BONUS | M. Gessen on "The Opinions"

- And I'm Juliette from New York Times Games.

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- Very cross-match. - The cross-word I did in my brother. We get says they sometimes. But I don't know, I couldn't do says they're my eye. - I feel like I'm learning.

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“- You should start with the word that strategically bad”

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from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news.

Here's what to make of it.

- I'm Ann Gassen, an opinion columnist at the New York Times. I'm also the host of a new show from the Times and serial called "The Idiot." And if you haven't listened yet, this conversation will have some spoilers.

The Idiot is the story of a convicted felon from my own family. In 2022, my first cousin, Alan, was arrested for taking out a hit on his ex-wife.

“He is now serving a 10-year sentence in federal prison.”

Alan has two children with his ex-wife, and he wants more than anything to connect with them. When I was making the podcast, I wanted to understand how that could happen. How children can build relationships with parents

in the prison system. So I spent a lot of time talking to a friend of mine who had to do this in her own life.

My friend's name is Harriet Clark.

Her mother, Judy Clark. It's been 37 years in prison. For driving the Getaway car in a brand strawberry that left three people dead. Harriet is the author of an upcoming novel

that draws on her life. It's called "The Hill." I've read it, and I loved it. And she joins me today. Harriet, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me. When I was working on the podcast, they idiot. I had a point where it was difficult for me to develop the character of my own cousin, Alan, the one who was now in prison.

At that point, I hadn't yet talked to him, and I realized that I had no empathy for him. And talking with you helped me to understand him a bit more, because you somehow managed to hold empathy for people who do terrible things.

But before we get to that, I want you to tell me a bit about what it was like growing up with a mother in prison. I was actually very lucky in the sense that I was able to visit my mother every weekend

for my entire childhood. Within a deeply unlucky situation, this is a very lucky version of it. I was also very lucky that my mother was incarcerated in a facility that tried to facilitate relationships

between parents and their children. And so there was a space in the visiting room, called the Children Center, so that we could play with our mothers, and we could make crafts, and have games.

And it tried as much as possible to have the prison still fit inside the child's reality in a way. And my family, though it was incredibly torn apart by my mother's crime,

and there were a lot of tensions and chasms between people, everyone in my family worked to make sure my mother and I had, as close a relationship as possible. So I had special dolls that were kept by the phone

to help a young kid figure out how to stay on the phone, which can be very hard, obviously, when you're a toddler. And people read me my mother's letters, and she would describe the bird she could see from herself. You know, my grandfather had a bird book,

and we would look up the birds, my mother was seeing. And so many people made many efforts to really enable my mother to remain my mother. And that is a great form of good fortune in a system that is very often trying to take people's parents

away from them.

“- So I think I need even more help with this, right?”

Because full disclosure, we're friends, and I've seen you with your mother, and I find your mother delightful, and you're so happy to hear this. - And your relationship is so close,

and certainly for me, thinking about my cousin,

“who again took out a hit on the mother of his children, right?”

- I think, well, why would you want to have a relationship with a parent who did something so horrible? - You know, people have actually put a lot of thought into this, this question of what do we do with kids who's parents on side,

because it's easy perhaps to think, well, if someone's cause great harm, they've, you know, abdicated their right to be in their child's life, including the fact that, you know, sometimes at home, as in your case,

takes place within the family, or they think prisons are traumatizing spaces, and we have to spare children those spaces. And actually, again and again, I think what people have found

is that children are aided by staying in relationship

to their incarcerated parent. When your parent goes to prison, you inherit a very painful piece of knowledge, which is that you are livable, and that's a very scary thing for a kid to know.

And I think that you need that knowledge counterpointed by as many efforts as possible from your parent to continue to connect with you.

“You need to know that they still think of you,”

that they're still trying to reach out to you, that they're still trying to support you. You need to see that in a certain way, they haven't left you. If you don't facilitate a relationship

between a kid and their incarcerated parent,

the absent parent just becomes this black hole,

and they take on this kind of mythic dimension, and kids deserve to have a person, they can bring their confusion and their upset and their needs and their rage too. You know, the black hole does not serve them,

especially because you're not just then dealing with the absence of the incarcerated parent, very often, you know, there's a kind of awkwardness around the child when people are discussing the absent parent, or not discussing them.

You can tell the adults around you are uncomfortable, you might even be able to tell the adults around you are hostile towards that person. And all of that is really damaging for a child. You know, I think sometimes we think,

we remove the incarcerated parent, and the child appears to adapt, and to me that's a problem because it's the family replicating that's kind of carceral logic of, you know, removal and disappearance.

