THE HUSTLER FILES

It’s hard to imagine someone spending 24 years in prison, let alone 10 of those in solitary confinement, but 5 years after his release, he’s the Vice President of Social Responsibility at tech innovator CHECKR, and Executive Director of their corporate foundation, Checkr.org. This is the journey of Ken Oliver. In the broad landscape of fair chance hiring, Ken knows firsthand the barriers that face anyone who has been justice impacted. As Ken says, ‘it’s not just someone’s criminal record, but there are 44,000 other collateral consequences that can prevent a justice impacted person from finding a job’. Ken has chosen to take up the flaming sword and use his powerful and passionate voice to educate corporate America, one company at a time, about the fair hiring practices associated with assessing justice impacted individuals when they are applying for a job.

Take a moment and think about that time when someone accused you of saying or doing something that you did not do AND no one will believe you! For those who have been wrongfully convicted and locked up behind the wall the emotional torture of knowing you are innocent is unimaginable. But if you are fortunate to connect with Mike Semanchik, Executive Director of the San Diego, California, Innocence Center, and he and his team research your case and confirm that you were in fact wrongly convicted, well then, you’re in great luck that you might finally be exonerated. Visit the Innocence Center dot org to learn more!

To be a paid journalist writing about prison life and the barriers of justice impacted individuals is one of the two pillars that Ryan Moser represents. The other pillar is that Ryan also has the lived experience of incarceration. After 8 years in prison for a property crime due to his addiction, Ryan has emerged from behind the wall to use his lived experience and unique writing skills to advocate for all aspects of prison reform, including the needs of so many, post incarceration. It was while incarcerated that Ryan attended a writing class with Exchange for Change, a prison writing program. That program and its mentors led Ryan to his journalistic path and appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered, News Nation and CNN. As Ryan himself says, “I’m fighting for social justice through the medium of writing for changes.”

For three decades, Jean Trounstine has dedicated her life to being a storyteller, activist, educator, and theatre Director in the criminal legal system. She came upon her calling while working as an educator at the Women’s Prison in Framingham, Mass, where over the course of a decade she directed eight plays for the incarcerated women, groundbreaking work that resulted in her highly praised book, Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison. From her next non-fiction, Boy with a Knife: A Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoner’s Fight for Justice to her first foray into the fictionalized book, Motherlove, just released by the Concord Free Press dot com, (check out for a free copy!), Jean brings to life and light stories that will leave you spellbound while acknowledging that the U.S. criminal justice system is not, and never has been, black and white.

Her team at NBC Universal Filmed Entertainment refers to her as an “inspiration for change”. She herself has faced prejudices throughout her life, but as a HR Professional in the entertainment industry for over 25 years, and now SVP of Human Resources, Globally, Hoai Scott, has played a key role in educating leaders in diversity and inclusion, leading with purpose and creating a culture of inclusion and belonging in the workplace. Beginning in 2018, NBCU began a partnership with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in Los Angeles to open a door to those who were justice involved but pledged to be crime free, gang free, drug free, enrolled in a school and volunteering in their community. The fair chance hiring opportunities that Hoai and her team offer is a life changing career pathway, and one that celebrates and supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is at the very heart of the NBCU culture.

Rewind 25 years, and for most men, their parenting role was that of bread winner and disciplinarian, like their father before them, and so on. Mark Perlman, a licensed social worker and councilor saw an opportunity to change that dynamic while the Executive Director of his wife’s counseling center. As Mark so aptly puts it, “I started writing a program that would offer fathers a workbook guide, but as I wrote the program, I felt as if the subject matter was coming through me, rather than from me’. Mark’s program, and soon to be passed on to one of Mark’s sons, Corey, is being facilitated through counseling agencies, the military, social work curriculums and behind the walls of minimum, medium or maximum prisons, across the United States. Mark’s program takes the voluntary participants on a journey from understanding the roots of their own upbringing to developing attitudes and skills that will ultimately, over the course of the program’s 13 weeks, heal their father wound and change the trajectory of their relationship with their children.

