"F*** Him, But F*** Jail": The Power of Restorative Justice

just a fair warning, but stick around. I am so excited to have Danielle Sarah, a really wonderful human being been and someone who you know I've talked to you about because because you know her work, but you don't know her no, no, right, I mean I've been reading all about restorative justice and her organization, Common Justice, But but you work with her personally, right, Yeah, Yeah, we know each other from my work at the Very Institute. And I gotta tell you I've had a dozen conversations

with Danielle. I've broken bread with her. I know her really well. And she's going to talk about restorative justice in the context of her nonprofit work, Common Justice. So let's break down a little bit what restorative justice is. Yeah, So, in the broadest sense, it is a process whereby two people come together, a harmed party and the person who's

done harm. So like what many people would say, like the victim of a crime and the person who did the crime, the victimizer that's right, the perpetrator of the fender or the kind of criminal justice terms, but Danielle refers to them as the responsible party. And restorative justice has been around from millennia and often associated with Indigenous communities as a way for people to be restored back

to the community. Something has gone terribly wrong between two people and they come together and they talk it out, and usually there's some form of accountability. There's some form of the person who's done harm doing something to restore the relationship, hence restorative justice. But you're saying this idea of like bringing those two people together, that's right and having them figure out like what accountability is and how to heal the harm. That's not abnormal. That's like just human.

It's not only human. But it's very old. We've gotten away from it, and I think for Common Justice, which has been around for about fifteen years. It is a Brooklyn based nonprofit. The practitioners work directly with the courts

and even with the prosecutors. Where a young person in general who has committed an armed robbery or an assault or some other horrible, violent thing gets brought before the court, and there's an option in that case, based on the victim's perspective or the harmed party, to say whether or not that person should get restorative justice. What's so amazing about this is that we are talking about people who

did violent crimes. Yes, and often when we think of like the violent offender, those are the people that we don't want to deal with it all. That's right. What Danielle Sarah is doing is actually dealing with people who are involved in violence, who committed violent crimes, who are victims of violent crimes, and figuring even those people who have been dismissed by all the sort of criminal justice reforms that they could, there's an alternative to prison. Yeah.

I'm not even sure everyone knows what you mean by dismissed by criminal justice reform. Say a little bit more about that, I mean, yeah, so like the idea that most of our reforms for the past dozen years have been about non violent and mostly non violent drug offenders,

Like that's where we've sort of thought of mercy. Yeah, And that's why Danielle is so important, because she is providing the actual evidence and the roadmap to doing alternatives to violence, meaning that this isn't alternatives to drug offenses, this is alternatives to violence. We should not simply be locking people away for violence because we haven't given the harmed parties what they want. The harmed party wants accountability. Yeah,

it's she said, It's not because of mercy. It's because the people who were harmed, they want to be restored. This is for them. Yeah, So let's get to Danielle. I am so excited to have Danielle Sarah a really wonderful human being. Some of my best friends are just really delighted to be able to have an important conversation with you today. Welcome to the show. Thank you so

much for having me. Awesome and Danielle Khalil and I were just talking about how back in October, how President Biden had pardoned all of these people in the federal system who were convicted of simple marijuana possession or thousands of people who are convicted for marijuana possession who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities to the result of that conviction. My pardon will remove this burden on them.

And I might say, all these people we meet a few thousand and you know, what we were talking about is like, you know, maybe since two thousand and nine, we've been taking these sort of first steps on criminal justice reform and really just sort of like first steps. And you know what Biden did is again non violent drug offenses of seeing some kind of leniency. And the flip side of that is that we're not really changing how we think about violence of people who both committed

violent acts and people who suffered from them. And that's where your work comes in, and that's what we want to start maybe talking about to really change the criminal justice system. That's what we have to do, right, We

have to dig into these issues of violence. I think you're exactly right, And just from a numerical perspective, more than half of people locked up in the United States are locked up for crimes of violence, right, And so if we want to see a transformative reduction in the number of people locked up, we have to take on

