Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep12: Conversation with Jared Fishman (EP.65)

Written By Tim Cynova

Updated

September 9, 2022

In episode twelve of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Jared Fishman, a civil right lawyer and Founding Executive Director of Justice Innovation Lab, a company building data-driven solutions for a more equitable, effective & fair justice system.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:

  • Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG

  • Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods

  • Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent

  • David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia

  • Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21

  • Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look Listen

  • Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools

  • John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach

  • David Reuter, Partner, LLR

  • Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University

Want to explore resources related to this episode? Jared suggests:

Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guest

JARED FISHMAN is a former federal prosecutor and the founder and executive director of Justice Innovation Lab, an organization that designs data-informed solutions for a more equitable, effective, and fair justice system.  Justice Innovation Lab uses a collaborative approach to identify and fix inequities in jurisdictions across the United States. Prior to founding Justice Innovation Lab, Jared served for 14 years as a senior civil rights prosecutor at the US Department of Justice, where he led some of the most complex civil rights prosecutions in the country, securing convictions in high-profile cases involving police misconduct, hate crimes and human trafficking.   He began his career as a line prosecutor at the Washington, DC US Attorney’s Office, where he handled domestic violence and sex offense cases. Jared regularly speaks on issues of data-driven criminal justice reform, police accountability, hate crimes, and human trafficking, and has trained international and local police, prosecutors, and judges. His work and analysis have been featured on CNN, CBS, CBC, and in the New York Times and the Washington Post., and he serves as adjunct faculty at Georgetown University and at the George Washington University Law School.

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Jared Fishman:

A lot of lives hang in the balance. We have an obligation for those of us, with power, with strength, with connections, with money, to try to undo some of these harms. One of the examples we often use is if you can, as a thought experience, imagine a building where the person who built that building hated people with disability, and they went out of their way to make it the least accessible building possible. Now fast forward a hundred years that person's gone. You're now the owner of that property. What is your responsibility to deal with it? Even if you don't have that intent, it is still a building that's creating adverse effects for people with disabilities. There are folks who say the only solution is to tear it down.

I spent my early career working in war zones where people were tearing things down. My takeaway is that is not the solution. We're not going to wind up with something better, but we have to figure out where are the levers to make the system better now. There is so much low-hanging fruit and it is far harder than it should be, but there are real places where we can make a difference right now if we take action and if we don't then that's on us.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about, well that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10-part mini-series called White Men and The Journey Towards Anti-racism. While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out episode 54 of our podcast, where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduce the series and frame these conversations. All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic, not by white guys, can be found on workshouldntsuck.co. In this series, we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked they each define the work in slightly different ways. Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti-oppression work. Others say they approach it more through a justice lens, others inclusion, and belonging, still others equity and impact. Through these conversations will explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations that this was work for white guys to be doing.

We'll discuss what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging, and since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with. On today's conversation, I'm joined by Jared Fishman, the founding executive director of Justice Innovation Lab, a company building data-driven solutions for a more equitable, effective, and fair justice system. You can find Jared's bio linked in the description for this episode. In the interest of time, let's get going. Jared, welcome to the podcast.

Jared Fishman:

Thanks for having me.

Tim Cynova:

How do you typically introduce yourself and the work that you do?

Jared Fishman:

I'm a civil rights lawyer and a former federal prosecutor and now the founder and executive director of Justice Innovation Lab. The work that we do at Justice Innovation Lab helps law enforcement decision makers, typically prosecutors and police, use their data to make their system less racist, to understand how they are making decisions that impact the lives of the people within their jurisdictions, and how they could do it better.

Tim Cynova:

What does that look like in practice then?

Jared Fishman:

In practice, we partner with jurisdictions, usually district attorneys or the chief prosecutor of a jurisdiction, and we get the data of all of the decisions that they make throughout the criminal justice process. That includes how they set bond, how they choose to charge or dismiss cases, and what recommendations they have at sentencing. Ultimately, what are the results of those decisions, who is incarcerated for how long, what are the impacts of those decisions? Within that data set, we're helping them understand, are they making decisions equitably. Can they be making decisions better? Where are the problems and opportunities in their jurisdiction in order to have more fair, more effective justice?

Tim Cynova:

How long has the organization been in existence and doing the work?

