Highlights from our Beyond Bars Event
We were so grateful to partner with the Nasher Museum to host an event in conjunction with the exhibit Processing Systems: Numbers by Sherrill Roland. The exhibit features work by Sherrill Roland, Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of North Carolina from his ongoing exploration of the criminal justice system. The works are part of a cross-disciplinary project that critically examines United States Federal and State Correctional Identification Numbers, which are assigned to inmates upon incarceration and historically have been used to reduce individuals to a series of digits. Roland, who was wrongfully incarcerated in 2013, uses this numeric system to generate artworks that follow specific rules, like the sudoku puzzles that helped him pass time while he was in prison. Learn more about the exhibit on the Nasher's website.
In our event, Beyond Bars: The Hidden Cost of the Criminal Legal System, we hosted members of the Duke Law community in conversation with Sherrill Roland about the wide ranging impacts of the criminal legal system, moderated by Wilson Center policy analyst Lindsay Bass-Patel. Here are some highlights from the conversation:
Sherill Roland on how his time in prison has affected his work: "I felt that the law was a weapon that was used against me because it was so unknown to me...I felt like I wanted that power. I wanted to know it myself. I wanted to also not weaponize it too much, but I wanted to arm the community so that nobody else could have the potential of being taken advantage in that way, because it's a massive machine."
Professor Jim Coleman, Director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic on the impact on his clients: "We see the system at its worst, where it's failed and our clients have spent years and sometimes decades in prison...When they go in, their life stops. Their life stops, and they're under complete control of the prison. And then 30 years later, they're released. The rest of the world kept going, and they are at the same place they were when they went in, and they have to adjust. Most of them have lost contact with people they knew. They're put out on the street. They can't get a job. They're in poor health. They almost always are suffering from PTSD. And so they're a wreck, honestly. And one of the things that we discovered in the course of our work is that getting our clients out of prison by showing that they were innocent turns out to be the easy part. Trying to help them to have a life once they get out is the really difficult part, and we haven't mastered that yet."
Professor Elana Fogel, Director of the Criminal Defense Clinic on the coercion clients sometimes face to accept a guilty plea: "Folks feel pressure to accept guilty pleas, even when innocent or even when there is insufficient evidence to prove their guilt...even if there's a very tenuous case against you, if somebody comes in and says you've been in a cage for 30 days and you can walk out today, but you've got to take another notch on your record and make it even more difficult for you to get restabilized and back to work, it is very hard to have a conversation with that client...So waiving rights in exchange for less time is often the other side of the coercive choice that folks face and the pressure they feel and are put to to accept and admit their guilt, despite us often not knowing the state of the evidence at the point that those decisions are made."
Duke Law Student Max Tinter, member of the Duke Decarceration Project and Research Assistant with the Wilson Center on what suprised him coming into the field and working with clients: "People who get caught stealing diapers go to jail. People who write a false check at the grocery store because they can't afford groceries, otherwise, get arrested. People who're clearly having a mental health crisis but don't have a home to go back to are arrested and sent to custody. And those things should absolutely surprise us...It costs $130 a day to incarcerate someone for stealing $50 worth of diapers? That's nuts."
Watch the full discussion on YouTube.