The problematic agent has been taken out of the picture, and now the child is safe. And in actuality, I don't think that's true. The absence is as present as the presence is, and I also think people inside have rights,

still to connect with their children,

“and I think that trying to still parent their children”

from inside is what helps a lot of people rise to the occasion of becoming the parent they want to be. And I think it's so necessary for families and communities to say, you know, your parent may have done a terrible thing, but they love you, and they are still worthy

of affection and care and concern. - I know that at least for some time, both of your parents were imprisoned. And so you had the experience of visiting your mother at a facility that, as you described,

was as well suited as a prison can be for bringing a child and their parent together. And I think your experience with your father's place of incarceration was quite different. Can you talk about that?

- Yes, I actually visited my father fairly little. This was because my grandparents' fury at him was, well, actually, you know, they're very, went in all directions, but they expressed their fury by minimizing my relationship with him.

And I think they did think the facilities he was in would be more damaging. You know, they were often the kinds of visits that have to happen through a plastic wall. And then he was very sick.

He had cancer a number of times while he was in prison, and the prison hospitals are really repulsive often institutions. He was shackled to beds. And so I think they thought, you know,

this was too much upset for a child. And so I speak from that experience when I say the absence can be worths, because it was due that I didn't understand what had happened with my father, and I did feel more abandoned.

You said a phrase that something is too much upset for a child.

Again, I think of my cousin's children,

who I call O and L in the podcast. O is now 12. He has access to the internet. He knows what his father did.

“And I don't know how a person wraps their mind around that.”

I don't know how I as a 59 year old would wrap my mind around finding out that one of my parents wanted the other killed. What do you do with that, you know, too much upset for a child logic, because there's so much in prison,

whether it has to do with your own parents, or with their circumstances, that seems like it would be too much for a child. - I mean, I think one thing is often, as comes up in various ways with your family story,

we try to protect children by controlling their reality.

And the reality is O's father,

who was at some point a primary caregiver for him, is in prison. So he can't be protected from that reality. What he can be is companioned and loved within that reality, right?

So, you know, what can happen is that his father can still be a source of delight and support and affirmation in his life. The whole family can rally to help that happen. When we think about prisons or too upsetting

of an environment to bring children, well, then everyone needs to work really hard to figure out how to make that a nice day actually, within the upset, whether it's that, you stop for a milkshake on the way,

whether it's that, you just let them be quiet afterwards.

“And so I think if you're trying to make sure”

the family doesn't replicate this kind of carceral logic that says, well, just remove them, just disappear them. That's how we'll handle this. You know, the opposite of that is to say, we're all collectively responsible for figuring out

how to let as much good as possible into this relationship, into this child's life, we're here to help them understand things. When I was young, my mother would say, you know, you're gonna hear a lot of stories about me

and you're gonna hear a lot of different ways of understanding my crime. And the one thing you need to know is that I love you, that everyone loves you, that you did nothing wrong,

and that we're all gonna take care of you. - There are a couple of things that are striking me about the way you talk about the cross-rural system. One, and this is, I'm going to bring this around to a question, but let me make an observation first, right?

You're not really criticizing the system itself. You're criticizing our attitude to it. - Oh, I'm very critical. - I have no doubt. - Very critical.

“- But I think that, you know, something happened to me”

when I was reporting this podcast that shocked me, and that's very, I talk about it on the podcast

that I've always thought of myself as somebody

who's opposed to carceral justice, somebody who's really critical of that reserval process, and then I found myself in the courtroom watching Alan's my cousin's hearing, and rooting for the prosecutor. And like, wanting this guy to go to prison for as long as possible,

which, you know, first of all, that shocked me about myself. It also surprised me, because if there was one thing that I sort of believed about the system, was that it at least performs the function of staying the hand of vengeance, right?

One of the ideas that we have about our system of justice, such as it is, is that it stops people from acting out of vengeance, and the state steps in, and acts on the basis of law, and does justice. And I found that, in fact, my own sense of vengeance

was being channeled by the prosecutor, right? And it, as though it was in total, was of concert with the carceral system. And you're nodding, I feel like, you maybe you've thought about this for a minute.

- Well, one thing I would say is that I wish the system kept the forces of vengeance in their place, but actually, my primary experience is in the New York State prison system, and a huge reason why so many people

are serving such obscenely long sentences is because they're being denied parole, and a huge part of why they're being denied parole has to do with the efforts of survivors' communities to keep them in prison forever.