Jared Fishman:

We launched about a year and a half ago. For many years, I was a federal prosecutor and this project got underway because I had worked a murder case, the murder of Walter Scott, a black man who was murdered by a police officer in Charleston, South Carolina, and through the course of the prosecution and investigation in that case discussions with people in the community and particularly with the lead prosecutor there about systemic issues facing that community. The question was, are we being fair? What can we do to be more fair? The chief prosecutor collected years of data but didn't have the internal capacity to be able to understand that data and to be able to use that data to make better decisions.

After being a prosecutor for a really long time and spending my career looking at individual accountability and holding individual people responsible for civil rights violations, what bothered me over and over were the systemic problems that were not being addressed. So often when we see a police shooting or we see police violence, we look at the individual who committed that crime or committed that action and try to see, can we hold that person responsible.

What I've seen over the course of my whole career is that these people are operating within a context that is much broader than any given individual. What can we do as law enforcement, as prosecutors, as members of the community, to ensure that people are set to make better decisions? We take that data and we look to see, all right, how long is it taking you to handle a case for a black versus a white defendant? What are the penalties associated for that for someone in terms of who's being incarcerated and for how long, and do we see differences based on race? If we are, what are causing those decisions so that your prosecutors can make better, fair decisions? For many years, when I started off as a prosecutor, I had hundreds of cases and I was making hundreds of decision every single day. Though I wanted fair decision and I wanted to do the right thing in any individual case, the reality is, I didn't know whether or not, in the end, I made a fair or just decision because there was no way to evaluate those decisions in any concrete way.

What we're hoping to do is to give prosecutors those tools, give prosecutors those answers so that they can make better, more fair decisions. A lot of times what that means is prosecuting fewer cases. What we've seen in recent years is that most offices are dealing with low-level non-violent crimes that disproportionately affect people of color and people in lower-income communities side. It's a result of the way those communities are policed and prosecutors are in a situation where they have the greatest ability to affect change if only they use those levers of power in a more effective, more thoughtful, and more equitable manner.

Tim Cynova:

Really fascinating work that you're doing. I guess maybe let's go a little bit deeper and back up and say, what led you to be on a podcast with two white guys talking about race and racism?

Jared Fishman:

Yeah. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and I grew up in an environment where my schools both sent me to Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolence and Stone Mountain State Park with the Confederate generals and formally the headquarters of the KKK without any irony. This was a part of my upbringing that we would go to both of these places. I remember growing up and being very enamored by the civil rights movement, but thinking that I had missed, I had missed the moment that it had come, that I wish that I could go integrate restaurant counters, go down and help advance voting rights and all of these things. That time had come. What came to realize over many, many years is that many of the most egregious and most obvious forms of racism had disappeared, yet the systems and structures incorporated many of those same racist ideologies.

Now they're just harder to see. As I became a civil rights lawyer, it started off by wanting to advocate on behalf of victims. I wanted to get justice for victims of crimes, but once I was in the system in my first week as a prosecutor in DC Superior Court, you can't help but notice that almost every single person in there is black. You can't help but notice that the impacts of our system is disproportionately affecting people of color, most of whom are lower income. That to me was really shocking so I didn't want to prosecute people for low-level drug offenses. I didn't want to use the prosecutorial power for that. I wanted to use it to speak on behalf of people who were victimized by the system.

For 14 years, I was a prosecutor at the justice department, traveling all around the United States, including as far off as us territories in the South Pacific. What became clear over and over again was that the problems that I had seen in DC Superior Court were not unique to Washington DC. They existed in South Carolina. They existed in Georgia and Louisiana and Kansas and California. These are baked into the system themselves and more often than not people don't realize what is happening. As a white guy, number one, I've had access to seeing what is happening in court across the country over and over again. I also have access to levers of power. I have access to prosecutors who are making those decisions. I have access to police officers. I have the ability to convene. To me, I see that as a responsibility of having that access to number one, raise attention to people who may not have that same access. Then number two, to use the levers of power that we have to actually do something to fix the problem.