crimes of violence. The math doesn't work out otherwise, and so be even clearer, even a transformative reduction of fifty percent doesn't bump us out of our spot as the nation that is incarcerated more of our own people than any other in all of human history, right, So it's a good aspiration to get at least that far, and we will not get farther without dealing with violence. And while I celebrate any shrinkage of the criminal legal system, like I believe every single day of every single person

freedom is a sacred thing. Right, so that means one person getting free a day earlier is a sacred thing. At the same time, I know that even trees that are trimmed at the edges continue to grow, right, Like, the question is what's happening at the root. And I believe the root of the criminal legal system in this country, the place that where it continues to get its nourishment is our relationship to violence, and that until we upend that, we'll keep doing the same thing in slightly altering form,

but not much more than just trimming and pruning. You came on the show just throwing haymakers. You're just like you got it, you started it. You've brought up this question of violence, like I was just going to take that casually. Someone listening to you describe this might still have a hard time wrapping the head around like the actual experience is there. I mean, given the hundreds of cases that you've supervised with your team at Common Justice,

and I've heard you tell stories. You're already one of my best friends, so I've heard some of these stories. I think people would really benefit from just hearing, you know, just a snippet of someone or communities life that have experienced what you're talking about. So you know, I only tell stories I've permission to tell, and so this is one of those, and it's one of our earlier cases. And the hard party in it was an immigrant to this country. He was working for cash and a kitchen

and midtown Manhattan. He was on his way home from work, and on his way from the train to his house, he was robbed and really brutally assaulted, and he experienced really standard post traumatics trust symptoms, right, so, he experienced hyper vigilance, or has he put it, he was whenever anyone walked up behind him, even quote unquote a little old lady like, his mind would race, and his heart would race, and stomach would just fear, just act physical

fear and trauma. And because of that, he was withdrawing from many things in his life. He withdrew from his ESL classes, he wouldn't go out anywhere with his partner. You know, he was exercising all this different kind of care to try and avoid those circumstances where he felt so afraid and so activated, and so his life, all these good things in his life get lost to that experience. Right, So, just so we're clear, the perpetrator, I'm sorry that the

responsible party. See I'm learning the responsible party is actually apprehended, arrested process, arrested charged, is facing a significant prison sentence. And is this person sitting in jail? And how old? How old are these people? Roughly the sponsible parties twenty the harm parties twenty four. I would say, okay, okay,

and he consents to him being in the program. We go through that preparation and we get to the circle process, and we're going through it and through it, and part way through, the responsible party says, every man and my family older than me has served at least a decade in prison. And he said that, you know, my older brother served eleven years, and every one of those eleven years he won the prison Boxing League championship. And my

brothers the one who taught me how to fight. And that night on the street, I showed you the wrong end of it. But he's also the one who taught me to defend myself. And if you wanted, I would teach you that too. And one important thing about a circle process is if you don't have the talking stick,

you can't talk. So I can't be like, um, may I please consult my general counsel before we agree, right, it's the vision of risk moves before my hours, right, But I don't have a six, so I just shut up, like and it goes to the harm party, he says, I would love that. And so after some time we set up a training time at a local dojo with a marshal arts instructor present to watch over it. Because to be really great at something, you have to know what you don't know, and we do not know that.

And in that process, the responsible party teaches the harm party how specifically, how to free himself from certain constraints, right, And he starts modeling by modeling. This responsible person, right, the one who did it, is standing as though he's being restrained, and he's coaching the harm party through the process of how to break free of that as he

models it. So, just to be clear, because I'm looking at you, right, we're having this conversation, but I can actually see you talking, and you're literally saying the person who gave this twenty four year immortal fear after having

been assaulted and robbed. The responsible party has the victim in a bear hug, teaching him about to teach him how to get the harm party has the responsible party in a bear hug to put it nicely, right, like okay, And so the harm party is the one doing the constraining first, right, while the responsible party is demonstrating how

