Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV After Words 20130819

Abusive to go through this a you have to be prepared. Three codify if would have absolutely no interest but i have two sons that i know love the game. My oldest son and number three son josh the right think i feel safe with my oldest son because he is a massachusetts it as hard as a republican to do anything but my son josh i could see him doing something down the line. Host your publisher . What is saddam mountain . Guest they will be representing me to get the book out. He is a medium potatoes guy. Homemade rolls with the Sweet Potatoes that he loves. So this is a basic cookbook for home cooking. Its not a fancy cookbook. Where was this taken . Guest in my kitchen and laureate. Host we have a kitchen in laureate that we celebrated rather late last spring. I do remember the first chance i had to actually get the family together and be off the trail for a day or two, the first thing i did is get ready and make his favorite dinner. The romneys family table was the name of the book and it comes out and fall of 2014. Ann romney, thank you for being on book tv. Thanks so much. Up next on book tv, after words with guest host after jf from columbia university. This week Joshua Dubler and his latest book down in chapel religious life in an american prison he experiences muslim and christian prisoners that make their way through the prison chapel for more reasons than of worship. He discusses the place of religion in rehabilitation and incarceration. The program is about one hour. Good afternoon. Its a pleasure to have a conversation about this wonderful book, down in the chapel. Your book may be seen as an opportune moment. This is the year when there has been much discussion, different sorts of the place of prison in American Society and the contemporary moment i think in particular. On the one hand of michele alexander, the new jim crow, and more recently i was introduced through colleagues through the new netflix phenomena. On the one hand the public against mass incarceration and the other sort of personal story of an interesting entre in the prison system. In many ways your book is able to do both the risks detailed description of the experience and weigh in against the system as it were, wondering how you see this as a way of opening up the conversation and where it might fit in that landscape for the new jim crow. Guest we are speaking after eric holder went on the record about the mandatory minimum, and the federal court declared it to be unconstitutional, so it is a momentous gathering. I think of structure and agency has interdependence putative i think that it would be my new book on its own could raise consciousness but theyre seems to be a current, and i hope and i am ambitious that my book could contribute to the dawning sense that how we do criminaljustice is somewhat in same and a moral atrocity. With respect i havent seen oranges the new black, so the Meshaal Alexandre spectrum its very much about the everyday and the two men that read my manuscript repeatedly they may have been frustrated that time but it wasnt explicitly policy oriented. I do think there are some policy conclusions the book makes. And i would hope the readers would come to that on their own. Host i hope that we can talk about the way that you have raised criticisms and invite the discussions about solutions. What strikes me, that seems to be the urgency of the hour often overrides the complexity i think your story in fights. A couple of years ago i had the opportunity to do a story and they want to know how do we explain why their reentry numbers are so low meanwhile stories of individual lives how they make sense and their experience prior to and in the new york collection. So i want to get there but i think that what your story and perhaps the tone always invites us to linger with the complexities a little more. Maybe we could start although its not a story about you but your experience and the men that you had a chance to build relationships with. Its more than a dissertation. If you frame it in your first response, how did you come to write this wonderful book about the particular prison system or the religion in prison . Guest i tend to think people are a product of their circumstances because i am so acutely a product of my circumstances. Those two modes of incarceration on the one hand, a child growing up in the 1980s and 90s had a time when the american prison population is exploding 600 or 700 and my mother among her others worked on Rikers Island so i was aware from the young time and at a younger age about the phenomenon of the mass incarceration. And i was always horrified by it in the way that one is drawn to Something Like a vacation. As for the other piece, i think the field of religious study is populated by people who tend to be emphatically ambivalent about the positions of their upbringing. I fit into that category. I was raised essentially an orthodox jew by agnostics although i didnt figure that out until somewhat later in the game. So in fact my orientation both through judaism also stands independent of that but very ethically minded and a distinction that i learned in the Jewish State School that i talked about in the book. The amendments that pertain to one relationship the almighty and that pertain to ones relationship with a fellow man and woman, and i have always been on the latter half of the spectrum. With that said, i say in the book that to honor the complexity