Tim Cynova:

I've felt over the past two years, along with the global pandemic and also George Floyd's murder that white people, in particular, have started to see systems that they've not noticed before. We've seen supply chains and unemployment and all of these things that maybe white people through white privilege and white advantage have been protected from seeing. People are starting to see the systems behind the curtain if you will. When looking at the work you're doing, what are some of the things that white people still might not understand about the system in which you're operating and trying to change?

Jared Fishman:

Well, I'll take one example from some of the work that we've done. We looked at prosecutorial decision to see whether or not black and white people are being treated equally in the system, but you don't just look at black and white in the aggregate. You want to be comparing similarly situated people so people who are charged with the same types of crime, people who are coming from similar situations. What we found was quite interestingly on the whole, at least for some of the decision points that we were looking at black and white people were being treated equally when they're similarly situated. Yet what we were seeing on the back end were massive disproportionalities in incarceration. How is that possible?

How is it possible that you can treat people equally and still have massively different results? The answer is that if you put racist information systems, racially oriented arrests, to start off the system, then no matter how equal and fair you are, once it's in there, you're still going to have those disparate results on the back end. Explaining that to people has been, I think really enlightening because a lot of times, most of the people that I deal with, they want to do the right thing. They want their communities to be safer. They want to be fair. They don't always realize how decisions that get made before them can then mean that the results of their own work are unfair or unjust. Then once coming to that realization, the question is, okay, well now what can I do about it, and what is my responsibility to do about it?

Tim Cynova:

What are some of the things that people are actually able to do because I see this as a question like, all right, so I get it, but what do I do as a single person here, as a single white person?

Jared Fishman:

Well, we're working with the decision-makers so a lot of it is looking at your data and asking better questions. I think a lot of times, at least when I started off, I thought we would be using data to show problems. That we would be using the data to show where the differences and the disparities are and that's true. We do that, but even more interesting than that is asking questions about the data. How do you define whether or not you're being fair? What are the factors that go into your decision-making? To people who are not in the law enforcement system, it's different.

The work that we're doing is looking at who is the decision maker. I think one of my big realizations about everything is that someone is ultimately the decider. Someone is the decision maker. What we try to do is make sure that that person is informed so that they can make better decisions. Whether or not you're an executive or you're just a regular person, we make countless decisions every day, and having access to the information that helps enlighten us as to what are impacting and affecting our decisions is the first step in making better decisions.

Tim Cynova:

What does the Justice Innovation Lab structure look like? Who's a part of it? How does it work? Have you sort inwardly taken the data to make data-driven decisions in how you've structured the organization in the group and your policies, practices, and procedures?

Jared Fishman:

Who are we? We're a collection of prosecutors and data scientists and economists and visualizers and leadership coaches, each of whom bring very different, unique skill sets and perspectives to trying to address this problem. One of the things I realize that if we're going to take on something as big as mass incarceration or racial disparities in the criminal justice system, it requires a lot more skill sets than typically get brought together. What I think is most exciting about this work is that talking to a prosecutor versus talking to an economist versus talking to a designer, have very different thoughts about how to tackle these problems. Collectively, we come up with better questions and better answers as a result of that. We are our own team that then gets supplemented by people who want to work on these issues.

We've worked with an ethical coach who's a consortium of leadership coaching who's provided services and leadership training to prosecutors. We've worked with academics who either have an engineering capacity or an analysis capacity to help bring that to the table and we work with impacted communities and people who have had this experience themselves to help shape our analysis. Sometimes when you become very data-driven, you forget that the numbers are actually real humans so it's important to remember those stories and those experiences of the people who are most impacted at. We use a design thinking human-centered design approach in how we tackle problems.

We try to meet people where they're at. We try to understand the problem that they're trying to solve. Then we help them think about that problem in a different way, partly by looking at their data, partly by thinking about what questions would you want to ask, and then looking at the impact. At the end of the day, our real goal is to affect outcomes that... We're looking to change what is happening in systems. Sometimes those solutions are easier than we think. It just takes people coming together to ask those questions in a way that allows us to explore solutions.

Tim Cynova:

Describing your team as reminiscent of IDEO, where you're bringing together a lot of different people with a lot of different backgrounds to reimagine what might be. At the same time, you're bringing together people with diversity of thought and perspective, and life experience. What does that dynamic look like on your team when you're in the room with all of that difference and trying to work on a project together?

