Nora Carroll is a public defender at the Legal Aid Society, and cofounder of the Parole Preparation Project. When host Rafa Kidvai asks her to apply a reproductive justice lens to her experience in the criminal legal system, Nora explains how difficult it is for folks in prisons or jails to exercise their right to exert control over their own bodies. And how even after getting out through parole, probation, or community supervision programs they are under constant surveillance, lack access to abortion care, and are unable to freely support their families and communities.
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Rafa Kidvai: This is No Body Criminalized. How the state controls our bodies, families, and communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, Director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. How in our podcast we talk with experts, activists and advocates who daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. Sister Song defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children. And parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. You will hear us restate this shared commitment throughout these interviews. Because regardless of the specific issue each guest focuses on, that is ultimately the world we are hoping to create.
Our guest today is Nora Carroll. Nora is a public defender, that's the lawyer assigned to a person accused of a crime who would otherwise not be able to afford a private attorney. She calls this her jobby-job. Specifically she's a public defender at the Legal Aid Society's Brooklyn Criminal Defense practice.
Nora Carroll: The way that I see the work that I do is just harm reduction, trying to mitigate that system of social control, trying to keep people out of prison, trying to get people out of jail. Trying to do everything that I can to create some kind of intervention to prevent the state violence or interference in my client's lives.
Kidvai: Nora's been doing this for about a decade. I actually worked with her at the Legal Aid Society myself for about half that time, because I was also a public defender there. Before we dive in, here's why we felt talking to an expert on parole was essential for a podcast on reproductive justice. If you're on parole, you have to get permission to do pretty much anything, including leaving the state. Right now, abortion is effectively banned in 14 states, meaning people have to leave those states to access abortion care in a clinical setting. And beyond abortion access, being on parole adds to the complicated web of state surveillance and control of our bodies. Parole, probation, and other systems committed to community supervision, which is literally how they refer to themselves, are yet another way the state strips us of our bodily autonomy. By limiting people's access to family and community. Nora and I had a lot to talk about in this episode.
Hi Nora. It's so nice to have you here. How are you doing?
Carroll: I'm okay today. How are you doing?
Kidvai: Good. Thanks for joining us. What made you want to do or be in this role?
Carroll: As a white southerner, I feel that it's kind of my duty to work to dismantle this system. I mean, that is directly an outgrowth of slavery that is directly an outgrowth of convict leasing. And it contains the legacy of legal racial oppression. And mass incarceration is a humanitarian disaster. And that's sort of more widely recognized today, but it's a failed public policy and it creates a lot of harm. And what's so sad about that is that it purports to be addressing harm, to create fairness and dole out justice. And unfortunately it's not.
Kidvai: Nothing about it leads to anything good. It's just a site of trauma and state violence and control. That's your jobby-job. And then for your non-jobby-job in 2013, along with Michelle and Andrea Yacka-Bible, you founded the Parole Preparation Project and in your work you train hundreds of volunteers to really directly support incarcerated people around the parole release process. Tell us about the project and why this was how you wanted to spend your time, which you chose a day job that's pretty traumatizing. A side hustle that's also a lot.
Carroll: There's no legal services for people who are in prison. When you get arrested and charged with a crime, the state is required to provide you an attorney by constitutional law. But once you're convicted and serving time... And remember, we give out an insane amount of time for criminal convictions in this country. You're just there and people have an incredible need for legal services of different kinds. But particularly in the parole area. Our volunteers collaborate with people who are trying to get past the Board of Parole. And that's a group of commissioners appointed by the state who make a determination whether someone's a good risk to be released. So sentences of 25 to life, let's say, that sentence means that you serve 25 years and then you're eligible for parole.
Which is a discretionary form of release where you would have an interview without an attorney or any advocate, before two or three commissioners appointed by the governor. And these are people who are often very mainstream in their approach, very law enforcement-oriented in their backgrounds. Although that's improved somewhat. And they decide if you're ready to come home, based on whether they think you're ready to come home.
Kidvai: So you're there trying to convince them that you deserve to be out. What are you trying to do in the process of convincing them?
