Discussions on Downstate: Prisons Cannot Protect Us
On Saturday, December 3, a panel discussion was held at Playwrights Horizons. Below are edited and transcribed highlights from the full discussion. To read more about the other events in this series and for program curator Sivan Battat's curatorial framing essay, please click here.
"Prisons Cannot Protect Us”* with panelists Dr. Emily Horowitz, Willie Trent, and Judith Levine
“Why should we care about those who have done terrible things to others? After all, society tells us, they made a choice to do something that caused their predicament. Yet the reality is that registries do absolutely nothing to deal with the scourge of sexual harm. They don’t make us safer. They’re merely a punitive tool of social control that subjects millions to cruelty and harm that then spreads to their families and communities.”
-Dr. Emily Horowitz
Downstate asks: What do we do with these individuals in society? What might we do better? How do we heal from harm without repeating the cycle? This conversation with justice field experts and those affected by the registry engages with the challenging, visceral questions around the justice system brought up by Bruce Norris' gripping work.
SIVAN:
Willie, can we begin with you? Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to work on issues of this?
WILLIE:
…Good evening everybody. My name is Willie Trent…. I'm here because I'm actually on the registry from Suffolk County, New York. I got placed on the registry in 1998, two years after the registry fervor kicked in, but I didn’t know nothing about that at the time.… When I was … a rather young man, I had a sexual interaction with a young lady, took her to a beach, did some inappropriate things. She wound up getting pregnant. So when she gets pregnant, she's in school, she's throwing up, she goes to the counselors, they're like, what's going on? …They bring in the caseworker, social workers, and the detectives, and they bring in the Special Victims Unit. And she's like, “Yeah, my boyfriend, we had sex the other day, whatever.”
At that point, they pulled me in, detectives pulled me over. “Willie, last time we seen you with a young lady, she's been missing…. We need you to come down to the detective bureau and tell us what you know, the last time you seen her, cuz we think she might be kidnapped or something.” I'm like, “Wow, I'll be right there.” … So I go…. they're like, “When's the last time you seen her?” I start explaining all the details. So they're like, “Alright, we just need you to put that in writing, and we'll follow up on it.” So I go in there like, “No problem, I really hope you find her, I hope everything's okay….” So when they're done, they're like, “Alright, Mr. Trent, we got good news and bad news.” …They're like, “Well, the good news is she's not really missing, the bad news is we're gonna charge you with statutory rape…. You're gonna be arraigned tomorrow. And we're gonna put it through the criminal justice system.”
So, long story short, I go through the process. Family ponies up every little bit of money they got. They're talking 12 ½ to 25 years. I'm like, “No way, this has gotta be some kind of error, a mistake.” So, the detectives, we get a private investigator, all that good stuff. They do their homework. They're like, “Look, there's definitely been an incident here where there was sexual relations … but she wasn't strong armed into the park. She wasn't strangled.” Cause they portrayed it like a Hollywood narrative, like a … novel. Like, you know, you drug her in a wooded area, it was real good writing…
So anyway, long story short, I wind up copping out three and a half to 12 years. I did eight years in prison. That was a very lengthy eight years, very rough eight years. While within the Department of Corrections, every time they came up with a program that was supposed to be therapeutic because you got a sex charge, they made you take it. So every 90 days or six months, they came up with a new program for therapeutic needs, the prime candidate was me. “Willie, you gotta take that program.”
So prison was one thing, but I never had a reality of what it was gonna be like when I got out. So in prison we’re thinking we’re gonna do all these programs, gonna come home, get a job and reintegrate back into society, no big deal.
So, it comes time to get out. I'm like, “I'm gonna go to school and I'ma just work. I'll just, you know, slowly put my life back together.” …So when I go to college and I apply, at this particular time, they had on the application Question Number 10, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” And when I put, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” They said, “Alright, what is the felony?” Once I told them what the felony was, the whole dynamics of the room changed. And then a whole different group of people came in and they're like, “Willie, we need you to write a five page essay. You have to detail your criminal history in your own words. You have to bring in your rap sheet. If you're on parole probation, we need to speak to your parole probation officer.”
So I submit that paperwork. After submitting that paperwork, they're like, “Denied.” Denied admission. I’m like, “So what am I denied for?” They're like, “Well, we think you pose a threat to the safety of the campus.” So now this is 2009. So two years later, 2011, I reapply. Denied. 2013 comes, I apply. Denied. This is six years now, trying to get into college. Now I'm not just talking one college, I'm talking multiple colleges….