to release from that. And then they switch and this survivor is being held in the same position by the same person whose actions are the cause of all that pain, only this time he's coaching him and how to get out right, and he's like, okay, a little left, Okay, that's the spot right, you know, like over and over and the first he's holding him pretty lightly, but as the harm party starts to learn it, he's holding him more and more strongly, until he's holding him with all

his strength as he did that day, and over and over the harm party is breaking free man. So he closed the session. After that, we go home. The next day, the harm party, the survivor calls me on my cell phone, which is sort of widely understood to be for emergencies. And he called me and I said hello, and he said, hidan, yelle, I'm just calling to tell you nothing happened, which didn't immediately sound like an emergence. And see, but I asked him,

can you say more? It can be a very useful question. And I said can you say more? And he said, I just walked by a six foot four man and nothing happened, right, meaning his mind didn't raise, his heart didn't raise, his stomach didn't turn, and he had about half an hour before he went to work, so he went to Times Square so he could be around as many people as possible. Actually contend that this is the only truly positive story about Times Square trone. So see

if you can find another. I don't think you can't. And he's there on the phone with me and he's you know, the crowd, and he's like, hold on, I see a tall one right and you hear him like crossing the street and he says nothing, nothing, but tell

me he didn't deserve that. I don't know when we talk about all of the reason we talk about incapacitation and detance, like what in the whole moral fuck would give us the authority to say he did not deserve that, especially if simultaneous to him getting that healing, we could ensure and we have now insured more than a decade out from that case that that young man never committed another act of violence. It's a decade later and the

responsible party has not committed another act of violence. Wow. So I'm like, if we as a people, right, if we know a way that we can keep community safe and heal the pain of survivors, Like, what is the moral basis for our going up to survivors and tell them we have made a decision to deny you this opportunity because of this age old, largely disproven theory called deterrence. Yeah, absolutely not. I'm hearing that story and I'm like, I'm

having trouble catching my breath. I'm so moved by it, and I guess I want to hear, which is what a cynic would say, that that's not a story of just two incredibly exceptional individuals, like you know the movie, Like I want to hear that this is Like yeah, So I'll say two things about it. Like one is, there are fifty stories like that, right, and they're not all.

This one's a little more dramatic, but there are fifty stories where the thing somebody wanted they could only get from the person who hurt them, including when what they wanted was answers, like as survivors, we want to know why me? Was it a real gun? Was it something I said? What would you have done if I fought back? If I didn't fight back? Did you know what I was going to use that money for? And the impact it had when you took it right? There are things

that we can only get from the person who hurt us. Wow, this is so interesting. We're going to hear more from Danielle. After the break, we're back with Danielle Sarah of Common Justice. We are hearing from you, Danie, these amazing stories of what's happened when people have a chance to come together to talk about these terrible incidents of violence. So there are countless stories. There are people who wanted to meet

each other's children after the circle. There are people who stayed in correspondence, people who worked out together, people who met at the spot of the incident every day at the time that happened and shook hands just to overwrite that person's experience of that place with something positive. Right,

So there are countless things like that really powerful. And there are these other stories where the agreements are fairly average, where they aren't like brothers to each other in the end, where they don't embrace, and where they heal, and where neither of them hurt anyone ever again, And I actually believe those are just as beautiful, Like restorative justice isn't actually like a matchmaking service, like like our aspirations, isn't

like how many brother like friendships have reformed, right, And sometimes I struggle telling these stories because there's too beautiful and we're so used to these. These are the stories we tell, right. We either tell of someone who wants the death penalty or someone who forgave the person who kills her child, and now that person has Thanksgiving at her house, and like most of us aren't that person.