And the certain kind of sense of vengeance

And so, I don't actually think that the law is keeping those more primal impulses and check unfortunately.

“The other thing I would say is that I think you're allowed”

to have whatever feelings you want, but that it's useful to acknowledge them as in-process. So you were in a moment when you felt furious at your cousin, disgusted at your cousin, vengeful towards your cousin.

And I think in general, I would hope this is true for all people inside, but especially when we're talking about people who have children,

I think we're always trying to help each other

get to the next healthier stage of this process, the one where there's less and less hostility that the children are growing up around. And so in that sense, I went turn on the vengeance you felt then, but I would say that you and your family

are now in a lifelong process. And Carceral Logic says, you know, disconnection is how we repair after harm. And I would really argue, that's not true, right? That actually what's going to repair your family

is figuring out as much as possible how connections can be rebuilt. - Staying with this theme of vengeance for a second. No, I mean, you alluded to your experience in the state of New York and I think,

if I understand it correctly in your mother's case, the families of the people who died were instrumental in preventing your mother's release for many years, is that correct?

- It's very important to me to never speak about those families

because I feel like my family participated in orphaning nine children. And so my fundamental feeling is those people can feel, however they want and whatever is their healing process, I want them to have it, including, you know,

if feeling that my mother needed to be inside forever, was that process? I don't have any thoughts about how they should heal. I just wish it for them.

“- I think in terms of this notion of vengeance,”

one thing I had gotten from your show is that most of your interactions with your cousin after his arrest occurred via the phone. Not visits? - I've never visited him in prison,

and to be fair to my cousin at a certain point and he changed his mind about talking to me when he realized that I didn't believe that he was innocent, but during the months that we're talking, I tried to get permission to visit him.

- Yeah, because I think when we speak to people in prison, that's a very siloed form of interacting with someone who's incarcerated, and it's very different to me than when we visit prisons.

Because when we visit a prison, we're with everyone else visiting someone in prison.

You know, I never had to think,

I was the only kid that's happened to, because every week, every time I saw my mother, I was with other children who were going to visit their mothers. So I knew I was inside a collective reality. And I think that, you know,

one issue is that it's a profoundly collective reality. Right, we have five million children in this country who will have a parent incarcerated at some point in their childhood. So when you go to prison, what you get to see

alongside all the upset and suffering we were talking about, you also get to see the incredible people who are making heroic efforts to not let the state tear their families apart. And I feel like those are the people I grew up around.

Those are the grandmother to get up at 4am, to take a seven hour bus ride, to bring their grandkids, to see their father, their father, who may have done something terrible, who may have even harmed members of their own family,

and still, what those women are saying over and over again, is I'm not letting them throw you away. I'm not acting like you don't exist. You are still my son, my grandson, my father, my brother, my husband, you are still these children's father.

“And I think the more you see how beautiful that effort is,”

the more you think that's the camp I want to be in. I think you would be inspired by the people you met in prison, and that too would help to stay vengeance. - One might get the, I think mistaken impression that you're advocating for sort of letting sleeping dogs lie

or leaving things behind, because everybody just does terrible things. And you get past them, but I suspect it's a little more complicated than that.

you really kind of woke me up at a certain point,

because I was so focused on what Alan had done.

“And you really helped me refocus on what happens after, right?”

So what does happen after? - Yes, I'm excited to imagine this in part as a conversation about your as yet produced six episodes of the thus far five episode series. I think what happens next has to do with

how the members of your family decide to facilitate as good a future as possible for Alan and Priscilla and their children. And for all of you, I think that figuring out how to be with people after they have caused great harm

is incredibly difficult, especially because in this instance, there's not just the kind of outrage at what he did. There's also the fact that, as you say, you don't really like him that much. He just annoys you and actually, you know,

that sometimes can be the greatest hindrance to moving forward with someone. It's a long and hard journey figuring out how to become good people in each other's lives.

“But I think it's a very dignifying journey.”

I think when you start figuring out how can we help Alan be the best possible parent he can be to O and L while he's inside and then afterwards? How can we help ensure that Priscilla

both is safe and feels safe after Alan's release? I think that figuring out collectively how to answer those questions will be a really meaningful process. I think it's true that very often people preceding a violent act are inside some sort of reality

that feels utterly untenable and unrelenting. And the violent act is a way to kind of explode out of one reality and into another one, often of course far worse, or an attempt to take control when things go out of control.

