An Interview with a Leading Criminal Justice Reform Advocate: Marc Howard
Marc Howard is one of the country’s leading criminal justice and prison reform advocates and lawyers, and he is currently a professor of Government and Law at Georgetown University. He is the founding Director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative at Georgetown, through which he recently established a Georgetown degree-granting program for prisoners. He is also the Founder and President of a non-profit, the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, aimed at combating prisoner stigmatization through open dialogue between the incarcerated and non-incarcerated communities . In 2017, Mr. Howard published Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism, which contrasted the United States penal system with those of other industrialized nations. Mr. Howard is also the author of two other books as well as many articles and op-eds in major newspapers.
The interview below was conducted in the spring of 2021. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): What sparked your interest in civil rights law, the prison system and prisoners rights?
Marc Howard: So for me it's very personal, and it has to do with the wrongful conviction of my childhood friend, Marty Tankleff. I have known him since we were three years old and on the first day of our senior year in high school his parents were brutally murdered. By that evening, he was in handcuffs and charged with the murder of his parents. By the next summer he was sentenced to 50 years to life. I believed he was innocent and I supported him at the time and wrote about it in our high school newspaper. But then, unfortunately, he went to prison, and we went in different directions. He loves to say, “Marc went to Yale and I went to jail.” It was always eating away at me but it wasn't until about a decade later, when I was a professor at Georgetown, that we reconnected. We started writing letters and I started getting phone calls and visiting him in prison. I got very involved with this case and I made the decision to go to law school and try to help get him out of prison. He was exonerated just before I started law school. I kept attending and got deeper and deeper into the area of criminal justice reform. Now, we work together on wrongful conviction cases and we have helped get other people exonerated and have more to come.
HULR: Your class at Georgetown called “Making an Exoneree” got publicity after the exoneration of Valentino Dixon, in which your students played an essential part. Can you describe the experience of launching and teaching that undergraduate class and then seeing the real-life exoneration of Mr. Dixon?
MH: Honestly, if you had told me before the class started what we were going to be able to do, I would have said, “There's no way. Are you kidding? That's impossible.” We thought it would be really cool to take undergrads and get them to reinvestigate possible or likely wrongful conviction cases. I certainly see a lot of cases and get contacted about a lot of them. Now, of course, I get flooded with them since we have had success. People want us to take their cases, but even before that I knew that there were a lot of cases that were worth looking into. So, we thought why don't we have students do it and have it be part of a unique new class? What was extraordinary was that we didn't even realize how amazing the students would be, how devoted they would become to the cause. It wasn't just a class at all. It wasn't a hobby, you know, or an activity. It was the meaning of their life. It became the thing that they devoted every ounce of their energy to. We have students working 30 to 40 hour weeks on the cases, not for the credit or the grade. But, how can you not when you get involved in a case and you get connected with somebody, visit them in prison and meet their family, and you're convinced that there was an injustice? How can you not do everything you can?
Most of our previous students are still involved and in touch. One of the men that was wrongly accused in our case sadly died in prison from a heart attack on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2020, after having spent 40 years in prison. The students and I went to the funeral. I even spoke at the funeral, so it was heartbreaking; we became family with them.
The Valentino Dixon exoneration was just miraculously quick, but I think we've also shown that students are capable of a lot more than people realize. With proper guidance, supervision, and a lot of input from experts, we can very quickly establish a much more realistic, honest, and truthful version of what actually happened than the police did. They have very quick investigations and are often very biased. So, we're able to present a more truthful version of events, then ideally actually prove it to the world, in the courts, and eventually get the person out of prison.
HULR: Do the students do most of the research, even though they do not have law degrees?
MH: Some cases have lawyers, some cases don't. Then in some of them, Marty and I become co-counsel with attorneys, or become their attorneys. I want to highlight what our students are doing is not legal work, they are not filing petitions or motions, they are actually reinvestigating the case. They are going to the crime scene filming and creating documentaries. They're going in there, measuring, looking at crime photos, and finding out what angle the bullets were fired at. In one of the cases, the man supposedly was on the fire escape, which is there at the crime scene and they're looking: here's where the victim was shot, well that's a downward trajectory, but the autopsy showed that bullets were at an upward trajectory. So they are reinvestigating the case, in a way doing police work, you might say. They're often finding incredible new aspects to the case that really should cause them all to be reopened. It's very hard to get cases reopened, so that's where the legal side comes in, and we try to help, but that's not our direct task. It is really a full reinvestigation: talking to witnesses, talking to people involved in the original trial, and so on.