So I actually go to Columbia University, they had a conference there, like a workshop, and I'm talking to the students that's in the social work program, and they're like, “What do you go to school for?” And I'm like, “Uh, I really don't go to school … they don't wanna let me into school.” They're like, “Nah, you're kidding.” …I’m like, “Alright, so you guys aid and assist me. Go along with me. We'll take a trip to some of these colleges. You could actually see the process with me and we'll see what the results are.” They're like, “Sure, Willie, no problem.” So I get some real smart students, the A class students, ...So they wound up working to aid and assist me in getting into John Jay University. So I got into John Jay, same thing. They denied me initially …I said, “Listen, just let me speak to somebody that’s got some power….” So when I go speak to him, he's an ex-FBI guy. He's like, “Willie, what's your story?” …So I tell him, and he's like, “Alright, I'm gonna let you in.” And just like that. I got in.
SIVAN:
Thank you, Willie. Thank you so much. How did each of you come to work on issues of the registry?...
EMILY:
… It's sort of like once you learn a little bit about what life is like on the registry, you cannot look away. It's so horrifying…. My book, a lot of it is about how people on the registry have low recidivism rates. It doesn't protect anyone. 95% of sexual harm occurs within families and non-strangers. But this book that's coming out very soon is really much more about the cruelty and mean-spiritedness and horror that people on registries face and what they live under. And it's gotten a lot worse. The book I published in 2015 was much more optimistic and talked about some potential reforms and ways we could roll back this endless punishment that's just cruel and horrible…. I'd kind of thought maybe I'd write about something else. But after that book, like Judith, I got lots and lots of calls from people directly impacted by these laws and their family. And they're just crazy. They're useless. They're mean-spirited. They're cruel. And nobody will listen. There's so much hysteria. People, Judith and I talk about this, like our leftist friends, feminists. It's very, very hard to make people think rationally. And I love this play because I think it's a really good effort to humanize. I mean, it's so horrible to use the word humanize. They're humans. But you have to humanize people who've made mistakes and done bad things. And I struggle with how to communicate to people: why are sexual mistakes or crimes that are sexual so much worse and treated so much more differently? why can't we forgive and accept that people can be punished and change? ...
SIVAN:
I'd like to talk about the registry in practice for a few moments. The theory versus the practice of how the sex offense registry is working. Emily, you have, as you mentioned, a book, Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us. I'm wondering – of course, for those who have seen Downstate, the play does cover some of this – but I'd love to hear from you directly based on your research and your work, how is the registry meant to function and how does it work?... And then, how is the registry failing to protect children and why?
EMILY:
Well, registries originated as a way to police gay sex. They started in the forties and they would list men who were arrested for consensual adult relations to keep track of them. And then in the nineties (this is like really fast), feminists worked together with tough-on-crime law and order politicians to promote the idea that people who committed sex offenses should be listed on a registry … based on the myth that people who commit these offenses have frightening and high rates of recidivism. They can't stop. They won't stop. They’re quote unquote “predatory.” They're animals. They're not human. They're driven by this. So they need to be listed on a registry. And they were never intended to work as anything but to punish, stigmatize and banish… The advocates for them in the nineties included the parents of murdered children. Many of these laws are named for white, middle class, very young children who were abducted and murdered, most often not by people on registries. But this fear gripped the public, that they were being abducted by people who had committed sex offenses in the past by strangers, and they took off.
It's a bipartisan love affair with registries. Bill Clinton signed Megan's Law, Democrats and Republicans united and came together over registries. Feminists are very divided in recent years. Judith’s book, she can tell you more about that, but she talks about feminist anti-carceral efforts to push back against registries. But many feminists advocate very strongly for registries and these laws. So they never came about because of anything rational. They were political. They were emotional. They were a way for politicians to say, “We care about the children and we hate sex offenders,” people convicted of sex offenses.
It fails to protect children because most sexual harm occurs within families, among people who know one another. Very few children are sexually abducted by strangers or are harmed by strangers. “Stranger danger” is largely a myth, and there's been a lot written about that, but it drives much of our culture and the way we raise our children. So they were never good faith efforts to protect children. They came out of fear and hysteria and political goals.