of the world with my description as a scholar in the way that we do is about as theological as i get. So i feel like my obligation in the world is to try to do them justice. Theyve been very generous with me and i hope to repay the debt. But as a scholar it seems as though we do a certain kind of violence to the world when we eat race that complexity that you call attention to. Host i think the way that you balance the interpreted and the descriptive or theoretical claims you are sort of reticent of making any sort of large claims about what this means to allow the men to speak for themselves, to tell their story. But then maybe you will take a direction that seems to be an engagement of religious studies but opening up those questions for the broad and the more accessible audience. So, throughout the book, you in the direction of a larger interpretation out line ten. Tell us about the visas and what role they play for you and how they inform your engagement with the details of their lives. Guest a little bit of background if the view for hasnt read it. Its structured over seven days. That was born in response to the week of events that take place in the chapel of which over ten different groups have 55 different worship sessions and bible study and music rehearsals. I did it as an experiment in which the chapel was open and that became the spine of the book. As a dissertation stage, i need was insistent the book was going to be Something Like a 95 film. I dont know if you remember but movies that dont use any external artifice where they dont use external lighting or music. So i wanted everything to be within the narrative frame including my theory. By the central character of the book is a scholar of religion. And i bring that those perspectives to bear on this conversation. But for a long time the book was largely with in that frame. When i came to Farrar Straus i came to work with an editor named paul ely, and he was productively he pushed me for more. He thought i owed it to the reader to let them know what i thought and i can decide that he was absolutely right. So i wrote for him a document. This was back in the summer of 2010. I wrote a document of the ten visas of range from the genealogical to talking about religious experience to talking about religious practice to try to encapsulate what about these mens process is productively american and tries in a number of perspectives, some of which mutually conflict. So, i wrote that for him and then i wanted to keep it apart from the book, but in the book. So theres also a lot of analysis that takes place. Sometimes by this guy that is the narrator and sometimes by what is obviously the leader joshua then you have the species that span and opposition so that the fee of the cheese stands in opposition to certain kinds of religious practice on the one hand you have the kind of day in and day out flow of complexity that messy and some of it pertains to abstraction and a lot of it is very material. Then you have the thesis that the temps to, you know, to encapsulate was going on but in tended to stand in in tension with the seven days. Host you mentioned the publisher and was very much of religious studies training you bring to bear in the conversations youll have opted for the genre that sort of pushes the standard academic monograph. I wonder what your commitment to capturing the complexity in addition to the conversations with paul ely, was their something about the creative nonfiction more so than the standard monograph that you felt help you tell the sort of story that you were trying to tell that balances the description with the analysis . Guest i dont want to sound like i was trying to reinvent the wheel or i did reinvent the wheel and that it is so open in its form and its medved. So why didnt have to topple any giants. I precede a lot of support. With that said there is the sense of the form a kind of protest against the standards of academic argumentation for the reasons i suggested earlier about what i know about people that makes people interesting. What makes people global. Its a difficult to capture that with a scholarly argument. Its precisely where people violate your expectations of them. Its the point that your supposition that they become interesting in a way that we turned to literature in a way that when i want to know people intimately i will turn rather than a book from the field. The other part of it and i guess that would be a kind of aesthetic. The other part is that the call and this is where i would really hope that this book is received by our Scholarly Community as a scholarship which is that there is a kind of way and necessarily that it seems to be in an academic conversation buying as you often to the following relationship with the people that you write about. So you have this conversation and have an empirical counter with people and then you come back and continue the conversation. The people in some way become reduced in some way by the data and what is produced is those of us that think and write about and those that have been written about. And especially when dealing with the kind of problems of power that come with writing about prisoners. I really wanted to write a book in which my interlocutors were primarily not necessarily scholars of the field all the wood is the field that makes me the person i am that asks certain kind of questions but really the man i met first and to have my perspective but against their perspective to see what happens. Host