[music] I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, executive director of the Louisiana Parole Project.

Andrew Hundley, a pleasure to be with you today, sir.

Thank you for your time.

Thanks for having me.

Andrew, I thought we could begin with your story, and tell our viewers about your impact in the system and what led you to start the Louisiana Parole Project.

Certainly, when I was 15 years old I received the life without parole sentence for a tragic crime that I committed.

When I was pretty young, I committed a crime against another young person.

Led me to be sentenced to one of the most ultimate sentences that the criminal justice system has, and that's a life without parole sentence.

In Louisiana at the time, like a lot of southern states, states all around the country, you can be tried as an adult and get an adult sentences for your crimes.

So I spent 19 years of a life sentence in the Louisiana Department of Corrections before I was given an opportunity at parole.

And when I come home from prison, I knew I had left behind so many people who were no less deserving of a second chance than I was.

And I envisioned an organization that would provide people open opportunities to reach their full potential if they got the second chance that I got.

And was it due to a Supreme Court decision or a state court decision that ultimately precipitated your freedom?

So, there was a series of US Supreme Court decisions from 2005 to 2016, dictated that life sentences for juveniles, the harshest sentences were unconstitutional that states had to set up mechanisms where juveniles who received adult life sentences weren't necessarily let out of prison, but they had to have a review mechanism.

So myself and many juveniles who were in prison across the country who received life sentences for crimes when we were teenagers, were given a second look.

Some people are not released, but some people in my case, get parole hearings.

I was fortunate to be the first juvenile lifer in Louisiana to be granted parole.

And that was in 2016 after the Miller and Montgomery decisions by the US Supreme Court.

What was the process of parole like for you?

Whenever I was given a parole hearing, I'll be honest with you I thought to myself, "I'm gonna be denied parole."

There was more reasons to not necessarily be hopeful than than be hopeful.

The criminal justice system's awfully harsh, looking away from the fact that I look different than most people who are serving life without parole sentences.

I look different than most people who are serving life without parole sentences given to them when they were juveniles.

I can't deny that the color of my skin obviously gives me privilege and gave me privilege when I went up for parole.

I think people may, who were decision makers and stakeholders may be more likely to identify with me than some of the people that I served with.

But it was a very nerve wracking process.

I went before the board and had to talk about the accountability I had for the crime that I committed, the remorse I had, but also what I had done with my life while I was incarcerated, to change who I was to be rehabilitated and find redemption.

And fortunate for me the Louisiana Parole Board saw that I wasn't the same person that I was when I was 15 years old, that I had changed my life and that I had some worth and value, and that I could be a good citizen if given a second chance.

You well know that the largest part of the justice system impacted system impacted people are not in jails and prisons.

They're on probation and parole.

I presume that that's correlated in Louisiana too, that more people are on probation or parole in Louisiana than are incarcerated in prison or jail.

Yeah.

There are thousands of people on community supervision in Louisiana as there are in many states, but people get a criminal record.

They have to serve probation on the front end or parole on the back end.

They have regulations that they have to meet, parole fees, that they have to pay for many individuals.

And that's what I wanted to zero in on, because I'm curious about what the process was like for you, -Certainly.

-because your particular conviction, it was not overturned in the sense that it was invalidated.

It was, you had, you were just given a second look like you said.

So, the concern now here, and we've talked about this on The Open Mind, is the ability of people to be able to comply with the terms of their parole because they can't access a job or they can't see their family because their movement is restricted during the period of rehabilitation or that transitional period where they would be exiting the system.

So, I'm I'm wondering from your perspective, from the experience you had fast forwarding now to 2025, is it different?

Has it gotten worse, better in certain respects?

So, I'm fortunate in, when I came home from prison my experiences were different from many people who come home because I had doors opened for me.

I had opportunities.

I heard yes, more than I heard no.

Oftentimes I've been told that I'm an exception to the rule, and I like to remind people no, I'm an example of what happens when there's good policy in place and when people have opportunities.

