30 year Corrections Veteran Andy Potter on creating effective prison reform

perspective to the conversation around our criminal legal system. I believe that that's what leaders should do, tell the truth about a system that I believe wasn't designed for success, was built around a racist ideology that exploits anyone that comes into contact with it, and when they work there, they perpetuated, but they also collectively have the strength to change it. He launched the national campaign One Voice United in two thousand sixteen with the aim to bring about

long lasting reform that will actually work. Andy Potter right now on Righteous Convictions. Welcome back to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom today's episode. You're gonna be a little surprised, I think by by first of all, because our guest is somebody that you might say, Flom, really you can interview that guy. But when you find out why, it's all gonna make a lot of sense. And without further ado,

I'm going to introduce Andy Potter. Andy is a thirty year veteran of the Michigan Department of Corrections, but moreover, he is the founder of an organization called One Voice United. So Andy, well, first of all, thanks for being here. Thanks, I appreciate it. And Andy, you know, there aren't enough people like you in my opinion, right, somehow or other, our system has gone from one well it's called the corrections system, right, but it's gone to a punishment system.

It seems to me sort of holistically across this country. And I'm hoping that the pendulum is going to swing back in the other direction, and people like you are leading the charge. So I want to thank you for that. But you know, how did this start? I mean, you've been in this work since the since the eighties, right late eighties. I don't want to date you, but what

led you to this type of work? You know, like a lot of other corrections officers would say that our story is this corrections allowed a lot of us and still does allow a lot of folks to come into the middle class. And when you live in rural Michigan where I grew up, I grew up in a very broken town and we didn't have a lot of options. My friends and I, you know, we had broken families, most of us, and a lot of the friends and neighbors that I had a lot of them went to

prison or worse. And so for me and my friends, we just higher education wasn't an option for us. The options that we had in front of us were the military. You could go to work in a factory um like Oldsmobile that no longer exists, or you could go to corrections. It was in the eighties there was a boom going on tough on crime. They were building a lot of correctional institutions inside of these rural areas where there may have been another viable industry that left, like logging or

mining or something, and this is what was there. So it was an option for us, and that's the option that I took. So you're a thirty year veteran of the Michigan Department of Corrections, and around two thousand four you were elected to the m c O State Executive Board. But you had been active in the union before that, So tell me a little about the m c O. So I actually had about twenty eight years in the

Michigan Department of Corrections. I'm retired and I've been the executive director for Michigan Corrections Organization, which is a union that represents just the corrections officers in the state of Michigan. The way I always frame it is that I've worked in and around the Michigan Department of Corrections for over thirty years, and I'm the founder of One Voice United,

which is a national campaign. I'd say it's unusual and refreshing to see somebody like yourself take it on the topic that is most near and dear to my heart, which is criminal justice reform. Tell us about One Voice United. One Voice United is a nonprofit that I founded in two thousand and sixteen. And in two thousand and sixteen in Michigan, we had a riot in the Upper Peninsula. There had been some uprises all around in the United States.

I had been tracking them because I track and I do a lot of forecasting where I can and when I can inside of our profession, and so I was a little bit expecting something because across the country they had and making changes policy changes inside of the corrections institutions, and in Michigan they had lowered the wages for those incarcerated who were working throughout the institution. They lowered their wages, they raised the prices in the store, and they had

a private food vendor. This private food vendor we in Michigan really rallied against. We had a lot of officers that took a lot of chances, took pictures of food that had maggots in it and stuff like that, and sent them in so that we could take that to the legislature and argue to get rid of the private food vendor. There wasn't enough oversight. There was a lot of things happening inside the institutions that were dangerous, and nobody liked it. Those incarcerated didn't like it, the staff

didn't like it. A lot of staff felt it was just immoral what they were feeding folks. And so the riot broke out, and it was over a series of these issues. You know. I interviewed a lot of those

officers afterwards. Not one of them was physically harmed, and a lot of comments were made throughout the night and day that you're not going to be hurt because, look, you took on some of our plight here, and a lot of officers said they couldn't blame anybody like you get to a certain point and there's a boiling point and you know. So they told me, basically, this is

an issue. It's a moral issue, and we stand on this moral issue, and we should be taking this as far and wide as we can to make sure this doesn't happen in other places. So, just looking at that issue, I'm saying to myself, how is it and why is it that we're in a system where something really affects everybody that's working there, And how is it that we can't bring ourselves to a place to work together to get that figured out and stopped when we know that's

