Southern Center for Human Rights: Fighting to end mass incarceration, the death penalty, and the criminalization of poverty

The LEADing Justice podcast is honored to welcome Terrica Redfield Ganzy, Executive Director, Southern Center for Human Rights. The Southern Center fights for a world free from mass incarceration, the death penalty, the criminalization of poverty, and racial injustice. A passionate, indefatigable leader with many years of dedicated service, she states: “What brought me to the work was anger. What keeps me in the work is love.” 

 The Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) was founded in 1976 by ministers and activists concerned about criminal justice issues in response to the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the death penalty that year and to the horrendous conditions in Southern prisons and jails. After the 1970s, the criminal justice system exploded in size and reach, now with over two million people imprisoned. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world.

 Originally named the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, the organization’s attorneys and investigators worked alongside civil rights organizations, families, and faith-based organizations to protect the civil and human rights of people of color, poor people, and other disadvantaged people.

 In addition to representing people facing the death penalty, including cases argued before the United States Supreme Court, SCHR employs, class action lawsuits and individual representation to challenge unconstitutional and unconscionable practices within the criminal justice system.

Dr. Janet Dewart Bell • Executive Producer / Host | Chris Neuner • Producer / Editor | Theme Music • First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn

Transcript

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I am Janet Dewart Bell, the founder and president of LEAD Intergenerational Solutions, Lead advances in Democracy and Social Justice by promoting democratic principles and leadership from an intergenerational lens. LEAD builds on the wisdom, experience, energy and perspectives of diverse leaders and activists in the fight for America's future. The Leading Justice podcast will tackle the most challenging issues of the day through provocative and informative discussions with singular guests who make a difference in the fight for freedom in America and the world. 

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Securing a just and equitable future requires courage, commitment, compassion, vision and hope. Those elements are the themes of the Leading Justice podcast. 

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With us today is Terrica Redfield Ganzy, the executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. Prior to becoming the executive director, Tara has served in several different roles, most recently as deputy director for nine years. She was a staff attorney in the Southern Center's Capitol Litigation Unit, where her work focused on representing clients on death row in Georgia and Alabama for five years. 

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She also served as the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Death Penalty Resource Council, providing training and resources to capital defense attorneys throughout the nation. Terrica Redfield Ganzyreceived her law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law and an alum and trial advocacy group, Temple University. She received a bachelor's in English and Humanities summa cum laude from Tougaloo College in her home state of Mississippi. 

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She's admitted to practice law in several states and the Supreme Court of Georgia and the United States Supreme Court. Welcome. 

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Thank you, Janet. 

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I'm fascinated at the kind of work that you have done and certainly the work of the Southern Center for Human Rights. Tell us about how you've come to this important work. What compels you? 

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I was. 

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Going into my senior year of college when I received a fellowship at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. As part of that fellowship, we. We're able to tour the Cook County Jail, along with some law students who are also clerking at large law firms for the summer. And that, I think, is the experience that set me on the direction on the path that I am today. Because it was in some ways traumatizing or triggering. 

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It was my first time being in a jail. And I did not feel comfortable being there, not because I felt unsafe, but because I felt intrusive. It felt like it was wrong of me to be walking through this jail gawking at people who were in cages. I just felt unsettled. I noticed the majority of the people incarcerated there were. They looked like me. And I thought, Huh, there's got to be something wrong here. 

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Why are all these people locked up in this jail? African-American. And then the third thing that really struck me was when there were some law students also on the tour who asked the officers to make the people incarcerated fight for their entertainment. 

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I just was floored by the inhumanity in the request. And I don't know that I had considered myself somebody who would even be moved in any way. You know, I just don't know that I had given it a whole lot of thought. But in that moment, I just was horrified. I was horrified at the request. It was as if the people who were incarcerated were nothing. They weren't even human beings. They weren't fathers and brothers and uncles. 

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They were just tools for entertainment. And I just I didn't know what to do or say. And the other thing that I kept meditating on was the power associated with that request and with the people who were making the requests, those law students would eventually become lawyers. And then I thought, Hmm. These people who will one day lead something, have these thoughts about the people who are incarcerated, then we're in trouble. 

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We're in trouble as a society. And so I took that experience with me to law school. I just couldn't let it go. I hadn't planned to go into criminal legal defense. When I went to law school, I thought I was going to be a law professor. But summer after my first year of law school, I volunteered at the Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center and started learning more about the death penalty, interviewing jurors who had sat through capital trials, interviewing witnesses who had testified in capital trials, being in people's living rooms and looking them in the face and just watching the questions flashed before their eyes or listening to a witness cry because she was worried that the person that was convicted was not the right person. 