Jared Fishman:

It's been really enlightening. We have one guy on our team who designs our curriculums and he has a very different approach to best practices in adult learning and what do adults need to learn and thinking about objectives of sessions and it's transformed not only the way we build curriculums, but now it's, every time I have a meeting, I start by walking myself through this process. What am I hoping to accomplish? It's so simple in so many ways, but yet we don't do it. When I listen to economists talk about incentives and incentive structures. Now I see incentive structures everywhere I go. So often as a lawyer and I know as a young lawyer, part of the reason I got into the law was this idea, well, if we had rules and we had effective rules, we could build a better society.

Well, that's part of it. We need rules, but we have to understand how people's behaviors are affected so to have an economist and a curriculum developer and my comms person talking about how do you tell a better story, it just means that you're able to be more thoughtful in your analysis and more effective in your implementation. None of us have the skill to do this by ourselves. We have to partner and collaborate. Finding people with the dedication to tackle these complicated problems, who both understand that they are hard and we will not always win and we will often fail, but also are open to broader possibilities. It's kind of cheesy to say that it's magical, but it can be really magical sometimes.

Tim Cynova:

A lot of people talk about diversity of teams and what happens. When you get to sit in a team like that, you're like, right, this is what everyone was talking about. When you actually see it at play and realize how that informs just the way you work yourself, it's such a fun thing too. You might be trying to tackle some really serious meaty things, but the fun in energizing an intellectually stimulating environment that creates oftentimes is magical.

Jared Fishman:

Yeah. It just enables you to think about problems differently. A lot of people talk about innovation. We need more innovation. We need more creativity. What I've come to realize innovation really means is taking someone else's good idea and bringing it to a new context. That's all innovation is so if we can expand who we're hanging out with so that the advances in cognitive psychology or the advances in data processing, or the advances in economics, and we can learn what they have learned and say, all right, well now can we apply that to this new context of race, of justice, of what that means? It enables us to do things in different ways that are inherently going to have better effects.

Tim Cynova:

I found that often talking about reframing anti-racism work as innovation sort of clicks with some people. When you realize there's no playbook for this. There might be wise practices or things you should do versus things maybe you shouldn't do, but what's exciting and also challenging is we're learning together. We're making this up as we go along oftentimes, and oftentimes it's bespoke to our organizations and what we're trying to do in our resources, and whether we define it as equity or justice or anti-racism or anti-oppression or belonging and inclusion, it's also one of the really exciting things about this work in that we are struggling to change systems that have been around for oftentimes hundreds of years but doing it in a way that is bringing together all these different perspectives, but anti-racism work often isn't framed as innovation.

Equity justice work often isn't framed as that. I think in reframing, it might help people unlock some of that risk tolerance too. We're not going to have the right answer always, but how else do you approach innovation and using that frame I feel, especially for white people in general sort of lets them settle into, oh right, this is unknown and we're sort of learning as we go along.

Jared Fishman:

One of the things is, if you think about America's mass incarceration problem, we've got 2.3 million people who are incarcerated. The problem is even bigger than that. We have 10.6 million people who are arrested and wind up in jail every single year. It's a lot of people. It's an overwhelming question. Part of the way the American legal system is set up is incredibly local. These are decisions that are being made at the county level so fixing that problem actually means getting down to the county level and trying to help those people make better decisions, make more fair decisions, recognizing the places where their values and their goals are out of alignment with what their actual practice is. That takes a step of slowing down and really starting to take it step by step. If you start with one problem that people can wrap their heads around, for example, time to disposition of a case, which is not remotely sexy to anyone who's not in this field, but it's about how fast and how fairly and how efficiently can a case move through the system.

Everyone in the system can wrap their head around that problem. Then you take it step by step. All right, well, what do we think are some of these causes, what do we think are leading to these results? You brainstorm and you wind up saying, all right, well, there's like 25 things that people think may be affecting these decisions. Can we measure it? Yes. Okay. Which one of those things had the biggest effect? Let's work on addressing one of these. One of the things that I found most exciting about our work is it's those little successes that then lead to bigger successes that we continually iterate and build off what we learn.

