Diana Angelo
What His Year Behind Bars Taught Him About America’s Prison Crisis: A Conversation with Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith is the author of, Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America’s Prison Crisis, in which he passionately documents what he deems to be the most tragic aspect of prison in the United States: the deliberate waste of untapped human potential.

Smith served as a Missouri state senator from 2007 until 2009, when he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice charges stemming from a 2004 congressional campaign. The crime? A few of his campaign aides had met with an outside party to create a postcard which advertised the “miserable attendance record” of his opponent, Russ Carnahan— the heir to Missouri’s most powerful political dynasty. When asked if he knew anything about the crafting of the postcard, Smith lied to the feds and said no. He was later caught on tape discussing the entire debacle with his best friend, who was wearing a wire. Mr. Smith Goes to Prison is a story about “how politics prepared [Smith] for prison—and how prison prepared [him] for life.” It’s shrouded in fear, frustration, sadness, and a few smiles; but underneath it all, and above all else, it’s brutally honest and inspires new discussion on deep-seeded systemic failures.

Smith is currently a professor at The New School’s Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy.

I had the opportunity to speak with Smith about his thoughts, his book, and his previous life in politics. There was no need for introductions; we just dove right in as he mused over the device I had selected to record our interview: a spy pen!

12TH STREET: It was a gift from my brother. He thought I could use it to record lectures during my lecture halls.

JEFF SMITH: And then how do you take the…the files…

STREET: It unscrews here, and you plug it into a computer.

SMITH: Wow.

STREET: The pen part doesn’t really work, but, theoretically you’re supposed to be able to write with it while you’re secretly recording. It can also record video.

SMITH: Wow! How much does one of those things cost, do you know?

STREET: I have no idea.

SMITH: That’s a nice gift! That’s a nice gift!

STREET: It is. And he knew that I would probably only use it for what it’s intended for. But I could imagine that in the wrong hands…

SMITH: Oh my God that could do some damage! Trust me. You know that’s how I got in trouble. My best friend was taping me.

STREET: That is how you got in trouble. So let’s talk about it—and this postcard that started it all. Why was it such a problem?

SMITH: Well, somebody else put out this postcard, but he talked with my aides about it. Because of campaign finance restrictions, they say that any coordination with a third party group that spends money to put out information about your campaign is technically a circumvention of the finance limits—how much someone can give to your campaign. So, even though it was just a postcard that cost a small amount, you can’t do any coordination. And when my aides told me they were talking with this guy, I should’ve said, “Don’t talk to him anymore” Instead I said, “Don’t tell me anything.”  

STREET: Sometimes it seems as though all you ever hear about is how much money a political candidate has contributed to his campaign and what’s going on with his campaign finances. Why do people running for political office need so much money in order to be taken seriously anyway?

SMITH: Well they need money to be able to communicate with voters. So if you’re running for U.S. Senate in a state like New York, no one would know your name in New York. To get the word out about you, you would need ways to do it. Those ways would be TV, radio, mail, and digital. The most efficient is TV, or the way to reach the most people statewide is TV. To buy, like, one week of network TV time in New York City, it will cost you about a million bucks. So you….

STREET: Make a postcard.

SMITH: Or you do a ton of direct mail. Either way it costs a ton of money if you don’t start with a lot of name ID. If you were Andrew Cuomo’s daughter and you wanted to run for something, you wouldn’t need as much money, right? I was running against the son of the governor—his dad was governor, his mom was a U.S. Senator, and his grandfather was a Congressman. So, he had tens of millions of dollars of name ID because of the money that his parents had spent on politics. But I didn’t have anything like that, so we were kind of behind the eight ball, which is what caused me to make a bad decision. It was out of desperation.

STREET: Did you have to get permission to talk about some of the things you talked about in your book regarding Carnahan?

SMITH: Well, Carnahan is a public figure. I mean if he wants to sue me, he can sue me.    

STREET: Well let’s hope not!

SMITH: It would get more publicity for the book, so I wouldn’t care.

STREET: Do you have any idea what Carnahan, or your best friend, Steve, or your State Representative Donnelly think about the book?

SMITH: I can’t imagine any of the people that you just named wanting to [read it]. I mean, I think I was totally fair. I wrote about Steve in as objective of a way as I possibly could. He was a dear friend of mine. I wrote about his positive qualities, as well as his negative. Carnahan, I don’t really know or care what he thinks of it. But, I told the truth as I saw it and let the chips fall where they may.