In 1989 two horrific crimes took place in New York City. The first was the rape and almost death of the woman who would be come to know as the Central Park jogger. The second was the arrest, interrogations, and ultimate prison sentencing of five Black and Latino teenagers, for that crime. A crime they would later be exonerated for, in 2002. It was during her senior year of college in 2003, while interning for a law firm, that Sarah Burns began the arduous process of unearthing the entire story, initially for her college thesis, to understand why and how these five teenagers could have been so falsely convicted. Almost a decade later, Sarah, simultaneously, along with her husband David McMahon, not only published the book, The Central Park Five; A Chronicle of a City Wilding, but along with her father, documentarian, Ken Burns, produced, wrote, and directed a film by the same name. The Central Park Five documentary received numerous awards in 2012/2013 and is still available to watch via streaming.

Noelle Hanrahan was 57 when she attended law school. As a founding member of Prison Radio dot org, Noelle realized that it wasn’t enough to just be a journalist and broadcast the voices of those incarcerated individuals who were brave enough to speak out about prison treatment and conditions, she needed to find a way to get their release. Prison Radio stories serve as catalysts for policy changes, public awareness campaigns and community activism aimed at addressing systemic issues within the justice system. Across the U.S. there are approximately 5.5 million people under a form of correctional control.

Venturing Out is the antithesis of what most women behind the wall at MCI Framingham (Massachusetts) will ever be granted. Yet for Beth Goldstein and Elizabeth Swanson their in-prison initiative, Venturing Out, offers so much more than the literal description of their program. For Beth and Elizabeth, whose day job is as educators at Babson College, to go behind the wall to empower and educate the incarcerated female population with an entrepreneurial mindset in humanities and leadership is a way to have local and personal impact on these women’s lives.

For most adults in the U.S. their only exposure to the criminal justice proceeding, known as parole, is what they see on film. But the actual details behind parole hearings, those who qualify, and the process for those incarcerated to receive their freedom is not for the faint of heart. As Attorney Ryan Schiff says, “In a parole hearing, we as attorney’s must take a back seat and no longer be the Director of the proceeding, like we are with our clients, pre-incarceration”. Another fact, the knowledge of a parole hearing, for an incarcerated individual can be many years away. As Attorney Melissa Celli states, “You can walk into any prison in the United States and ask an incarcerated individual the date of their parole hearing, no matter how far in the future, and they will know it.” Join Melissa and Ryan as they open a door to the true facts behind parole.

In January 2024, the criminal justice system progressed for many in Massachusetts and digressed for those on death row in Alabama. In Massachusetts, Attorney Ryan Schiff and others ligated a landmark decision where it is now unconstitutional to sentence any adult, under the age of 21, to life without parole. This new law, in Massachusetts, currently affects 200 incarcerated individuals. The door is now open for them to apply for parole and show that they’ve rehabilitated. This reversal of the current law is based on the advancements in scientific research that the brains of emerging adults, up to age 21, are not yet fully developed. Only one other state, Louisiana, still has a life without parole sentencing for those under the age of 21, for first degree murder. Within 2 weeks of this landmark decision, the State of Alabama executed 58-year-old Kenneth Smith, for murder, with the use of Nitrogen Gas. As David Hoose, a long time Criminal Defense Attorney notes, ‘there is never a good way to kill someone, and right now Nitrogen Gas is the flavor of the month”. So, as we know, once again, how you live or die depends on where you serve your time.

With 10 million job roles open, employers today not only need to broaden their search parameters, but they need to retain the employees they hire. Across the U.S. there are organizations popping up to assist employers by re-imagining how they hire and teaching them how to combat the biases that political unrest, structural racism, and increased mental health conditions have levied on the workforce. To the rescue in Chicago is the Chicago Resiliency Network, an initiative of the Corporate Coalition of Chicago. Heralding their charge to help employers, across their region, create workplaces that are better for employees and better for business, is Program Director, Marcos Gonzalez. Marcos and his team lead the employer cohorts through training and simulations that address the hiring of justice involved individuals and explore the root causes of trauma and toxic stress. The outcome, new knowledge, better training, and stronger resiliency practices that best suit their business.

