Rev. Jeff Grant, Co-Founder of Progressive Prison Ministries, the world’s first ministry created to support individuals, families and groups with white collar and other nonviolent criminal justice issues, talks white collar crime, prescription opioid dependency, federal prison, redemption, etc. with Toni Quest on her podcast, “Talk with TQ.”
Rev. Jeff Grant, Co-Founder of Progressive Prison Ministries, the world’s first ministry created to support individuals, families and groups with white collar and other nonviolent criminal justice issues, talks white collar crime, prescription opioid dependency, federal prison, redemption, etc. with Toni Quest on her podcast, “Talk with TQ.”
https://soundcloud.com/reentryusa/sets/reentryusas-get-free-stay-free
Link to Transcript of Jeff Grant Interview; please download and send to a loved one in prison: https://reentryusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Ep.-1-Jeff-Grant.pdf
Link to Transcripts of Glenn E. Martin, Jeffrey Abramowitz, David Garlock, Dirk Van Velzen & Brandon J. Flood Interviews. Please download and send to a loved one in prison: https://reentryusa.com/?page_id=214.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=DpsejAgUZIs
More about ReEntryUSA.com:
https://soundcloud.com/reentryusa/sets/reentryusas-get-free-stay-free
Link to Transcript of Jeff Grant Interview; please download and send to a loved one in prison: https://reentryusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Ep.-1-Jeff-Grant.pdf
Link to Transcripts of Glenn E. Martin, Jeffrey Abramowitz, David Garlock, Dirk Van Velzen & Brandon J. Flood Interviews. Please download and send to a loved one in prison: https://reentryusa.com/?page_id=214.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=DpsejAgUZIs
More about ReEntryUSA.com:
We were prominently mentioned in this article about our friend Chip Skowron. Please feel free to email your thoughts and comments to me at jgrant@prisonist.org.
“Jeff Grant, the lawyer turned minister who counseled Skowron before he entered prison, [is co-founder of Progressive Prison Ministries (prisonist.org), the world’s first ministry supporting the white collar criminal justice/economy exiled community]. Greenwich’s taste for schadenfreude, he says, has much to do with brute competition. ‘When anybody shows signs of weakness, everyone is feeding on the carcass—of the person or institution that’s been torn down,’ he says. ‘In Bridgeport, when someone goes down for a crime, the community rallies around to help the family. Here, we cast them out on an iceberg.’”
In early 2006, before the indictment and the headlines, before he was abandoned by most of the people he knew, Joseph Skowron III and his wife, Cheryl, were living in a tidy three-bedroom ranch home in Greenwich, Connecticut. In the early 20th century, Greenwich attracted flocks of industrialists and their descendants—Rockefellers and Morgans, beneficiaries of Carnegie Steel—who built manor homes on generous acreages. Always prosperous, the town was in the midst of another boom, and Skowron, who goes by Chip, was a member of the town’s new elite, a partner in a hedge fund called FrontPoint Partners. Since 2000, drawn by Connecticut’s relatively low taxes, the hedge funders had all but taken over Greenwich, occupying much of its office space and replacing its stately Victorians with garish mansions, priced to move at $15 million. As VANITY FAIR observed at the time, “The people who can afford to live in Greenwich these days run hedge funds.”
Among the aggressive, often eccentric billionaires who dominated the town, a peacock spirit prevailed. Paul Tudor Jones II, the founder of Tudor Investment Corporation, built a Monticello-like mansion so imposing as to overshadow the yacht club next door. Down the shoreline, Edward Lampert, the founder of ESL Investments, bought a $21 million home, only to tear it down and erect a sprawling new estate in its place. And in the rural backcountry, Steven Cohen assembled a 32,000-square-foot spread that included an ice rink to rival Rockefeller Center’s.
At 36, Skowron didn’t quite have ice-rink money. He had begun his career in finance just five years earlier, as an analyst at Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors. But before long, he was overseeing some $1 billion in assets at FrontPoint, where one of his partners was Steve Eisman, the shrewdly bearish housing-market investor profiled by Michael Lewis in The Big Short. Cheryl was expecting the couple’s fourth child, and Skowron wanted a home to reflect his success. In early 2006, he bought a three-acre tract on Doubling Road, a quiet, curving lane lined with old trees and low stone walls, for $4.1 million. Across the street lay Greenwich Country Club, whose membership roll included Gerald Ford, Tom Seaver, and various Fortune 500 executives. Skowron hired an architect to design a New England shingle-style home of more than 10,000 square feet. Completed, it had seven bedrooms, four fireplaces, a pool, a wine cellar, and a seven-car garage. Views stretched to Long Island Sound.
