Bernadette Rabuy works to impact criminal justice policy. She recently visited the San Quentin News office to meet inmate journalists, who frequently report on her research.
Rabuy has been working for 16 months at Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), where she wrote a report revealing how some correctional facilities are replacing in-person visits with video visits. It was the topic of a recent San Quentin News article.
She “exposed one of the nastiest tricks ever developed: replacing free in-person family visitation with paid computer chats,” said Peter Wagner, PPI executive director. “Her report has helped restore in-person visitation in Texas and Portland, Oregon, and I think will have permanently changed the future of this industry.”
Rabuy also wrote the study Separation by Bars & Mile that details the immense effect distance has on incarcerated Americans visiting with their families.
“Policymakers are starting to understand that millions of families are victims of mass incarceration,” said Rabuy.
The University of California at Berkeley graduate was poised as she discussed an array of prison issues.
“When I first started doing this work, I was really shocked,” said Rabuy. “I was jarred.”
Rabuy started doing criminal justice work with Voice of the Ex-Offender. She has also worked to halt jail expansion with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and Californians United for a Responsible Budget.
The work Rabuy does is centered on recasting the way Americans view mass incarceration. She said one of PPI’s objectives is to create awareness on what is happening in the U.S. prison system.
“We’re small, but we do important work,” said Rabuy. “I’ve seen the way we’ve been able to change the discourse on the criminal justice system. The campaigns we work on are to show how mass incarceration is really destructive.”
She said an example is how “prison gerrymandering affects everybody’s vote.”
Gerrymandering involves census counting millions of incarcerated Americans where they are imprisoned instead of in the communities where they are from. This awards undue political influence to people living near prisons.
Rabuy’s work is reminiscent of 1960s organizations committed to social changes. She is a civil rights emissary, similar to the idea President John F. Kennedy had when he encouraged men and women to join the Peace Corps as America’s ambassadors.
Her venture inside San Quentin came on the heels of Barack Obama’s recent historic trek as the first sitting president to visit a U.S. prison.
Unlike Rabuy, many veteran journalists have yet to enter a prison to gain insight on what is going on in them, and she did it without the aid of the Secret Service, just the watchful eye of her father, Octavio Rabuy.
“We walked in with Lt. (Sam) Robinson, so it was very easy,” said Rabuy.
Rabuy said the work she is doing to call attention to mass incarceration is moving at a pace too slow to be effective any time soon.
“I can recognize how people are paying attention in the last four years. But I’m worried that it won’t lead to substantial change, especially in the state system as opposed to the federal.”
She plans to attend law school next year.
“I’ll be sad to see her leave us this summer to go to law school,” said Wagner. “But I’m excited to see what she can accomplish for justice reform when she can add ‘the law’ to her long list of skills.”
Rabuy’s recent PPI work involved reducing the price of telephone calls made from correctional facilities.
As a result, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in October took steps to reduce excessive phone rates and fees charged to inmates’ families.
“We’re excited that they (FCC) are eliminating all the fees,” said Rabuy. “We were excited to submit that 92 percent of prison calls were inside the state.”
Rabuy said because of the recent FCC action, PPI is expecting companies to sue the FCC.
Rabuy said PPI is looking at email issues in the federal Bureau of Prisons and the possibility that communication between attorneys and clients are being stored. She said telephone calls may also get recorded.
As Securus Technologies has recently purchased JPay, the leader in video visitation for jails and prisons, Rabuy said PPI is looking at possible anti-trust issues.
“We’re updating our whole piece of the pie report,” (Mass Incarceration: the Whole Pie) said Rabuy. The study, published March 2014, detailed what percentages of the 2.4 million incarcerated Americans are warehoused in various jails, state and federal prisons and detention centers.
While Rabuy contemplates the future of her education she remains committed to the work she is doing at PPI. “I love it. It’s been great,” she said.
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