If you think of this path, not as linear, that you have to have the answers before you start off that you have to have the change in mind, but really you have a problem. We're going to tackle this problem. We're going to recognize that we're not going to solve a hundred percent of the problem right off the bat, but maybe we can solve 20%. Maybe we can solve 50% and with each new step forward, we come closer to tackling that problem. That's what people need to stay motivated. It's what we need to keep moving forward in progress and recognizing, yeah, we get stuff wrong. We have theories that turn out not to be true, but the fact that we're asking the questions, trying to measure it, developing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses, that's how we're going to develop the evidence base for broader, smarter change.

Tim Cynova:

Several years ago, I watched the documentary Slavery by Another Name and there was a quote. I'll get the quote paraphrased, but not exact that has resonated with me since I watched that. It was essentially someone was remarking did they really think they would let 4 million free laborers just up and walk away? This was in context of the peonage system and sort of what happened after the emancipation proclamation. As I think about your work and I think about resilience and I think about you and your team tackling this massive challenge, systemic issue, where do you find your strength and resilience in this work personally, and as a team and leading a team that's tackling such a huge problem?

Jared Fishman:

I'm constantly grateful for the opportunities that I've had in life. I think when you can see the worst excess of punishment when you see people who are stuck in a cage because they don't have enough money to make bail. When you see how mental health and lower-income communities is treated, it's like that is not a problem that I have to live with. I have been fortunate not to have to do that as I've had plenty of problems and challenges in my life, but I've been fortunate to have resources to be able to respond to that. What continues to make me able to do this work is knowing that that is not true for a lot of people. A lot of lives hang in the balance and we have an obligation for those of us, with power, with strength, with connections, with money, to try to undo some of these harms.

One of the examples we often use is if you can, as a thought experience, imagine a building where the person who built that building hated people with disability, and they went out of their way to make it the least accessible building possible. Now fast forward a hundred years that person's gone. You're now the owner of that property. What is your responsibility to deal with it? Even if you don't have that intent, it is still a building that's creating adverse effects for people with disabilities. There are folks who say the only solution is to tear it down. I spent my early career working in war zones where people were tearing things down. My takeaway is that is not the solution. We're not going to wind up with something better, but we have to figure out where are the levers to make the system better now. There is so much low-hanging fruit and it is far harder than it should be, but there are real places where we can make a difference right now, if we take action and if we don't, then that's on us.

Tim Cynova:

Your comment about not tearing it down resonated with me. Why do you say we shouldn't tear it down?

Jared Fishman:

What happens when we tear down institutions? We see this happening in the United States right now is people are weakening institutions that have, I mean, America has plenty of problems, but we also have institutions that have protected rights for people for hundreds of years in ways that don't exist in other countries. We have to have systems in place to protect the rights of people and if we tear those down, what's going to fill the gaps? It's going to be wealthy-powered interests that are going to just recreate new systems of power that are going to benefit those. We have to be working inside that system to empower people. Part of the challenge is not everyone in positions of power want to do this so we can throw our hands up and say, well, people in positions of power don't want to do this.

I don't think that's true. I think there are a lot of people in positions of power who do want to do something different but don't have the tools or the ideas or the know-how or the team behind them to help answer these questions. That's what we have to be doing. We have to be having the conversations about the need for these things. Then we have to be giving people the tools, the resources, the partners, to be able to make that a reality. Thinking about it, talking about it is the easy part. It's the building and the change that is far harder. It takes longer and it takes more resources and more ideas.

Tim Cynova:

How would you respond to a prosecutor saying, I'm game, I'm ready to do this, but I can't because those above me aren't interested in doing this work? What am I supposed to do?

Jared Fishman:

We work in places where at the very least leadership is interested in taking a closer look. They don't necessarily recognize there's a problem. They don't necessarily know what the answers are, but they're willing to be reflective and to at least ask questions. That's what we require to work with. I think there are a lot of people out there who are not there yet. We could worry about trying to convince those people. That's not our sweet spot. I think the majority of the country says like, all right, something's not right. I want to do something about it, but I don't know what. If you're willing to be self-reflective, if you're willing to ask hard questions, and then when you find out the answers do things differently, then that's all I need to work with you. That's the mindset that we need for change. There are enough people out there that we can start there.