Cheryl had no interest in the Greenwich social circuit, with its acquisitive pulse. But Chip reveled in it. The Skowrons, already members at one of the town’s several country clubs, applied to join another. Greenwich has a dense calendar of charity galas, and Skowron made sure that he and Cheryl turned up at the right events. He joined the Monticello Motor Club, a speedway in upstate New York where Jerry Seinfeld is a member. One item in his auto collection, an Alfa Romeo 8C Spider, once appeared on a list of Greenwich’s most expensive cars. He traveled widely and lavishly. In Paris he favored the Plaza Athénée; in Barcelona, the Hotel Arts.
Among friends and family, Skowron was known to be generous, loyal, and fun-loving—a griller of burgers and sharer of beers. But he was emotionally exhausted, wrung out by the pressure of keeping up appearances and increasingly troubled by a sense of emptiness. “I wanted to be somebody that was important,” he recalls. “I wanted to accomplish, succeed, to be satisfied. It was all illusory.”
In November 2010, the façade began to slip. Press reports indicated that Skowron had become a target of a federal investigation into insider trading spearheaded by Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Marshaling tactics traditionally associated with Mafia and narcotics investigations, Bharara and his team uncovered webs of criminality that stretched across the hedge-fund world and beyond. Skowron stood accused of bribing a French doctor with wine, cash, and travel in exchange for confidential information from a clinical drug trial—a scheme that allowed FrontPoint to dodge some $30 million in losses. He was suspended from the firm, which quickly collapsed. More than 200 people lost their jobs. Charged with securities fraud and obstruction of justice, Skowron faced up to 30 years in federal prison.
Like many people contemplating a once unthinkable future, Skowron found himself drawn to religion. He read Scripture obsessively. As he considered whether to fight the charges against him—charges he knew to be legitimate, and which did not encompass the whole of his insider-trading résumé—a passage from Matthew seemed especially relevant: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
Skowron decided to plead guilty and was sentenced to five years. Prison remained a frightening prospect. He knew that Cheryl would be left alone with four children in the big house on the hill. But incarceration also presented an opportunity. Perhaps, through the crucible of imprisonment, Skowron might escape a life of grasping narcissism from which he could not otherwise tear himself away—a life he had come to believe would destroy him. What he didn’t yet know was that the challenges of prison would pale in comparison to those of coming home.
Skowron was far from Greenwich’s biggest hedge-fund manager to face prison time. Following a seven-year investigation, Bharara’s office accused SAC Capital—the firm run by Steven Cohen, Skowron’s first Wall Street boss—of trafficking in “inside information on a scale without any known precedent in the history of hedge funds.” Cohen avoided criminal charges, but SAC was forced to admit to an institutional culture of illegal trading, paying $1.8 billion in fines before shuttering in 2013.
Still, Skowron was prominent enough to become a cartoon of financial excess. New York highlighted his Ferrari 458 and Porsche Cayenne; a New York Post headline sneered, CHIP’S OUT OF LUCK. With his blond hair, blue eyes, and prominently dimpled chin, Skowron made a natural subject for Wall Street caricature. But he’d spent most of his life pursuing a less narrowly self-interested profession. When he was 11, his father was power washing their home, in Cocoa, Florida, when he fell off the roof. Skowron discovered him crumpled and unconscious, a picture of powerlessness. The scene terrified him. He decided to become a doctor, the kind who could fix such injuries.
After college, Skowron received a full scholarship to a combined M.D./Ph.D. program at Yale. During his residency in orthopedic surgery at Harvard, he used his vacation time to provide medical treatment in places like Kosovo and Guatemala. But he quickly grew disenchanted. No matter how many surgeries he performed, there was always pressure to do more. The older doctors he knew seemed discontent; many had failed marriages. His disillusion was bewildering, akin to losing faith. But Skowron had lost neither his sense of exceptionalism nor his outsize ambition. Soon after dropping out of Harvard, he decided to go into finance.