HULR: You have recently founded the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, which is a non-profit designed to promote dialogue between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people, in the hope of building empathy and understanding and making positive change to the carceral system. What do you hope to achieve in the next year or two with the Frederick Douglass Project?
MH: It is true that right now the last place anyone would want to go visit is inside of prison given COVID, especially since it's impossible for social distancing in prison to be safe. Since the vaccine is coming and working its way through, hopefully that's going to change and we can start in-person visits by late summer or fall. However, we are currently developing a virtual visitation program that should start in May.
The idea of the program is to really allow outside visitors from all walks of life, all persuasions, denominations, just anybody, to have the opportunity to go inside a prison and meet incarcerated people and really connect with them on a human level. Overall, to discover that they are just like us, that they have families, that they have hopes and dreams, and also just like us that they're flawed and have made mistakes. They still need us to support them and really help them on their journey towards second chances and re-entry.
Through humanization, we're trying to defeat what has been really decades of a culture of demonization. It's been demonizing people who make mistakes, demonizing people who have addiction problems, demonizing people who were themselves often victims of crimes— and then ultimately perpetrated them too— demonizing people who are victims of poverty and incredible life struggles. We are trying to show that we all share a common humanity. I found in my work that when you can connect on that human level, you suddenly don't see people as monsters and you want to support them, and when they get that support, they succeed in their re-entry.
HULR: In your most recent book, Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism, which was published in 2017, you made a direct comparison between the United States and other countries’ criminal justice systems, which are glaringly less punitive. What was the most shocking thing that you found and that you want everyone to know?
MH: Well first off, everything is shocking, so it's hard to say just one thing. But, I'll say that I always knew that the statistics on the levels of incarceration in the US were much higher than in European countries. That kind of just says, well there's more people prosecuted, more people charged and sentenced longer sentences. What I think that I came to discover through the research and also through my own work and experiences is that the conditions in prison are also so much worse. For example, if someone got sentenced to spend let's say five years in prison and somehow could pick the country among advanced industrialized countries, the United States is the last, and I mean the very last, country they would ever pick because the conditions are so dehumanizing. They're dangerous. They're so unproductive and in other countries, the emphasis is on rehabilitation and getting people prepared so they don't go back to making more mistakes and committing other crimes. In the US, largely what we do, there are exceptions to this fortunately, but overall we do warehousing. We put people in conditions that are dangerous, where they're subject to abuse and violence, and somehow we blame them later on when there are problems of recidivism.
The solutions are clear: it's rehabilitation, support, and also shorter sentences. We don't need to be sending people to prison for 30 years for marijuana or for life without parole for juveniles. So the sentences shock me, but really the conditions in prison are the biggest difference. They are just on a scale of dehumanization that is appalling.
We have over 100,000 people at any given time in solitary confinement and right now with COVID, frankly, most of the 2.3 million people are in a version of confinement. It is egregious; it's appalling. On the other hand, with COVID, it's hard because if there are so many people packed in they are also going to be spreading so you have to pick your poison. But, the psychological damage is a serious problem. So, I think the conditions in prison are really pretty horrifying.
HULR: There is a longstanding prison abolition movement that calls for the complete demolition of the carceral system. Given there are other less punitive alternatives as discussed in your book, what is your stance on prison abolition? Would you advocate more for a reforming of the system rather than a complete dismantling of it, and how would you go about it?
MH: Right, so to me it's a little bit of an artificial debate because it's very much academic and I know that there's a purity in being able to say, “I'm a prison abolitionist,” so I think this should all be torn down and built back up and so on. I just think that's very unrealistic, in the sense of one, it just wouldn't happen. It's something where the status quo is so glaringly wrong. But, the only way for it to change is for people to embrace change, and the only way that's going to happen in most places, is if it's bipartisan, or ideally nonpartisan. That is what I try to be in all of my work, which is why I focus on humanization; really getting beyond partisan divides. Prison abolition helps to get people riled up and in principle, yes I would love for there to be a world without its presence. But, I think getting there is impossible. I think even trying to get there, you tear down the very possibility you have for building meaningful reform and to me, reform is not useless. It's worthwhile and can be done, it is being done in many places and that's better. I would rather, let's say, focus on making incarceration more humane, making sentences shorter, giving people meaningful parole opportunities, and giving them support on reentry, rather than saying oh no, that means you're supporting the prison industrial complex and you have to be an abolitionist. I have many friends and many students who are abolitionists. I respect their view. I respect that moral purity, but I don't think it's practical, so I don't identify that way. I am trying to make meaningful change that will quickly and decisively help people's lives. I think that's more important.