STREET: In the book, you talk about going to solicit an endorsement from your state representative, Donnelly, and she’s rather short with you. Can you go into more detail about that conversation and why you think she reacted the way she did, given that you were one of her constituents?

SMITH: Her reply was, “Well, I have a lot of constituents!” I mean, that’s just how politics are. If people don’t know you or if you don’t come from like, the right family, then there’s a real reluctance to take a chance on anyone new. And St. Louis is very much like an Old Boys’ Club, and I had not been a longstanding member of the democratic club, or whatever. I had supported candidates, I had worked in politics and volunteered for some candidates, but I didn’t have the relationships that people thought I should have. I didn’t have the name ID, I didn’t have the financial connections. I didn’t have the traditional background that one would expect someone to have to run for politics. So the State Rep, for example, was like, “Who the fuck are you? Why do you think you can leapfrog me? I’m here on the totem pole.” (Smith places his hand in the air on a horizontal plane). “Why would you try to go here?” (He places his other hand slightly above the one already in the air.) “You haven’t even gone here yet?” (He brings his second hand down below the originating plane.) So, that’s really the attitude. It’s like, stay in line, wait your turn—and I got out of line—because I tried to skip people. That was a problem for a lot of elected officials.

STREET: That’s sad because, according to your book, it seems as though you had a lot of great things to bring to the political table. But that lack of support from the higher-ups didn’t deter you at all?

SMITH: I mean, I didn’t really have that much respect for many of those people, sadly. I was just like, “Look, you’re not going to vote for me, don’t vote for me. I’ll go around you.” I don’t really believe in the power of endorsements. I don’t really think most voters are like, “Well before I figure out who I’m voting for, for Congress, who did my State Representative endorse?” No one cares. And these people really have inflated senses of themselves when they’re like, “Well I’ll consider endorsing you, but first you have to blah blah blah.” I just didn’t believe many people followed them anyway. So when they all ignored me or blew me off, it didn’t really faze me.

STREET: In your book, you talk about going to see some plays put on by the Prison Performing Arts, a nonprofit that produces theatrical performances by prisoners in a local prison. You said that you invited the rest of the senate to accompany you to these performances, but they all declined. Can you tell me why you think that is?

SMITH: Well most senators are thinking all the time, “Am I doing something to further my relationship with my constituents? Am I doing something that’s going to help me raise money? Am I doing something that’s going to get my name out?” And in no way would any of those imperatives be fulfilled by going to a prison and watching a bunch of prisoners do Shakespeare. It doesn’t get you votes in your district; it doesn’t endear you to your constituents or deepen your relationship with most of them. For me, a lot of my constituents were locked up. But for most guys, that population was invisible to them, especially for the guys who came from rural areas; they didn’t really think about it. They think crime is just an inner-city issue, not their problem. They weren’t going to raise more money by going into a prison. For them, these [prisoners] were off the radar: out of sight, out of mind.

There were a few who were concerned with criminal justice issues, but not many. And to the extent that they were, most of them were concerned from the angle of “how can we make our criminal code tougher?”

STREET: Tell me a little more about the time you lived on food stamps to “prove a point.” That was like, one line in the book, and I thought, where’s the rest of this story?

SMITH: (he laughs) Yeah. I just, for a week, lived on food stamps to call attention to the fact that you have, like, 23 bucks a week and that people live on so little. And that we should raise that stipend. I think I was asked to do it by some group that was trying to raise awareness about hunger in St. Louis. They contacted me and said, “Would you do it?” And I said, “Yeah sure!”  I didn’t do much to promote it because I thought it would look obnoxious, but I thought it would be a good way to understand more about what it’s like to live on not much money.

STREET: And then, after all that, you went to prison over this postcard snafu. Tell me why and when you decided that you were going to write about your experience.