SIVAN:
…To elaborate on this, Judith, we’ve spoken about the stated goal of the registry and of carceral systems versus the actual goals of the registry and of carceral systems. So can you speak a little bit about what is the registry effective in accomplishing and towards whom and if possible, put that in context with other carceral systems?
JUDITH:
I think this play shows very dramatically the ways in which not only, as Emily was saying, registries and all of the restrictions that go with them don't protect anyone; they also do not do what we would hope a rational justice system would do, which would be to hold people accountable for the wrongs that they do and the harm that they do. The criminal justice system, not just around sex crimes, but around all crimes, really defeats accountability. And it also defeats the ability for the harmed person to repair the harm, to get something back and to heal from the harm. When you're a criminal defendant, your job is to say you didn't do it. Even if you did do it, your defense attorney's job is to say you didn't do it, or if you did it, it wasn't really your fault and someone else was involved … and then what you see in this play is how punishment continues. It makes people feel bitter, frustrated, angry. They can never get on with life. They can't atone for their sins and then go forward and do good in the world as Willie's talking about doing. So it doesn't hold anyone accountable. It doesn't keep anyone safer. And the other thing it doesn't do is that it's not really satisfying for the victim.
…I mean, at the moment when a very terrible, terrible thing happens to you, when you're grieving, often your first reaction is rage. And so that's the moment at which we sentence a person and send the person to prison. And as Emily was suggesting, prison sentences have gotten longer and longer and longer, particularly for sex crimes. But many people find as time goes by that the fact that this person is locked up for a long time is really not healing them.
And you see this victim who has just stewed in this his whole life, and he's broken by it and wants to break others for it. I can talk later about Restorative Justice practices, which really do hold people accountable. They allow the victim to speak about the harms that have been done to her or him, and then also find a way to repair the harm and then to be able to re-embrace that person back into the community so that they can do good with their lives rather than continue to live in isolation, banishment and frustration….
…
SIVAN:
Willie, I'd love to turn to you on this question of theory versus practice as well….
WILLIE:
On my own personal level … there's zero tolerance with law enforcement. So in the play there was dialogue between the parole officer and the individual. In real life it doesn't work out that way at all. Either you sign the condition or you go back to prison. Parole's a privilege, you have no right to parole and they make that very clear. In my own particular case, on the registry in … Suffolk County, you get a GPS, they're putting a big goofy GPS on you and somehow it conveniently goes off at all the wrong times. Like when you're in class, when you're in social service, in a play, something like this panel, all of a sudden you get a beep beep beep and everybody's looking around and you can't control it. They control it manually from wherever they are. It's a way of humiliating you and shaming ... It's not like it's an accident. So that's one thing. And another thing I noticed is that, in theory, everybody's entitled to an education … and the reality I came up with is … if you have a murder or rape, they don't really want you on the campus. The theory is that everybody's entitled to an education. The practicality is they got so many levels and barriers that dissuade you….
As far as housing, in Long Island, they created a housing law. So once they realized that certain landlords were willing to rent to people on the registry, they started attacking those landlords, writing them citations. High grass, vehicle inappropriately parked. They basically were harassing the landlords that were housing people on the registry.
And then they came up with something where they started just basically putting rocks in vacant spaces, girl scouts, boy scouts, and they started naming them “parks.” And they did that as a way of social ordinance to zone the registrants out of existence. That's what they said publicly, “It's designed to zone the registrants out of existence.” Like, we're gonna just go from a big blob, get smaller, smaller, and eventually just dissipate like a gas, they thought.
And I'm like, how are they able to have these kind of discussions publicly? And in a room with people who are highly educated. We're not talking about laymen, we're talking about people that’s clinicians, who teach the class, who teach these workshops, and they're going along with this. So it's not really about the research from my experience, the research doesn't play much into this. It's more about just being tough on crime.
And many people say, “Willie, if you can give me something to give my constituents, I can make some change.” I'm like, how could you really package that in a way that's politically acceptable? I don't know how to do it. And if somebody can do it, I think there would be some changes. But as far as the facts, they don't really play too much into the equation from my experience.
SIVAN:
Thank you. Just to pivot the conversation a little bit towards looking forward, the sex offense registry is harming those who live on the registry, as Downstate shows, as this play shows if you’ve seen it, as this conversation has continued to demonstrate. It's also ineffective point blank at protecting children, as so much of all three of your work is discussing.