HULR: Last week it was announced that Maryland inmates can now receive a Bachelor’s Degree from Georgetown University as part of the Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative, of which you are the Director. Can you expand on the importance of this program and the impact it will have on the participants?
MH: I'm super excited and really proud of this program. It took a lot of work, we have a big team at Georgetown that's been very dedicated to direct the Prisons Justice Initiative. I have a number of colleagues who've been working really hard to bring this to fruition and we've all done this together.
First off, the research is very clear on the benefits of prison education: people who acquire education don't go back to a life of crime. It is that simple. Even as little as one non-credit higher education course will reduce recidivism by 43%. The Bard Prison Initiative is the longest standing establishment, having been around for over 20 years. They have over 500 graduates with bachelor's degrees from Bard and their recidivism rate is under 2% and they have had zero violent crimes. The recidivism rate could include someone going back for a parole violation for something that's not even criminal, so it's basically zero in my book.
So, Bard has been doing a great job and some other universities have been coming on board with it but, you know, they're kind of three levels. There's non credit, then there's credit, and then there's degree granting. We started with non credit in 2018 and then later that year we moved to credit. That was a big step I was really excited about, but my dream was always to get to degree granting. We were able to make a big push and it wasn't easy. There are a lot of people, with Georgetown being an elite institution, saying well why should that be for prisoners wondering if it is sort of bringing down the value of a Georgetown degree. I know that with my alma mater, Yale, they just announced the degree granting program but it's not Yale's degree. It is in partnership with the University of New Haven, so it's Yale running the program doing a lot of the courses, but then the credits and the degrees go through University of New Haven. It is still great that happened, but I'd like to actually see Yale offering degrees to prisoners. I think there's a little bit of reluctance among elite institutions to take that last step and I am really proud to be at an institution that was willing to do that. I am in conversations with people at other leading institutions who are asking how I did it.
I think it's really important because one of the things I realized in my work is that intelligence and education are two different things. I've been in situations where there are people who are in prison who dropped out of school in eighth grade and I would put their IQ, their debate skills, and their work ethic up against students at any elite school in the country. They might be 40 years old at the time they changed their life and got into that mode and when they were in high school they weren't studying for the SAT; they were committing crimes. However, the point is that we need to think more broadly about education. It isn't just about, you know, the sort of super high-achieving high school kid with all the privilege and the support. It's more about a life journey. I think that universities, especially these days, as technology has shown us that we need to broaden our view about who can be a part of the community, we need to embrace incarcerated students.
I think Georgetown really took a bold step. We got approval from the President of the University and we got it passed unanimously by the Board of Directors. So this is a real full Georgetown program, and I'm really excited to be able to get it started.
HULR: What actionable steps can someone reading this take in support of prisoners’ rights and supporting some of the social initiatives you are spearheading?
MH: I think a big first step is just to be informed; follow the news. There's so much out there right now, it's probably hard not to follow it, but maybe you can drown in it. Really follow the Marshall Project which is the greatest news organization that covers criminal justice issues and has fantastic content all the time. It's really moving and is a visually appealing, fun way to follow and watch. I would also say to get involved with organizations. Read about them, perhaps volunteer for them, perhaps intern or work for them down the road. It is important to talk about these issues, pushing family members to think about them. There's a huge generational shift that's taking place that I've seen just in the last decade with my students. When I first started teaching on these topics, students were always intrigued and it was kind of a wacky course on prisons. Now, my Prisons and Punishment course has the longest waiting list of any class at Georgetown. It initially was kind of a novelty, people would wander in just to see what it was about. Now I feel like everyone is engaged. The current students have all read The New Jim Crow and certainly understand about problems of policing, prosecution, and racial bias. So there's been a generational change, but I think what needs to happen is people need to talk to their family members. People need to keep spreading the word and to really have it lead to action and policy change. So, information, advocacy, and ultimately policy change.