Dr. Brittany White on ending mass incarceration

to improve our education system, our healthcare system. As society, we have to take ownership of how we have failed people and not criminalize people for our the trauma and the impact of not having their needs meant by the government in this country. Her experience in a prison system propelled her on a tireless mission to address the corruption and despair she witnessed on a day to day basis. Right now on Righteous Convictions, Britney White, Welcome back to

Righteous Convictions Today. We're speaking with someone who used the experience of serving time as the impetus for her life's work, which is overthrowing the prison system. Upon her release from Alabama's Julia Tutt Wilder Prison, she started from the ground

up as a volunteer organizer in Dallas. She's now the decarceration director at Live Free USA as well as get This, an organizing fellow at Harvard Law School's New Institutes End Mass Incarceration, and she's an active voice for formerly incarcerated Black women. And she'll tell us more about all the other great work she's doing to make the world a better place. So, without further ado, it's my great pleasure and my distinct honor to introduce Brittany White. Britt, welcome

to Righteous Convictions. I appreciated Jason glad to be here. Everybody. Britt You're You're awesome, first of all, but let's go back to the beginning with they're doing the movies where it gets all foggy and they you know, they do the flashbacks. So you were originally from Ohio but grew up in Texas. Right, that's correct. I'm from Dayton, Ohio. Shout out to all the Buck guys who are tuning in and tell me about your upbringing. Your parents both

achieved master's degrees. Right, so you have a sounds like you have an interesting family history. I mean, I have a dynamic family. I think part of my journey in life is that I have been fortunate to be born into a family that is deeply loving and loyal to each other. And our experience in this world as black people from the Midwest, were from a little city, and we grew up under a lot of systemic policies that were just detrimental to live in a life of dignity.

And my parents have been together almost forty two years, and through that experience, I have watched them both get their undergraduate, their master degrees, excel in their careers. And as soon as we moved to Texas and nine seven, less than a year later, my dad woke up and had a seizure and it was discovered he had a malignant brain soomor And from that experience, watching my dad go from making six figures too not even a third

of his salary almost it was just very difficult. And if it was not for our faith community, Concorde Church now here in Dallas, Texas that embraced us, my family would have had to go back to Ohio to create us a sports system. And so being young, watching my parents navigate the failure that is America's healthcare system gave

me a very unhealthy relationship with money. And it begins to appear to me, just like many people I've talked to who are justice impacted across the country, that money was a solution to all my problems, and so it put me on a pathway where my pursuit of money make was my main focus, and it led me down a path to a penitentiary in the state of Alabama. Yeah, now that's obviously a key part of your story and

your journey. Right. So you were working at Verizon in Buckhead in Atlanta, but as you said, like a young ambitious person that you were, you were also looking to try to get ahead, and that led you to get involved with some marijuana stuff, right, tell us about that.

I was arrested in the state of Alabama in January of two thousand nine on a cold freezing night for trafficking marijuana on I twenty in the state of Alabama and a very little rural county called Saint Clair County that sits right outside of Birmingham and reminds you of Mulberry.

And what I will say about that experience and that time period in my life is that we have to be careful how we characterize people who have been in the justice system in their crime, because we begin to associate a lifestyle with what they went to prison for. And I, for example, was involved in many different things in that point of my life, in the pursuit of money, and it just so happened that with this particular instance, I was arrested for trafficking marijuana, and that's what I

was to prison for. And people can put whatever interpretation behind that that they felt comfortable with. But like I said, with that lifestyle, it's more so about the pursuit of a of an ends to a means, which for me was working like you said at the time at Verizon, but also just involved in a number of different things

trying to accumulate capital. Well, so let's talk about the marijuana trafficking charge, so cannabis would call it these days, but anyway, um, so, what was the charge trafficing marijuana in the state of Alabama, A Class A felony. What was the quantity? I will not say the quantity. It was over fifty pounds and under a hundred Okay, so it was not a small amount, because we know there are people in America serving life for small amounts of marijuana.