SMITH: After I found out that my best friend was wearing a wire, I had about six months between then and when I went to prison, so I just started writing down what had happened in my life in politics—to record it, you know? Just in case I ever wanted to write about it. I started journaling everything that had happened before I would forget it, because I had no idea how long I would have to go to prison or what it would be like. I thought, “Well, if I have to go to prison for like, 4 or 5 years, I want to keep track of all of this.” So I needed something constructive to do, and I channeled that into this recording thing. I had no idea; I just did it for myself. Then when I got to prison, the first thing my cellie said to me was, “How long you got?” And I was like, “A year and a day.” And he’s like, “Damn, I’ve done more time in the joint on the toilet than you got time.” And right then, I was like, man, I should write some of this stuff down because people are going to have these clever witticisms. So I just started [writing] on napkins and on toilet paper and whatever scraps I could. I was carrying them around, and carrying around a pen, so that I could just jot stuff down. I got about 50 pages that were not, like, sentences, just 25 pages front and back of things that happened or things I heard or things I saw. And those are the notes that became the book. At night, I would change it from the scrap paper, or napkins, or toilet paper to a sheet of notebook paper. Then I’d store it in another person’s cell, because they found out I was writing something and started shaking down my cell a lot. And then he’d send it home to his brother, and then his brother would meet with my friend or my then girlfriend.

STREET: Why did the prison shake down your cell for writing? What’s wrong with writing in prison?

SMITH: Well they knew that I was jotting down stuff that I was seeing. And so the head of discipline for the prison threatened to throw me in the SHU (Special Housing Unit, also known as solitary confinement) for six months if he caught me doing it—or if I was trying to monetize. Basically they were just trying to intimidate me for writing about what I saw.

STREET: But these people know now that you published a book about it, right?

SMITH: I would assume so. I get letters from inmates in the prison where I was [about it]. I just got one like a couple days ago. I’ve gotten like three or four. They won’t let the book inside the prison.

STREET: Is it because it’s still in hardcover?

SMITH: Well there are some prisons that will allow hardcover books, as long as they’re sent directly from the publisher inside the original wrapping.

STREET: In the book, you describe a scene when you were first getting acquainted in prison, and you equated it to a high school reunion amongst the other prisoners. But you said that it made you sad. Why is that?

SMITH: Well because this was like the closest they would ever get to a high school reunion—seeing other people they were locked up with somewhere else. And it was sad, I think, for them too, that their world is so circumscribed by their experience, that their social network is just people that they had been involved in drug dealing with—at least in my prison it was all drug dealers—back in their neighborhoods, or people that they had met in other prisons. So when they’re trying to come out of prison and get a job, who are they going to put as a reference on their resume? What it did to me, more than anything, is that it distilled for me, or crystallized, how circumscribed their life experience was.

STREET: Speaking of high school, what’s your take on the presence of metal detectors and cops in schools?

SMITH: Well, what got me interested in a lot of these issues in the first place were urban education issues. And I see both sides of that. I started a school—which is now five schools in St. Louis—and a lot of the parents wanted [metal detectors and cops].  That was how they felt—that their kid would be safer. It’s easy to sit here from this perch and be like; “this is horrible to condition these kids to that,” but [for] a lot of the parents, that was the one thing they asked us. They’d say, “Well do you have metal detectors? I want that.” So, I think it’s a tough issue.

STREET: In the book, you talk about the problems with filing a formal complaint against a CO (corrections officer), even if it’s justified. Could you talk a little more about that?

SMITH: Yeah, you don’t do that. There were a couple of guys who would file actual complaints, and they just had a terrible time. One of them had, what I described in the book as, “diesel therapy.” You cannot win. There’s no world in which that complaint goes up through the system and it actually helps you. Or, if there is, what you will experience in route to that is going to render it not worth it. They know who’s filing these complaints. It’s not like you have this independent process where it’s fairly adjudicated and then they come back through the chain of command and say, “You know, we’ve looked at all sides of this…” You’re never going to get a fair hearing. It’s your word against the CO’s word; they’re going to take the CO’s word every time.

And to loose every time? I mean, I never saw anyone win one of those and get actual disciplinary action taken against the CO for doing something. All it does is inspire retribution, in small ways and large. You know, you’ll go through the lunch counter and everyone else gets a thing of meatloaf that’s like, this big (he holds up his cell phone), and then you get like, a little crumb. I saw this one guy, and he was like, “Bullshit! I want my meatloaf!” The smallest things turn into the biggest deals in prison. And most of what [the COs] do wouldn’t be considered a violation. They have a right to do almost anything. You don’t have basic freedom. I saw them do things that were obviously against their policy all the time. They stole from inmates; they stole from the prison itself. They just acted with impunity.

STREET: So, in the book, you say that everyone has to have a job in prison. But you also say that white people are more likely to get high-paying jobs. Can you expand on that?

SMITH: Depending on what you do, [pay] ranges anywhere from like, $5 a month to like, $70 a month. Most of the people who were in the $70 a month jobs were white, it seemed to me. There were two sides to the warehouse. I worked on one side where you did the hard labor; the other side was where you just carried in chairs, or other lightweight stuff. The other side was all white people, and my side was almost all people of color.