His timing was good. Eager to add an intellectual gloss to his already fantastically lucrative empire, Cohen was hiring professionals with Ivy League pedigrees and turning them into specialists in areas like energy and technology. Skowron’s background made him perfect for health care, one of Cohen’s favorite sectors. Instead of saving lives, Skowron could make a fortune tracking real-world events—the discovery of a new treatment, say, or the failure of a clinical trial—that might spark profitable volatility in health care stocks. In 2007, only six years after beginning his career in finance, he made $13.5 million.
Skowron’s fall was jarring. But he quickly had reason to think that, in pleading guilty, he had made the right decision. On his first day in prison, at a medium-security facility in Pennsylvania, another inmate extended his hand.
“Hi,” the man said. “My name is Chip.”
Unbelieving, Skowron replied, “My name is Chip, too.”
“Let’s be clear about this,” the man said. “I’m Chip 1, you’re Chip 2.” Noticing that Skowron was holding a Bible, Chip 1 quoted from Romans: “Just remember that all things work together for good.” They embraced, and Skowron felt confirmed in his newfound belief that he was being guided by God.
About 70 percent of Skowron’s fellow inmates were drug offenders, many of them poor young men of color. He saw gentler versions of Hollywood prison tropes: friction between inmates and guards, black-market intrigue, prisoners who liked to stir chaos just to thwart boredom. But the distance between his expectations of prison life and its reality was vast. Skowron had imagined that things would be horribly dull: rows of men staring into space, counting hours. In fact, prison was dynamic—rich with incident and culture. Some of what happened there seemed to shimmer with biblical resonance. One day, the prison was beset by a plague of snakes; they dropped from a light fixture onto men watching soap operas and rose out of a drain in the shower, where an inmate known as Joe the Greek was bathing. Then there was Chuck, a powerfully built gym buddy of Skowron’s, who began rapidly losing weight. By the time an appropriate doctor was consulted, his cancer was beyond curing.
It wasn’t all grim. One day, an inmate known as Gunz offered to give Skowron a tutorial on curried jack mack, a delicacy involving the bone-in mackerel sold at the commissary. Another prisoner, Kareem Burke, who went by Biggs, provided a pepper and an onion for the dish—a rare stash of fresh produce. Burke, who had cofounded Roc-A-Fella Records in the 1990s with Jay-Z and Damon Dash, was in prison for conspiring to distribute marijuana. Despite their differences, he and Skowron bonded quickly. Both men had lost their mothers at a young age; now, in quick succession, both came to consider themselves born again. Their high-profile friendship attracted others, and they were soon joined by a large group of inmates for regular meetings in Skowron’s bunk. The gatherings resembled AA meetings: discussions of sin, suffering, and the search for meaning and consistency in the wake of trauma. Burke spoke about his guilt for failing to support his older brother, who had been murdered years earlier. Others regretted infidelity. Many admitted their failures as fathers.
Prison ecology isn’t known for rewarding vulnerability, but the bunk became a foxhole, fostering a spirit of confession and mutual reliance. Among the men who met there, Skowron found he could expose himself in a way he had never been able to before. When news of his legal trouble broke, his Greenwich social circle had vanished. He was ejected from his country club, and his family felt humiliated by the publicity. Worried that he might be wearing a wire, former business associates wouldn’t speak to him. The abandonment surprised him. Skowron believed he’d had deep, nuanced relationships. On reflection, he saw that most of them had been based on the conference of status. Virtually none of his old friends visited him in prison.
As his relationships with the other inmates deepened, he became ashamed of his pride in his education and his wealth, which had insulated him in a cocoon of superiority. He saw that it had enabled a false, destructive worldview—the kind that, widely held, abetted mass incarceration. The people in prison were not who he had expected them to be, and prison, he now believed, was not where the vast majority of them belonged. Increasingly, he felt, they were his brothers.
Following his release, in November 2015, Skowron returned to live with his family in Greenwich, where they remained comfortably situated at the house on Doubling Road. There was the pool and there was the billiard room, with its Oriental rug and its Monaco Grand Prix posters. There was the view of the country club. Skowron’s office, paneled in dark wood, was like a stage set, accessorized with props from a prior life: framed credentials on the wall, a shelf dedicated to Ferrari paraphernalia, a photo with George and Barbara Bush.