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I just couldn't let that experience go. The more I learned the angry I became, I was angry about the racism. I was angry about the classism. I decided that I was going to use my law degree to do something about it. For example, we represented a man who was holding up a sign in the city of Atlanta to say, Homeless, please help. He was arrested because that was a crime and he was placed in jail and was there for 72 to 90 days. It was a long time because he couldn't afford to get out. 

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We represented another man who lived in a house that didn't have one running water. He burned leaves in his yard and he was fined for that and was put in jail. We had represented people, grandmothers who couldn't, didn't have a tag and got a ticket and had to do a bake sale in order to raise the money to pay their fines and fees. And bail, for example, is is a system that is negatively impacting people who cannot really afford it. 

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So if you can afford to pay your bail, you get out. And if you can't, you stay. That's what we mean by criminalization of poverty, where we in society, in effect, makes it a crime to be poor when you cannot get out of jail because you cannot afford to pay your bill, then you lose your job. If you had a job, you may lose your apartment. Part of the challenge around bail is that it? It negatively impacts people who have the least ability to suffer a new burden. 

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And people who cannot afford bail are not necessarily guilty. 

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Explain juvenile life without parole. That's another term that we hear a lot about. 

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Juvenile life without parole. It simply is children who have been sentenced to prison for life for the rest of their lives. And without any opportunity to be released, it takes away any opportunity for them to learn, to grow, to mature. It's as if we are saying that putting a stop sign on children that says you have gone as far as you can go in life, you will never be worthy of being released. 

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And we just know that there's the fallacy with represented people who were convicted of crimes as children. Probably some of the best people I know, a young man who was sentenced to death and was able to get relief from his death sentence through the Roper v Simmons Supreme Court case, but has been serving life without parole since that time and even before he got relief from his death sentence. 

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He just went on this, a personal journey to figure out how he could be a better person. There's just so much that he's done in his time that he's been in prison. He's been such a role model. He was receiving his D. D. He has started groups and within the prison to help other men. He's done so many amazing things while he's been locked up. And he's done that because he's wanted to contribute wherever he was. 

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Even with the idea and the reality, he may not ever leave prison. He has decided that he wants to help improve the place where he is right now, improve starting with himself, but also rippling out to the people who are around him. It's heartbreaking to think that he won't get another chance to be free and to show the world what he can do. But I think it's also moving and inspiring that he is choosing to bloom where he is. 

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And he's choosing to help improve the lives of the people there. 

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We say we believe in a second chance. The can you tell us a little bit about those those people who you lifted up at the Frederick Douglass Awards dinner? 

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One of our honorees was Andrew Hanley. He runs a nonprofit that works on helping get people released on parole and then providing them with the resources that they need to thrive once they're out on parole. He, too, has served time in prison. He knows intimately what the struggle is like, not only being locked up, but also finding your way once you are released. He's had the experience of being someone that people wanted to throw away. 

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He's helped hundreds of people come out of prison, helped them thrive so that they have jobs once they're released. 

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So you do death penalty work and you do impact litigation. 

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We define impact litigation mainly as class action lawsuits that have a systemic impact. When we when we do a lot of filing lawsuits against prisons and jails for inhumane conditions within those facilities just last year, we're able to get the Department of Justice to come in and investigate Georgia's prisons because they are just bastions of inhumanity. And when you think about solitary confinement, we've we've seen prisons where they've keeping people in solitary confinement indefinitely for decades. 

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We found a lawsuit against a jail where women who had mental health concerns have been arrested, for example, proselytizing at a mall for loitering and would be jailed for months. Some women were forced to be in solitary, is basically a stone box with no lights, feces and blood on the walls, not being able to shower for weeks in some cases where there was a shower in the cell, then the cell is flooded with water. 

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So the kinds of conditions that you wouldn't put animals in there gradation, I think is the word I think I would use. Where? People are not treated humanely. Hold these systems accountable for the way that they are treating the people who are in their care. And care is the word I use because that is the way I want them to believe their role is. But the way that it actually shows up is certainly lack of care. One of the problems with the system is that not enough people outside of the system bear witness and care. 

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So what ends up happening is people are in some ways disappeared into prison. Right. And we can all go along with our lives and never really have to think about the folks who are being negatively impacted by this system. Some of us can. I mean, as a black woman with black children, the system impacts me as well. But in general, I think one of the challenges that we face is making sure people don't look away. I think in 2020 is that people couldn't look away. 

