TUPIT panel discusses impact of excessive penalties on re-entry

Tisch College’s Tufts University Prison Initiative hosted a panel discussion Wednesday titled “Ending Excessive Sentencing and Mass Incarceration.” The panel included activist and author Kenneth Hartman, MyTERN alumnus Swinks Laporte, civil rights attorney Michael Meltsner, and TUPIT undergraduate student Kentel Weaver.

The death penalty is currently legal in 27 US states, and life imprisonment without parole is legal in all US states. About 14 percent of inmates incarcerated in Massachusetts are serving life without parole.

Each of the formerly incarcerated panelists spoke about the impact of excessive sentences on their lives.

Weaver shared his experience of being incarcerated at age 16 and sentenced to life without parole at age 18. In 2013, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that life sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional, making Weaver eligible to work for parole. Weaver earned an associate’s degree in liberal arts from Bunker Hill and is currently completing a bachelor’s degree in civic studies at Tufts.

“I didn’t think I was eligible for parole, but the one thing I knew I had to do was at least try because I had my mom and sister in my corner the whole time. “Weaver was there,” he said.

Swinks Laporte was also sentenced to life in prison without parole when he was 17. Laporte found a path to education with the help of the TUPIT inside-outside program.

He recalled thinking: “If you’re going to take my crime so personally, I’m going to take it personally to show you that I will do a lot of things with my life while I’m in prison.”

Michael Meltsner, former deputy counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and professor of law at Northeastern, has spent his career fighting for civil rights and against the death penalty before the United States Supreme Court many times.

He emphasized that while efforts to pass bills to address diminished employment opportunities and other forms of discrimination faced by formerly incarcerated people have been successful, legislation often fails to have its intended impact.

Hartman was convicted of murder at age 19 and sentenced to life in prison without parole until his sentence was commuted by Governor Jerry Brown after serving 38 years in prison.

“I was one of the first two people to get out after being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole as an adult. This was after 38 years and a really long time in prison. I entered at 19 (and) left at 57. “The world changed completely during my imprisonment.” Here’s what Hartman said:

In his work on prison reform in California, Hartman toured correctional facilities in Norway, Finland and Germany and learned what worked for global leaders in modern correctional facilities.

“They believe that people in prisons are human beings” Here’s what Hartman says: “They treat people in prison as if they were human beings, as if they were going to come out of prison and be their neighbors. “And we have a strange system in this country where people go to prison to show their humanity and believe that they should be treated like animals for the rest of their lives.”

Hartman unveiled two bills that are part of a long-term strategy to improve the incarceration system in California. Providing Access to Healing simplifies the process for volunteers to work with programs in prisons. The importance of the first law, AB 1104, is that it states that the penalty for a felony conviction is deprivation of liberty, while the purpose of imprisonment is rehabilitation, education, and preparation for reentry, Hartman said.

“This makes it very clear to the Department of Corrections: Your job is not to cause any suffering.. Pain is being here; “There’s no need to make the situation worse,” he said.

“What (these international prisons) prove is that if you treat people like people, they will treat them like them.” He emphasized that while these facilities were still prisons because the detainees could not leave, correctional officers had the attitude of “you work with us, we will work with you.”

Hartman explained that programs such as TUPIT, which offers education to incarcerated individuals, exist in “every prison in Norway.”

State Senator Jamie Eldridge, who spoke briefly after the panel, expressed his support for prison reform and his concern that the issue did not receive enough attention in the legislature. He expressed optimism that more will come to light in the next legislative session, which begins in January.