STREET: Is there a way for people to work their way up into higher paying jobs?

SMITH: No. There wasn’t like a transfer from this side of the warehouse to that side of the warehouse. It was just, all the people on the dry goods side, where you carry in notebooks or pencils or stuff for the commissary, or whatever, [were] white people. I don’t know why, but, the higher paying jobs were definitely more likely to be held by whites.

STREET: In the book, you talk about this theory you came across in your research called “acute disjunction.” Can you explain that a little more in depth?

SMITH: So if you grow up, and you go to St. Louis public school, 60 percent of the kids drop out before they finish. You’re just the median kid, a regular kid from the poor family, going to a shitty school, and you drop out—but you see TV, and you watch people who have nicer and nicer and nicer stuff. The disconnect between what’s possible in your life, legitimately, and what you see just becomes so stark. I think criminal behavior, in some respects, is a response to this yawning divide. Where I grew up, it was a middle-class neighborhood, most kids went to college; a lot of kids went to good colleges. Your friends’ parents are lawyers or executives, and you see that you can have a good life. You see what they did, and you just do what you’re supposed to do, and you’ll have the good life. Conversely, [if you were] the first kid I described, you can’t possibly envision the good life through what you see. You don’t see any dads come home in a suit with a briefcase making six figures. The only people you see with any money are doing something illegal. So the way you reconcile that is, you say, “Well I want that. I want that good life, but this [disjunction] between my reality and getting there…” [This] is what a lot of sociologists believe contributes to criminality.

STREET: Some may say that there are plenty of examples of people rising from out of these impoverished situations and making their way into a legitimate “good life.” How would you justify this theory to people who say that?

SMITH: Sure! Most people grow up and don’t commit crimes. Even in crime-ridden neighborhoods, the majority of the people are law-abiding. But I think, clearly, people want the same things; people want that good life. And I understand. It doesn’t mean I’d condone someone robbing people or dealing drugs, it just means that I understand why they do if there’s no realistic mechanism to get [to the good life]. I mean, there’s no Harvard recruiter going to their high school, you know?  I think I write it in the book in a tone that’s like, I don’t excuse criminality, I just explain. I try to just observe and not pass judgments on what I see. I write about the prisoners, and that was one of the biggest challenges, frankly, as a writer: to draw real people, in all of their splendor and squalor and nobility and crudeness.

STREET: You made them human.

SMITH: I wanted to humanize them. And I wanted to draw three-dimensional characters, not just perfect people who never did a thing wrong, and who should be out in the world because they [got a bad deal in life], you know? That wasn’t reality. A lot of my friends who teach are like, “I want to use your book, but I don’t think I can because of all the language, and because of a couple of these scenes…I’ll get in trouble if I use the book. Is there any way a 2nd  edition could, like, take out the bad language, you know, take out the N word, and take out blah blah blah…” But it’s real. I didn’t want to draw a sterilized view of it. But at the same time, I wanted to show that two things can coexist inside one person. The same person who’s, you know, like my cellie, so kind to me, showed me the ropes, and really took me under his wing—for the first few months—ends up threatening to shank me and offering me ten stamps to have my wife, my now wife…well, do you remember that scene? Take the napkin, and…yeah…well…So what I’m trying to show is that, that environment forces people into their most primitive behavior.

STREET: So what do we do? I’m sure the rate of recidivism isn’t helping matters either. How do we get on base one with correcting some of this?

SMITH: I think base one is sentencing reform so that people who shouldn’t be locked up don’t get locked up. There are some people who have an addiction, and they should be treated as people who suffer from a big public health problem. Secondly, we should not have overly long sentences for people who sell drugs. It shouldn’t be that you should have to go away for 15 years because you’re 18 years old and you get caught with enough drugs that they get you on conspiracy to distribute. It shouldn’t be that because you wanted to find a way to make money that you should automatically go away for 15 years. Then, we got to look and see what goes on inside of prisons. We got to say, “Look, what can we do for the next 8 years to try to make sure that you never come back?”—the same way you do with special needs education, where every kid gets an IEP (Individualized Education Program). It’s like, okay, what’s your issue and what special thing do we need to fix with you and what talent do you have that we can build on? We should look at the assets that people bring in and say, “Okay, well you’re 19 years old, and you were running a 6 million-dollar-a-year business, and making yourself a million bucks a year. You figured out a way to set up an executive structure, and you started doing this when you were 13 years old as a runner, and you moved up the chain. Now, what can we do to help you translate those skills into a legitimate enterprise?” So how do we figure out each person’s aptitudes, and get them in programs while they’re in prison that aligns them with either jobs, or employment needs in the community to which they will return? Or at least give them the tools they’ll need to start their own business?