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We couldn't look away at the people who were being murdered by law enforcement, not to look away or to forget about the people who are incarcerated. We lift up the stories of the inhumanity that people are facing and invite people to join us in the fight. When I was a young lawyer and I are in law student, the more I learned the anger I became and I came to the word because I was angry about it, because the more I learned, the more I couldn't look away. 

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But I stay in the work because of love and love for the people that we are trying to support and lift up and protect. Love for the people who become our friends, who become family, and that can support in their new journey of freedom. What brought me to the work was anger. What keeps me in the work is love. 

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The United States incarcerates more people than any other civilized country in the world. Why is that? 

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There is something about our culture where we we are more inclined to punish than we are to protect. For example, ending poverty, homelessness, mental health, physical health. All of those things, but more prisons. We can always find money to build new prisons. I grew up in the South. So I think there's a whole culture in the South about crime and punishment that is problematic. Related and probably a descendant of slavery, right? It's more popular to dismiss people who need help than to actually help them. 

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What are the national implications of the work that you do? I know the Southern Center primarily works in the Deep South, and you've done work on a national basis. 

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Personally, I would say injustice is everywhere. I choose to fight in the South because I love being a Southerner, because I am proud of the roots and proud of the ways that my family has stayed to fight. And I also think that, you know, in some ways, as the South goes, so does a nation. I think it's the same in the South in some ways is the belly of the beast. If we can fix what's happening in the South, the ripple effects will be tremendous. 

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What's the sentencing Project? 

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We identify there are a lot of people who are serving extreme sentences like life without parole and life initially for minor offenses such as drug possession. We needed to do something. And so we've been successful in helping to work with prosecutors and judges to get people released started in Georgia. Now, we're doing a lot of work in New Orleans, Louisiana. But we've also been able to train other people in other states to do this work. I would like for the conversation to shift, and I hope that the work that we do helps to encourage media, encourage people and who hold positions of power to start thinking about justice differently, to start prioritizing addressing the root causes of crime more than they do building new jails and prisons. 

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I would like for us to get closer to our vision of. The criminal legal system not being used as a tool to concentrate power and control, but as an opportunity for communities to come together, to hold each other accountable and to help each other thrive. 

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What specific strategies do you employ to do that? To get there. 

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We have litigation. We represent people charged with crimes. We file class action lawsuits against jails and prisons, but also municipalities. We have a public policy team that does statewide advocacy at the legislature as well as local advocacy. We do coalition building. It costs nothing to care. Starting with care and concern can have a ripple effect in terms of creating change. 

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And that's not something that anybody has to pay for, although we will accept your donations. But it is about fundamentally deciding that the world that we have now can be better and should be better for future generations. 

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Does mass incarceration make us safer? 

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Mass incarceration in some ways is indiscriminate. So it captures a whole communities, but in other ways it's very specific in that it it captures specific communities. And when you take mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers out of communities, then you're you're harming whole family structures and community structures and prisons are places that retraumatize or traumatize people even more than they were probably traumatized before they came into prison.

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And then if those people are released without any support systems, then you end up having a cycle of hurt people in communities that have not built their processes and policies and resources to help them thrive. And so the answer has never been that locking people up is the way to make communities safer. The data just shows that that is not true. Crime has actually gone down, and I think our impetus to continue to lock people up is not based on any facts or logic. 

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I hope that we can say that we all make mistakes. If every mistake that we made, we threw people away, then we would all be locked away. We criminalize too much stuff. We criminalize jaywalking. We had to fight a bill in the last legislative session where we were criminalizing protests and giving people the right to run over protesters if they got in the way. But all of that feels like tools to concentrate power and control, right? It's a level of power and it's deciding who's worthy in those cases. 

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The criminal legal system is about power and control. And often the people that we're trying to control are people who are people of color and people who are living in poverty. At the CNN Center, we work for equality, dignity and justice for the people impacted by the criminal legal systems in the Deep South. We work to end mass incarceration, the criminalization of poverty, the death penalty and racial injustice. For us, this fight is personal because we believe that all humans deserve dignity and that we cannot have justice if we don't have equality. 

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And so that's what we're working for every day. 

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Tell us how we can get more information about the great work done at the Southern Center for Human Rights. 

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You can visit our website. W w w. That s. C. H. R that or. 

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Thank you. Terrica Redfield Ganzy, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.