Title: RDAP DAN
Show: RDAP DAN
Date: 2018-06-26
URL: https://youtu.be/R_oIObeqj6U
Duration: 20:00

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[00:00] Congress makes 50 new crimes per year can you imagine such a thing 50 new crimes per year so this is something that was legal last year is a felony this year and will send you to jail or prison that's just not normal normal countries don't do things like that [Music]

[00:41] I heard you speak a little bit about the living conditions and how prison reform is a huge concern of yours now now I've known other high-profile cases the minute they start to speak on anything immediately they're shipped around you found a way through your communication which I read through the Huffington Post found a way to not be affected by the diesel therapy and for those people that don't know what usual therapy is I'm what you explained it but explain how

[01:12] your how you're able to continue outing the prison system and the work that needed to be done and not getting shipped around it was an odyssey before I went to prison one of my attorneys said hey once you get comfortable write us a letter and we'll e-mail it around to your supporters there were like 600 people who had signed on to an email list just wanting an update to see how I was so six weeks in I wrote this letter

[01:46] and I told a couple of stories that I didn't even realize were we're stories about the guards breaking the law in targeting me so I sent it to my attorneys I didn't realize that one of my attorneys was friends with Arianna Huffington and so she sent it to Arianna and Arianna plastered it as this banner headline on the Huffington Post I got more than a million hits and within days it had been picked up by every major

[02:16] newspaper all the network news broadcast CNN came to the Jake Tapper came to the prison to interview me I was on NPR from the prison I mean it was ridiculous and so and so the guards started threatening me and then there was one who was actually friendly like only when we were alone he was friendly he was supportive he actually told me once that he thought it was a miscarriage of justice that I

[02:48] was in there and he said to me hey you need to you need to watch out they're talking about putting you in diesel therapy I said what's that I had never heard of it before well what it is is if you're a prisoner who's deemed to be something of a troublemaker they will put you in transit status now they'll put you on a prison bus send you to USP Kane in the penitentiary which is a transportation hub for the Northeast you might be in Canaan for a week a month six months

[03:18] whatever you don't know they put you on another bus to Harrisburg in Harrisburg they put you on a con air flight to USP Atlanta you stay there for a period of time then they send you to Oklahoma City which is the national transportation hub from there maybe you go to Yankton or Springfield or Denver or Lompoc or whatever well they can keep you in transit status for two years the thing is is when you're in transit status you don't have access to email to a phone or

[03:49] to a pen and paper it's it's a way to legally silence you so what I did is I wrote about this immediately and I sent it to Arianna and she immediately published it at the huffington post and again it just it went viral it went everywhere well Oliver Stone and John Cusack tweeted it they tweeted hands off John Kiriakou and the peace group code pink asked all of their members to call

[04:21] the office of the head of the Bureau of Prisons and complain they logged 1,600 calls to the Bureau of Prisons saying you better not put him in diesel therapy and they all backed off all those Bo P officials they all backed off and I knew that I was Teflon after that so what I did is I filed a Freedom of Information Act request on myself and it was

[04:51] actually very quick it only took about four weeks but I got a big fat package of stuff back most of it was useless it was my visitor list it was my medical records - stupid stuff right but there were eight pages in there that were very clearly marked FOIA exempt do not release to inmate so it was one of two situations either the person doing the FOIA request was so friggin stupid that they didn't see these giant red block letters at the top and bottom saying do not release the

[05:22] inmate or somebody took pity on me and they released it to me on purpose so what it was was a series of memos going back and forth between the warden and the Bo P saying what do we do with this guy he's famous and we're not sure what to do and then finally the warden wrote a it wasn't even a memo so much as it was like a sign in these huge capital letter block letters that went all around the prison and it said caution inmate has access to the media and then underneath that it said inmate is not to

[05:54] have any contact with the public has access to the media so I knew I had him by the balls I knew that I could say anything that I wanted and there was nothing they could do to me and so that's what I did I ended up writing 19 blog posts and they became this book I called them letters from Loreto and I incorporated them into this before the book was even published I won the pen First Amendment award from the pen center USA which is like the preeminent journalistic freedom organization so

[06:27] prison was a quite an experience for you with with what you've accomplished and seeing things I mean it's not very often that somebody from one side of the law from the side you Iran gets to see it from a complete opposite point of view aside from being away from your children what was for you probably the toughest portion of the whole prison sentence you know it was it was brown hot day it's every day is exactly like every other

