Transcriber: Hanaa Yehia Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
So I had occasion to speak at a boys and girls home,
where there were tens of kids there
who had been removed from their home for one purpose or another.
It wasn't a secure facility,
but they were removed from their homes,
most of them with no fault of their own.
I had the honor to speak to these kids
who were sitting in a room much like this,
and I could just see the wheels turning inside their minds.
The wheels turning,
and thinking, "Poor me. What did I do?"
Or more distressing, "I have no shot."
So I spoke to them for about an hour.
I shared with them a bit of my story.
More importantly, I tried to share with them
that they had the opportunity to do whatever they wanted to do.
And as bad as it feels to be removed from your home,
to be separate from your family,
to be sitting in a home with a houseparent
who's not your parent,
that 20 years from now, none of that would matter
if they made the choice that it wouldn't matter.
And I thought I hit a home run.
They lined up to see me - literally lined up to see me.
Ten kids afterwards, teenagers no less,
lined up to come talk to the secretary.
And in my head, I'm saying,
"Yup, I did that.
I reached those kids.
And now they're coming up to thank me for changing their lives."
First little girl came up, maybe 14, 15.
Actually looked like one of my daughters.
Hair immaculately braided -
that doesn't look like one of my daughters when I braid it, for the record -
pretty little girl, big brown eyes.
She walked up to me, and I said, "Can I help you?"
This little girl then pulled a little piece of paper out of her pocket.
This side of the room will know what that paper said:
P.O. Box 244.
For this side of the room,
that's the P.O. Box for SCI Graterford.
I froze when I saw that address.
But I didn't know what was going to come next,
and I was not prepared for what came next.
Because that little girl looked up at me,
and she asked me a question
that caused me to stop dead.
You know what question she asked me?
She said, "Do you know my daddy?"
"Do you know my daddy?"
I'm a man who believes in data.
I'm a man who believes in research.
I never ever talk to a group
that I don't spit out eight million statistics
about incarceration,
about the impact it's had on communities.
But at that moment,
none of that mattered.
And perhaps for the first time in my career,
things became very clear to me.
This field, our field,
it's not just about incarceration.
It's not even just about rehabilitation.
Our field and where it's at today
is a logical consequence of bad policy decisions over the past 30 years.
(Applause)
But we don't have the luxury to look backwards
and whine about bad policy decisions.
But our numbers, our corrections field today,
is also a logical consequence of your bad decisions,
(Applause)
of your unwillingness to do the right thing,
of you making a decision
that whatever you were doing,
whatever was in that bar or on that corner
was more important than that little girl
who's sitting in a home because her dad's in prison.
So I spend a lot of time criticizing policy.
I spend a lot of time criticizing even decisions I've made.
But at that moment, when I did something I rarely do, which is stop,
it struck me that we all need to stop.
And it really starts with you.
Stop the madness in the streets.
Stop.
Stop complaining.
Stop whining.
(Applause)
Stop saying, "It's unfair."
Stop saying that we're in poverty, so we have no chance,
because that's crap.
Because everyone of you knows somebody who came up in the same circumstances
and are successful today.
We heard Kenya Mann Faulkner talk earlier.
Same circumstances.
She's the chief counsel at University of Cincinnati.
Stop blaming others.
Stop blaming people for treating you like you're less than human
and then come in here and get on the block and get in the yard
and act like you're less than human.
It starts with you.
And then, let's talk to the policymakers.
How about we stop?
How about we stop using the facade of public safety
to enact bad policy?
(Applause)
How about we stop saying,
"Oh, this is going to make us safer,"
and not measure it and not identify an outcome,
and then look the other way
when the outcome is that we have people who come out worse than they came in?
Let's stop that.
Let's stop trying to get elected by being tough on crime.
(Applause) (Cheers)
Let's stop focusing on the next election
and start focusing on the future of our children.
(Applause)
And how about our community?
First of all, let's stop relying on those politicians
who are relying on the next election.
How about doing something for ourselves?
How about standing up?
How about mentoring?