an issue. So that led me down the road to come together with some of the smartest people that I had know, people that I've done research with and different kinds of projects with, along with corrections officers and others, and we created One Voice United, which is really designed to unearth those places of alignment. Even though you may not see someone as the most ideal partner or an

unlikely partner in an issue. I'm trying to bridge that gap so that folks can come together, unearthed those places of alignment, and really go at that together with one voice instead of different sides because that's the way this system is designed. It's designed us versus them, and I'm trying to take a little bit of that out of this in order to save lives, create something that's different than what we have. People deserve basic humanity, right. The

food is like the most basic of human needs. And if you're serving people food that's rotten, that's infected with maggots as you describe, as well as the other deprivations that they're dealing with, of course it's going to get to a point where it boils over. And it's a miracle that nobody on the staff was hurt. I think it speaks a lot to the character of the incarcerated

people there. But you know, in lesson, until we start treating our incarcerated population with some semblance of decency, I think we can expect that these situations will get worse. You know, people talk about the private prisons. Only six

per cent of prisons the United States are private. But the services, as you described, Andy, the services, the people that are making money on these things, they're incentivized to do everything and cut as many quarters as they can, as cheaply as they can, and the people on the short end of that stick are always going to be the incarcerated population. In all of my years inside of the system, what it's done for me is allowed me to scrape my eyes clear and see that system for

what it really is. And I wouldn't be any kind of a leader at all if I couldn't try to make an impact, try and make a difference for everybody that comes into contact with it. Folks who worked there and folks who lived there. I mean, they're inextrictably late in order for the reform where it works, when it works, how it works. To really have a legacy, we've got to bring those who live there, those who worked there.

They're the two largest stakeholders in this. All those stakeholders should be in that conversation about why it should be different. Righteous Convictions with Jason flam is super excited and honored to have the support of a great organization like Galaxy Gives. Galaxy Gives leads the filanthropic efforts of the Novograds family. They invest in organizations, campaigns, and leaders who are directly impacted by and working to dismantle the current punitive justice system.

Galaxy Gives also builds power for the community's most harmed by mass and parceration and forges transformative solutions for responding to that harm. They envision a society where the structural barriers created by racist and poverty and inequality are no more. Instead, all people have the dignity, freedom and rights needed to thrive.

Reformers have all done a great job highlighting issues and bringing the problems to the surface, and I think the impact that One Voice United is made is that I do think a lot of reformers now see that there has to be room. There has to be some space made for the understanding of how this isn't extrictably linked between those who worked there and those who are incarcerated.

So just getting the recognition that those that are doing the work every day know that system better than anyone, and they should be consulted to how do we make it better. The idea that you are take in best practices and ideas from people who I'm guessing around the country have no voice. Right they go to work, they go home, they probably experienced things that don't have to experience. And I don't think it's a job that most people

would want if they couldn't have some ability to affect change. Yeah, you know in Michigan, most of the corrections officers that go through the academy, I get a chance to talk to them, and most that I ask, I always ask, why are you taking this job? And most of them, Jason tell me that they of course want to have a good job, a reliable job, but they also want to make a difference. They believe that there's a way for them to impact somebody in a positive way. Now

I can tell you not just in Michigan. The system. The light goes out of their eyes from the time they're in the academy to the time they walk through the front gates to do their work because you're trained they in a day out to desensitize yourself and that takes a toll. That's the system that we have, and that's why I'm trying so hard to change this system because it's killing people on both sides of us. I've

had thirty years of experience. I've seen pain on both sides of this, and we haven't done a good enough job as leaders to bring our unions to the table to have these conversations about how do we make it better, not just for folks incarcerated, because they do need schooling. They do need education, so do those corrections officers in order to be a legacy for that change that we're all looking for. It's so strange right now, Andy, Right, I'm in New York where we've had sixteen people be

murdered or died under to be as circumstances. Nobody died of old age. I'm talking about inside Rikers Island, right, which is sort of five miles from where I'm sitting right now. Sixteen people and the photographs that have come out of that institution are horrendous, like just you would think this would be in a fourth World country. And at the same time, just across the ocean, in places in Western Europe, you have facilities where they treat the

incarcerated people as their neighbors. I mean, they have cells that look more like college dorm rooms. Some places they have cells that locked from the inside so they can have privacy, right, they have their own phones in there and things like that, and all of it is designed to create sort of a ramp to success on the outside where it feels like here we build walls to not only in terms of the way we treat our incarcerated population, but also in terms of how we stigmatize