And I think very often, one part of that reality therein before the violence is usually tends to be pretty isolated. You know, violence is the aid people turn to when they don't feel like there are other places

to turn for help.

“And I think that always what happens after violence”

and rupture has to be the stepping in of the collective. Has to be this kind of countering logic that says, we will have to figure this out together. - Your mother was released in 2019, right? - Yes, right before the pandemic.

- What kind of work did you have to do to have a relationship with your mother? - I mean, this is what comes back to you and your family. I actually didn't have to do very much work to have a relationship with my mother,

but a profound amount of work had to be done by other people. That's the actual work of getting me every week to the prison.

You know, one of the most important things people do

in terms of helping you have a relationship with your parent when they're in prison is to not speak ill of your parent. I think, oh, I know, I really believe that children are identified with their parents.

When someone says, where is your father and you say prison, the same of that moment is your shame. And so there's a real stigma. It lives in your body, the sense that whatever has gone wrong is a part of you too.

And I think that it's so important that the people around you help you know, that there's also a version of your parent that you can be proud of, that you're lucky to have in your life.

And I think that's the work that people did that helped me have a relationship with my mother.

I always knew my mother was worthy of respect.

And I'm sure that this has enabled me to have a strong sense of self-respect. And so I think once you have someone and a family going to prison, you enter a sort of ecosystem-- a ecosystem of influences on the child.

And one set of voices they're going to hear just comes from the culture. If your parent is in prison, they're bad. And so to some extent, whatever you believe or not, Masha, you will play the role of a countering voice.

I think everyone helps to create the conditions whereby a child can feel respect towards their parent. And your father, he died in 2009, right? Yes.

I think maybe this comes back to where

your fifth episode ends around the question of accountability. Which I did struggle with accountability as this kind of ultimatum that was delivered to your cousin, confessed to your crime, tell us the truth, take accountability

or you're not in the family.

“And I think that processes of accountability”

are actually a lot longer than that, usually. You know, the women I grew up around, many of them insisted on their innocence for very long periods of time. And some of them were innocent, and some of them were not. And prison makes it very hard to tell the truth.

Right? If you have active appeals, you're not going to confess to a crime. If you think it puts your relationship with your children and jeopardy, you might not confess to a crime. And I think that the process of accountability

also looks really different for different people. But I think what my family shows me again and again is they're incredible at taking responsibility from this moment on. You know, my father, he had been incredibly mistreated

by the medical system in prison. He would have died if he hadn't been a doctor and known how to take care of himself. He helped many other people in prison as a doctor. And when he got out, he devoted himself

to talking about health care in prison and the lack thereof.

I've always been able to be proud of my parents.

And many people have helped my parents. Be people I could be proud of. And that to me is what I mean when I say, you know, so much of this is about what goes forward for your cousin, about I understand he'll be discharged.

So how can everyone help him eventually do work? His kids can feel proud of. I feel grateful that fundamentally, I have known that people I love have done terrible things, but I have not felt ashamed of the people in my life.

- You've sort of teased this imaginary sixth episode of my five episode podcast. And this is where I think I handed over to you. I'm a little nervous because I know you're going to challenge the ultimatum that ends the series.

And again, for people who haven't listened to it, there's a long journey that I go on. In the series, but in the end, I write my cousin an email saying,

“look, if you want to re-enter the family,”

you're going to have to fess up to what you did, which you can continue to deny. And I gather you think that's wrong. (laughing) - Well, I think that's a moment in the process.

As you may be can tell, I'm not at the business of necessarily saying it's wrong. You know, you and I have some things in common. We both know people do terrible things. And I think you come at that in part as a journalist,

and your focus is on, as you say, you know, getting to the truth. And I come at it as someone who for almost 40 years, only ever saw my mother in a crowded room within ear and I shot of other people

including surveilling guards on the phone. I spoke to her on a recorded line where people could listen to us. And I knew from a very young age that these were not the conditions

in which I could ask my mother to tell me the truth of her crime.

“I think when we're in relationship with people in prison,”

we always have to remember the actual conditions therein.

That's why I say things like, no one who's in an active appeal is gonna confess their crime to you. So I think that this demand for truth can sound very reasonable and seem very ethical and actually I don't know if it should be allowed

to be the be all and all of our relationship with people. And so my feeling was less either your cousin tells the truth now or he's out of the family, we say, how can we help your cousin and your whole family on the very long road to accountability?

And it might be that he has other positive things to offer you and his kids and the members of your family before truth. I guess I would like to know what you think happens from here. What do you think is required

but your family as a larger whole to move on from here?