Can I clarify that Jason. Of course, when people say that it was not a small amount of marijuana, I just want people to know who engage in marijuana legally or illegally, all across the country. It is not being transported in small amounts, no matter if you just purchase a graham from whoever you indulge with. It is transported just like any other good and large amounts. And so, I, as an advocate of the criminal legal system, do not like to make hierarchy. I don't say violent, I don't

say no violent. I don't hierarchy crimes or anything like that. It's not helpful to the conversation understood. I mean, look, you're absolutely right to point out that the pot you know, I called pot whatever whoever you want to call it, it has to come from somewhere, right, Somebody brought it to somewhere in order for you to be able to enjoy it. And that's really what it comes down to it. So, okay, let's get back to your story. So here you are, all of a sudden, how old were you at the

time that you're arrested. I had just twenty three the month before, and you were charged with this trafficking and your parents from what I understand, advise you to take a plea? What kind of plea did they offer you? Every single person in my life who cared about me advised me to take a plea. And I'm almost ashamed to say what my plea was because I just know I'm going to be judged so harshly. But I believe

I was offered. So I want to clarify traffic in marijuana and to state that Alabama has a mandatory three years sentence. So under the ninety four crime deals, those harmful policies, Alabama carries one of those mandatory minimums. I believe I was offered eighteen months on a ten year sentence serving the rest storing probation, so very similar to what I was sentenced to um a split sentence once I lost trial. So everyone advised you, but you you

took a stand um and said tell me the thought process. Yeah, I mean a lot of it was youthful ignorance and and knowing absolutely nothing about the criminal legal system. The way that my car was searched when I was pulled over, the state trooper actually had a dog in the car and he illegally searched my trunk when he could have just pulled out the dog and went through procedure, and so I had to paid attorneys throughout that process, and both of them urged me to take a plea. I

felt the search could be thrown out. And one of my mistakes was going to get my attorney from Birmingham, the larger main city that was close to St. Clair County. But it is very fratern and brother in law in these small rural counties, and you should always get a lawyer from that county who was in the circle, in the network and passing favors with the fraternity of lawyers from that small area. And because my attorney wasn't in

the loop, it was not a good trial. As you can see, I was found guilty and sentenced to well later sentence the twenty years Split Five 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 filmthropic efforts of the Novocrats family. They invest in organizations, campaigns, and lead ters 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 incarceration and forges transformative solutions for responding to that harm. They envisioned a society where the structural barriers created by racism, poverty, and inequality are no more, where instead all people have the dignity, freedom, and rights needed to thrive. First of all, I was arrested in January and it took me six weeks to make bond, so

I was released in March. So during that time period of my life, I have lost my apartment, I've lost my job. I have to go face my parents and be accountable for the fact that I've been engaging in all this illicit activity. And I have some mentally prepared air myself to fight for my freedom, which I was not equipped to do. And so October I finally go to trial, and it was such a quick process. I

was completely thrown off. Once it was determined I wasn't going to take a plea, we immediately struck a jury, went to trial. I remember one black woman juror who would never look me at my face. So I do not have a jury of my peers. And I was found guilty and my mom was the only one to go through that experience with me, because I went to trial so quickly, I didn't even have the opportunity to tell anybody else in my support system for them to

walk through that with me. And now you are tried, convicted, and sentenced to no no, no, no no, because Alabama, it's not that generous. They left me in the county jail in October through January while my judge decided what he was going to do with me. And anybody who knows anything about being incarcerated, county jail time is not designed to hold people for long periods of time, so county time is grueling. And so in January I was

sentenced to twenty years. Then I was held another like seven months before I finally got to go to prison. I mean to hear you say, if you finally got to go to prison, that almost Yeah. It really does put a fine point on just how terrible the jail

must have been. And it's weird because britt, I feel like people most people think of it as jail being a more benign term and more benign place than prison, right, But in fact, what those of us who work in this movie and know is that jails are inherently more dangerous, chaotic um and well just to say disgusting, right then, even some of the worst Max security friends. So yeah, can you just shine a light on that first before

we get to the really other important parts of your story. Yeah, I mean, I do think it's important for me to talk about my county jail experience. And in Pale City County Jail, what was especially hard for me is you have to prepare to go to prison for a long period of time because in prison it is very difficult