One of the things that I've come to realize about prosecutors and part of the reasons we work with prosecutors is that prosecutors are the most powerful people in the system. They're more powerful than police. They're more powerful than judges in terms of how their individual decisions impact the lives of the people in the system. What has surprised me about this work is how prosecutors don't recognize that. There's almost this lack of understanding sometimes that the most powerful people have the power so part of what I say to anyone is understand where you are the decision maker, understand where you do have that power because every step of the way you have the ability to make better decisions, you have the ability to be more fair. If that's all you can influence is the things that you touch and have direct power over. Then we're still going to be a lot better off than if we do nothing.

Tim Cynova:

A year or two ago I did a session with another colleague of mine, another white guy around anti-racism and how it shows up in organizations and what you can do. At the very end of the session, someone said "that was all really great stuff, but could you give us some tangible examples of that", which I thought, the entire hour is all tangible examples. I was remarking about this to one of my colleagues and she said, "I think people confuse tangible with impactful and impactful with visible." Adding pronouns to an email is tangible. Ending gender discrimination is impactful. Increasing gender diversity at an organization is visible. As you think about the work that you're doing and the approach the Justice Innovation Lab is taking, what resonates for you in those different distinctions?

Jared Fishman:

Obviously, everything we want to do to be real. We want it to be tangible and we wanted to be impactful and we want to affect people's lives for the better. One way you could look at it and if you're looking at reform, we could be looking at people who are incarcerated for 20 or 30 years, massive massively punitive punishments that affect a single person. Then we also have the problem of hundreds of thousands of people having really small sentences, but that are incredibly disruptive and punitive. Which problem is more important to address that really long sentence for someone who is wrongfully convicted or who is just receiving the punitive excess of the system, or is it the person who gets brought in on shoplifting and gets 15 days, but now has their total life upended? To me, they're both really important and some of them are going to be easier to fix, some are going to be harder to fix.

There's so much stuff that is easy to fix, but the putting together the coalition, the collaboration, the building momentum it's harder than it should be so we strive to be impactful. We strive for it to be visible. We strive for all of these things to take place. So much of what's happening in the criminal justice system is behind the scenes and is unseen, but yet has huge impacts on people's lives. At the end of the day, that's what we're looking at first, can we impact people's lives for the better? Can they get resources to deal with addiction and homelessness and poverty that they can't currently get because that's what we want? We want to be not just not punishing people. The absence of punishment and the reduction of the harm is important, but at the end of the day, we want to build something better.

Tim Cynova:

As you think about things you've read or watched, what resources would you suggest for people to take a look at if they want to understand more about the dynamics that you're exploring and operating in and the systems that are at play?

Jared Fishman:

There is a lot of great resources out there. Specifically, on the criminal justice system, I think Danielle Sered's book Until We Reckon is a great way to think about what is the purpose of punishment. What is the purpose of accountability and are we doing it right? I think understanding the historic racism and the system, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is great. Douglas Blackman book that you referenced the documentary of Slavery by Another Name. Thirteenth, the documentary, is a great explanation of the link from slavery to the modern-day criminal justice system. These are I think really important books. I think there's a lot of great work in moral psychology and behavioral psychology that I think to me has been really influential because we're talking about systems and we're talking about laws, but really at the end of the day, we're talking about human behavior and we want to encourage human behavior to be more pro-social and result in better outcomes collectively.

Books like Nudge the Behavioral Code, Jonathan Haidt's writing on morality and psychology, I find very enlightening. Then I read a lot about data science and probability and understanding algorithms and understanding what we can learn from these other fields. I read Moneyball back in the day. It was my first experience with data science. When my comms person said, "I think when you explain this as Moneyball for the criminal justice system, people can understand it better." So, that's what we're doing. We're Moneyball for the criminal justice system. If we can be using data to make companies more profitable and baseball teams win more games, certainly, we can use data in a similar way to make it more fair, more just, less punitive, and result in better outcomes for our communities because everyone wants safer communities.

Tim Cynova:

I find that one of the also really exciting things too, applying something from a different field, my background is in the cultural sector and I find the most intellectually stimulating things come from outside of the cultural sector and then get applied to how can I learn from Moneyball or how can I learn from IDEO? Then take that learning to be a part of creating something new and different within the sector or organization, which I work, and going back to this work is bespoke and there's no roadmap for it. Being open to where you can learn and how you can apply things differently in different ways I think is one of the really exciting things about the work and being part of this. What would you say to people who feel like they're outside of the criminal justice system saying, I hear you? I want to do something about this. What do I do as a citizen?