The murder of George Floyd was a catalyst for an onslaught of positive change in so many areas of our society, and no more so than in Chicago where business leaders came together to address the economic and racial inequities across all the neighborhoods in the Chicago region. Out of that confab came the Corporate Coalition of Chicago with more than 40 members of the Chicago business community, 23 anchor partners and 5 initiatives to reduce long-standing and continuing inequities and create a thriving economy throughout Chicago. One of these initiatives is centered in Fair Chance Hiring and addressing the talent shortage and the population that faces severe limitations to gaining employment because of a criminal record. This model is being adopted across the U.S., but can it grow fast enough to save our businesses who can’t find employees.

In Episode 45, Attorney Ada Lin of Prisoners’ Legal Services in Boston, Massachusetts discussed the need for the pending House and Senate Bill that would allow for a more compassionate release of those incarcerated individuals who were terminally ill or permanently incapacitated and facing an end-of-life situation. In this episode, Ada Lin returns with Dr. Alice Bukhman, an Emergency Department Medical Director, and Head of Medical Partnerships for Prisoners’ Legal Services to discuss the medical parole need in more detail. Ada and Alice offer a voice for those in need of medical parole, and work with teams of hospital caretakers to improve management of agitated patients, and reduce bias, especially where it concerns a shackling of a patient who is already incapacitated.

The Medical Parole House and Senate Bill, in Massachusetts, is described as the following: To ensure that the medical parole works as the Legislature originally intended by providing a measure of public decency toward incarcerated people who are terminally ill or permanently incapacitated while ensuring public safety. This Massachusetts House Bill was written by local Massachusetts House Representative Mindy Domb with the support of Prisoners Legal Services, an organization that considers itself a champion that ‘carries the water’ for current and formerly incarcerated individuals, despite the lawyer ratio of over 3,000 to one. This episode’s conversation may be centered on the State of Massachusetts, but the conversation of Medical Parole is one that is played out, State by State, across the U.S. The key words to finding success for this bill, human decency, and public safety. Where would you stand?

While Stephanie and Corey have vastly different backgrounds and stories, the common thread for both is not only their association with the AISS program at the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office, but their passion to use their past to help change other’s futures. The paths they chose to lead after overcoming lifestyles that ran the gamut from false accusations and wrongful arrests to domestic violence will not only inspire but hopefully activate change for those who may be looking for their better path as they unlock their past and rewrite their future.

When a legendary lawyer and a legal scholar reveal the structural failures that undermine justice in our criminal courts, the result is an absolute MUST READ aptly named The Fear of Too Much Justice. While this is not the first book for authors Stephen Bright and James Kwak, it is their first collaboration that offers a heart-wrenching overview of how the criminal legal system fails to live up to the values of equality and justice. “- their goals are to protect the poor and innocent, expose the truth behind capital punishment and wrongful convictions, and call out corrupt prosecutors and incompetent judges, along with any other bad actors who have ruined our system”. – John Grisham

Massachusetts House Representative Lindsay Sabadosa’s path to politics probably started at the age of nine, when she held a protest march over the closing of her beloved town library. Yet it took a few more decades of working in the private sector before she launched her political career. While Representative Sabadosa takes up the flaming sword in a variety of arenas, she has a deep passion for criminal justice and prison reform, and in this episode speaks passionately about the House Bills she has launched, from changing the parole system for incarcerated elders to implementing an Act that will track how bail must be set, commensurate with a defendant’s economic means.

Justin Brooks will tell you that, as the Founder of the California Innocence Project, he was just following his passion as a criminal justice attorney to exonerate those who were falsely accused and spending decades in prison. He may only have been in his twenties when he launched the California Innocence Project, but as of 2023, Justin has received exoneration for 40 such individuals and travels the world, helping launch Innocence Projects in other countries. It was also Justin who took a chance with Brian Banks and was instrumental in having Brian exonerated! If you think that heroes have gone the way of the dinosaur, you haven’t met Justin Brooks!

If you were hoping to hear how Brian Banks overcame the adversity and punishment that was thrown at him in Part 1 of our interview, then here it is! You’ll hear how Brian stayed ‘sane’ despite his time behind the wall, his home life, that still felt like jail, while on parole, and the knowledge that he’d always live in a societal prison with a sex offender stamp on his record. That was until criminal defense lawyer and the Founding Director of the California Innocence Project, Justin Brooks, agreed to take Brian’s case, despite the fact that he was already post parole, and you’ll NEVER believe the role his accuser played in Brian’s exoneration!