And the binary between sex offender and victim is also a false one, as we also see in the play Downstate. We know that statistically, and we just spoke about this on the previous panel as well, that a very high number of individuals convicted of sex crimes are, themselves, also survivors of sexual violence, just if you look at the numbers.
So what do we as a society, and specifically policy makers, need to address in order to actually prevent true threats to child safety? Emily, Judith, do either one of you wanna begin?
JUDITH:
I think we should start by having housing for everyone, healthcare for everyone, good educations for everyone. Everyone, including adults. Good sex education, nutrition, all the rest of it. Because people who are in satisfactory situations do not usually do violence to other people. One thing that Emily also suggested is that even people who are involved in criminal legal reform also exclude people who are on the sex offender registry, so that whenever there is a reform that's up for a vote, generally the sex offender is traded away as a pawn right in the beginning.
One of the things people always say is, “Well, we should give people therapy.” And I also think probably everyone needs therapy, and certainly anyone who's gone to prison needs therapy, because prison itself is a traumatic, violence-producing, humiliating, and horrible experience for anyone.
There is no psychological profile of a person who abuses children. It's sometimes a crime of convenience. It's sometimes a crime of patriarchy, that is, that the child is considered to be yours to use. This is not exactly a psychopathology, it's a sociopathology. So that's another thing that we could do, we could actually respect children, respect their sexuality, respect their boundaries, treat them like human beings. And also condemn those who do not, such as fundamentalist religions. I mean, the very same people who are pushing the sex offender registry also have ideologies and practices that make life difficult for children. So, these are none of the solutions that are ever given for what we should do about sex offenses.
Oh, and the last one I would say is, there are many different feminisms, but I do think that feminism, which says that people have their own bodies – and we still have it in spite of Dobbs – that we have a right to our own bodies, to autonomy over our own bodies. Everyone does. Every human being does.
Feminism has actually, I think, had an effect in reducing sexual crime. Not just because people will reveal when they have been harmed themselves, but because it is less acceptable to do it. I mean, when I was a kid, you would get on the subway and someone would expose themself to you. I mean, it happened every day when you were 12 years old. That doesn't happen anymore because it's no longer acceptable. So I think these are social, economic and political responses to prevent sexual harm….
EMILY:
The Crimes Against Children Resource Center, which is where they keep all the data on documented cases of Child Sex Abuse, found that rates of Child Sexual Abuse started falling dramatically before the registry in the early nineties, partly as a result of feminist movements, and awareness, and a cultural change that took Child Sexual Abuse as a serious problem. Children were believed, and it was elevated as a serious social issue and not a myth. And also, as a result of increasing economic prosperity. We know when unemployment goes up and poverty goes up, rates of all forms of child abuse go up. I mean, the most prevalent form of child abuse is physical abuse and neglect and maltreatment, Child Sexual Abuse is a very small portion of that. So I always get a little irked when people are like, “What do you think about child safety?” I'm like, “Well, Child Sexual Abuse, there's a lot of people working on that. There's a ton of money and resources devoted to that. Not so much to physical abuse, maltreatment and neglect, which are all correlated with poverty.” ...
SIVAN:
Thank you. There's a language here that I'd like to bring in of Abolition, which some folks might hear as an abolishing of a system, which it is. It's about abolishing policing, prisons, carceral systems, registries. But it's also about building something, and it's about creating. It's using our imaginations to imagine what resources could our society thrive if they had access to, and could our people thrive if they had access to. And so I think Abolition, as an organizing tool, as a vision, as a movement, is an answer not just to Child Sexual Abuse, but to other systems of child violence and adult violence and all types of, quote unquote, what we label as “crime” in this country.
So I just wanted to bring that language in here. Let's pivot to speaking a little bit specifically about Downstate, and about the play whose home we are sitting in as we speak. Willie, I'd love to start with you on this. Can you share a little bit about how the stories demonstrated in Downstate relate to some of the realities you've encountered of people living on the registry, and are there any other realities you'd like to add into the fold in terms of obstacles?
WILLIE:
I think the play was a really good play. It really captured a lot of the real dynamics that exist with individuals on the registry. Even looking at the house, the sober house, they have weights in the living room. That's something that a guy who spent a lot of time in prison would do. That's not really what most people do, they usually go to the gym or something like that. But a guy who's a couple years in has no problem turning the middle of the living room into a gym.