Skowron was barred from working in the securities industry, but he quickly took ownership stakes in several businesses—apparel, medical marketing, health care, car sales—drawing on many of the same qualities that once made him an effective hedge-fund manager. Within two years, he found himself meeting with a top executive at HSBC, slipping almost seamlessly, he marveled, back into upper-corporate echelons. He enjoyed driving his silver Porsche Panamera, which smelled sweetly of his cologne. He kept his taste for fine wine.
But Greenwich was full of social trip wires. At Whole Foods or the park, Skowron was likely to encounter people he had caused to lose jobs or money. His neighbors were polite but distant. Not long after coming home, Skowron suggested to his wife that they have dinner at Mediterraneo, a favorite restaurant downtown. “I’m not going to that hedge-fund hangout!” she said. Ultimately, citing the Parmesan-encrusted halibut, he convinced her—only to run into Gil Caffray, a founding partner of FrontPoint.
Shortly before going to prison, Skowron had met with Jeff Grant, a former lawyer and onetime Greenwich resident who had spent 14 months in federal prison for wire fraud and money laundering. Grant, who had become a minister, counseled numerous hedge funders during Bharara’s insider-trading probe, and the chilly reception that greeted Skowron in Greenwich was familiar to him. It could seem in part like an aversion to self-knowledge; to interact with men like Skowron was to confront the sometimes suspect means by which the town maintained its status as one of the world’s most privileged enclaves. “It’s a mirror on themselves,” Grant says.
On Friday, Oct. 18, 2019, 9 am ET, Michael Kimelman, a former hedge fund founder and manager who was convicted and incarcerated for a white collar crime (who is a member of our online White Collar Support Group), was our guest on Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant – The Voice of CT Criminal Justice. Live on WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven, rebroadcast at 5 pm. Live-streamed and podcast everywhere, see below. Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
Michael Kimelman is an expert on disruptive innovation and personal disruption; he uses the lessons of his own life to offer inspiration and insight to others — from formerly incarcerated youth to global CEOs — on overcoming personal and professional challenges. His mission is to empower people with the skills and mindset to become resilient and prosper in the face of adversity. Michael was a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell and then founded Incremental Capital, a New York-based hedge fund. He is currently the head of Blockchain Strategic Development at Loop Media, Inc., and is the co-Founder of Crypto.IQ, a strategic advisory and media firm with a focus on digital assets. Michael’s website: https://mikekimelman.com
Michael is the Author of the book, “Confessions of a Wall Street Insider: A Cautionary Tale of Rats, Feds, and Banksters,” available at https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Wall-Street-Insider-Cautionary/dp/15107133.
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The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy and Jeff Grant is broadcast live at 9 am ET on the first and third Friday of each month Sept. through June, from the WNHH 103.5 FM studios in New Haven. It is rebroadcast on WNHH at 5 pm ET the same day. Podcast and Archive available all the time, everywhere.
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An article about each show is published a few days later in the New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org).
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Season Three Guests:
Fri., Sept. 6, 2019: Khalil Cumberbatch, Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice
Fri., Sept. 20, 2019: Aaron T. Kinzel, Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn
Fri., Oct. 4, 2019: Charlie Grady, Outreach Specialist for the FBI CT Community Outreach Program
Fri., Oct. 18, 2019: Michael Kimelman, Former Hedge Founder and Manager who was Convicted and Incarcerated for a White Collar Crime
Fri., Nov. 1, 2019: Corey Brinson, Former Attorney Convicted for a White Collar Crime who is running for Hartford City Council
Fri., Nov. 15, 2019: Cathryn Lavery, Ph.D., Professor of Criminal Justice at Iona College, New Rochelle, NY
Season Two Guests:
Fri., Sept. 9, 2018: Kennard Ray, CT Unlock the Vote and Candidate for CT State Legislator
Fri., Sept. 21, 2018: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50
Fri., Oct. 5, 2018: Sue Gunderman & Beth Hines, CT Reentry Roundtables
Fri., Oct. 19, 2018: Venice Michalsen, Assoc. Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University
Fri., Nov. 16, 2018: Andrew Clark, Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, Central Connecticut State University
Fri., Dec. 7, 2018: Glenn E. Martin, Founder/Consultant of GEM Trainers and Past-President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA
Fri., Dec. 21, 2018: Fernando Muniz, CEO of Community Solutions, Inc., and community leader Rosa Correa.