Carroll: I mean, it's like the worst job interview ever, because your liberty depends on it. So you're trying to impress them but also convince them that you're sorry for something, probably that happened many years ago. You may not feel sorry or it may be complicated. But you need a good release plan, ideally somewhere to go, employment, support on the outside, letters of support and so on and so forth. And those things are less available to people who are poor, who exist outside of traditional families. To people who are older. Sometimes many of their family members have died. Sometimes people have served long sentences. They may be estranged from their family members, which then gets held against them as not having a good release plan. But it's like, that's because they were locked up for many decades.
Kidvai: And so then you go up in front of this parole board. Let's say you somehow convince this group of people. Once you're out, you're free?
Carroll: Then you're on parole. So when you add up all of the people in this country that are on some kind of supervision, whether it's parole, which is usually after you've served a prison term and been released. Or probation, which is an alternative to prison, second chance type of a sentence. Or maybe you're just on some kind of pretrial monitoring. There are millions of people in this country who are under that type of surveillance of one kind or another. And when you talk about reproductive justice and the ability to self-determine and self-determine your family, it can get really complicated with these kinds of surveillance. So really for parole, you're supposed to get permission to do anything. And parole has interfered in people's family relationships in a variety of ways. Including, they get to decide where you can live. So if they don't like who you proposed to live with, they can just reject that.
And then you're going to the shelter system. If your PO likes you and you get along pretty well, all types of stereotypes and perceptions play into this determination by the parole officer of whether this is a "good parolee" or somebody they need to really scrutinize. Really what it boils down to is that it's similarly discretionary.
Kidvai: Yeah, it sounds like a minefield almost like someone's waiting to get you, which doesn't sound like the freest of freedoms after being released at all. I know in the current landscape, at least many of us are worried about movement generally to access care. But also what happens to folks that are part of this list of millions of people under supervision. On top of that, I'm imagining that being on parole comes with a huge amount of stigma. It comes with a lot of discrimination. And to feel like everyone you interact with, you're constantly having to be reminded of how you're being stigmatized. How your whole existence is stigmatized. That sounds really painful.
Carroll: If we're talking about reproductive justice, as families and communities that are safe and sustainable.
If reproductive justice is striving for families and communities that are safe and healthy, then it's incredibly damaging to our communities when our loved ones and family members are returning to them from these incredibly harmful and traumatizing places. And they've also spent time away from their families and communities at a point in their lives when they would normally enter the workforce, they would help support the family. They would sort of decide what they want to be when they grow up. And instead, people who serve time, they don't really get much net benefit from that time. College programs are few and far between. It's hard to get a job. You have a felony on your record.
Kidvai: Right. And what has that done for your connections? You've missed out on your children, on your parents. You've had losses along the way. I feel like the number of times I've heard people talk about how devastating it was to lose their mother or their father while they were incarcerated and how that just sticks with you for the rest of your life, because it's such a foundational relationship.
Carroll: When we pair volunteers with someone who's served a lot of time, and to us that usually means between 20 and 40 years, which is an incredibly long time, and yet a fairly common sentence. It's fairly common experience for people to say that when they go visit the person that they're working with, the parole prep volunteers are the first visitor or visitors that the person has had in decades, which is...
Kidvai: That's devastating.
Carroll: It's heartbreaking, but it's also affirming in the sense that the work is meaningful.
Kidvai: I know that the state already targets the most marginalized of people. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how, not just do these restrictions, target marginalized people. But they function to actually further marginalize people. It's not an accident that the state controls certain people or that this leads to further harm to actually sort of what the system is intending to do.
Carroll: One thing that happens when people are seeking parole release and trying to make their lives both legible but also appealing to the parole commissioners so that they'll let them go. Is that anything that's viewed as other, whether that is race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and anything like that, it presents a challenge. And when one of the lecturers that we bring in for our parole prep volunteers is a woman who fortunately was released by the Board of Parole, and she talks about the conversations that women have at Bedford Hills about how to address the Board of Parole. And it is really a difficult thing to navigate because for instance, the women will talk about whether to dress up, try to look nice, wear makeup and so forth.
Or will the parole commissioners interpret that in a way that they think that she looks overly dressed up or looks overly sexualized or looks slutty or something like that. As opposed to professional or taking the proceedings seriously. Our lecturer shared with the group that it's a very fraught question whether to cry or to show emotion. It's incredibly common for people to feel overwhelmed in these parole interviews because it's so high stakes.
Kidvai: But God forbid you cry too much and someone deems that manipulative or trying to sway you and therefore not legitimate feelings.