- Well, the honest answer is I don't know. But as I listen to you talk, I think, you know, that's all very beautiful, but. - It's so annoying. - No, I don't think it's annoying at all.

I think it's very challenging. And I wanna parse out a couple of things. So when you talk about somebody being treated with respect in order to treat you with respect,

“I think it's not so much a question of respect as trust.”

This is somebody who lies habitually and who lied repeatedly when he took his child without the child's mother's permission. And then he did it again. And then he pretended to enter into custody agreement

with her while he was also taking out a hit on her. And now he is lying that he was set up by the FBI. And I just wanna acknowledge your point about an active appeal, but I also think it's the decision one makes, right?

One can one who's going to get out in a few years could say, you know, instead of trying to pursue an appeal, that at best will get six months off my sentence, maybe I will pursue repair. So it is very hard for me to imagine what happens

when there's no trust. But of course, what you said about respect also holds for trust. If you don't extend trust to somebody,

“they're not very likely to be able to earn your trust.”

But what do you do with somebody who, you know, lies habitually and I'm just gonna say one more thing, which is that I did 35 hours of interviews with my cousin. And at a certain point, I was really, really wishing that I could believe that he was not guilty,

or at least not as guilty as it's, he seemed to be, because I was so full of empathy for him. And then I came across a slatter that he wrote not to me, but to friends and family who weren't me, but a fairly white circle of people.

So it was circulating and it described a court hearing that I had been at. And it was so completely full of lies. And I found reading that email almost physically discombobulating, because I thought,

oh, he is telling all these people exactly what he thinks is going to work for this particular situation, which I fears what happened over our 35 hours of interviews. He was telling me exactly what I wanted to hear. And obviously I've had this experience before,

when you're interviewing somebody who tells you exactly what she wanted to hear, I find few things quite as upsetting, which is probably why I'm advancing this unreasonable sounding demand for truth.

- I mean, I really hear you that it is infuriating to be manipulated. I would say in the realm of lies and manipulation, those are some of the problematic behaviors. I was raised around the question remains,

what's the best possible version of his role in the family? If you don't trust him, great, don't trust him. Don't leave him alone with his children, offer to be the presence when he gets out that helps to kind of ease that dynamic.

And if you don't trust him in regards to Priscilla, then be there, help take care of Priscilla. I am in no way suggesting, you know, give your trust to people who haven't earned it.

I think we always need to be clear-sighted,

but I think when we talk about carceral logic, we're talking about the logic that are used to justify and normalize the role of prisons in our society. And they say this person has caused a problem

and so we've removed them, that's the solution. And I don't believe in that as the only solution.

“I believe you have to come up with a collective solution”

for the fact that you have an untrustworthy member of your family. You have someone in your family who tells lies, you have someone in your family who tries to manipulate people.

And now your family has to figure out how to literally and figuratively keep everyone safe in light of that. And it also has to figure out as much as possible how the people here who can enjoy each other,

which may never be you and your cousin,

are unable to enjoy each other. Right, so most urgently, him and his children, we can't say that this capacity and you disqualifies you totally. That to me is a logic that feels inhumane,

of how people are. Have you ever told the lie? Yes. Yeah, have you ever manipulated people? Yes.

Of course, right, and so this two is part of the problem of carceral logics. They try to take sinful behavior and say, it belongs just to this population, watch this population.

Right, and the truth is, in general,

I mean, not necessarily to the extent, obviously, you know, allegedly taking a head out on your ex.

“But the truth is, we're all capable of harm.”

And we know that. And in fact, sometimes I kind of unhandled ways of dealing with our own capacities for harm. It's why we're willing to vilify and single out the people who've been caught.

I think we just have to be inside the truth that we're in relationship with each other, that that requires something from each of us and that we're aided when those relationships are satisfying as possible.

You know, my mother and grandmother,

“there are a thousand things they could have talked about”

that they were never gonna see the same way.

So they talked about things they could enjoy talking about. And you might see this as a kind of problematic version of letting sleeping dogs lie. But actually, it's about taking very seriously that any form of connection is meaningful

inside experiences of profound disconnection. - Well, Harold Clark, who has made me think harder than maybe I would like to. I do actually want to thank you particularly

for recording this conversation,

which I think at some point or another, the kids will certainly listen to this stuff.

“And this is possibly the most important thing”

they'll ever hear about what happened with their dad. Thank you. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - If you liked this show,

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