to get anything in. So the state of Alabama allows you to bring like what we call your whites and your hygiene, so you can take in so many T shirts, so many pairs of panties, so many bras without underwire, all of your hygiene, your shampoo, your conditioner. I'm a black woman with natural hair, so I have to use very specific things on my hair. The captain at that county jail, Captain Moss, would not allow my family to

send me anything to take to prison with me. She would lie to us explicitly and say they're gonna throw it all the way once you get to prison. And that is just simply not true. And I'm talking about stuff that I would have needed to set to set me up to do five years, and she completely robbed me of that opportunity. In addition to that, the jail was disgusting, like the sewage will back up in the middle of the hall and just still out all types

of feces and filth. Trying to get an actual person to come back there and give you medical attention was just almost impossible. And so I was very relieved to finally get to prison number one, to get some yard time, to be able to feel the sun on my skin, to be able to move my body and begin to get a routine going so I could get about the business that during my time. And so then you were finally sent to the Julia Tutt Wilder Prison for Women.

And there were a couple of very noteworthy things that we're going on there that further opened up your eyes to some systemic prison injustices and that's probably not even strong enough word, and the urgent need for reform. The first one had to do with Priya the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Tell us about what you saw there. Yeah, number one, there was a young lady who was pregnant by one of the correctional officers, which started a huge

sexual investigation with the federal government and Priya. It was very scandalous when I first got to the prison. And what they would do is whenever a correctional officer was accused of having a sexual encounter with one of the prisoners, they will put them in the watch tower. And that was what we used to call solitary confinement for the correctional officers after they would have accusations of sleeping with the young ladies who were incarcerated there. Number two, what

was notable is there was an HIV a's dorm. There's a dormitory style that we live at the prison, and first you go into a dorm where everybody goes through their health screens and the women who would be found HIV are positive for AIDS were actually confined to be dorm until they won their federal lawsuit and were able to come out into population. Okay, so so you were sent to twenty to life, but you were freed after five What happened to get you home after five years?

And then let's talk about the transition. Yeah, five years is my full sentence. So I was sentenced to what is called a split sentence in the state of Alabama. If I got into any trouble while I was incarcerated during my five years, my judge had the discretion over me to pull my split and put me on a straight twenty. I also had the option to continue to to petition him to let me come home early. He

denied every single one of my requests. I served five full years in prison with jail credit and came home September sixteen, and I came back to Texas where my parents lived, to rebuild and restart my life. So you come out, and now your priorities have I mean made

a radical shift, right. I mean you talked about before how because of your father's experience, your father's horrendous experience, how that shaped you as a young woman to want to make money to help yourself and your family avoid ever having this awful experience that you have with the health care system or the other things that come when you don't have access to ready cash. Tell us what happened and what you started doing and and all the things that have led you to this place that you're

in now. Yeah, So when I come home, I left for twenty three year old young woman, and I came home getting ready to turn twenty eight. So I'm now I'm much older, and while I've been incarcerated, my grandmother has died, my uncle died, my great grandmother has died, And my relationship with my family is a little strange because now I'm emotionally cold, because that's what prison teaches you, to turn off your feelings. Plus my clothes are old, my car is gone, and I pretty much don't have anything.

And so everybody coming home deserves the support system. And I had more than a lot of people have because I had my parents who allowed me to come there and with their support, get my life back together. So I got a couple of jobs by lying on my applications saying I didn't have a felony. I'm reporting for

probation every month um. Even before I had a job, my probation fees started stacking up so high that at one point one of my bosses actually gave me over seven hundred dollars to bring my probation fees back current so I wouldn't get violated and go back to prison.