thats actually a perfect segue to begin to think about not just the sort of framing questions you bring to the book but to talk about the lives and the institutions that are essential to the book and places that you are you arent going to tell the story about prison, religion, and a grand sense that you are talking about religion in a particular time and place. Tell us about what some could argue in itself in the landscape of american prisons and history is a sort of secret space that has a special visitor that you refer to the folks on the one hand the renowned boxer Bernard Hopkins but also visits from muhammed. Tell us about this institution outside of philadelphia. Host guest there are Amazing Things that have happened over the years but its pedigree comes if you were trying to make it the microcosm. It comes from the fact that eastern state penitentiary over in downtown philadelphia, which is, you know, the prototype of the modern penitentiary when it closes down in 1971, its prisoners and many of the staff go to great referred which opened in 1922 is sort of the inheritor from Eastern States. So we are talking about Eastern States we are talking about quakers and theorizing a kind of solitary confinement where people who have come, become corrupt can be put in privacy with their meager and they can grow a new. So if i were thinking about it in the history of american presence, that is the connection that i would draw. Today it is an Old Institution in the era that pennsylvania has built more than 20 in the last 30 years. It is an old and somewhat and wielding an institution. It houses Something Like 3500 men. Of those coming you know, 4 5 or the general population prisoners and of them may be 700 or men who are serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole and in pennsylvania if youre sentenced you are not eligible for parole. So that is the culture of the book is determined by these men who are disproportionately active and all of the activities and to almost exclusively are the ones who work in the chapel. So, in the chapel you have the five chaplains who work there and to Correctional Officers and 15 prisoners who work as clerks and janitors. While i began my research doing a participant observation in the space of the religious practice explosively, you know, my deepest relationships were forged with these men who were also participants in these practices. Thats why they choose to have the job. But also just kind of their day in and day out just hanging out. Host when its not a particular service. Between the activities and maintaining the chapel. And there are some characters that you develop real life relationships with. You talk about pushing back against the subject and a scholar through this approach. Tell us about your lot in foremans which you both agree isnt the term to define your relationships but whose name in the book baracka who i think you described him as interesting, is that right . Perhaps why he can to be the person that he developed the most deep relationship with or the primary guide. Tell us about baracka and how that relationship develops and how did he become to be the one that you spent most of the time with and who is he . Guest you identify with what i think is the key passage in the book where i identify him as someone who was interesting in the world where so many of these other men are struggling so hard to be good, baracka is about something more different. Hes more mischievous than that and more skeptical of what the value of being good is in the day and age when there is no possibility of parole. I think that baracka chose the more than i chose him. He was curious, he was there in the chapel. He was curious about me and he kind of took me under his wing. One of the kind of dominant tenors of these relationships especially with baracka is a kind of paternal relationship because even though i was 30yearsold at the time in my field work and maybe i was young, in the chapel for 30 is young. Most of these men are in their 40s and 50s or even 60s and more than that, i am 30 and secular, i dont know what is true about the world, and that is very different than the way of being in the world that dominates them where you know what you are and you know what youre about and its very important both for your survival on earth and your everlasting life that you know what you are about. So you know, baracka kind of took me under his wing. I called him early on i think as my dissertation adviser. And he really liked that kind of play of being the one who introduces me to what is going on in the chapel and being my kind of primary interpreter. He himself is a very unique character in the book and different in a lot of ways. So he is a person serving life without parole and hes been in prison longer than i have been alive. It seems to me that is an insane policy. He is someone who is convicted of a homicide. He claims he didnt do it. But hes in prison for 40 years. He was in the nation of islam growing up. So he has that kind of Selfhelp Group uplift kind of attitude. Hes frustrated about people who count tale to his orthodoxy. He wants people to live up to their potential. So hes perpetually kind of frustrated by his fellow man to beat he is an estimate and he is somewhat irregular. He likes to say things to me i think he has a lot of these relationships with younger men. Know who you are and let the world of figure you out. But he is something of a holdover because one of the story is the book tells