But I think about like one of our harm parties, who in that outreach conversation elected to have the person take part in common justice, like the way he described it as he said, fuck him, but fuck jail. I've thought about writing an essay where that's the whole content of the essay, and then it's like eighty pages of footnotes that support the legitimacy of both those claims. But

actually it's incredible. Like, as a survivor myself, I have worked arduous decades to not think often about the person who hurt me, right, And so for someone to be like I don't really think about it much is extraordinary, right. And not because they've oppressed it, not because they've numbed it, but because it no longer constrains and shapes. They are daily choices from when they wake up in the morning to when they go to sleep, and whatever comes to

them in those dreams is night. Yeah. Part of the choice that survivors are making is not just what you've described so beautifully and compellingly, but it is also the

practical reality that people come back home. That's right. Like one of the first cases we had that this young man robbed and assaulted a fourteen year old boy, and so his mom was the one who got to consent because he was underage, right, And at that point in the process, the person who did it was facing three years in prison that had been negotiated down from much higher offer at the beginning. And when I reached out to her to see what she wanted to have happened.

She said, you know, when this young man, she did not call him a young man. I will not use the words she used when this young man first hurt my child. First I wanted him to drowned to death, and then I wanted him to burn to death. But then I realized, as a mother, I don't want either of those things. I want him to drown in a

river of fire, so I don't have to choose. And then she said, but three years from now, my nine year old child is going to be twelve, and he's going to be coming to and from school and tow and from his aunt's house and tune from the corner store alone, and one of those days he's going to walk by this young man, and I have to ask myself on that day, do I want that man to have been upstate? Or do I want him to have been with y'all. And so what she's doing is exactly

what you describe Khalio, right. She is prioritizing her son's safety and the safety of kids like him over her emotional desire for revenge. Now, like as a mother myself, I don't know that I could do that, and I don't know that I actually should have to. I don't know that it's a parent's responsibility to be able to make such a practical choice, But I do believe it's

the criminal legal system's responsibility. I don't believe a system has the right to choose some conceptual feeling of revenge over all the practical evidence of what actually produces safety. That's right. I've heard you as a friend, as a colleague, as a public scholar around these issues and educating the

public around this. I've heard you lean into the reality that violence is everywhere, and Yelle, I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, Like, how many times have you heard someone say we never talk about the violence in the community, And I'm like, you haven't been listening

to people like Danielle or once for myself. You know, here, I am at the Schaumberg Center working late one night and Al Sharpton has a bullhorn outside my office window talking about stop the violence, and it is literally engaging in a public rally around this issue. What's the expression when you say you are in the business of ending violence? Right?

That's right? Well, and I think you're right, and I think people who live in communities or families where violence is common are talking about it one way or another all the time, like all of us want to be safe. We want our children to be safe, we want our loved ones to be safe. When that isn't present for us, there is not a day we're not considering what we could possibly do to secure that safety for the people

we care about. And I think at the same time, part of what happens is that people in communities racked by violence, they consider what would keep me safe, and their answers are things like, we need early childhood education, we need decent schools, we need clean water, we need mental health care, we need hospitals, we need educators to be paid a living wage, we need to be paid a living wage, and all the service industries we work in.

And when people say all of that, they are talking about violence, right it doesn't register in the public discourses that because we refuse to think about violence as something that's produced systemic factors. And on top of that, people are also talking about violence in the narrowest sense, and very often they are solving it fully apart from the criminal legal system. Fewer than half of victims called the

police in the first place. Fewer than half the people who are the victims of violent crimes they don't even go to the police. That is straight from the Department of Justice. From the Department of Justice's own statistics. When I was in school, fifty percent was in half, Right, that's the starting point. Yeah, another half of those drop off before a grand jury or the first evidentiary hearing

in whatever jurisdictions. One statistic use site a lot is it's seventy five percent of people don't call the police to report when a crime happens to them. Is that because they actually don't believe the system can deliver what they want. Yes, survivors, And I say this as a survivor myself. I've survived rape, I've survived assault, I've lost loved ones to murder. I've loved many people who've gone through this kind of pain. Right, so this is not