Fri., Jan. 4, 2019: New Years Retrospective Show Looking Back at Past CJI Guests.
Fri. Jan. 18, 2019: Peter Henning, Law Prof. at Wayne State University and “White Collar Watch” columnist for the NY Times.
Fri., Feb. 1, 2019: Jeffrey Deskovic, CEO of The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation who was Exonerated after Serving 16 Years in Prison
Fri., Feb. 15, 2019: Jeffrey Abramowitz, Executive Director for Reentry Services, JEVS Human Services, Philadelphia.
Fri., Mar. 1, 2019, Rollin Cook, CT Commissioner of Correction
Fri., Mar. 15, 2019: Dieter Tejada, Justice Impacted Criminal Justice Advocate
Fri., Apr. 5, 2019: John Rowland, Former CT Governor
Fri., Apr. 19, 2019: Gregg D. Caruso, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning & Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Fri., May 3, 2019: Michael Taylor, CEO of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in the Greater New Haven area
Fri., May 17, 2019: Tarra Simmons, Esq., Attorney & Criminal Justice Reform Advocate, Washington State
Fri., June 7, 2019: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux!
Fri., June 21, 2019: Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop
Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
Kathy Morse is a member of our online White Collar Support Group that meets on Monday evenings. Caution: her story is horrifying and very graphic. I admire her courage in sharing it to bring truth, awareness and light to the darkest of conditions in prison; conditions no person should have to live through. – Jeff
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“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.- Anais Nin
I broke the law, I stole $283,000 from my employer, I was guilty and I knew it, I own it.
Two months after I was fired from my job I surrendered, was booked, arranged and released on my own recognizance all in the same day. Fast forward 10 months and I am running around town doing errands with my 19 month-old daughter napping in her carseat when I saw the red flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. I had missed a court date because I was home sick in bed with pneumonia and the judges clerk had misplaced the doctors note which was faxed to them, a warrant for my arrest was issued, which because I resided in New Jersey made me a fugitive from justice even though every day I was travelling in and out of Manhattan to work. Going about my daily life.
I was remanded to the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island. My time at Rosie’s was fraught with pain (both physically and mentally), a loss of dignity, self-esteem, self-respect, heartbreak and trauma. I became numb, I had to separate myself from what was going on around me and how illegal and morally wrong it all was because at the time there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had to turn off my emotions and any indignation I might have at how not only I was being treated but how others were treated as well. I was threatened, verbally and physically, I was taunted and spit on, I had property stolen from me, I was extorted, I was preyed upon and yes I was sexually assaulted (once) and mentally abused on an almost daily basis.
I was Sexually Assaulted while at the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island. It’s Time to Tell My Story. – Kathy Morse
I spent my time at Rosie’s living in a dormitory type housing unit with row upon row of metal cots totaling 62, a bathroom that contained 6 toilets separated only by a 3 foot tall wall but no door or curtain, the shower room consisted of on open room with tiling on 3 walls, shower heads one after the other lined one wall and hooks for towels on one wall, no shower curtains, no low walls to separate you, in other words no privacy, it was all out there in the open to share with 61 other women. For someone like myself who is rather modest about their body it was very uncomfortable to get used to, very painful. Trying to use the toilet while the person next to you wants to have a conversation as if you were sitting next to each other on the subway is a bit uncomfortable, intimidating for me so taking a shower with 6 other women whom I do not know in an open room can be rather overwhelming if you are not used to such a situation.
I was raped on this Unit, it was 5 upper (at the time, in the Annex), in the shower. When I moved from reception after clearing my TB test I asked the officer where I was going and he replied, “Don’t worry, you are going to the ‘Hilton’ of housing units, the girls there will take good care of you,” At the time I wondered what he meant by this comment and why was he doing me a favor of looking out for me, why me, who was I but a white middle age mother from New Jersey who stole money from her employer. A woman who did not sleep or eat and paced in her cell at night, kept quiet and to herself, only came out to talk on the phone and cried a lot. So what was it about me that made him want to send me to the ‘Hilton” of housing units?
I walked into the unit with my white pillow case overflowing with my bedding and was greeted by a variety of facial expressions, none of the least I found to be overly friendly it was downright frightening, overwhelming and yes intimidating as hell.