that this a time frame well beyond the seven days is about the evolution of islam at the prison. And while i see that most people watching if they have a kind of assumption about what an islamist prison looks like they think it is political, they are thinking malcolm x. But actually that is at least from 2006 and 2007 may be things are changing now that it was kind of a dying breed. Its the kind that lead the black nationalist note that want to talk about the economic empowerment. The dominant kind of mode of muslims and at gratherford they are about getting it right and getting the practice of islam right. They are theological resentment or sociological that go back generations between the two subcultures. But they think that nation of islam even after 75 when Elijah Mohammed dies and they become sunni muslims. That is a religious what thats about instrumental wising for the purpose of politics. That is essentially a blasphemy. So the dominant muslim mode at gratherford is much more sexual doctrinaire, i forget what the right answers are, trying to execute your practices according to the right doctrine. And baracka is this kind of hes different. I start the book and baracka aphorism is a god created the world and said how bad it, fellow. Host if baracka is the foil to any sort of a notion of a man in a prison attempting to be good, the men who are charged in a fury with overseeing that because you dont just tell the prison stories coming you also tell the story of Correctional Officers. Tell us about these men who are charged with overseeing the implementation of a good or rehabilitation. Host guest right. Much like the prisoner who comes to work in the chapel, the Correctional Officers that work in the travel also bid for the post. They want to have the particular job and they probably want to have the job because they themselves are men who are engaged in a religious block. I dont take them to take their tax as having anything to do with the rehabilitation. Something that is surprising in the book i think is the kind of general tone of the daytoday relationships of the Correctional Officers, of the chaplain, of the prisoners is essentially that of colleagues. You know, the Correctional Office everyone knows there are particles to observe and everyone is scrupulous to try not to screw up in a way that will make their life more complicated. But i dont think that coming you know, day in and day out the Correctional Officers are seeing the prisoners as this people that need their rehabilitative efforts. The chaplain also, you know, theyd rely a lot on the chapel workers. And in general, you know, there are moments where has it happened in the book on tuesday there is a kind of you know, resurgence of Something Like criminality and suspicion and it throws everything off because everyone suddenly remembers we are in a prison and you are free and i am a prisoner. But in the day in and day out, they are all kind of working age of eight hours at a time. Host it could be the opposite i think that is one of the powerful ways and which you tell the story. The reader can forget as a moment as the folks are talking about the detail and about movie deals this is anything could be at stake and we could be anywhere. And at the same time we are in gratherford. Guest it is one of the fears i would have in the book. So why try to build some hedges against that and other places. But i have to characterize what my experience of being their day in and day out was, it is perverse. But the word if i were being totally honest it is Something Like fun of. Like i came in there. Im somebody that studies religion. They have serious ideas about religion, they are coming from a very different place and im very and i want to mix it up to the it was Something Like fun. And when i was around was fun for them because they have been doing this for five, ten, 15, 25, 30 years and here is this. So its like a catch22 a little bit. Its kind of like theres something horrible beneath the surface. It is day in and day out. Host and the of the discourse. At the end of the book you talk about a sort of perverse pleasure of someone like yourself who feels called to do the work there. But they have the men and all the different stations specially have a discourse on pleasure and play or even how freedom figures into that and it ties into the religious story in some ways that weather one is free on the streets or in prison. Maybe you could speak a little more about that. Host guest there is a way that teddy that is one of the central characters and is the heart and soul of the book. If baracka and al that are these older men that know they are all about and are always in control, hes very emotional, hes undergoing a lot of feelings and starting to think of the time of the book that hes never going to get out of prison but he is the most playful in a way that i take to be it comes naturally to him that it is also generous because nobody in that world wants somebody that is going to bring you down. To be able to bring levity to this case that you are in i think is a virtue. But that on the playground. With christ coming from here and played so coming from here, we have a lot of ways of thinking about freedom in our philosophical and religious discourse where the state of ones body doesnt ultimately matter that much or even the state of having the body is itself car sergel because the ultimate reality is somewhere else. Its not so much among the muslims with the christians will talk about