theoretical for me. And we are of course deeply emotional, like we feel at the best way I even described it. We feel lost, like so profound we'd like ring out our bones to be free of it from the marrow there. And we feel fear so all consuming that at night, in the safety of our beds, and the arms of the people we trust most. We can't fall asleep, and when exhaustion finally takes us, we wake from it with nightmares. We feel rage so all consuming it makes us unrecognizable

even to ourselves. But at the end of the day, we're pragmatic, and there's two things we can't stand. We can't stand the idea of going through it again, and we can't stand the idea of someone else going through it. Those things are intolerable to us as survivors, and so if we're presented with options, we will always choose the option that's can prevent those things we don't stand. So seventy five percent of victims opt out of that system entirely.

They're like, the police will not believe me, and they will not be able to protect me from that violence. And I know that because I've seen a thousand times their failure to do that. Seventy five don't call that remainder or the group of people we reach out to a common justice. And even of those people who elected to participate in the criminal legal system, nine percent of them say yes to us. It's not mercy. It's not because they want to shrink the footprint of mass incarceration.

It's because they want to survive. Wow, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk to Danielle about her own personal journey into this work. Welcome back to some of my best friends are and so, Danielle, you and I have talked about how this works very personal to you as well

as obviously very political. But your own experience as a victim of violence is something that I asked you, was it okay for us to talk about on this show, because I think it's an important way for listeners to understand how you yourself, even as a young adult, committed grand theft auto. That's right. I also committed some violence that I didn't get caught for, which is also typical.

I mean, I was an adolescent. I was an adolescent who had experienced traumatic things, and so I was both foolish and dealing with the reverberations of trauma and so and in the most extreme version, you know, I was brought up on multiple serious charges in the criminal legal system in Chicago, and I and how old were you at the time, fifteen? And I was given a slap on the wrist. It included community service cleaning fire trucks like it definitely didn't like heal my underlying trauma or

shape my consequential decision making. And I don't have criminal record, right.

And at the same time, the people, the young black people I knew in love, who are engaged in exactly the same behaviors as me, face very serious sentences, like some sentences that rolled up into their entire lives, right, And so I came to understand the racism of the criminal legal system as someone who benefited from it, And so I understood that it was then it was my job to make that inequity my enemy and to find people who were fighting that inequity and to fight alongside

them until we won or I died, whichever came first. So Danielle Khalil mentioned to me that you have a three year old son. That's great, congratulations. How do you talk to him about restorative justice. I'm really interested to

know how you're raising him with these values. And so there are a few things, like one is that we've been doing the restorative justice steps in my house since he was like a year and a half, you know, and those steps are you acknowledge what you did acknowledge it's impact, express remorse, make things as right as possible, ideally in a way defined by those harmed, and commit to not doing it again. And so when he's tiny,

it's like he throws a cheery up my head. I'm like, that made me sad because I asked you not to do that. He said, you're sad. I say yeah, he says, I'm sorry. I say, give me a kiss on my forehead. He kisses me. He said, I'll try not to do it again. Done right. It's an eight second process. I mean, one of the things I love about restorative justice is it's just fiercely proportionate, right. And so he does this all the time and is used to it. He has come to expect it from his three year old peers

who are not all used to it. And then we also, you know, he talked to him about my work is getting people free, and what does that mean two or

three year old? How are you explaining it with So for a while we talked about freedom as people being able to be with the people they loved, right, drawing again on Andrea James's wisdom that freedom is mostly about connection, not about getting to do stuff, and for a while for I would say, you know, six months or a year of him being able to talk about getting people free in some vague way. He never asked this question that he finally asked maybe a month ago, where he said, Mamma,

where people when they're not free? Interesting? And I said, in jail? And we had had someone we know and love who was recently incarcerated, and he'd heard us talking about it. I think that's part of what brought this into focus for him. And he said, you know, did the police take him from his home? And I said yeah. And he said how do people get to jail? And I said usually they drive people there in a bus. And he said could he get off the bus and I said no. And he said his jail inside or outside?