STREET: Wouldn’t a big obstacle with starting a business be, once again, finances?

SMITH: There are four or five different incubators around the country now that help people coming out of prison start their own business, because it’s so hard to get a job when asked if you’ve committed a felony. There’s the Prison Entrepreneurship Program—which I’m on the board of—Defy Ventures, and some others. So in certain places around the country there are opportunities to do that. But you’re right. Starting a business is going to be really hard for most people. There’s a lot to navigate. But there are successful businesses that have been started by former prisoners coming out of places like Cleveland, TX, where the Prison Entrepreneurship Program got its start. It’s not impossible, and we need more training and [more programs] for ex-offender entrepreneurial endeavors because they have so much either before prison or while in prison. So many of them start their own drug businesses, and then in prison you’re hustling all the time, so people further add to their entrepreneurial toolkit while they’re incarcerated. I think we should look pretty seriously at that around the country, and see what we can do to provide micro loans to people who want to start small businesses when they come out.

STREET: For the most part, your book ends on a hopeful note. You provide practical solutions and talk about places and organizations that are doing great things for ex-offenders. But where should we go from here?

SMITH: These are small programs right now. They’re showing a lot of success. PEP’s (Prison Entrepreneurship Program) recidivism rate over the last 11 years was six percent. That’s 1/10 the national rate. Obviously, there are good things going on. But the question is, will the public factor embrace some of these paradigms? Because it’s not going to work if it’s just like a few million bucks of philanthropy here and a few million bucks of philanthropy there. That doesn’t bring anything to scale. POs (Probation Officers) need to think differently. POs around the country need to say, “You know what? I understand that you’ve been looking for work and that you haven’t found any. But instead of coming down on you, I’m going to encourage you to take that idea that you’ve got to start a janitorial business. You said you have three people who will hire you to come clean their office buildings, and you have a cousin who will come and do it with you. You know what, I know that’s not ‘going to work for a company,’ I know that’s not doing what’s usually acceptable to fulfill your requirements for probation, but instead of telling you that you’re going to have to show me 10 places where you applied for a job today, I’m going to say, I’ll come visit you at the site where you’re cleaning and I’ll look at your paychecks that you’re getting from that.”

Right now, most probation officers and parole officers won’t be flexible like that. You’ve got to work for someone else. There [are] a lot of constraints within the system that we can change.

STREET: Some people say that providing education and rehabilitation measures in prison—and out, for ex-offenders, is a waste of taxpayer money. Some even say, and I’ve heard them, that “all you need to do now is commit a crime and go to prison where you’ll get a college degree for free.” What would you say in response to that?

SMITH: The overwhelming majority of prisoners in this country don’t have access to a college education, and that was because of the changes in 1994 after Bill Clinton signed the 1994 Crime Bill that eliminated Pell Grants for people in prison. So that opportunity is in place for very few people. For whom it is in place, it’s one of the best uses of taxpayer money you could possibly spend—because it’s a public safety issue.

There are two things that we know [of] that can reduce recidivism substantially. The first one is when people advance a level educationally while they’re incarcerated. With people who advance enough to get a college degree while they’re incarcerated, their likelihood of recidivating plummets. So, not only are you increasing public safety, but you’re dramatically reducing the cost related to locking people back up again that society’s paying for. You can pay a small amount of money for them to take college correspondence courses, or you can pay a ton of money later to lock them up for another five, or 10, or 15 years if they reoffend. And the numbers that I argue in the book, because I [looked at] a lot of studies about this, show a 43 percent reduction in recidivism for people who advance educationally while they’re locked up. But the cost savings to that are extraordinary.

The Rand Corporation Study that I cite, that compiled all these other studies, found that there’s a more than five-dollar reduction in costs related to recidivism for every dollar that you spend on prison education programs.

STREET: And what’s the second way?

SMITH: Keeping people in touch with their loved ones—and their pastors.

STREET: In your book, you talk about how expensive phone calls home can be. It must be difficult then for prisoners to keep in touch with their loved ones if they’re only making $5 to $70 a month.