And then, when the parole officer was like, “You can't go to the IGA no more because they've expanded their feets up to 2,500 and the IGA’s off limits now." In Suffolk County, that was really real, like daily, they would just modify how far you can go because people were putting rocks in the ground. They were like, “This is Hamlet Park now.” It's like, “This is a weeded area.” But now it's Hamlet Park because the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts cleaned that area up, they put a rock with some glitter on it. So now that's a park, that's really something that was happening. And as far as the travel, they go as the crow flies, so it doesn't even have nothing to do with the highway. As if we are riding around in jets. And when you start seeing some of that stuff really play out, on some level you be like, “This has gotta be a joke. How could this actually be legally passing? Like, law enforcement, social workers, people are actually doing press conferences saying this is a good law.” Even the Black guy who was overly caring, in the sober houses, those kinds of relationships do happen. There's an older guy in there, and people just start taking a liking to him, like a grandfather figure, and people do become protective of him. That happens in real life. So I was like, “Who did this? He did a really good job.”...
SIVAN:
Emily, do you want to add anything in terms of other obstacles or how these stories relate to the folks you've worked with and met?
EMILY:
Yeah, I thought it was amazing just how everything they wanna do, they can’t. They want to go to the grocery store. They can't go to the grocery store. They're harassed, they want them out of the house, they can't go here, they can't go there. They're just beat down at every single moment, they can't catch a break. I mean, there's tons of obstacles, with housing, with employment. It's so hard to get a job if you're on the registry. It's so hard to find housing. It's so hard to do anything. You can't even travel within the United States, you can't even go to another state, and they hit on that, which I thought was really great.
And the other thing that really comes through is that you're so isolated, because people on the registry are rejected by friends, families, and social networks. So there's a huge feeling, or a huge reality, of social isolation and banishment. You're just throwing people in the garbage and you don't think their lives matter because they did something that you're judging them as crossing some line. This play captured the cruelty and the pain of their existence….
JUDITH:
And just to add on to it, I just want everybody to know, civil confinement is not civil. They’re actually in prison. So, they're saying it’s civil confinement as if they're in society, but civil confinement is actually within the Department of Corrections. That's a prison outside of a prison, but it's behind a barbed wire gate. It's patrolled by correctional officers. They cannot go home. They cannot order fast food. They're in prison. So there’s nothing civil about it.
SIVAN:
Thank you. At this point I'm going to turn over to … some of your Q&A questions…. “In what way do you think we can differentiate serial offenders and one-time offenders within the registry? Is there a realistic way of abolishing the registry while accounting for victim advocacy?”
EMILY:
I can answer that. I mean, we don't need a registry. If you commit a second offense, you'll get the book thrown at you. When you're arrested and convicted of a sex offense, you go to prison, you have to get through supervision, and if you ever offend again, you will go away for that. The registry does not prevent any sex offenses. So, even if somebody is a quote unquote “serial offender,” they're not gonna be running around the streets. I've never met anybody who's had a second sex offense who hasn't gotten decades in response. Our criminal justice system is really good at punishment. We don't need a registry.
SIVAN:
Thank you. For any of you, “At this time, is there a way to be removed from the registry?”
WILLIE:
Well, there is a way in theory to be removed from the registry. In theory you can petition. First, you gotta get a certificate of good conduct – what they would advise, you don't have to. I'm actually in the process. It's supposed to be that within 45 days, they're supposed to respond. I'm going on five months, no answer. All right. So, you submit a packet to the Department of Criminal Justice, they give you the certificate of good conduct or deny you…. There's a tier system. Three is a predator, two is moderate, one is low risk. But it's all discretionary based on how the report's written and who reviews it. It's not real empirical data. They can override it, make you a higher risk. They can downgrade it, make you a lower risk. That's discretionary. So after you do that, you can petition every year and you can show how you've been reformed and rehabilitated.
And in an ideal world, they'll take that into consideration and they'll say, “This individual is a remarkable citizen, no longer needed to be on this or that level,” and they'll depart. I have yet to see it personally. I'm sure there's somebody that actually did get a downward departure. I just haven't met 'em yet or heard of that.
EMILY:
In states like California, there are ways to get off the registry. It's very difficult and it's not widespread, and you need representation and money to file, but there are some states where there is a path off, but it's pretty nightmarish.
