Career Pivots and Being Of Service with Chris Schramm Esq.
Today’s guest Chris Schramm Esquire is a personal friend, former Coast Guard, and public defender in Louisville Kentucky. If you have questions about the episode please contact emilyatgettintintuit.com.
Resources if you want to dive further into the justice system and how you can affect change in it.
list of companies using prison labor https://returntonow.net/2016/06/13/prison-labor-is-the-new-american-slavery/
If the justice system is an area where you want to help create change here are a couple of suggestions from the linked article on medium about how to be a good ally:
1. Read up about mandatory minimum sentences and watch videos about this on Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM’s) website. FAMM’s website includes work being done at the federal level and state level. Call or write to your state legislators and governor about reducing mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes.
2. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write to your federal legislators in support of the bipartisan (sponsored by Sen Lee (R-UT)) Smarter Sentencing Act (S. 2850) which reduces the length of federal mandatory minimum drug sentences by half, makes the Fair Sentencing Act’s crack sentencing reforms retroactive, and expands the “safety valve” exception to mandatory drug sentences.
3. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write to your federal legislators in support of the bipartisan (sponsored by Sen Paul (R-KY)) Justice Safety Valve Act (S. 399, H.R. 1097), which would allow judges to give sentences other than the mandatory minimum sentence for any federal crime.
4. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write your federal legislators in support of another great criminal justice reform bill, the Second Look Act, which would make reduced sentences for crack convictions from the previously passed Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, reduce mandatory minimums for people convicted more than three times for drug crimes from life without parole after the third offense to 25 years, reduce mandatory sentences for drug crimes from 15 to 10 years, limit the use of solitary confinement on juvenile prisoners, etc.
5. Call or write to your state legislators and governor to support state-wide criminal justice reform including reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing sentences for non-violent drug crimes, passing “safety valve” law to allow judges to depart below a mandatory minimum sentence under certain conditions, passing alternatives to incarceration, etc. Study after study shows that racism fuels racial disparities in imprisonment, and about 90% of the US prison population are at the state and local level.
6. Call or write to state legislators, federal legislators, and your governor to decriminalize weed. No, not because Black folks use weed more frequently than white folks. Because Black Americans are arrested for marijuana possession far more frequently than whites.
And again, if you’d like me to feature you or someone you know on this podcast I’d love to hear your suggestions via email to emilyatgettinintuit.com. We are all doing the best we can with the lives we have and have a duty to take action to educate ourselves and help doing the work of changing the system that we benefit from