And I said it's inside, babe. It's like a lot of rooms and people are in that either by themselves or with some other people. And they locked the doors. And he said do they lock the doors from the inside the outside? And I said from the outside And he said is there a window in that room? And I said sometimes there's a window and he said, well, if there's a window, even if he can't see, he could call out and say I love you, and they

could yell I love you, popa wow. And you know, first, I'm like, there's something about his instinct to find like the place, the crack in the structure where love can get through. Right, He's like, it's not gonna be the bus, it's not the lock it. Oh no, He's like, the window is going to be the thing. Right, There's something in us I think as people. It's so literal, right, it's such it's such a crystal clear expression of like hope and light and connection as you describe. And none

of what I described about prison is disputable. Like I didn't say, baby, it's the grandchild of slavery, it's white supremacy culture writ large. You know. I'm just like it was just it was just literal stuff. And to him it's horrifying because it's not been normalized yet, right, And just the logistics of it I think remind us of

like who we've allowed ourselves to become. That anybody who is not raising their child to fight this has to raise their child to accept this, Like those are the choices and to become a people where mostly what we have to do is raise our children to accept this. I think is devastating for all of us. So, Danielle, I'm writing a book in a way about the parole system. It's called Correction, and it's about parole boards. It's about people who come up for parole, it's about people who

got out on parole. And you know, I mean, in a way, it's an advertisement for restorative justice. You know, I've been going to these parole hearings, and I mean I see families who are victims who have been coming to parole hearings for forty years, and forty years of punishment have happened. Somebody has been in prison for fifty years, and they still feel as unsatisfied and hurt and traumatize as they did at the beginning, that the prison system

has given them nothing. In writing my book, I looked at a ton of victim impact statements to for role boards. Right to your point, right, the number of them that say, I feel exactly the same way I did on that day, exactly the same way, and that is not how healed and healing people feel. And what they ask for is more punishment, because that's the only option that's an offer

to them. As you put it, that's right, And imagine if you had been on the same meds for forty years, and your pain was unrelenting, undiminished, and you went to your doctor and they just wrote you a refill. Like eventually you would be like, this doctor is trash. These meds are trash, right, And I think shame on all of us for not having considered, in the face of what you're describing, this question of like, what we be doing instead for these people who have suffered such horrible harm.

What should we be doing for them instead of this punishment of this person that is accruing as absolutely nothing to them in the end, as absolutely nothing of worth. And it's much easier to get stories to break through than to fully change everybody's minds. And so in part that makes me very hopeful about our chances to really up end this culturally. Danielle, you and I've talked about this,

and I've talked to Ben separately. I mean, I'm you know, I'm honored to be in this conversation with the two of you, who have spent a ton of time up close and personal with people. I mean, the kind of work I do is, you know, it's like book research, so I'm not as close to the actual lives that

you all touch anyway. So my question is, like, I also know that each of you at times expresses deep pessimism or may be, to say, skepticism about what white Americans are capable of when it comes to achieving change at scale. And I've heard you, Danielle, talk about guilt and how it shows up in this mass incarceration crisis. Yeah. So I think we've seen extraordinary pushback to the built power of especially black and brown communities, resisting the permanence,

dominance expansion of mass incarceration in America. Right, And I think we see a deep protection of a status quo that some white people will shift, Right, some white people will come to understand that if, even though it may not be in our material interest, it's in the interest of our humanity to live in a world that is more equitable, and we will choose that, right, We will

choose those values over particular material game. Right. Like that will happen, and some will not, partly because white supremacy culture, like white culture is so retributive and so narrow and so transactional in so many ways that our own cultural framework doesn't allow for a pathway of repair. Right, we