SIVAN:
To the next question here, what does the strategy for advocacy around challenging registry laws look like? And do activists have a cohesive plan, narrative, movement? Tell us a little bit about the work that's happening.
JUDITH:
Oh, Bill Dobbs is in the audience, who is very active in this area and critical of its incoherence. First of all, most of the people who are active against the registry are people who are on the registry and their families.
So, all over the country there are grassroots organizations that really mostly function as support groups, and from time to time they’ll go and lobby and have demonstrations.
There are more and more defense attorneys, legal aid, and even some parole officers who have seen the effects of the registry and the ineffectiveness of the registry, and so are doing some work against it. In my own opinion, the best way that we could do this would be to persuade people in the legal reform and abolition movements to embrace people who are also on the registry or who have sex offenses, because as long as they keep on excluding those people, not only will the registry continue, but also, the things that they do to sex offenders often eventually get done to other people who have felony convictions. There are registries for other things; for animal abuse, for drunk driving, for methamphetamine.
So … it’s a loose grassroots organization. It's mostly reformist. That is, “Let's tweak this and tweak that.” The abolitionist position is that we have to get rid of the whole thing, that it's really not reformable because it is just rotten to the core….
EMILY:
Even people who write about it face so much pushback from colleagues. And so if you're directly impacted, if you're on the registry, you're not gonna feel safe advocating for yourself because you're hidden away.
SIVAN:
Next question here: “One of the complexities of the play for me was that none of the formerly incarcerated men seemed to have taken accountability for the harm they had perpetrated. What would need to happen for a restorative process to be successful in a context like that between Fred and Andy, where it was so frustrating because they were talking past each other?”
I'm curious, in your restorative work at all, Judith, if you'd like to speak to this.
JUDITH:
I haven't done that much, but I actually don't agree with that. I do think it’s a catch-22, because if a person with a sex offense expresses remorse, they're called a liar. So, even when Fred says, “Yes, I have thought about this a lot, yes, I do feel I really wronged you,” Andy won't believe him. And people do sometimes apologize and they don't mean it, that happens all the time. And I also feel, I mean, you see in the end that Dee hates himself, and he's been encouraged to hate himself.
And furthermore, there are many things that are crimes that are not harmful, such as consensual sex between teenagers, and there are harms that are not criminal, such as not giving food and housing to children. The restorative practice, for those of you who don't know, is a group of different practices in which people who have done harm and people who have been harmed, and their friends and communities, are brought together in a facilitated circumstance, with people who are trained to ask the question, “What happened? What harm was done, why was the harm done? And what can be done to repair the harm?”
It is centered around the person who has been harmed. It doesn't happen unless that person wants it to happen. Sometimes you have a surrogate, because often the other person doesn't wanna do it either. It's not compulsory.
But it's often a very, very long process, because it takes a long time for people to take accountability, and it takes a long time for people to express the harm that they feel. And then the group, anybody who's in that group, works with the harm-doer and the harmed person, to find a way that is acceptable to the harmed person to repair the harm. It could be money, it could be community service, it could be a lot of things. In fact, apology is considered kind of a throwaway. It's not over when you apologize.
And then the group keeps track of that person to make sure that they are actually doing what they say they're doing. They're not gonna narc on them and send them back to prison. But the group takes accountability for that person too, because the feeling is that the community has responsibility for all of us, the harm-doers and the others. And then finally, if it feels as if it has been repaired as much as it can be repaired, then the whole group signs off and the contract is finished and it's finished. That's it.
So it's an imperfect practice, it doesn't always work, it's very messy. A lot of people are not very good at it. And then there's another thing called Transformative Justice. Transformative Justice recognizes that it's not just about individuals, but violence is done within a context, a political context, a community context. And so there's an effort to understand that and also to address those things to create communities in which violence is not acceptable, and is much less likely to happen, and also in which there are networks of mutual aid so that people can feel safe not calling the police, but calling each other.
So, as I said, it's not perfect and it's not gonna work for everybody….
…
SIVAN:
Well, we're gonna close out here in a moment, but I'd like to turn to each of you with this question as we close out. Where can folks turn for additional resources on this work, if anywhere? Of course each of your books, The Feminist and the Sex Offender, Protecting Our Children?...
EMILY:
I would just say, be really cynical when you watch the news and read the paper every single time. I noticed the other day there was a slow news day and there was like five stories about sex trafficking and Child Sexual Abuse and rings and all this craziness, which is not the reality when we overpunish people who are convicted of sex offenses to the point where it's obscene, it’s terrible.