Carroll: Yeah. Exactly. But if you don't, maybe you're a stone killer. It's so fraught and I think those conversations, you're really like, damned if you do, damned if you don't. And that, I think that really speaks to misogyny and internalized misogyny and not really knowing how to be.
Kidvai: It's a setup. And I think similarly to, when you talk about Bedford Hills, I think about so many people that are incarcerated at Bedford Hills are survivors. If you share your story or tell your truth, you're manipulative. If you're not taking accountability for something because on some level you must have caused this. If you're not a perfect sort of survivor, similarly to the perfect parolee, then everyone kind of turns on you, or they discredit the reality of your experience. And so to be incarcerated for that experience, to feel like you're already there because of violence and then to now have to talk to somebody who again has immense power and control over your body. Judging your every move waiting to get you actually. It's really working to take away someone's dignity, attempting to get at someone's sense of self.
Carroll: Yes, and there've been a lot of new laws, and I guess I'll do the air quotes around criminal justice reforms in New State lately. And one of them is a domestic violence survivor's justice act. These are some really important and great changes in a lot of ways. There's also some things that you can criticize about it specifically in this kind of loss of dignity, very invasive kind of way in order to be eligible to get a lower sentence. If you are somebody who is a survivor, you have to put it all out there and you have to have a doctor to sort of affirm that it's real to even get a hearing on it. And similarly with bail reform, there's greater numbers of people who are able to be out pretrial like you're accused of a crime, but instead of being in on bail, you're released to the community and with some non-monetary conditions.
Similarly, there. There can be a lot of invasiveness into your life, whether that is a lot of check-ins. Or I have a couple clients on electronic monitoring where they have to plug themselves into the wall every night. If my job is harm reduction, I'm for that. But at the same time, situations arise where the level of intrusion into somebody's life and the total lack of privacy and the total lack of respect for people to just do their own thing every once in a while, can be really crushing and really is an undignified existence.
Kidvai: For sure. I think we're also used to the state just invading our privacy, deciding things for us, assessing whether the care that we need is valid, worthy, etc. And then I think you're naming something that I wanted to talk about with you anyway. Which is that in New York where you practice, there's been a move away from cash bail, which should mean that people are free from state control. And then what you're describing, electronic monitoring or sort of all this invasive information gathering, that feels like a problem still. And it actually feels like a problem again with our imagination in terms of, can we even imagine a non-paternalistic controlling life?
Carroll: This is just a drum that I'll keep beating till I die probably, but it's frustrating, because there's not two criminal legal systems, but it's totally different, if you got a lot of money and if you can afford monetary bail, you just pay and you're out. All you got to do is come back to court. But for poor people, it's not that simple. You don't just pay up and then you're out. You have a bunch of other things that you have to do as well. And judges are empowered to mandate people to drug treatment, anger management, to other programs. If you're wealthy, first of all, you're going to have a totally different experience of the criminal legal system. But also you're likely not to end up there at all. And the real criminals are on Wall Street. My clients are accused of stealing like a few bottles of shampoo from Rite Aid, or doing that a few times. The scale of fraud and theft that happens that never gets prosecuted, because those cases are hard to bring. Prosecutors are not that smart. They don't want to have to track down all of these white-collar criminals.
Kidvai: I could hear you say prosecutors are not that smart a million times.
Carroll: I mean, sometimes that helps my clients. I try to leverage that as much as possible. But I get very upset about it, because it's not fair. My coworker was representing someone who was charged with assault 2, felony assault in a police officer because he walked through an exit gate in the subway and instead of letting it ride, the police needed to follow him out of the subway system to ticket or arrest him for not paying the fair. And because he freaked out because he was afraid of the cops, there was a bit of a scuffle and an officer basically slipped and fell down and blamed his injury on our client. And now he's charged with a violent felony. I mean, that's ridiculous.
Kidvai: Yes. And then I think about that case going to trial, and I'm thinking about a jury pool who's sitting there thinking, "Hey, you should have known better than to not seed all of your control to this person. That you should have not been traumatized and had a trauma response. That your fear is based on some failing in you." And that's the culture of where we live, which is that instead of thinking about someone's humanity or thinking about how, "God, if someone tackles me or if someone pushes me or grabs me or touches me, I am a person with a body that gets to have a response to that." And especially, I don't know about the sort of life and identities of your client, but we live in a pervasive culture of fear of police that's deeply valid. And if you're a black person, then of course your whole life is at stake in those moments. And how are you not supposed to have a trauma response? And I remember seeing this in court all the time, judges, prosecutors, court officers, everyone is enraged when you're not just willing to seed total control to them.