The day after I arrived on this Unit I started to hear muffled conversations referring to me as “Martha, Martha Stewart” – why because I was white, I had highlighted hair, I was a middle aged woman? I kept quiet and to myself, I only got up to use the bathroom and telephone. I could not eat, anything I tried to eat came right out of me. The name “Martha” continued to be mentioned when someone passed me. I was trying to figure out strategically when would be a good time to shower, when would there be the least traffic in the bathroom during the available shower-time hours when I could shower alone, so I sat on my bed and tried to figure it out, see if there was popular times, if there were certain groups who when in at certain times. Surely there had to be some block of 10 minutes when I could take a shower alone. I thought I had it figured out, it was a weeknight when a popular television show was on, the bathroom was deserted and I made my move to get a shower.
I went in the bathroom, it appeared the coast was clear, others were either in the day room yelling at the television, talking on the telephone’s, laying on their beds or playing cards with others. I got undressed, turned on the water, started to feel the warm water hit my face, run down the front of my body when I was grabbed from behind. One person got my face and neck, another pulled my arms behind my back while another grabbed my ankles. Another pushed me in the back of my knees causing me to go down, I tried to struggle out of their hold to break my fall but it was not possible. They were pulling my hair and jerking back my head whispering in my ear to be quiet, to not struggle or yell out and they kept over and over calling me “Martha, Martha Stewart” “Martha, we are going to teach you a lesson, this is what we do to snitches.”
At this point they had me down on all fours someone grabbing at my breasts while another was trying to shove the handle of the mop into my anus. I was struggling, trying to yell out in pain but nothing would come out, I had lost my voice and all I could feel was the searing pain in my backside, I could feel it being shoved in there, they switched to the handle of the toilet plunger and shoved it in as well, at this point I was seeing stars, the pain was unbearable and I smelled blood, I could feel its stickiness on my kneecaps. It felt like it went on for hours, the in and out of the wooden poles, the yanking of my hair, the grimy hand over my mouth, the ripping of my breasts, I had bit my lips to not cry out and they too were bleeding, I could now not only smell and see my blood but taste that metallic taste as well. Their last words to me were “have you had enough, Martha?” and they let me go and walked away. I lay there on the wet tile floor like a torn apart rag doll bleeding from my mouth and my backside, the smell of my own feces in the air, my breasts aching, my knees raw. I pulled myself together, washed away the blood and feces. I saw laying on the floor the mop and plunger they used to assault me with and they both had my blood, my body fluids on them, I simply did not care as I stumbled out of the shower, grabbed some sanitary pads to soak up my blood and crawled into my cot and just laid there too afraid to move, the pain was unbearable, the bleeding, the stickiness between my thighs. I was numb, I was cold, shivering, and could not get warm.
I lay awake that night and many thereafter afraid to sleep, afraid that they would come get me for round two. Hearing their voices mocking me, calling me “Martha.” The next days were a blur, I would get up to change the sanitary pads, I drank as much water as I could and I just returned to the bed. It simply hurt to much to move, to walk, to even go to the bathroom, I was afraid that I was going to die. I laid in my bed at night, in pain, bleeding and would have conversations with my father who had died 15 years earlier and I would in my mind talk to him, ask him to protect me, to help me keep safe, I had children at home who needed me, I needed to stay alive but at the same time I wanted the pain to go away and I did not want this to happen to me again, I wanted to die, I would ask him if I could come with him and if he would keep me safe. I laid in my bed, covering my bruises, using sanitary pads to soak up the blood, I was losing weight and did not care. I was afraid to shower and did not care, I would soap up a washcloth and use that. I knew who did this to me, but my will to live outweighed my right to report them. It simply was not worth it.
I would call home but not tell them what happened, I made a decision that I would tell no one. My attackers would walk past me and address me as Martha and I simply ignored them. I no longer cared, I figured they had already violated me what more could they possibly do to me. Gradually the bleeding stopped, the bruises faded, but the ache in my chest remained, it would not go away. I had my almost weekly visits with my husband and 22-month old daughter and I never told him, I stuffed it, buried it. The only time it almost came out was every time I went to court.
When I saw my lawyer at court I would beg and plead with him to get me out, and each and every court appearance the judge would deny our request for release or bail. I wondered if I went in to open court and told everyone what was done to me if it would have changed the outcome, I sincerely doubt it. But each court appearance became worse. I cried, begged and pleaded, it got so bad I started having panic attacks and hyperventilating and on several occasions was in no condition to see the judge, yet no one asked what was wrong, they simply assumed it was because I did not want to be in jail, at Rikers.