how they are free. That is their experience despite the use these regimented constricted lives. They certainly know they are free relative to they were so they know what its like to be addicted to drugs or to have been caught up in the life of crime and theyve been delivered from that. From the way they talk about it, theyve been delivered. There is a kind of there was a suffering. Their lives were characterized by suffering and now lives are characterized by grace. I will tell you every christmas like this that there are a kind of fuel in the book that are geniuses it seems to me in the way that their experience of the world. And its problematic as a person who is coming in and i dont want to just endorse it and say wouldnt it be great if we all could be so happy in the world because there is work to be done. But they do manage to particularly the character that i call who other men disparage as mushy inside but the elevator does to the top floor. But to transform his own pain into the gratitude for what jesus christ did to him he knows about his freedom. Host its almost part of your argument if William James for and the quality of being a religious genius might not these men . Theres a way in the religion that your writing against is dismissed pete i think that you refer to it as the bad man religion and the poor mans religion. And there is a sort of religion is making a larger claim to you. Tell me a little bit about whether its the argument of the religious geniuses or the question of sincerity is what is at the center of both of those theories. Guest i come from a place raised by the agnostic orthodox. Its a slight exaggeration and orthodoxy is a slight exaggeration but more or less, you get the picture. So it made sense. A secular jew saying its not about what youre pointing to and its not about the dog out there its doing these things here so i come from a place that its all religion saying this is legit and fraudulent but most people are. And so the tight side talking about occur at the intersection of how we tend to think about both prisoners and how we think about religion. And in fact a sort of light motif that is woven through is on the double consciousness that is the experience of being engaged upon the world with contempt and pity so they are the object of contempt and pity. First because that is more dominant. But religion as a kind of secularized discourse what is religion . What i know is true of the aftermath that is fixed religion and is probably recognized religion and christianity but it can also be something secular like your religion in the language which the Supreme Court adopted as one of the ultimate concern. So that religion. And here we have a murder or a racist and as much as by virtue of one thing theyve done in their lives and we can only assume that when that murderer or a rapist is professing his goodness and his desire to be good and his the devotee to the god that person is taking it. That is the bad man of religion and the discourse i think is disk popular in the public and is alive and well in the prison. It is to get out or to give the tiniest little thing. We are dealing with people that have so little that the ability to, you know, get some grape juice or grow your hair long in the case of native americans. The poor man is kind of a complement to the bad man and the poor man is a kind of a call them the religious subject of the imagination which is to say when obama was overheard saying in 2008 people that cling on to their guns and religion because they dont have anything else. But its a kind of secular idea that you dont have a real freedom. You dont have you are not engaged in fulfilling the profits but you have your religion. So that idea lines up with a kind of wellintentioned progressive notion of what a prisoner is, which is essentially a victim of the system which is someone that is born into the wrong body, usually black and brown and mail and to the wrong circumstances often urban poverty. And the dice is cast and that is what a prisoner is. I think probably my more sympathetic leaders bring to the text when they think about who these men are and so then religion becomes a kind of lamented condition. So the bad man is as far as their religion goes they cant possibly mean that. But the poor man they mean it but they probably shouldnt and these are judgments i dont claim to stand outside of them. Especially the poor man as a progressive who sees himself largely as a product of his own circumstances. These are judgments that are alive and how we think about this material. So i want the reader to encounter those judgments and himself. Host if he will recognize the falsehood of those claims they are maybe less sympathetic leaders that will say that a certain point where does he you make the point of saying thats not my business. Rather than why, where do the conversations you have and the fact that brought them into this decision that tends to define every discussion like where does that fit . Guest one word about the dead man and the poor long its less that they are wrong with your overdetermined. They are inevitable. We have the notion of religion and they are products of that so there is a truth that belongs to a set that historical circumstances that i would regard as one we should think about critically and why we think of religion this way and prisoners this way. As far as crime is concerned, that is a place i have to why is up because i do come from a somewhat doctrinaire position that people