How about allowing our children to have a relationship with their father
even if their father is at SCI Graterford?
(Applause) (Cheers)
And how about the fathers fight for that relationship?
(Applause) (Cheers)
How about you not look at the barriers,
but look at what your job is, look at what your responsibility is?
Own the success of your child, no matter where you're at.
That's all our responsibilities.
And how about us?
Why don't we stop calling ourselves "corrections"
unless we're going to correct?
(Cheers) (Applause)
And understand as you're cheering,
part of correct means "follow the damn rules."
(Cheers) (Applause)
Don't forget that part.
Amen that.
(Cheers)
It starts with that.
But then it goes beyond that.
Are we going to have the courage, as a field of corrections,
as the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections,
or as a correctional employee, to say:
"Our job is to create an environment
where someone can come in prison and get well."
Do we have those guts?
(Applause)
Because when you say that, everybody looks at me sideways,
like, "What do you mean?
Come to prison and get well?"
But I'll tell you this.
Look at the medical field
and look at the corrections field.
And look at life expectancy over the past 20 or 30 years.
What's it done? Gone up.
Why?
Huge body of research in medical, huge body of research in corrections.
In medical, if the research says, "That's not a good practice - change it,"
they change it.
In corrections, when the research says, "That's not a good practice,"
we say,
"Well, we've kind of always done it that way."
In medicine, as medicine has evolved,
surgeries have gotten more precise,
"more precise" meaning less damage.
Isn't that a blueprint for us?
Can't we get more precise?
And where does that start? In the front end of the system.
It starts at making good decisions.
Number one decision is public safety.
If you're out there hurting people, killing people,
welcome to prison, you belong here.
And if you want to come here and change your behavior, great.
And we want you to get out,
and we want to structure the environment so you can be successful.
But if you're an addict,
some piece of this response has to address that addiction.
If you're mentally ill,
some piece of that response has to address that mental illness.
And I don't even want to begin to talk about trauma
and the trauma of a little girl removed from her home
because her dad wanted to be a knucklehead
and her mom wasn't there,
and she's sitting in some home outside of Reading,
in a school district with none of her friends,
with very few kids who look like her,
asking the secretary of corrections
if he knows her daddy.
It's time to stop, all of us.
Every one of us, stop.
And think.
We have some brilliant academics in this field.
We have some brilliant academics in this room.
If we were to get together
and put together what a system would look like
that would be predicated
where the risk and the action combined
yields a response from the criminal justice system
that is equal to the action itself
but likely to get a result at the back end
that that the individual is less likely to commit a crime,
why aren't we doing that?
The simple answer is we don't have enough courage to do it.
Because if we know the answer and we're not doing the answer,
what else is the other answer?
So it's time for us
to stop talking about it and start being about it.
Martin Luther King -
one of my favorite quotes from him
in part talks about
that progress does not roll on the wheels of inevitability.
That means sitting around,
waiting for the system to change when you're not changing yourself.
That means sitting around, waiting for policies to change
when you don't have the guts to push good policy.
It means as a community, sitting around,
waiting for somebody in Harrisburg or D.C.
to fix the problems you don't have the guts to fix yourself.
Or a corrections system that's not getting the outcomes you want
and doing nothing to change those outcomes
means it's not going to get it.
But the time is now.
And the place is here to start this.
We chose Graterford for a very specific reason.
Number one - staff bought into the success of the offenders,
empower offenders to allow to have all these lifer groups.
There are very few prisons in the country
that would allow inmates, lifers no less,
to develop programs -
are you kidding me?
So recognize how lucky you are that you're at SCI Graterford.
And recognize that the staff at Graterford
benefits from the stability you provide by being empowered.
And if we take that model,
we take a model where we're solely focused on how we create outcomes,
and that outcome, specifically, is less crime,
and we start that in the community
with the children today who are growing up without fathers,
and we take our time as individuals
and mentor and read to kids
an hour a week, an hour a month,
an hour a year -
that's where we start to stop.
My name's John Wetzel.
Thank you, Graterford.
(Applause)