SMITH: A lot of this has improved in the last six months. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) just came out with a ruling a few months ago that said that prison phone calls can’t cost more than 14 cents a minute. But while I was there, they cost substantially more than that.

Here’s the deal: The prison has no incentive to lower the price because the prison’s not paying for the phone calls. The prison actually has an incentive to inflate the price because prisons negotiate deals where they get a kick back—so they get a percentage of all the profits. So say, if they’re getting 40 percent of the profits from the phone calls, then their incentive is to be like, “Let’s charge a dollar for a minute, fine. You want to charge two dollars a minute? Even better! You want to charge three dollars a minute? That’s grand!” Because the more money you’re making off the most vulnerable people in society, the more money comes back to the prison. And the prisons justify that by saying, “Well that’s the money that we take to fund your activities. You wouldn’t have any rec (recreation). You wouldn’t have weight piles.” But, trust me, the money they spend on recreation pales in comparison to the money they’re actually making.

Yeah, they have a weight pile. They have free weights that look like they’re 80 years old with ancient machines. There is no correlation between what they’re making and what they’re spending on the prison’s rec. So, you know, as long as companies exist, they’ll be a step ahead of government. But now, even though the federal government has come out with this ruling saying that you can’t charge more than 14 cents a minute, what prisons have already started doing is going to video visits, and they’re charging a fortune for that. And in some of the prisons with video visits, they’re cutting off regular phone calls to make sure they they’ve always got their profit center—assuming that it will take at least a few years for the FCC to catch up to regulating those. And by the time they regulate that, they’ll probably have some other profit center. But they’re going to milk this as long as they can.

STREET: Switching gears a little, what has the reception been for your book so far?

SMITH: Overwhelmingly positive. The reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have been very good. CSPAN named it one of the top five books of the year, which was great. I get emails every day from, just, random people who read it and were moved by it in some way. A lot of prisoners are reading it. Almost every day I get snail mail letters from inside prisons around the country from people who read it.

STREET: What are some of the things they say when they write to you?

SMITH: “You very accurately portrayed life in here, and thank you for writing it and helping to try to be a voice of sanity to change the system.” I’ve been able to speak around the country. I’ve spoken about 40 different times to different audiences about this, and I think it’s been eye-opening for a lot of people. I think that we’re in a moment in this country where people are finally starting to pay attention to this stuff. So it’s been a positive reception. I mean, I’m sure there are some people who are like, “What business does he have writing this book? He was only there a year; other people are locked up for like 20 years.” I’m sure some people are thinking that and saying that.

And I’m sure some people are like, “What business does a white, middle-class person have writing this stuff?” And I think that’s kind of a dumb reaction, frankly. I think that if I was a person of color, I wouldn’t want the only people who speak or write about prison to be people of color. Crime is not a black thing in this country; a lot of white people commit crimes, too. And if the public thinks that it’s only black people in there, the public isn’t going to be very receptive to reform. So I hope that I can be a voice that is able to communicate this stuff to an audience that didn’t particularly care about it before. I speak to state legislators all over the country. I went out to Idaho—the senate president asked me to come out there—and I spoke and he said, “You know? There but for the grace of God, go I.” But if you brought an 18-year-old Latino drug dealer from Los Angeles out to speak to the state legislators, most of those legislators wouldn’t think, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” They would probably think, “this kid looks like he deserved to go to prison.” That’s the reality of our country.

I think I’m embedded to some extent with a broader movement now. I’ve met so many people who are involved with the movement and everyone’s just like, “Look, if you had the experience and you’re willing to get out there and talk about it in a way that can move the ball forward, that’s great.” So that’s what I’m hoping to do, and that’s what I hope the book accomplishes. And I think it’s changed some minds and inspired some people to take action—whether it’s to talk to their legislator, or write a letter to someone in prison, or visit someone, or volunteer in some way with a program.

If you want to pay for this revolving door of people that come back out and commit more crimes that threaten you, and you want to tolerate the rape culture inside of prisons that makes it more likely that people will come back out and rape your wife or your daughter; if you want to sanction this dehumanization of people while they’re inside [which] will ultimately come back and threaten all of us—go ahead. Or do you want something different? Here’s how we can do it. That’s all I’m trying to say.

STREET: Well hopefully everyone will read your book. But for those who may not, is there anything that you think they absolutely must know?

SMITH: That there are people inside just like us. They miss their families, they miss their kids. They want to be better. They make mistakes—like all of us make mistakes. They just got caught.