cant be defined by virtue of the worst thing theyve done. I dont look and see you and the worst thing you find and the worst thing ive done and that is fortunate because we have done some terrible things. So quite naturally to me to not want to not wonder or be curious or interrogate men about what theyve done to get their. But that isnt the world they live in and what their crime was in many ways does define them and of the man i got to know well, most wanted to talk to me about their crime. They wanted to talk about the crime because they wanted me to know they didnt do it or they want to talk about the crime because they wanted me to know they did do it and they take responsibility for it. But these men are the subjects of this discourse of criminality where you do come to be defined by virtue of your crime. So most of them obviously it is an event that defines them in so many ways and won they wrestle with both in terms of how people see them and in their own defense of what theyve done and what they owed to the world and in terms of will they have any chance to ever get all of prison host if we are not talking about crime and we are telling a story of religion and putting the bad man or the poor man off the table i think at one point in the work you present the argument to the Dissertation Committee that the reason this can be a dissertation and a compelling one in nist apartment is because gratherford is the most diverse place in the universe. He will be gestured in the direction of that talking about the islam sandwich baracka excess. It helps a little bit more about that pluralistic or reverse what looks like. Guest it is an irony of the book that inside of this monument to the american and the freedom and not just gratherford but those that house 2. 2 million of our citizens you do find a showcase. One of our cardinal freedom that we declared in the First Amendment and thats important to us and to them about who they are. The right to the exercise of the way they structure their alliance. That is all very real. And it really is an achievement albeit april 1st 1. 15 years ago at gratherford, you would have the right to practice collis as some or judaism and that is where the wright comes around in the 60s as the federal courts are looking to play ball because the 1965 immigrants have come to the country and you have hindus and buddhists and what sense are we going to make of this and the prisoners plush and they take their side and the administrators eventually give and have this tiny sliver of realestate. You have the jews and protestants and christian jehovahs witnesses coming you have in the geological treaty of the islam you have it all there. You have those as i call them Elijah Mohammed in 1975 in the nation of islam. What counts as a religion is not anything. Its been a narrow template thats been applied and the groups have had to make their practices intelligible in the template that has to do with i have an ultimate concern. The nation of islam in many cases wouldnt consider themselves the religion for the purpose of that they are happy to play by the rules. But actually the native american prisoners of sight because in the 1990s the native american prisoners as a Movement Began to get all sorts of accommodation. Then at the sid is the 60s and 70s when the bellwether case where that was closing down came out of gratherford and that is when a couple of the members of the black natural list moves and incarcerate and says we are a religion, too and the courts said he wore a philosophy. While you have these 12 groups you meet here and there and people practice of the things that are not welcome been. There is a wican martyrs the place made for him. He professes not to mind. Hes practicing in the chapel he says it would be like eating kosher in a pork factory. Host you highlight the protestant history. In casting the spectrum and illustrating the spectrum of the religious varieties coming you also point you mentioned earlier is the way in which in the face of this diversity, the lines are often drawn hard and fast from one tradition to the next. So i want to ask about another person that seems to suggest and was wrestling with the possibility of belonging to more than one. I think it is the catholic considering christian science. Is that right . So tell me a little bit more about jack and while we know the Racial Disparities he was a white catholics so against protestant protestant but embracing this tradition. Tell us a little bit about jack. Guest the fault lines are not what i expected and they are often in trouble nomination rather than enter. Notte between christian but between fallacy and war has been thus. The fault line actually often recapitulates other fault lines that are more sociological. They are not reduced by them but what neighborhood you came from matters a lot or who your friends are. Most people would tell me im not going to make friends with someone here. Im friends with someone i knew before. So the end up somewhat recapitulating other kinds of fault lines. As for jack who is stuck in between, my read is that has a lot to do with manhood and in part this comes from the fact i am a kind of younger man who has the tutelage of the older lifers telling me how to be in the world and the characters for even myself isnt yet fully sure how to be in the world. And they are trying to school me on it but it seems like they are very american in this respect. They have tremendous confidence about the religious judgment