And when we talk about like how can we really help justice impacted people come back into our community successfully, we have to be willing to give them that type of support, like the type of love that says, no matter what you got, I'm not gonna let you fail and you fall off. And when we talk about why people go into the system, it's often because they themselves feel like they have to figure out every single problem that life brings to them. They don't have a support

system to wield some of these challenges. And that's what organizing became for me. It didn't just teach me how to advocate for the policies for the people who I left behind, who I love, my state family, who are doing fifty years, who are doing life, who are doing life without possibility of parole, but also to advocate for myself that there was a standard of dignity for how I wanted to live my life and being able to have the tools and the support system to navigate those

challenges became very important to me. So myself as a college dropout, I sit here and think about how you got from prison in Alabama to basically be opposite right to being an organizing fellow at Harvard Law School in the space of seven short years. How does that even work? It's amazing. I mean, I give our glory to the Most High. My mom and my dad made it very clear that they pray that I will still be able

to have a future. And it's really about relationships. The people who I have come across, who have walked with me, who have been mentors, who have been boards of advisors, has just truly blown my mind and it's given me a confidence. It's giving me clarity about my purpose. And as long as I continue to be authentic and speak my truth, the Most High just opens the doors and I just continue to try to find the courage to walk through. But I have to give a special shout

out to my Live Free family. I am also the decarceration director for the Live Free organization, which focuses on gun violence prevention and decarceration work. And that's how I found the work. I'm at a past or at my

church who was connected to the Live Free network. They invited me in, took me too like a training at Live Free in Oakland, and it was like walking into a room full of people who were my tribe who gave me like a consciousness in a way of thinking that I didn't know exists, Like I don't come from the Bay or area, of the country where I remember like seeing a community organizer or knowing that it was

even a profession. Most of the people in my life watched me on social media and they're like, I can't say exactly what it is you do. I just know it's important. And those are the people I want to continue to organize and build power with, especially black women. Oh, talk to us as well, Brett, about your work to end mass incarceration and even I mean, you consider yourself an abolitionist, right, and that's an interesting term. I don't

think most people understand what that means. So tell us please about your your vision for prison abolition and and then to mass in carceration and are they the same thing and what's the nuance there? Yeah, I think before I even talk about abolition, I would say that America is founded by a set of twins. And it's the very popular twin of racism that many people are familiar with,

but the less popular twin sister is capitalism. And the way that we value in the relationship we have with money in this country is set precedent that some people are disposable, and because they're disposable, we have an unequitable distribution of wealth in this country, and we have a lot of black and brown bodies that are behind the wall, and that is to feed and fuel capitalism and keep big corporations rich. It is not just because somebody hates

the color of my skin. It's people out here who have no problem with black folks, but they want to hold onto their wealth. And so as the abolitionists, I believe the current system as it exists is not redeemable. We need something completely new, and it scares people because they are afraid of their own imagination and what it means to create a system where everybody can have dignity.

But if you have ever seen a homeless person who was mentally ill screaming at the top of their lan on a corner and you wanted to help, but you absolutely had no tools or services to offer that person, you can understand and imagine why we need to create a new vehicle to save all God's children because nobody. I don't believe anybody is expendable in our society, and my faith tells me that, and my purpose keeps me

working to build something new for that value. So we need to redirect the resources to helping these people on the front end and to providing the care and treatment that they neither. We can't do that while we continue to incarcerate more people than any country in the history of the world. So the question is abolition. There's a very controversial term. What does prison abolition mean to you?

Because people would say, even progressive people would say, but what are we gonna do if a guy goes and shoots up at school, right, or a church or a restaurant? Um are we really no, no, not put that person away? You know, It's always interesting to me that people immediately go in their minds to the worst possible scenario and call that imagination because I would challenge their thinking. Jason, what if we are able to address the mental health needs of people with a propensity to go shoot up

at school before they ever do. What if we address the fact that somebody with those type of health issues has access to a gun. We cannot create our imagination around the worst possibility of who we can be. We have to look at the way we have failed to invest into the socio economical well being of our society. We have to feed people better. We have to improve the quality of our food and give people real food. We have to improve our education system, our health care system.