[06:59] day and it doesn't matter if it's you know July 4th or it's Christmas or it's a Sunday or whatever every day is exactly like the next and or the one before that was one thing that that got old really really fast the other thing that bothered me was these arbitrary nonsensical rules most these guys it's there they were they were scrubs from the military they washed out of the

[07:29] local police academy they couldn't get a job doing anything else and literally the only qualifications you need to be a prison guard or you have to be either working on a GED or with the GED and or a high school diploma and never convicted of a felony that's it so the cream of the crop they're not um and then having to you know answer to these guys that that took some getting used to

[07:59] and a lot of them would try to bait me and I never took the bait never which just wouldn't raise them more there was one cop he had a reputation of being the worst of the worst he was the only he was the only guard who wore a stab vest because he was he was just such a total psychopath that he was justifiably worried that somebody was going to stab him he even covered up his name with a piece of electrical tape because he didn't want anybody to you know get released and then come looking for him so one of the

[08:30] Italians Mike my closest friend in prison said something to him one day he said hey his name was blue his nickname was blue we don't know what his real name he said hey blue where are you gonna be stationed the next quarter and he said um I'm gonna be in central one and he said the Italian said uh my friend Johnson is in central one and blue said the CIA guy and the Italian said yeah blue says I never mess with that guy and the Italian said yeah why

[09:00] not and he said that's all I need I work my eight-hour day and then I go to my car and CNN's waiting for me he said no thanks and that's how they all ended up being they just left me alone that's good that's good that's yeah unfortunate not everybody gets that same experience but it's good that you found a way to really work the system to your benefit what were some of the biggest reforms you said there's a lot of reform needed from what you've seen what just to talk just in just a second on that what was

[09:30] the real issues that you saw the the biggest overall like mirela issue is it has to be sentencing reform you know these draconian drug sentences that we have they have to be and I'm not talking about like just curtail they need to be dispensed with we lock up more people than any other country in the world I mean you've heard the statistic it's chilling but it's true we have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population that's that's not an accident

[10:02] we put ourselves in that position Congress makes 50 new crimes per year can you imagine such a thing 50 new crimes per year so this is something that was legal last year is a felony this year and will send you to jail or prison that's just not normal normal countries don't do things like that we've got to start with drug laws and drug sentencing on them on a more day-to-day level it's got to be medical

[10:32] care I mean in the very short time that I was in prison I saw four guys die for no reason all from preventable illnesses and the shame of it is that nobody gave a that they died you know nobody intervened try to help them and and that's that's just morally wrong you know the government is is duty-bound legally bound to provide adequate medical care and they don't now

[11:04] if you want to get a little bit farther down in the weeds food you know my first full day in prison one of the Italians said oh it's Friday it's fish day I said yeah well I like fish because not this fish we call it Seward trout he said don't ever eat the fish the cafeteria and there are these boxes stacked up behind the the chow line and they're marked Alaskan Pollock product of China which I didn't understand I still don't understand and then underneath that it

[11:35] said feed use only not for human consumption and that was the that was the fish that we eat every single week for the next two years it was Friday huh it was yeah fish Friday was animal feed now there was one terrible incident that actually made the press where the the slaughterhouse the packaging and slaughterhouse that provided prisons in our area with with ground beef it was based in Texas and they accidentally

[12:09] mislabeled a shipment of ground beef it was actually a shipment of dog food and it was mislabeled as ground beef and they sent it to us and we ate it well the shame was not even that we ate dog food the shame was that nobody even realized we had eaten dog food because it tasted exactly the same as the ground beef that we always ate that's how low the quality of the food is it's not human quality food this company was fined eighteen thousand dollars payable

[12:39] to the US Treasury so we never could we never got any of it even indirectly but that just it's just one example of how prisoners are treated as subhumans so having money in prison Audrey Missouri oh yeah and and what I ended up doing is is you know I ended up I ended up eating all my meals with the Italians and so you know four or five days a week they cooked they had a

[13:10] crooked cop on payroll he would bring in pork loin and chicken breast and white wine for the marsala sauce and fresh tomatoes and and mushrooms and I actually gained 25 pounds in prison because the way the Italians cooked I mean I eat like a king otherwise you're exactly right what you do is you go to commissary and you buy bags of chicken and tuna and you know instant rice and spices and and you just cook for yourself it's the only thing you can do