and they feel obligated to their religious judgment. So to be a man is to know what you are about and who you are and know who your god is and how that truth affects your daytoday life. So someone it is a place of tremendous diversity and mixing etc. But i think i say in the book that is fine as a limited condition but i believe it is fairly from upon to be one of these people who flowed between. And in fact who are the people that flowed between . Oftentimes this isnt true and jacks case but they come to the chapel any time and other prisoners often have jobs they are working but there is the new side not these on game lead years but small pods that have more control and its where the men that have certain kinds of disabilities, especially mental disabilities are howls to not only for their own protection and those are often the men that are floating between an army be a little more spiritual and openended and kind of want to ticket vantage of the few activities that are available but i do think it is incumbent upon a man to know who he is and what hes about. And its compelling. I think there is something to that. I dont mean to exclude women from that, too. But thats where if you take the ultimate concern not as descriptive but as a prescriptive, you know, host absolutely. Guest we should know what we are here for. Host and we should adhere to it. Thats that. Guest i dont know if thats that pitted host it tends to be if thats what i am then guest thats where i ask them i asked baracka especially how much of that is a virtue of you being in prison because that is the story that so many have been telling. And as this kind of who i am an outsider, a lot are eager to tell me what prison is about and i appreciate that and that mixes into the book and i dont claim to know what being in prison is about. But yes this is a place you have to know what you are about because there will be other people that tell you what you are about and they dont have your best interest in mind hitting it so thats where the kind of survivalist manhood becomes insistent about being what ibm and being fixed to what i am. An open question is how much of that is unique to prison and is that how most americans are who are sort of strangely absolutist and pluralist at the same time. Like my truth is the one true truth but i recognize yourself to a wrong truth . I dont know the answer to that question. Host on the one hand you provide that going to gratherford men could have a conversation about surviving were struggling anywhere. But at the same time you come to this realization as it pertains to religion in particular that once what you thought was a que ne as some and a remarkable within the walls might actually just be about philadelphia neighborhoods and there are these stories of new man entering the prison and somehow an older man recognizing him as the son of a former friend from elementary or high school, Something Like that. I wonder if you can talk a bit just about the psychology of philadelphia, the way in which they are always alive in both places. Guest i would say not the portrait of acumen as a bunch of guys that hang out in the neighborhood. I think that what i am free up to do is the way that i play with the thesis in that analysis has kind of an argument but its more, it is more subjective and provisional. It is also it is muslims and christians have been arguments about the nature of god. It is also a bunch of guys who grew up together in a particular neighborhood. You know, if it was one of those things i hadnt picked up on and once i picked up on that they couldnt believe i had and because who could be so stupid not to know. But sitting in the chapel one day on friday this guy comes up to me and says what you need to understand to understand all of this is the gang a tendency in the africanamerican community. An africanamerican by. And i used to people talking about other peoples the five religions or gangs and as fact religion as such in the relationship. Thats all about gangs. This is the kind of evangelical source and it reject it as a kind of wrong way. But he was applying of the judgment as the kind of bad man of religion judgment to himself so i found it interesting. And he said just when i sit in the chapel i can see it plain as day. But if you look over there its like there is north philly over there with a kind of strong correlation between the man who are now identified as coming from the north and west and the man who identified as coming out of the south. So yes, as i said, that recapitulates, according to them the logic of the culture. If i didnt know you then im not going to get to know you now. So it preserves the ecology of philadelphia. Host mabey perhaps it stands as a definitive moment before and after in the entire book in which you narrate on one hand the rise of crack and of the explosion of mass incarceration, the expansion of religious freedom, which we just talked about. So many of the men who married their story before and after the rate. Why did the rate matter so much not just for your story but to their lives . Guest thank you so much. What i fear in the daytoday, engaging is that you could lose the contingency and the artificiality of the day today and that is where you find it is one of many. And i think without dispute its not the best of all possible worlds. Even as i engage in debate today i want to get the sense of the genealogical sense of how it was manufactured and was manufactured brutally. So i tell this history