Sue Ellen Allen
WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, President Obama will include a renewed promise to change the way the criminal justice system deals with suspects, offenders, and convicts in his final State of the Union address.
In the audience will be woman who has seen all sides of the justice system — and all after her 57th birthday. Sue Ellen Allen, who spent nearly seven years as an Arizona inmate in the state’s women’s prison near Goodyear. Allen was raised middle class, lived wealthy, and lost it all on her way to being convicted in absentia of securities fraud while an international fugitive on the run with her husband who also served time for the crime.
Allen, in 2003
Sue Ellen Allen
Allen, this year
Sue Ellen Allen
After she got out of prison, in 2009, Allen did everything she could to get back in and offer resources to women still behind bars that she believes will help them escape the recidivism cycle that traps many inmates in the justice system for years. Now she regularly returns to the prison that held her to run education and jobs programs for the women there. She says the experience of seeing another side of America was “a blessing” and that her new calling is part of making good on the lessons she learned behind bars.
“I was well educated, I was privileged because I have white skin — I’m a white woman and that’s a privilege,” Allen told BuzzFeed News. “If you had told me what I was going to see and experience in prison, I would have said, ‘Not in my country. We don’t treat people that way.’ I was wrong.”
When Obama delivers the State of the Union speech, Allen will be one of his guests in the audience in the Capitol chamber where the House of Representatives meets. Presidents regularly use their guest list to highlight issues and policy goals, and Obama’s seventh address will be no different. (Obama is breaking the mold a little next week — one of his “guests” will be a seat intentionally left empty to highlight the Americans lost during his presidency to gun violence.)
But White House aides say the focus of the speech is different than other State of the Union speeches. Instead of the standard list of policy ideas and applause lines, senior administration officials say this State of the Union will be about the broad changes Obama promised in his first campaign and how they play into his presidential legacy.
Criminal justice is set to be a huge part of that legacy, and get a prominent place in the speech. The Obama administration has linked up with conservatives and liberals to push changes to the justice system aimed at reducing the number of people put in prison, the length of time nonviolent offenders spend there, and reducing the costs associated with a system that houses more inmates than any other country on earth. The Obama administration has attempted to address longstanding goals of criminal justice advocates at the highest levels — the administration has supported dramatic changes in the war on drugs and called for an end to many mandatory minimum prison sentences — and the lowest. Obama has taken interest in prison life, becoming the first president to visit a federal prison last July. He’s called for new anti-recidivism programs and more efforts to offer education and other assistance to people behind bars. Changing the way prisons work, the president has said, can reduce the number of people who go in, out and back into the system.
Gina Panetta
Sue Ellen Allen
This is where Allen comes in. In prison, she says she met women most people from her strata of society — white, wealthy — never come in contact with. One of them was her friend behind bars, Gina Panetta, who died of Leukemia while still an inmate at the age of 25. (Allen suffered from cancer while an inmate, as well, undergoing treatment for breast cancer.) After she was released in March of 2009, Allen started an anti-recidivism campaign named for Panetta aimed at helping women behind bars pursue education, job training, learn leadership skills, and line up apprenticeships and jobs for when they get out. Allen started the effort with Panetta’s parents, and Panetta’s mother, Diane, will also be at the State of the Union.
"People say, ‘Why should inmates have education? Why should they have anything?’ Well it's a not privilege or a reward. It's a necessity,” Allen said. “It's a necessity for them and for society. Because they're all going to get out, and if we don't prepare them and help them, they're going to go back to their old life.”
Allen’s programs have been successful, according to data provided by the group. Allen said about 600 inmates at the Arizona prison she did time in have gone through her program since 2011, about half that number have since left prison, and only 35 have returned after being released.
“That’s a pretty good success rate,” she said.
More focus on what happens the day after prisoners leaves the penitentiary can dramatically reduce the chances they return, Allen said.
"We need to completely reinvent reentry. We need to start working with inmates and staff right now to create a ‘human resources department,’” she said. “We need HR departments in all our prisons that are looking at jobs for inmates before they get out, so when they get out know they have a job they can use to pay for their halfway house, so they can afford a bus pass, so they can afford toilet paper."
Allen said prisons also need to develop programs for staff to find new jobs in a world where prison populations decline as many advocates hope they will with changes to the justice system supported by the White House and many libertarian-leaning Republicans.
For women behind bars, Allen’s appearance at the State of the Union is a signal from the White House it endorses programs like hers for prisons across the country. For Allen, the trip to the State of the Union as a guest of the president, and the visit to the White House that generally comes with it, will be an unlikely bookend to her strange trip from the cushiest parts of American life to the roughest. During the George H.W. Bush administration, Allen — then a prominent jewelry designer — was contracted by Barbara Bush to create a signature pin for the administration’s Thousand Points Of Light volunteerism initiative. That was years before her fall from grace, flee from the law, prison sentence, cancer diagnosis — and attempt to use her experience for good.
When she got the call from the White House offering her one of the president’s tickets to the State of the Union, she didn’t believe it was real. After the president’s staffer hung up, Allen called the White House switchboard to confirm the call was genuine. In an interview last week, she still seemed a little shocked that it was.
“I’ve gone from the White House to the Big House to the White House,” she said.
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1JCHQhB
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