I guess just be mindful and be aware that this is crazy. It's crazy the way people that have been convicted of sex offenses are treated and viewed and our whole culture's understanding of this is completely unrealistic and irrational and hysterical.
JUDITH:
If you want to find out more about Restorative Justice, just google it cuz there is actually really a lot of information about it and there are places where you can be trained and participate in it. … There's some really good books that have come out recently about feminist abolitionism, which is a mixture of caring about justice and the carceral system that we have, which is, I would just add, also a racist system.
I also wanna say that the carceral system is not malfunctioning. It's doing what it's supposed to do, which is to, not to put too fine a point on it, but perpetuate white supremacy and capitalism and the rest of it. Because even though if you watch Law and Order, the sex offender is always white, there's a disproportionate number of people of color on the sex offender registry and in prison, of course. So there's a book Angela Davis has just recently, she's written a number of books about Abolition Feminism. There's a really wonderful woman named Mariame Kaba, who's written a number of books…. I would recommend those and Emily's book if you wanna really know about the details of the registry and what it's like to be on it, Emily's books are really the books to read.
SIVAN:
Willie, do you have any closing thoughts?
WILLIE:
Yeah, so I definitely would agree with Judith. She has great books as well.
…When you’re doing what you're doing in your personal life, in your professional life, really just take the stance to do what's right. You know what's right. A lot of times you're gonna be confronted with pressure to go along because of your jobs, and I'm not saying lose your job, but at the end of the day, if you could work behind the scenes and talk to your coworker, like, “This is kind of really off the radar right here. Is there anything we could do?” Likely you're gonna get the pushback … but if you could just make whatever change you could make on your own individual level, I think that'd be far more beneficial than a whole bunch of ceremonial this-and-that. That's just from my own personal experience.
EMILY:
And can I say one thing that Willie did by pushing it and pushing it and forcing CUNY to accept you, and let you go there even though they don't let you have all the privileges of a regular student? (Which you should sue them for because they … but we'll talk about that later.) But now they've convened a working group where they're going to develop a policy for allowing people who have prior sex convictions on campus.
So it's all because of Willie, so that's pretty awesome.
WILLIE:
And the assistance of countless people like you.
SIVAN:
Well, with that we'll close for today. Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.
About the Panelists
Emily Horowitz (Ph.D., Yale University, 2002) is a Professor and Chair of Sociology and Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, where she founded and co-directs a college degree program for those with criminal-legal involvement. She is the author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us (Praeger, 2015). Her From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear is forthcoming (January 2023) from ABC-CLIO/Bloomsbury. Emily is also a policy advocate who challenges public conviction registries and banishment laws, and serves on the board of several national organizations engaged in this work.
Judith Levine is a journalist and activist who writes about the intersections between the body and the body politic. She is the author of five books, most recently The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence, with Erica R. Meiners (Verso, 2020), and hundreds of articles and personal essays, mostly on sex, justice, and feminism. She is a co-founder of the National Writers Union and No More Nice Girls and is currently most active in securing abortion access and reproductive justice in the U.S. www.judithlevine.org
Willie Trent is from Long Island New York, and advocates abolishing the Sex offender registry. Willie has worked with diverse community activists to share and revel in tales of travesty and triumph encountered by those affected by the registry. Willie has paneled on The Ban The Box Campaign, and The Criminal Justice Investment Initiative, and is a member of several grassroots organizations. Willie presently works in the construction field and is pursuing a Bachelor of Criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
About the Curator & Facilitator
Sivan Battat (she/they) is a theater director and community organizer, and the Associate Artistic Director of Noor Theatre. Sivan seeks to bridge justice work and cultural work, bringing the power of performance to our movements, and the vision of movement work to our theaters. www.sivanbattat.com
Downstate was co-commissioned and its world premiere was presented by Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Anna Shapiro, Artistic Director; David Schmitz, Executive Director) and The National Theatre, London (Rufus Norris, Artistic Director; Lisa Burger, Executive Director).
This production has received generous support from the Roy Cockrum Foundation and the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.
Downstate was co-commissioned and its world premiere was presented by Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Anna Shapiro, Artistic Director; David Schmitz, Executive Director) and The National Theatre, London (Rufus Norris, Artistic Director; Lisa Burger, Executive Director).