I kept this story in for over 10 years. Never told the whole thing, not even to my various therapists, I kept it in when I attended trauma therapy, I kept it in when I have been interviewed for various publications. But now is the time, I need to get it out, I need to free myself from those mental shackles that have held me back. I feel no shame, I feel safe, and secure. I am in a good place now and know that I can tell this story without regret. I know that the officer who promised me that I was going to the “Hilton of housing units” had set me up, I realize that now. I know now that those women who attacked me thinking I was a snitch were wrong then, do I forgive them yes, I am at that point where I need to forgive and move on, to heal and I am okay with that. I am no longer numb, the thaw gradually happened over a period of time since my release 5 years ago.
I do believe that the trauma of my incarceration is still with me and will be for the remainder of my life, I still have PTSD but it is no longer as severe as it once was, I still have nightmares and flashbacks and those too are lessening over time. What this experience has helped me do is to bring my story and that of so many other currently and formerly incarcerated women incarcerated to the community, to educate them on what it really is like to be incarcerated in America, to reveal to them the horrors, the trauma of incarceration. Why, because with current trends within the criminal justice system there will come a day when everyone in the community will be impacted by incarceration, be it themselves individually, someone in their household, a relative, a friend, a co-worker a neighbor, everyone regardless of socioeconomic status will come in contact with incarceration and it’s better to be as educated about it as you can than to have it sprung on you like it was to me.
I was incarcerated for a reason, yes mostly because I broke the law and needed to be punished but also because it exposed me to a world that I otherwise would never have known about intimately, the things I personally experienced, I witnessed, I heard is nothing that can ever be taught in a classroom or read in a textbook. It has provided me with a once-in-a-lifetime education that I am using to bring about reform in criminal justice across the country. I promised the women that I left behind that I would make sure that their stories were told, that I would educate the public as to what really goes on behind bars to women and girls, that I would make sure to fight for reform. To never stop talking, begging and pleading, cajoling to bring about change for a more humane, rehabilitative and restorative approach towards punishment and away from the medieval mindset currently held across the country. This is why I do the advocacy work I do. I have a story to tell, many experiences to share and I will not be stopped or silenced any longer.
Some think I am blunt, I take that as a compliment, incarceration and detention and what happens in jails and prisons needs to be told bluntly, no need to make it pretty because honestly, the abuse, brutality and violence is not pretty, it’s traumatic, traumatic as hell to be honest no need to sugarcoat it.
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Kathy Morse is an advocate on social justice issues, concentrating on incarcerated women and adolescents, more specifically trauma, sexual assault, dignity for women and girls, education during incarceration, family reunification, restorative justice and parole/probation reform.
Kathy holds a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Law and Justice from Rowan University (1981) and worked for over thirty years as a paralegal. A featured character in Rikers: An American Jail an award winning documentary produced by Bill Moyers she has participated on numerous panels following screenings of the film all over the United States. She is often interviewed by various media outlets regarding issues related to women, girls and incarceration in the US. She is a 2019-2020 Cohort in the Faces of Women Imprisoned speakers bureau.
A co-founder of “CloseRosies” a grass-roots campaign she focuses on issues faced by women & girls incarcerated in jails & prisons across the country. Initially created to draw attention to the women and girls detained at the Rose M. Singer Center (“Rosies) on Rikers Island the campaign has expanded to include jails and prisons across the country.
Kathy can be reached at: mkf0914@gmail.com Twitter: @kathymorse0914 @CloseRosies, Facebook: kathymorse0914, LinkedIn: kathym0914
On Friday, Oct. 4, 2019, 9 am ET, Charlie Grady, Outreach Specialist for the FBI CT Community Outreach Program, was be our guest on Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant – The Voice of CT Criminal Justice. Live on WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven, rebroadcast at 5 pm. Live-streamed and podcast everywhere, see below. Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
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The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy and Jeff Grant is broadcast live at 9 am ET on the first and third Friday of each month Sept. through June, from the WNHH 103.5 FM studios in New Haven. It is rebroadcast on WNHH at 5 pm ET the same day. Podcast and Archive available all the time, everywhere.