of the evolution of islam matched in certain ways to the history of the rise of the mass incarceration. And principally in the raid is a kind of central event of that. So up to the mid nineties coming you had this tremendous kind of openness of religious freedom and you had down in the chapel in part refers to the three mosques that were below the chapel in the basement where there was a tremendous amount of autonomy. Some of it was used beautifully and there were all sorts of studies going on. There was a vibrant intellectual culture from what i understand. There was also an overstepping the boundaries and there was, collectivity. And so, certainly by 1995 what existed in the chapel was lightly out of step up the time. So 1995 is essentially 20 years and to the incarceration boom. It is less about rehabilitation at that point and it is more about control. And tom ridge who will be pushing his first Homeland Security director runs in 19,948th law and Order Campaign and he wins. This is winning politics in the 90s. So, willie horton, 98, is essentially no democrat is going to be confused as pro prison or again. And bill clinton in 1996 finds the antiterrorism effective Death Penalty act but wisely restrict habeas corpus. It is a time when it is only the pure advantage to the anticrime, to be antiprisoner. So up to and including al gore when he ran in 2000 says im proDeath Penalty. Why . Because i think it is a deterrent. The data might suggest otherwise. So ridge runs and he wins. He wants to do the three strikes and youre out law and he wants to tighten parole procedures. When they come and they decide they need to send a message to gratherford and by the standards of what we would assume present looks like and he was wild. In fact younker prisoners referred to the raid as tv meaning it would prison looks like and its what you see. But its not what you have in the daytoday control in the kind of controlled prison. And so they came in and they destroyed of peabodys stuff and they shipped out and fired staff on the spot. They shipped out the worst of the worst across the state, across the country in some cases. And there is just a new regime. So she is more loose in a permeable plays than other institutions. But a lot changed. After that the mosques were closed down, and the cinderblock structure was built and that is where it takes place. Prisoners Free Generation have all sorts of rights like to read their own services and they dont have the right any more. There has to be a chaplain or a volunteer present and they have to have family members come in and worship them and celebrate holidays with them. That isnt true anymore. So its not anything the day in and day out i think people are more surprised about what used to be there than what you find there today. And what used to be their strikes people when i describe it as weigel of the black. But that is how gemini. Its hegemony that we now incarcerate so many people in such a restrictive way and it becomes almost unthinkable that there could be another way of doing it. Host we only have a few minutes left. I want to ask you kind of a twofold question on the personal and on the political. You see throughout the book sort of haunted by the possibility that you may betrayed the trust these men have given to the act of creating this beautiful book. I wont give away the beautiful final line that embraces with charles. I wonder for you what has it has now been at least a few years since you have been as regular a presence in the prison. What sort of relationships are you able to maintain with these men, and then on the political front not to enforce the bayh and mary binary but where do you see your books and arguments taking on the more political role in terms of the various movements and opposition of mass incarceration you mentioned the sort of recent gains and the critiqued. Just yesterday personally where has the book taking you in your sort of afterlife but then also politically where do you see the book engaging . Guest today is the publication date and i have ten copies going out in the mail today. And i am nervous and i hope that the man at gratherford feel like they are trusting me. One of the ways that one of the point of translation between the kind of religious ideas some at the orientation of so many in the chapel, and my kind of secular ethics i think can be found in the notion of the fidelity to enter event. Part of that idea of who you are is accepted christ on such and such day. And though the world pulls you in all sorts of different ways, you know, being true to the event is what makes you an ethical person. And this is such an event for me. Its the time id spend with these men it seems to me that they gave me a lot. Here i am talking about this book. And i await to them and by 08 to myself that i became and continue to become to remain engaged. Towards the end of my field work people started to encourage me to teach at the university as a program at gratherford. So i taught a number of class is in the years that followed through the program. Is that enough . I dont know. Im not a protectionist. But i think if i have some kind of responsible practice going, then thats not the worst thing in the world. Right now im working on a project with a philosopher and anthropologist. The working title is called break every yoke that is lined with from messiah that the abolitionists used and we were having a conference in the fall. We were writing a book i think in which we were going to try