I was allowed to have a college education when I came home from prison.

The family support I had gave me the resources to ensure that my parole fees were paid.

But I had a job early on and was able to cover my fees and cover living expenses at the same time that I was going to college and doing everything I had to do to fit in and meet the terms of my condition.

So many people don't hear yes, at a job interview.

And then after a month or two, they're behind on parole fees and they're at risk for a technical violation.

So certainly as soon as someone comes home from prison, there's an issue of like can they sustain what's expected of them to remain on community supervision.

And oftentimes people immediately are in a hole, whether it, you know, financially, whether it's expectations that they are to require, it's a real problem.

But I like to remind people I'm an example of success.

Because all these doors were open to me.

I had all these opportunities and I heard yes, more than I heard no.

Are there specific reforms that you're lobbying for in Louisiana that would make the process more doable, that people can safely and successfully exit the system?

Whether that's increasing the opportunity of second chance jobs, or whether that's changing the perimeters through which you can travel so that people can access it may not be a parent, it may be a distant relative who's willing to open their doors for you.

So what if any, in your state, one of our 50 laboratories of democracy reforms are you pressing for to make the process work like it did for you?

So one successful policy change we were able to achieve a few years ago in Louisiana was to end indefinite parole, to give individuals an opportunity to achieve an active parole.

It's not something that's given to you, but if you meet all conditions after several years you can apply to be placed in an active parole.

Because parole officers have such large caseloads, they need to focus on the people who truly need interventions that are most likely to re-offend.

So we want to incentivize people on probation and parole to have an early termination of their probation or parole, if they're meeting all the guidelines successfully, those individuals who've had the opportunity to be placed on inactive parole or a early release from those conditions, by and large or showing success.

And we have fewer unnecessary people who are on parole officers caseloads.

Moving forward, one thing that we've, we're looking to continuously expand on as an organization is enlarge the pool of potential employers.

We've seen over the last several years as the job market's gotten tighter, more organizations are more likely to take chances on people we call second chance hiring.

And we've encouraged lawmakers, whether it's through tax incentives, whether it's through indemnification of organizations that take a chance and do second chance hiring that employers have incentives to go down that route.

The more likely someone is able to have a stable employment as early as they can when they come home from prison, the less likely they are, they're gonna re-offend.

Most people are gonna hit those critical time periods when they're gonna struggle early on.

Very seldom do you have someone who gets a job within their first month of coming home stable employment that goes back to prison.

It's those people who struggle with unemployment for long periods of time.

Let me ask you about restorative justice and the people you work with whom you're attempting to give these second chances to better society post offense.

Do you find in the public and the people you interact with, that their perception of criminality -is objective or not?

-So, What I've learned is that crime is usually committed by young people.

17 to 25 year olds account for such a large part of the crime that's committed in our countries.

In our country, young people with undeveloped brains, immaturity, unstable situations at home, theyre less likely to have the empathy or the compassion to understand the ripple effect of crime.

The most significant crime reducer is age, people by and large, age out of crime, age out of foolish immature decisions that lead to crime.

So what we see is that as people grow older, they generally take stock of the bad decisions that they've made when they were younger.

They reflect on that and they have regrets and they look for ways to restore their lives and are curious how they can restore communities in which they may have harmed.

So what we see a lot of is, people who are cycling through the justice system at a young age may have a difficult time thinking of restorative justice, but as people mature, and it doesn't take until they're 60 or 70.

People are maturing way before that.

But people are able to understand that there is a ripple effect.

And there is harm that associated with their actions when they were engaging in criminal behavior.

And so often people are looking for ways when they come home from prison to actually be a resource in their community and to give back in a way that we've found as an organization to help people set them up for success isn't simply by finding them jobs when they come home, but finding volunteer opportunities, finding community organizations for them to join.