Our Facebook Page (best place for information, news, articles, events):
https://www.facebook.com/criminaljusticeinsider
Our website: prisonist.org/criminal-justice-insider
Our Twitter handle: @insidercj
Our Instagram handle: @criminaljusticeinsider
The show is live-streamed & podcast everywhere at:
New Haven Independent: newhavenindependent.org
Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/wnhhradio
YouTube: https://youtube
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wnhhlp
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/wnhhradio
Periscope: https://www.pscp.tv/search?q=wnhh
The show is also archived at:
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/new-haven-independent/sets/criminal-justice-insider
Community Foundation of Greater New Haven website: https://www.cfgnh.org/LeadingOnIssues/IncarcerationandReentry/CriminalJusticeInsiderRadioArchives.aspx
An article about each show is published a few days later in the New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org).
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Contact us: jgrant@prisonist.org
Season Three Guests:
Fri., Sept. 6, 2019: Khalil Cumberbatch, Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice
Fri., Sept. 20, 2019: Aaron T. Kinzel, Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn
Fri., Oct. 4, 2019: Charlie Grady, Outreach Specialist for the FBI CT Community Outreach Program
Fri., Oct. 18, 2019: Michael Kimelman, Former Hedge Funder and Author of Confessions of a Wall Street Insider: A Cautionary Tale of Rats, Feds, and Banksters
Fri., Nov. 1, 2019: Corey Brinson, Former Attorney Convicted for a White Collar Crime who is running for Hartford City Council
Fri., Nov. 15, 2019: Cathryn Lavery, Ph.D., Asst. Chair & Graduate Coordinator for the Iona College Criminal Justice Department
Fri., Dec. 6, 2019: “Free Prison Phone Calls” Show, Guests to be Announced.
Fri. Dec. 20, 2019: John Hamilton, CEO, Liberation Programs
Fri., Jan. 17, 2020: Serena Ligouri, Executive Director, New Hour for Women & Children – L.I.
Feb. 7, 2020: David Garlock, Program Director, New Person Ministries, Lancaster, PA
Fri., Mar. 20, 2020: Tiheba Bain
Season Two Guests:
Fri., Sept. 9, 2018: Kennard Ray, CT Unlock the Vote and Candidate for CT State Legislator
Fri., Sept. 21, 2018: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50
Fri., Oct. 5, 2018: Sue Gunderman & Beth Hines, CT Reentry Roundtables
Fri., Oct. 19, 2018: Venice Michalsen, Assoc. Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University
Fri., Nov. 16, 2018: Andrew Clark, Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, Central Connecticut State University
Fri., Dec. 7, 2018: Glenn E. Martin, Founder/Consultant of GEM Trainers and Past-President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA
Fri., Dec. 21, 2018: Fernando Muniz, CEO of Community Solutions, Inc., and community leader Rosa Correa.
Fri., Jan. 4, 2019: New Years Retrospective Show Looking Back at Past CJI Guests.
Fri. Jan. 18, 2019: Peter Henning, Law Prof. at Wayne State University and “White Collar Watch” columnist for the NY Times.
Fri., Feb. 1, 2019: Jeffrey Deskovic, CEO of The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation who was Exonerated after Serving 16 Years in Prison
Fri., Feb. 15, 2019: Jeffrey Abramowitz, Executive Director for Reentry Services, JEVS Human Services, Philadelphia.
Fri., Mar. 1, 2019, Rollin Cook, CT Commissioner of Correction
Fri., Mar. 15, 2019: Dieter Tejada, Justice Impacted Criminal Justice Advocate
Fri., Apr. 5, 2019: John Rowland, Former CT Governor
Fri., Apr. 19, 2019: Gregg D. Caruso, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning & Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Fri., May 3, 2019: Michael Taylor, CEO of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in the Greater New Haven area
Fri., May 17, 2019: Tarra Simmons, Esq., Attorney & Criminal Justice Reform Advocate, Washington State
Fri., June 7, 2019: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux!
Fri., June 21, 2019: Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop
Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
Jeff talks criminal justice reform, white collar ministry, overcoming opioid addiction and devotion to service with Toni Quest and Peter Elvidge on the Seeing Beneath the Surface Podcast, Episode 60.
Listen on YouTube:
Listen on Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/seeing-beneath-the-surface/id1274257837
Listen on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/1489726131120734/posts/2344533745639964?sfns=mo