them when they come out. Have you studied the European model, particularly Scandinavia and Germany and some of those places. Yeah, I have. I've been to Norway a couple of different times and One Voice United work with the Norway Union in fact, and I've been to Germany, and like, if you look at all the especially to Scandinavian countries, as you just pointed out, their value on life is so much different than it is in America, and why they

incarcerate is different than it is in America. It's an interesting thing to understand though, because it helps you to try to understand how do we get back to a place where we can normalize some things here before somebody just goes and hits the streets, and how do we take care of them after they hit the streets so that they don't come back, and and even how are the staff treated? How is that profession looked at in Scandinavian countries has looked at much more of a desired

profession than it is here in America. And there's a reason. I mean in Scandinavian there's usually an intensive two year trading program and it raises that profession up in a way that makes them not just a stakeholder. What a piece of how that success has met for those who

are incarcerated. As you've mentioned, most correction officers are taking this job straight out of high school, where they're not getting the training they need for the kinds of mental health issues and situations that they're about to experience and

face inside prison. Right and to your point, with a higher professional standard and more respect for the position, we'd probably find a better prepared staff for those situations and experiences and then inevitably a result that would be better outcomes. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think it's very fair.

So the reasons why people give in to this line of work, as you've mentioned, they don't have a lot of other options in the communities that they live in, and for some it seems like there are only options other than the military are either go into crime or go into corrections. And then there's that other element of people who may even look at this as an opportunity to be violent in a place where they and you know, get away with it for lack of a better way

of putting it. Have you found that to be a common recurrence in your line of work. Yeah, I think that's the case for some men and women that take this job. You can never always tell why somebody takes a job, and especially a job that has authority to it, and it's really up to us to try to weed those people out. There is nothing that bothers a good corrections officer more than a bad one. And I can tell you I've identified my share of folks that come

in there and do things that are just wrong. But I've also far outnumbering them. And we say this even in law enforcement too, and I'm not sure that's the the the right way to approach that is to say, well, we have you know, bad apples, and so does Wall Street. These are positions that come with authority over other human beings. That's much different how we get through that layer to be able to determine this person is not for the

right thing, and we need to get them out. That's a systems change, and that's bigger than just being able to identify somebody and say they don't do the right things and they are assaulted and things, So we need to get rid of them because the system is designed two desensitize and dehumanize, and if we don't get at

that component. If we don't change that piece and how we're trained and how well we're trained, and how we looked at respected and the roles that we play, then you will never get at how you weed out bad apples. This is the common theme, right, I mean, whenever some tragedy strikes, you know, how do you make it so that a person like that isn't even allowed into that position?

So how do you address that? I mean, do you have any ideas other than like just the most basic we should be taking about drinking and see what kind of things that person says after a couple of Jamison's future. Well, that's the old school why of doing it. Yeah, right, when you're on boarding people, right, I think that is your best chance of identifying and when you can recognize

certain things. So those people that are on boarding new staff have to be trained and there should be maybe a psychological exam and different criteria that has to be met, and there should be a much lengthier time that that person is exposed to people who can identify it than there is today because today, in many cases, somebody is like brought on for a couple of weeks, they're handed a set of keys, because they need bodies, they need staff,

they need people to come in the door. I can point to a lot of prisons that are so understaffed that they can't possibly keep track of everything that takes place in a day's time. Any administrator can check any one of their boxes and say, yep, we're about reform, and we've done this, that and the other thing. But if they've hired a bunch of people with two weeks of training or six weeks of training even in some cases, and they haven't done their due diligence on what kind

of person they're hiring, then it's not real. Any good intentions are essentially worthless. That's right. They're just doing that for themselves. They're checking a box so they can say to anyone given community of people, I'm about reform, and you can see by the policies that I keep that I'm about reform. If they're not really getting at the humanity of this, they're not reforming anything. At the end of the day, they're going to be as big as

part of the problem as the originators were. You know, I've worked on a number of issues nationally and worked in and around other circles with other corrections leaders. But what really made me want to create One Voice United and make that a national campaign is that these are not the kinds of issues that we can any longer tackle at a state by state level because it's too easy for those particular states, because of the way they're set up, can possibly just ignore what those issues are

very easily and with no accountability. And I think One Voice United is on its way to building such a strong coalition of union leaders and other frontline staff, not just officers, maintenance, healthcare, teachers, and others that work in those facilities. It's creating such a momentum. So before we wrap up the show, I'd like to point out to our listeners who have heard what you said, maybe they want to show some support. So if you do, and I hope you do, please head to One Voice United

dot org. We'll have that linked in the bio as well. And he's didn't write it down. And now we go to part one of our clothing, which is something we always look forward to. It's called the magic wand question. I give you a magic want, I give you one wish,

what do you change? If I could wave a want and make a change, the change would be that we wouldn't incarceraate as many people, and those that were incarcerated and those who worked in those places could have a much more meaningful experience, a much healthier experience, and a safer experience. Whatever that looks like. That's a good answer.