Carroll: Yeah. And it really also points to a lot of times the system... Like a client who previously got abused by the police might be more likely to freak out and end up charged with resisting arrest or assault on an officer the next time around. And so then it's like their own trauma. The trauma that the system caused to them is being used against them to prosecute them. And that type thing happens all the time because it is the same people. The police harass certain people who again might be living on the streets or might be poor. And obviously certain neighborhoods are over-policed and it's not fair. There's also this way in which this system always wants there to be these very neat categories of victim and perpetrator. And I feel like the definition that we were talking about of repro justice has so much to say about that. Because, we don't just inhabit these categories like that. And yet that seems to be all that the criminal legal system knows how to deal with. This person is a victim.
They need to be protected from this other person who's a perpetrator. And we get a ton of intimate partner cases because the police are required to make an arrest if they're called to the scene of a domestic disturbance where one person gives them information that a crime was committed. And instead of that moment, a cry for help, a 911 call where somebody is either scared or they need some support or they're super angry or they're having a fight of some kind, what they get is the least helpful intervention possible. And as a result, the vast majority of those cases just get dismissed because people who care about each other don't want to subject the other person to the harms of the criminal legal system.
Kidvai: Because this podcast is called No Body Criminalized. I would love to hear what that phrase means to you? Or what it brings up for you.
Carroll: The first thing that it brings up for me is just the nature of incarceration. At its worst, when people are criminalized and prosecuted and convicted and serve time in prison, their bodies are so profoundly affected by that. I'm always talking about how the criminal legal system is just like where society covers up for all of its policy failures. The total lack of care, and that's where we put people, literally their bodies.
Kidvai: I guess in my work as a public defender, I felt that a repro justice lens was just absent in our conversations. What are some ways in which a repro lens could really serve people fighting against incarceration and criminalization?
Carroll: I think it's absolutely true that there isn't much of a repro lens in the public defender world, which seems odd in a way when you consider that. And there's always exceptions, but a lot of the people that get arrested in this country are really of reproductive age. And there are a lot of people, teens, 20s, 30s, who instead of developing these positive family relationships are having them interfered with by the state, as a result of policing criminalization and so forth. I think that it's missing in some sense. I mean there's so many things missing to be really important for us to, and this is one reason I got involved in parole prep to begin with. To be able to pull back sometimes from the daily and recognize the things that the system is impressing upon us and remember why we do this work. And I think that for people who are trying to fight the system, a repro justice lens is really useful and also just makes a lot of sense of what we see in the work.
Kidvai: Nora, it's been so nice to talk to you, even if it's been about really hard stuff.
Carroll: Thanks, Rafa.
Kidvai: We covered a lot of ground in this interview. So here are some key takeaways. First, there are millions of people under state control and surveillance right now in the United States. They're unable to fully control their bodies and futures. Unable to fully access reproductive and medical care. And unable to freely build relationships with their families and communities. Second, if the goal of reproductive justice is to have safe, healthy, and sustainable families and communities, parole does not achieve this. These supervision systems claim to keep our communities safe, but they're an extension of white supremacy and under white supremacy, none of us are free from harm. Even if you think you are.
Nora Carroll is an attorney at the Legal Aid Society and co-founder of the Parole Preparation Project. You can find her at paroleprepny.org. Nora told us they are funded by donations, so if you feel moved to donate or want to volunteer to work with someone seeking parole, check out their website. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for anyone criminalized for something that happens during pregnancy. Learn more at reprolegaldefensefund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org or call (844) 868-2812. No Body Criminalized is produced by LWC Studios for the Repro Legal Defense Fund. Sage Carson and Jen Girdish are the Media and Marketing team at If/When/How. Femla Kirkland is our producer. Alina Velasco is managing producer. Cogen Tejero is lead producer and makes this episode. And remember, keep your community safe and don't talk to cops.
CITATION:
Kidvai, Rafa, host. “Parole: The World’s Worst Interview.” No Body Criminalized, Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. March 27, 2023. Reprolegaldefensefund.org.