corrections and our leaders Governor Youngkin, Secretary Amy Gudera, and others making a big push to close the achievement gap by providing an education. Some will say a second chance.
I will say some of these adults, as high school students or middle school students, they ever had a first chance. So that's a great thing, but it's also a sad reminder that we have to wait for someone to go to prison in order to earn a GED or a high school diploma.
So your experience way you've seen so far that the act of earning the GED dramatically increases the likelihood the one they get out of prison, they'll stay out.
Yeah, there's a grade two studies one in twenty nineteen, one earlier twenty fifteen from the RAND Corporation, and those scholars identify that if you participate in a correctional education program, that's a dope basic secondary. Well, that's a dope basic education, which many Americans are involved in. Now that's also high school what they call adult secondary education. There's also post secondary education, which is college and career in voke tech.
If you participate, there's a thirty two percent less likelihood that you will actually return to prison. Follow Up studies have identified that people who actually earned a certificate for a job, the likelihood of them returning to prison as well has dropped. There's some challenges along the way, but there's definitely at least someone will say was is it
causal or was a correlation? While I'll let the economists and the others debate that, I just know, having talked to employers and having talked to college professors and to the incarcerated themselves, when they find a great education program, some may lead to a degree, some may not. It's the whole idea of being enlightened or reawakened and use that education and say, you know what, I'm going to do something differently, particularly for those who become entrepreneurs.
Now Texas has taken I think an interestingly different approach and what they call their Prison Entrepreneurship Program, where they actually trained people into the principles of business so that they could become entrepreneurs when they get out, which is I think an interesting approach.
Yeah. I had actually had an opportunity to see the prison Entrepreneurship program in person several years ago when I was visiting Texas and I happened to arrive at one of the days where I sat as a judge and
had an opportunity to hear the job pitch. Well. I was so moved by what I saw that some years after that, when I was full time at the American Enterprise Institute, we partnered with the University of Baltimore doctor Andrea Contoora, and we had a joint conference where we brought in people from the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, the entire panel, and just imagine when the audience learned that here were three men who have been formally incarcerated. One of them
was out of prison. Now he had a truck driving business making more than ten thousand a month, and another who had a construction company where he would gross over a million a year. And so it showed people in fact, who had no criminal record, who were in college or law school or a master's program. People were earning more than we would coming out. And it was just like, Aha, people can make a big change. But that's one great program. I also think about programs closer to home. In DC,
doctor Stanley Andrews was formerly incarcerated. He has a PhD in an NBA. He's got a nonprofit call from prison sales to PhD where he's taking people to the next level and saying, you know you can do this well. And even here in Charlottesville, we have Resilience Education, which is a nonprofit organization that partners with the Dark School of Business at UVA. We've awarded more than a thousand certificates in business entrepreneurship and people are coming out creating
jobs or getting jobs. So those things matter.
We've been talking about different projects around the country, but you now teach a course at the University of Virginia entitled Education inside the US and International Prisons. What inspired you to start looking internationally in.
Twenty eighteen and Elizabeth Smith where at AEI working with a group of people on the left and the right to try to lift the peil Grant band. And during that bipartisan work a metal gentleman by the name of Author Riser. He at the time was working for a right of center think tank. Well author has since then, he's enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Oxford. He and his wife, who are both Army veterans, they're the founders of the Aero Center for Justice and they're
looking at criminal justice in particular. And a good friend of ours named Mark Howard, who's a professor at Georgetown University, runs a exoneration project and the Frederick Douglass Project. The three of us got together and Authors said, listen, I'm taking a group of Americans left right, formerly incarcerated reformers and others to visit prisons in other countries, just so you can see what they're doing. Well, lo and behold.
Our group had an opportunity between twenty twenty three to twenty four to go visit prisons in Norway, in Germany, and Brazil. With another organization, had a chance to go to Kenya, but what we learned from There were a couple of things. At number one, there are some great things that other countries are doing that we can adopt here.
But number two that there are actually some programs here in the United States that other people like Norway, for example, Norway's drug Court was adopted from the United States, which was created, you know, in the late eighties in Florida.