Even something as simple as finding an AA and a group that they can join, where they can meet people in their community who are looking to better themselves, giving them that opportunity is a part of restorative justice and them restoring their own lives.

By year 10 or 15 of your own impacting the system, had you come to feel, even if you were petitioning for a new trials or part of the movement to lessen your sentence had you come to understand the psychology that had essentially substantiated this idea of no tolerance for violence, for violent crime, even for offenders who might be in their early teens as you were was there part of your journey that actually had an acceptance of that attitude even if that is a more counterproductive attitude, because throwing someone in prison and tossing the key is not actually gonna be constructive for the economy or for the broader imperative of civil society, but I'm just wondering if you had come to terms with that society for the decades of the '80s and '90s and early 2000s, by and large, was on that wavelength that if you commit a violent crime of the nature you did, that was what you had to accept.

So I think one thing I learned in almost two decades in prison, is that no one leaves prison the same person they were when they go in.

People can come out of prison a better person, people can come out of prison more prone to criminal behavior because of what they're subjected to during their incarceration.

So, the idea that prison's a place that on its own, the incapacitation will cure people, that doesn't happen.

Prisons are very complex places, but they're violent places and they're places where we put all the people who commit crime and they're in the same environment and they pick up things from one another.

I've had a very unique experience in that I spent a lot of time in prison.

When I come home from prison, I studied criminology, got my master's degree in criminology.

So I studied the penal system as a student.

And for the last eight years, I've been a criminal justice practitioner leading a reentry organization.

What I can tell you is that people are sent to prison, and there certainly has to be some accountability when people commit crime.

The problem that we seem to have as a country is, we don't understand that we can have the stick and the carrot, or that we can both hold people accountable and give them opportunities to redeem theirselves.

It seems like often people who would say that the only way to deal with crime is to harshly punish people.

What I would say is 90% of the people who go to prison are coming home someday.

So if youre someone who cares about crime, you have to be concerned about what happens to that person when they go to prison.

And what happens when they come home, because we want them to be successful.

We don't want them to commit new crimes.

We don't want them to struggle when they go home and be sent back to prison for technical reasons that just end up costing taxpayers more money.

So, I think while we are slowly getting at having a better criminal justice system, if we compare it to decades past, we aren't acknowledging the fact that we can hold people accountable for the crimes that they commit, but at the same time give them opportunities to change and better themselves.

There are very few people who are beyond change, and especially young people who are sent to prison, young people or like clay dough, they're moldable, you can form them.

The question is, when we send young people to prison at an early age, who do we want forming them?

Do we want environments that aren't conducive to rehabilitation to form them?

Or do we want to think about the criminal justice system as having this restorative opportunity where people can come home and be good citizens and be good neighbors.

It's a fair point that people who support the prison industrial complex, who want to punish someone for their act of violence are in effect in the current scheme, condoning a lot of violence within that system.

But the way that they might rationalize it, Andrew, is that it's against that, as sad as it may be, is against the person who perpetrated the crime so that there's in effect, sanctioning the crime that they see as just an additional piece of the punishment of that person.

And I'm heartened that you didn't feel that way based on your answer, that you didn't accept that society's response that had been exacerbated over the course of the '90s and early 2000s, was what you should be subjected to, even though you acknowledge that a punishment was appropriate.

What I heard you saying before was not that at any moment in your prison sentence that you accepted that this is the way things had to be, but unfortunately, so many people I think would rationalize it and say, there's no such thing as a prison that's going to be free of that type of of violence.

But you're working on the parole side, not within the prison system itself, but do you see a way to make the best argument for restoration and also make the best argument that it is inhumane to rationalize the violence that prisoners are inevitably getting subjected to in the system today.

As far as prison violence, what I can tell you is that everyone should, it behooves every citizen to want prisons free of violence because people are products of their environment.

And one, if you don't care about the people who live in prisons, care about the staff who has to work there, we want prisons to be free of violence so the people who work in prisons don't have to be worried about being harmed themselves.