And then on that note, I'd like to invite our audience in tune in next week when we speak with civil rights lawyer, trial attorney and founder of Civil Rights Core Alec carkatsan Us. He's a man on a mission to end systemic injustice in our criminal legal system, and that's no exaggeration. And he's also one of my great personal heroes. And now we go to the closing of

our show, which is called Words of Wisdom. This is where I first of all, thank you Andy Potter for joining us and for everything you're doing trying to make our system a little bit bearer and better for everyone. And then I'm going to turn my microphone off, leave my headphones on, kick back in my chair, and just listen to your closing thoughts. Well, I mean, there's a lot of things that I wish I could have covered. You know, we didn't get into the risk part of this.

Jason and not for a lot of leaders. The reason that I'm one of the only ones that step forward on a national level, and I wish that more we're willing to take the same risk, because at any given point, I could say something that's a little over the top for a majority of people that listen to me and follow me, and they're going to say, you're just too soft. And I run that risk all the time, and I

risk my livelihood, my reputation, my professional standing. But I have to push that envelope because I believe that that's what leaders should do and tell the truth about a system that I believe is usually talked about on one side or the other, but never really talked about as a whole, and what it does to people. My journey is going to be different than others, the journey that I had to go down to understand it wasn't designed

for success. It was built around a racist ideology that exploits continuously anyone that comes into contact with it, and those who come into contact with it don't understand that when they work there, they perpetuated, but they also collectively have the strength to change it. If everybody in our profession said this is wrong, it doesn't treat me right in a humane way, and it doesn't treat that person

that gets incarcerated in a humane way. If somehow we had more leaders that could come together and take that risk and push that, a couple of things would happen. Those who are making the policies would start to recognize that and take much more notice, and it would allow us to have a conversation around humanity and what that means.

There should be more leaders willing to step up and really tackle this problem if they've seen the things I've seen where I've lost people that I grew up with working in this profession to suicide because they're us to do things that normal people that go to work are not asked to do, and they're asked to do it sometimes twenty four hours a day. Maybe that's the extreme, but I can tell you across the country there's a

crisis right now with staffing levels. And when people are exhausted mentally and physically, they're not going to do their best work. They're not going to be able to be a legacy for any reform, and if the reforms aren't real, the first people that recognize that are those who are incarcerated and those who work there. If it's just to check a box. That's where you have a lot of leaders that are cynical, and they hear a lot about what we're doing. For those who are incarcerated, they're left out.

It's a blind spot. And I just wish we could talk a little bit more about that risk, because it's real, and as long as that risk is there, there's going to be certain leader is that that can't step up and won't step up to tackle the bigger conversation, and that is, how are we inextrictably linked and what can we do to create a healthier environment and raise our profession up in a way that's respected like they are

in Scandinavian countries. And we can't do that if there's inadequate training, if there's so much mandatory over time, and if the staffing ratios are so outrageous that you just basically throw your hands up. You can't stop something when you're by yourself and you know, and the scrutiny is such that you're you're just you're like at a point where you're like, I can't do this. And the tough guy prison culture thing, like we got to lower some of those kinds of things to have this conversation in

the right way. The big system a lot of people bull have tried, and there's a lot of people very comfortable inside of that system that don't want change. They're making money one way or the other, and they're comfortable with the way it is and they don't want anybody screwing with it. It just takes some deep insight to really understand it and to approach it in a way that says, I'm done seeing my fellow officers ruin their lives. Divorce,

drug abuse, depression. I'm done with that killing us. It's killing people on both sides. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions with Jason plom I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Claverne, and Kevin Wardis. With research by Lalla Robinson. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Out. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Lava for Good. You can also follow me on TikTok and Instagram at

It's Jason Blom. Righteous Convictions with Jason Blom is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Say Look Company Number one