And so that was the first AHA. And then I went to my forward thinking dean at both the law school and Batan School and said, if in fact we want to train or prepare our students for leadership domestically and internationally, we've got to get them on the other side of the Atlantic or the Pacific. And so that started a class where I'm bringing international concepts into our conversation.
You know. I was also surprised. I didn't realize that it's been a very long process of Europeans and Americans looking at each other's prison practices, apparently going on all the way back to alex Detoquil in the eighteen thirties. What is it do you think that we're all sort of floundering trying to find answers to similar problems.
We are when you think of Norway. The first things that come to mind are, you know, Christine Mountains, the Northern Lights, and Great Salmon. When I told friends of mine that I was taking eighteen UVA students to visit prisons, the response was, wait, what Why would you go to such a beautiful country to see such an ugly thing? The thing the prison that Nathaniel Hawthorn in the Scarlet Letter referred to as the black flower of civilization or
civilized society. And I said, because Norway is doing something differently, and the way in which it educates as correctional officers, one example, in the way that it addresses what we call rehabilitation. The Norwegian says, ah, you Americans have the wrong term. I said, well, what do you mean by that? They said, when you use the term rehabilitation, the assumption is one that some thing is innately wrong with the person, and that number two, that your institutions are carcer institutions
in and of themselves can change people. In Norway, we have something called the principle of normality, and that says what's that? They said, We want to make your life during incarceration as normal as possible, so that when you leave prison or we call re entry. It's not such a big shock, and so rather being called number seven five six twenty seven eight, they call me Gerard Robinson. I wear my daily clothes. I don't wear an orange jumpsuit.
I have my own cell. I have a working relationship with the parole officer as well as the correctional officer. So the principal normality is one. And I think another point is the Norwegians are very clear that your punishment is your loss of liberty. That once you've lost your liberty to have interaction with your family on a daily basis, you know you've lost your job. There's a shame or who wants to aspect that's your punishment once you walk
into the prison. The goal isn't to punish you more physically, emotionally and spiritually.
From your perspective, given problems like gangs, et cetera. Do you think this kind of approach would work in American prisons?
I think it will because I'm looking at principles, not at populations. And here's why I say that. People initially will say, well, what you're talking about can't work in the United States because we're more racially diverse. We have a much larger prison population one point nine million compared
to three thousand. They have one to one guard to correctional officer to prisoner ratio in the United States could be one to fourteen, in some places one to thirty, which is why several states have in fact employed the National Guard to serve in prison because there's a staff in shortage. Where those are population dynamics, I'm talking principle.
I'm saying that the principal normality in fact can work in the United States because the whole idea of treating people with dignity using this opportunity of incarceration to try to support you isn't a new idea. I mean, when toeuk Deville and Beaumont traveled to the United States in
the early eighteen thirties to visit America. When we think about Tolkeville, we naturally go to Democracy in America, which was published in eighteen thirty five, but we often forget that Beaumont and Tolqueville, in fact, they published a book on the American penitentiary and its application to France, and so democracy in many ways had to go through the
prison system. They were looking at American prisons because while we didn't call it a principle of normality, we were trying to normalize through education, through religious instruction, through self betterment, and through work how to make this happen. So at one level, this is partly what we're built on. That's number one. Number two, there are places who are actually
experimenting with this. Now. When I was at the University of Oslo, I had an opportunity to meet a professor who was part of a coalition supporting a program called Little Scandinavia. And it's the Scandinavian Prison Program Norway, of course, including Sweden, Iceland, others, and they've implemented it in a
prison outside of Philadelphia. They had the correctional officers from Pennsylvania traveled to Norway, spend time with their correctional officers, return to the United States and slowly but surely began to implement what they've seen in Norway. Now there's actually a documentary with one of the guards from Pennsylvania said, listen, I just don't believe this. I'm not sure it's going to work, but hey, I'm going to get a great
trip to Norway. Well, today, he's one of the biggest proponents of the trip because he said what he realized we had to change in the US wasn't simply the color of a prison or paint on the wall or uniforms. It was a cultural shift. And we know from social anthropology that cultures define as a transmission of hope, ideas, beliefs from one generation to the next. Well, we can inculcate ideas of human dignity, of reform, of betterment through
a cultural change. It's not going to be easy, it's not going to be overnight, but you have organizations who are doing that, so it's starting to work. It's already here in the US. But you also have organizations like Prison Fellowship started by Chuck Colson, who've been involved in prison work for over thirty years, who are doing great work. So we have examples. But yes, it could work here.