only know a pathway of punishment. The catch twenty two in it for me is that, as someone who does work on shame all the time, the only pathway I've ever found out of shame as accountability, the only one, you know, just like when we're on the receiving end of you know, when we lose somebody, we know there's a process, there's like a grieving process and stages of grief, and those things are are the things that restore us to our connection with one another, to our sense of

self love, to our sense of dignity, right like we get through those We do those things through our grief work. And I really I think accountability is the corollary to grief for those of us who have caused harm. That it's in the process us of acknowledgement and repair that

we regain our dignity, our connection, our self worth. I think white people are ashamed of what we have done, and we are terrified at the prospect of being ashamed of our own children, being ashamed of us, right, and that we do what ashamed people do, which is we commit violence. We do it interpersonally, we do it and as white people, because we have access to systems and structure as we do it systematically too, Yeah, and we do it by erasure. Yeah. For my part, I am

definitely full of my pessimism. And I mean especially seeing these last couple of years. You know, first we have George Floyd and this promise, and then all of the retrenchment on crime, all the tough on crime stuff that

has happened since. But listening to you, Danielle, the reason when you were talking about the doing restorative justice practices with your child, with your son, there's something so natural about that and so normal that as long as you don't think of another person as an abstraction, as some scary other like that, that that idea, even the analogy of how we hold our own children, our own families accountable,

just makes so much sense. And I think about what you do and how how that idea could spread, And at least I'm hearing it sounds like, even in this moment of retrenchment and backlash, it sounds like you're expanding from Brooklyn to other boroughs. Correct, that's right, and we're starting to support more and more groups doing aligned things Nationally.

I think the range of possibilities in this country is rapidly and vastly widening, like the best and worst are most as far apart as they've been in a historical moment that I know. But I'm with Khalil Muhammado's historians. I'm cautious about making too broad acclaim about the past in this person's presence. Well you have. You have totally inspired me and and anyone listening to this zation knows that that's not easily done in light of how I do think about the past and how sticky it is.

But Danielle, just so happy that you are able to be with us today and to share your work, your vision, your experiences. Your little guy is going to be something special just like his mommy. And if we could just clone both of you, the world would be a better place. Thank you so much for all of us, for all of your really incredible one. Thank you, Thank you, Danielle. Yeah,

this conversation just I think is so valuable. It reminds me why it's so important to be hopeful, because just reading the newspapers and listening to politicians isn't really the best way to know what's going on in this big, big, big country. And in light of what we talked about last season about our experiences in Europe and seeing how people are treated with dignity, how they treated as individuals

in prisons in other countries. Yeah, that's right. The whole purpose of restoring them to humanity, even though that's happening inside of the bars. Kind of the point is that people have dignity at all times and it's inviolable, and

so much of what Danielle sarahad is about is that. Yeah, I'll just sort of even repeat what we sit at the beginning, is that, you know, the work that she's doing is talking about people who committed violent crimes and people who suffered from violent crimes, and that's where we as a country, we haven't worked in that space. We're not doing it enough. And we just had a long ass conversation about how you actually can. And then on both sides of that, people are better by coming together

and not relying on prisons. Yeah, like literally, in the kind of language of economists, better outcomes on both sides of the equation. It's a total win win, and so beautifully she put it. I mean, you know, just like, don't people deserve that? Yeah, Thanky, she's not an economist. Yeah, well, Khalil love you, love you too, man. All right, all right. Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil,

Gibron Muhammed, and my best friend Ben Austin. It's produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. At Pushkin thanks to Leita Mullad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Gretta Kone, and Jacob Weissberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the Brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his music at his website Avery R.

Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. J Danielle, I didn't hear your response to the question I'm embarrassed, but is it Sarada. It's Sarah nobody knows, Sarah. It's never been the fight I've decided to pick because the things I want to get

right in this country. Pronunciation my name never rose. In seventh grade, I learned I had to fight because my seventh grade yearbook listed me as Khalua Muhammad. Yes. No, not even close. And it's not because you had a reputation for like drinking kind of weird coffee type booze in class note in seventh grade