And prisons that have more violent events taking place, you can believe it's not just prisoner on prisoner violence, that the staff is involved and are victims of that violence too.

So I think we should all care about prisons being as safe of places to work as possible.

Where often underpaid people who work at those prisons.

And I would make the point, people will, are not gonna, are gonna leave prison differently they went in.

We want them to be having exposure.

We don't want them to have exposure to any more violence than they have to have.

But what's really important is, I can tell you that I've visited in since I've been home from prison, I've gone back into prison.

I'm in prisons all the time in my state and in other states I visit many prisons.

I can tell you not every prison is just the same.

I'm not gonna name names, but I'm gonna tell you that there are prisons that are very dark places that have very little opportunities for rehabilitation.

They're punitive to the extreme in nature, and those are places that there are a lot of violent acts and violent events that exist.

On the other hand, there are places that there's more opportunity for education.

There are more opportunities for vocational skills.

There's more opportunities for rehabilitative programs.

So where we have prisons where administrators focus more on rehabilitation than punishing people in prison, there's less violence.

And those, the people who leave prison are less likely to re-offend.

I mean, a lot of the recidivism studies have shown that individuals at prisons who have opportunities to take part in that rehabilitative programming are far less likely to re-offend.

So, prisons as places of punishment, places that we expect or we condone, well we expect them to be violent places because that's what prisons are for, it doesn't benefit society.

It may be a good slogan for someone who's running for office.

In your mind, Andrew, was the darkness correlated with the management or was it correlated with the absence of food and healthcare or educational programs.

What are the backend fixes that need to be addressed for that unevenness in terms of how some facilities are restorative and some are not.

Sure.

It's easy to blame the management of the prison on prison conditions, that the truth is legislators, leaders, our elected leaders set the tone for what we expect.

If leaders create legislation that show that we're serious about public safety in the sense that we're not just looking to lock people up, but we're looking to give people an opportunity to rebuild their lives and be good citizens.

Those types of places often have prisons where rehabilitation can take place.

People who are in prison aren't cynical and feel like the public wants them to succeed.

It's the places where, that have a lock them up and throw away the key mentality that are more prone to violence and have darker prisons where it's impossible to create hope or give people the confidence that working on themselves in prison will long term pay off from them.

As a society, we have to care about what happens in our prisons.

Final question.

I asked you about restorative justice.

I didn't conclude the question, but in your own journey, were you able to have any face to face interaction with the family of the victim in a way that was a model that you would encourage people that you're talking to and working with today, that there actually can be dialogue with the loved ones of people that might have been victimized that you or the person that you're talking to might have victimized.

Was there any path for that in your case?

Unfortunately, in my case there was not a desire by the people that I had harmed to have that dialogue with me.

And I totally respect that and understand that that's a case by the case situation.

And where there are people who are victims of crime that don't wanna participate, certainly, it's their prerogative.

What I will say is that I have done time in prison with people who've gone through victim offender dialogue or that restorative justice that allows the face to face conversation.

I've had clients from my organization that have had that opportunity, and I've had former victims of crime who now volunteer with our organization that took part in victim offender dialogue.

What I can tell you is recidivism rates for those individuals who took part in victim offender dialogue are significantly low.

Their outcomes are very high.

There is an appreciation that they were given an opportunity for forgiveness, which so many of us, myself included, you know, you grow older and you seek forgiveness and it's not always attainable.

But for those individuals who do have the luxury of being forgiven, they have so much more drive and so much more hope and so much more passion to live a life that's worthy of being free and having that second chance because they realize how much grace has been given to them.

Andrew Hundley, executive director of the Louisiana Parole Project.

Thank you for your resilience and insight today.

Thank you for having me.

[music] Please visit the Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind Download the podcast on Apple and Spotify and check us out on X, Instagram and Facebook.

Continuing production of the Open Mind has been made possible by grants from Vital Projects Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, and Draper Foundation.