It'll just take a cultural shift. A phrase of often heard you use, we have to get rid of the prison guards of the past.
Mentally, that phrase may apply more to this podcast than to most of them. One of the things that you've really mentioned is that we actually ran much much bigger prisoner of war camps in the United States. We had about four hundred thousand prisoners of war, some three hundred and fifty thousand Nazis. But we dealt with them in a context of the Geneva Convention of twenty nine. What
was the effect of that? Mean, to what extent were the prisoners dealt with and a humane system that enabled them to return to civilian life afterwards.
One of the benefits of my trip to Germany with the cohort from the Aer Center was to actually visit different camps. So we went to Hamburg, which the second largest city in Germany, in May of twenty twenty three. We had a chance to go to the New and Gummen concentration camp, and it was created by the Nazis in nineteen thirty eight. By the time we get to nineteen forty five, forty thousand prisoners had died in the camp. And so we're taking a tour of the camp with
a great God who has given us the history. He happened to mention in me to be in passing. He says, well, you know, you Americans had some of our guys or in your and I knew we had some, But to be honest with the speaker, when I returned home from that trip and began to do research. I was shocked to know that at my gut level, I figured we had twenty thousand prisoners of war in the United States.
In fact, when I asked friends of mine, both who are university professors and otherwise, no one's gotten over fifty thousand. When I mentioned we had more than four hundred thousand prisoners of war in forty two states between nineteen forty two and forty five, They're like, wait, now, that can't be true. And then I began to send them information and even in Virginia we had seventeen thousand. Now here's
what's different. To get to your question, the Geneva Convention of nineteen twenty nine established a playbook for how to treat prisoners of war who were captured. And so, if you were a prisoner of war in the United States, there were a few things you received. Number one, you received nutritious meals per day, not just any meal. There was actually a coleric minimum per day that POW's had received. They had an opportunity to work. Some of them worked
on the grounds of the prison camp. Some were actually working outside the prison camp in local businesses in park. Because many men had gone off to war, and some other dynamics. Many of them had an opportunity to enroll into free education classes. Not simply high school, but there were also college classes that they can roll in for free. And they were also able to drink beer. Now, this
was primarily the treatment for prisoners of war. If you were a general or higher ranking, you even received better treatment.
And so I sat here for a moment and said, wait a minute, you mean at the same time that we were fighting overseas, that when we brought three hundred and fifty Nazis and some Italians and others over to the United States, that they were being treated more humane, with more dignity, receiving an education at a time in American history when many whites in the United States, particularly in the South, could not afford to go to a
public or private university. At the same time, you had black soldiers who were fighting overseas only to come back home and sit on trains guarding the Nazis, only to find out that once they passed the Mason Dixon line that they told the black soldiers they had to go to the back of the train, while the white soldiers sat in the front laughing at them, calling them monkeys and all kinds of names that you and I know about, And so I was like, how is it that this
could happen? Well, digging deeper to Geneva Convention of twenty nine, I understand why. But the bigger takeaway for me is we don't need a new experiment on whether or not in America can treat people who are incarcerated with human dignity. We already have an example of doing so. It just happened to be other people's prisoners. Now.
One of the points you make, though, is that we actually treated the Nazis better than the one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans who went to the US and tournament camps, even though two thirds of the Japanese were American citizens. Why were we treating our own citizens worse than we were treating the Nazis?
Were definitely part of it is cultural. At the time that the Executive Order assigned to round up one hundred and twenty thousand plus Japanese, this was built on over seventy five years of anti Asian laws and policies in the US, all the way from California to Washington, d C. And what's so interesting is that two thirds of them again where Americans g but we also put them in we called them internment camps. We'd call them concentration camps.
They were called internament camps because for legal reasons they were technically different. But when you looked at the treatment and the way in which the Japanese Americans were treated compared to the Nazis, culture was definitely dynamic. Number two was also international law. We wanted to treat the Germans and the Italians and the others well in hope and Japanese well in hope that they would treat our prisoners of war with the same dignity. Well, we know it
didn't happen to a lot of POWs in Japan. It was a movie several years ago about that story, and we know some similar tragedies happened over there. But race and class definitely had a role to play in how we treated the Japanese. And it was later Ronald Reagan signing legislation to provide their descendants reparations for that type of tragedy.