[13:42] you know it's pretty sad that uh you know you guys have a booze idea jumping from rooftops you guys shooting down with an ak-47 splats on the ground and you find a way to to keep them alive and bring them back to health meanwhile you got guys sitting you got Americans sitting in a federal prison aren't dying from gunshots there they're slowly dying but yet there's there's nobody to there to help them it's almost like you're better off being from somewhere else or being somewhere else

[14:13] altogether yeah this is what you're saying is not a joke you're actually not at all money what you're saying is that al-qaeda prisoners get better food and better medical care than American prisoners and that's the honest to God's truth well hopefully people like you that continue to to fight this seemingly uphill fight maybe at some point something that you're doing or something that many others are doing and I like to include myself in that fight maybe

[14:43] something what happened at some point so after getting out of prison you worked at home as a consultant for a medical firm what was that like is you you were working from home now how much halfway house time did they give you no not a single day that was my punishment for going public all the time so I deserved I did the whole stretch no good time nothing I had my good time and I there's of course a federal mandatory 90 days or

[15:15] 10% of whom could find that whichever is less I ended up with 87 days of home confinement so a good friend of mine is his dad and mom were both doctors and they put me on the payroll just to you know help them get their business up and running that lasted only for the period that I was on home confinement and then it went briefly to up to a think-tank here in Washington the oldest think-tank in town focusing on prison reform issues and then I ended up getting my own daily

[15:45] two-hour radio show I've got a syndicated newspaper column every week that runs in 220 small town papers around the country and and I speak at colleges and universities not only around the United States but all over Western Europe I go to Europe all the time talking about the the American prison system and what's wrong with it all of these issues that you now are able to identify how much of this were you aware of prior to going through it yourself none of it so with that said in your

[16:18] next think-tank are you guys trying to find a focus on how you bring this awareness to the population masses of people that do not know that it exists that are just naive to the whole concept how do you do that oh yeah I do that mostly well on my radio show we do a 30-minute segment every Thursday called called criminal injustice in which we we interview a reporter who covers criminal justice issues and the editor-in-chief

[16:49] of prison legal news magazine all right we have them every Thursday for a half an hour and we talk about exactly these issues we've got a good listener ship we've got about 35,000 people that download the podcast every day and then this is almost exclusively what I write about in my in my columns because nobody pays any attention to these issues you know we have so much to learn from our European allies about about recidivism and and job training and education and we think we're smarter than everybody

[17:19] else and we're not we have a lot to learn and so I work hard to get the word out I've been fortunate on Capitol Hill too because I've talked to a whole bunch of congressmen and a handful of senators and this is something where we're the right and the left have come together so you've got the Progressive Caucus and the freedom caucus the the Tea Party that are agreeing on these issues for different reasons but they still agree that especially on drug sentencing laws that these laws have to go I'm glad to

[17:53] see somebody out there is putting in time into this because I and where can people find your radio show your podcast information that you're putting out there should help bring awareness where do people go for this sure it's if you're in the Washington area it's on from 4 to 6 p.m. on 105.5 FM or a 13 90 a.m. that's Washington DC otherwise we're it's called loud and clear and we're podcast on itunes i heart radio and Spreaker and an MSNBC interview you stated people are trained to live for a

[18:25] living they lie to everybody you have to be able to separate lying from work for the betterment of the country and lying just for the sake of lying today looking back what is true for you when it comes to that statement that you made if you have a statement and that statement is exactly why you can't believe the likes of Gina Haskell because at the CIA we are trained liars your job is to recruit spies to steal secrets and in order to recruit spies

[18:55] you have to convince those people that you are their best friend in the world that takes a lot of acting a lot of lying the problem is as I told Chris Hayes in that interview a lot of guys don't know when to turn it off they lie to their wives they lie to their bosses and this is why the CIA has the highest divorce rate in all of the US government it's over 75 percent because they just don't know when to turn it off well you've got to know when to turn it off sometimes lying is good for the country because you're recruiting somebody who's

[19:27] going to help to to protect the country sometimes lying is bad for everybody and you know then it's it's never acceptable you just have to have a moral compass an ethical compass and and know in your heart that you're doing the right thing guys I'm r dot ban federal prison time consulting every day people helping people community is met with one day at a time thank you very much John how about I mean any day any time take care [Music]