Jared Fishman:

I always say to people, all right, don't worry about the criminal justice system. If you don't have contact or connections to the criminal justice, that shouldn't be the problem that you're solving, but what are your strengths? What are your skillsets and thinking about how can I use that strength and that skillset to advance the cause of racial justice? Everyone has people they are connected to whether it be their employers or their friends, or their community groups. I think the mistake often is people who don't know anything about a particular field but realizing it's a problem now trying to go and work in this field that they don't know anything about, but you do know a lot about something and you do have skillset and it's about how can we apply that skill set to this problem?

A lot of the leadership coaches we work with have never worked in the criminal justice system, but they know to how to help leaders think through these problems so we brought leadership coaching in not really to talk about race, not to talk about criminal justice system, but just even thinking about best practices in leadership because prosecutors are leaders too. They have to lead their offices. They have to make these decisions for their cases.

Same goes with the designers. We've brought in designers who don't know anything about the justice system, but they have a process with which they can help us design better things and think about how do we build these things differently. I always tell people "get good at something and then once you're good at it, figuring out who needs that skillset" because half the people I've hired wasn't because I knew that I needed that thing. I met someone who had a strength and said, "oh yeah, oh, I can use curriculum development." I don't know anything about curriculum development, but we're teaching people things. I want to teach people how to do those things better so that's how my team grows.

I feel like I build my team and my organization differently than many people and organizations often build and I think it's the problem with the funding space that I'm in is that oftentimes people want to know what you're building in the end. The answer is, I don't know yet because I haven't put together that team. Part of what is great is if you go in and you try to solve a problem and you get people talking and you bring in the skillsets, you're going to come up with far better solutions than anything I ever could have come up with at the beginning, giving yourself the space to allow that to happen. Then when you see things that work and when you see things that are innovative, when you see things that are being effective, that's when you want to scale it. That's when you want to take it to more places.

Tim Cynova:

That's awesome. We're coming up on time. Where do you want to land the plane?

Jared Fishman:

One of the things that I think has been inspiring for me is that we're operating in a time where there is so much pessimism. We see so much dysfunction in our government. We see so much division between the left, the right in America, that it's easy to get hopeless sometimes. One of the things that's been really inspiring about our approach and taking it a little bit differently is that we bring together people on the right and the left, people who are impacted by these decisions and the people who are making them. What has been very hopeful to me is that I think people still can solve problems. I think the ability to solve our problems is there. We just need to do it with a little bit more empathy. We need to do it with a little bit more thoughtfulness. We need to give the time and the space to try to work out some of these solutions.

It is not easy. You can't solve these problems with a soundbite. It requires sitting down, having hard conversations, being open-minded. One of the things that I worry about the most is that we're losing our ability to be open-minded everyone across the country, right and left together and we do that to our own detriment. I think the work that we try to do is to reopen people's mind as to possibilities, to give them tools to solve problems again, and to come together. There's a lot of demand for this so more and more prosecutors, police departments are coming to us asking for help and saying, how can we help? The answer is we just need more money. There are a lot of good people out there that want to do this work. We're just trying to continue to raise money to make this possible because the best ideas we haven't developed yet. We're going to develop that in the communities that we work with that serve as incubators and hubs of ideas and innovation. They're going to find the solutions to solve the problems that are translatable across the country.

Tim Cynova:

Jared, I'll say you were the first incredibly seasoned prosecutor that I've ever interviewed. I will say I was slightly nervous throughout the prep and this entire conversation, knowing that I'm interviewing someone, went through your skills, but...

Jared Fishman:

I didn't go cross-examine on you. If I turned it on you and started asking the questions that's when maybe you should be scared.

Tim Cynova:

That's true. Right? Good thing I am the one who can click stop on the interview here. Thank you so much for the time today. Thank you so much for your perspective, your vulnerability, your sharing your experience. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Jared Fishman:

My pleasure. Thanks for bringing attention to these really important issues.

Tim Cynova:

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Tim Cynova https://workshouldntsuck.co
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