It's one of the grammar parts of twentieth century American history. Although the treatment of African Americans and the treatment of Native Americans was a continuing problem throughout that entire century. Part of this which got us on the wrong track. I think you mentioned that there was a eighteen seventy one Virginia Supreme Court ruling. Can you explain it?
Yeah, absolutely, And so there were a few men who had found themselves in trouble with the law, and the case ultimately made its way to the Virginia Supreme Court. It's the Rough and the Commonwealth case. And when they were trying to decide on what to do with the men here, there was a phrase that was used to
determine how to treat them, and it's this term. They basically said that prisoners were merely slaves of the state, and that phrase helped lay the foundation for what in penal practice is called the hands off doctrine, simply meaning that, for the most part, prison and incarceration is a state function. Of the approximately one point nine million people who are incarcerated today, less than two hundred thousand of those are in federal prisons. And so they're saying this is a
state function. And when the incarcerated began to identify indignities placed upon them by Wharton's correctional officers, either other incarcerated
men and women. They said, we need legal relief. And from the eighteen seventies up until around the nineteen fifties, before the start of the civil rights movement, many judges said, listen, we simply can't have the judiciary involving itself in the day to day management of prisons as once as just as Thomas said, course decades later, these are naturally dangerous places, and so the hands off doctrine basically said, listen, prisoners are mere slaves of the state, looking at this metaphorically
and otherwise, and therefore we cannot do much for you. And so when the Germans or the POWs from other countries are here, they're treated with dignity because they're not slaves of the state. They're citizens of another country, citizens that were at war with But we've signed on to a doctrine and a social compact that says we will
treat these people differently. And yet in your state of Georgia, where there were approximately twelve thousand POWs, some of them at Camp Wheeler and Macon and others at Camp Stewart and Savannah, they weren't treated with the same dignity, even though they were American citizens. In many ways, symbolically and metaphorically, they were still slaves of the state.
The date of this decision, eighteen seventy one, is only six years after the Civil War. So the term slave in Virginia had a very vivid, complete state of impotence and subservience. Wasn't just a rhetorical term. It had a very vivid and real meaning.
Absolutely. Yeah, after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, the majority of the people who were incarcerated in state prisons and federal to some extent in jails were white. And my students are often shocked by that statement, and I said, well, it's because the blacks were already in prison. It was called slavery. Now, of course there were free blacks who found themselves incarcerated, but after the Civil War, going up to nineteen hundred, many prisons, particularly in the
Deep South, became ninety percent black. And so that phrase slave of the state, naturally, as you mentioned, was more than just symbolic.
So REMARKA, you know, I always find when I talk with you, I learned stuff that I had no notion of because of the range of research and the work you do. Where can listeners read more of your work or follow the projects you're involved in.
So if you go to my website at the Batin School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVA, you could find not only my web page, but a link to some of the work that I do, both publication wise and also presentations. Second is to go to my page
at the American Enterprise Institute. I've got articles there from twenty fifteen moving forward, and also you can purchase a book that I had a chance to co author, publishing twenty nineteen, is called Education for Liberation, The Politics of Promise and Reform Inside and Beyond America's Prisons, and the forward is written by two people speaking New Gingrich and Van Jones.
That was one of our early collaborations, which seems to always surprise people. We're going to post those on our show page so that people who listen this can find all of your points of entry. You're very busy and very creative. I'm really grateful that you would take the time to join me, particularly since in the next few days your daughter is going to get married, so it's very cool that you take the time out. Thank you
for joining me. Your recent op ed piece how World War Two became a fork on the road on prison policies. It's available now on the Virginian Pilot website at Pilot online dot com, and we'll post all of the ways of reaching you on our show page. Thank you very much, Gerard.
Thank you, missus Speaker, for your continued leadership in this and so many other areas of social and pullet policy.
Thank you to my guest Gerard Robinson. You can learn more about criminal justice reform on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Ganglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloman. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team in ganlishtree sixty.
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