As society, we have to take ownership of how we have failed people and not criminalize people for the trauma and the impact of not having their needs meant by the government. In this country, we like to criminalize people, but not take ownership of how many children we have failed. And my vision around abolition is public health. How do we better take care of people first to be a

better society. The investment that we put into policing and incarceration should be put into the wellness of us as people. That is, I mean a long term vision that I think everyone can get around, but in the short term I think again, in order for us to get people on board with abolition, unless I leave out the fact that you know, prison is the most expensive aside for

everything else, an inefficient way to address these problems. Rikers out of the New York City Control They're recently released a report that showed that it cost five hundred and sixty five thousand dollars a year to keep somebody locked up at Rikers Island. That's five hundred and sixty five thousand a year, or about six hundred dollars a day. I think that comes out to which means somebody do the math for me. But that means you could put them in a suite at the Ritz Carlton in Manhattan

for that same amount of money. And as I just want to say that person that it costs five hundred and sixty five thousand dollars in Carson right, how long across their lifespan is it going to take them to earn five hundred and sixty five thousand dollars. Secondly, we are currently in the fiscal part of our local government. County commissioners or whatever the equivalent is in your county are coming up with the budget for tree. This is

an opportunity to begin to fund wellness. We're coming out of COVID where I see that there is a lot of flexibility with dollars. There's still some American Rescue Plan dollars that have been sent down from the federal government that could be used to start these initiatives and these improvements. Leaving REX centers open in neighborhoods so kids have a safe space to go, being able to give a local

stimulus check to help with inflation. Your county government has the ability to do that, to divest some of the dollars from the policing budget and put it into healthcare services for the elderly, re entry programs, gun violence prevention programs, these types of fiscal investments. Because your money where your treasure is, your heart is if we truly cared about the well being of people, we can begin advocating with

our local county officials to make those investments. Now, we want to put links in the bio to any organizations that you want to highlight. So where would people go if they wanted to get involved? What kind of are there any links and stuff that we can add? Yeah, so I would love to shout out Mothers against police brutality. I do not have a specialty in policing, but the

work that they're doing is phenomenal. It has taught me so much about policing and how we can proactively policies and protocols we can put in across the country to proactively keep people from going into the criminal legal system. Also, the Clean Slate initiative, shout out to my bases Chaine of me the work that she is doing at state legislators to be able to grant people the opportunity to come home and get housing and to get employment because

they would have a clean record. It's so important. Buff of these organizations are led by black women, So shout out to them, and we cannot leave out Galaxy gives. Tell us what the Galaxy Gives fellowship means to you, you know, shout out to Galaxy gives special shout outs

to Alex and Aaliyah over there. You know this foundation just their support and their censoring of justice impacted voices, the resources, the encouragement, the relationship, the platform, the elevation like with dignity, their leadership and their platform isn't only resourceful and rich, but it's very thoughtful about my particular experience and the accessibility that I have to Alex and Billy to thought partner with me and connect me to

like minded individuals has been invaluable. So much much love to my Galaxy Gives family. I can't wait to see y'all. I want to remind our listeners to tune in next week when I'll be speaking with a superhero, a woman named Lolas Ango about the absolutely incredible work she's doing building a movement for abolition in Arizona, which happens to be the nation's fifth post incarcerated State. And now we

turn to our two very special closing segments. The first one is called the Magic one Question, and it's super simple. It works like this, I ask you the following question, which is that if I had a magic wand which I wish I did, But if I had one, to could create you one wish, what would it be? What would my wish be? My wish would be to heal my father. My dad has been six since. Anybody who has ever been a caretaker knows that health comes in season.

And he's the absolute best person I know in the world. And if I could restore his mobility, I absolutely would. It's beautiful. And the final segment of our show, my favorite part of our show. It's called Words of Wisdom, and that's where I turned my microphone off, put my headphones on, kicked back in my chair, and just listen to anything else you want to share with me and our wonderful audience. My words of wisdom are around women

and our unique experience in the criminal legal system. Oftentimes, I have sat in countless rooms from high academic universities to black churches down here in the South that talk about our brothers, our fathers, and our uncle's who are behind the wall, and it completely erases me and other women who I love who are also for our freedom. I remind you that prison is especially hard on women's bodies. It's full of concrete and metal, which is very, very

hard on your feminine health. I see you women, especially the black women and the women who are incarcerated in the Midwest, in the South, some of the worst prisons in this country, and I will continue to uplift you in our experience every chance I get. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea, Jeff Kleber

and Lila Robinson and Kevin Wardis. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Lava for Good. You can also follow me on both TikTok and Instagram at It's Jason Blom. Righteous Convictions with Jason Lab is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one