#23 - Unveiling the Deep-Rooted Problems Plaguing US Prisons in America: A Closer Look ft. Elizabeth Mikotowicz

00:00:00 - Radell Lewis Welcome back to The Purple Political Breakdown. I'm your host, Radell Lewis, and we are back with episode number 23 as we plan to talk about the prison system, the inefficiencies behind it, and potential ways we can find solutions to, at the very least, make it better than it what it is in the American system. Of course, I have an excellent guest to talk about these issues. Choose. But before I dive into any of that, I'm going to read off a review of one of you all. Make sure you leave a five star review on Apple podcast so you can be shouted out in the next podcast episode. So this review is from C Draw 18. They said informative and an interesting take on events and political perspectives. I appreciate that the information is broken down into digestible bytes for people who want to be informed but aren't necessarily aware of all the terms and their definitions. So I appreciate, you see Jaw, of course, that I am trying to do that in terms of laying out the facts, laying out the information, and making them understandable to the average person on the street. Right. So with that said, I do want to dive into the topic at hand. I kind of already did the introduction, so honestly, we could just start off with you introducing yourself. 00:01:24 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Hi, I'm Elizabeth. I'm an artist and activist and a fashion designer. 00:01:31 - Radell Lewis So, Elizabeth, when it comes down to introductions, I also like to ask my guests moving forward, this is a new thing I actually implemented what is an interesting factor opinion that you would like people you wouldn't mind people knowing. 00:01:46 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Five years ago, I was painting murals as a federal inmate, and now I've had my own art shows and launched an environmentally friendly clothing brand based on my art and gotten bills passed for prison reform and further go to the people. 00:02:03 - Radell Lewis All right, excellent. Hey. It really shows that anybody is capable of making change for the better for society. If you care enough, for the most part, anyone is able to do something that's interesting. What was the reform? Is that something you're going to talk about later or do you want to talk about? 00:02:26 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yeah, well, I was going to talk about both bills. Only one has to do with prison reform. But there's a reason across the country, all these jails were getting PPP loans to expand their prisons during the pandemic. Like the money that should have gone to the people. And they're doing this so they can have more beds. And when I was in prison, we got $5.25 a month for work, being paid to work 40 hours a week, all month. And if you don't, you get punished. And so this is all a free workforce to them. And a hospital saves $350,000 a year contracting their linen to be washed by inmates instead of paying people minimum wage. They don't even want to pay us a minimum wage, let alone a livable wage. And now we went from three empty properties to 29 empty properties for every homeless man, woman and child in America. The homeless problem has exploded and now they're criminalizing it slowly. I mean, in some cities you can't even feed homeless people without being fined. So they're literally criminalizing these people and they're going to end up putting them all in jail and it's just a free workforce for them after getting out. Finding a place to live was very hard for me and it's still hard for me, even though I've done five years really good and proved to the community that I can be a decent person and not break the law. It doesn't matter. I still have my record thrown in my face and I'm still discriminated against. And up in Bangor, the homeless problem just exploded and these landlords were charging application fees and they'd get like ten application fees in a week and then not even rent the apartment because they're getting three times the rent. They don't even have to turn anything on and it's just free money to them. And it's like you had 70 people look at this apartment, you can see on some of the websites how many people have viewed the apartment and applied and it's like within 70 people, you couldn't find a tenant. This is all just free money to them and it's driving the homeless problem up. And I'm not talking about the small time landlords because it's really not them. It's like the big corporate landlords that have thousands of properties and they're having these application fees and processing fees and it's just driving the homeless problem up. Crime would go down if people's basic needs were met and I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. But the bill they got the main state representatives passed was landlords could only charge an application fee if a lease was signed. So they're not just getting a pile of money for a whole bunch of applications that they're not actually looking at. 00:05:25 - Radell Lewis All right, yeah, it seems a lot of things that were said I found very interesting and definitely worth discussing and deliberating about. In the future, I definitely plan to do a deep dive in terms of affordable homes and all that, because I do think there's an actual low key problem, although that's not like one of the mainstream topics that they put on the news because they want to focus on other things that don't matter. So I do think there is something there in terms of the homes and people not being able to afford homes. And the homeless problem, there's a lot of that goes into it with the corporates being greedy and then the culture behind being homeless and the mental illness stuff as well. So there's a lot of avenues and viewpoints to go into that topic of discussion. So it's very interesting. So before we dive into the main topic at Hands on new segment I also like to introduce is what you need to know what is going on currently, by the time this episode comes out, we'll probably be very much past. I was going to talk about the because it kind of goes hand in hand with what you were just talking about, the Jordan Neely stuff. But by the time this comes out, I feel like that situation will be relatively maybe a charge or punishment or he's set free will happen. I don't know. But I don't know if this will be a topical discussion point by then. But one thing I do want to bring up in reference to gritty corporate people is recently apparently there was this infamous Mormon church that was found to be basically scamming the people and keeping a bunch of funds over billions of dollars and not reporting it. And they said the amount of money they had was like more than even the Bill Gates and Melinda fund. So this Mormon church was able to keep billions of dollars at hold. Fortunately, there's a whistleblower who came out, called them out and exposed them for the frauds they are. But it really tells you that all these kind of organizations that's supposed to be meant for a good purpose and there's plenty of examples out there just want you to donate to them so they can keep your money and actually don't do anything in terms of what it's meant for in the first place. So that was an interesting thing. I don't know. Have you heard about that Mormon church that was able to scam people for billions of dollars? 00:08:04 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz No, I haven't. But there was a similar story. I think Joel Austin, like the janitor, found like $300,000 in a wall or something. These religious institutions really need to start being taxed, I think. 00:08:24 - Radell Lewis Yeah, it'll be tough to kind of attack a religious institution as of right now due to how the country is founded, the First Amendment, all that stuff. But at the very least, they definitely need to be held accountable way more so, especially these more new religious institutions that keep on popping up. Yeah, those ones that keep on popping up out of nowhere. We got to realize they're sketchy for a reason. Yeah, that's definitely a problem. 00:09:00 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz I think there is a problem with institutions in this country having way too much power and corruption to get away with what they're getting away with. There's so much sexual assault going on inside the jails, and this is actually a bill that I'm working on. So when I was at Somerset County my first week there, I witnessed an entire pot of women get stripped out because they signed up for a razor. And a male sergeant wanted a list of who shaved their vaginas and who didn't. Those that did were in trouble, and I was forced to strip in front of cameras under duress of being extracted maced, all that stuff. And for those of you who think, oh, I'm going to refuse, well, you will be met with a SWAT team, and they will use extreme violence on you. They will throw canisters of chemicals in your cell that are chemically designed to take the oxygen out of your lungs. And if one cell is getting it, they're all getting it. So, I mean, it's just what one does that everyone gets punished for. So, in Maine, it's illegal to have cameras inside cells. So when I was at Alderson, I filed a PRIA, which stands for Prison Rape Elimination Act. They don't actually do anything for you. And this is how they're burying me abuse. So when Alderson got the response back from Somerset, they wouldn't even let me hold it to read it myself. They read it to me and then told me I couldn't have a copy of it. Now, you only have 100 days to file a complaint when you get out of prison against an institution. And the first thing they asked for is, was there an outcry at the time? Did you file the proper paperwork? Well, yes, I did, but they would not give it to me. And then when I got out of prison, the captain and four subordinates at Alderson, Captain Grimes, you all can Google that they all got arrested for raping and stalking inmates and tampering with PRIA evidence. Like, I was not nearly the worst victim. And this is how they're covering up the abuse. They're just not giving the paperwork. By law, they have to give us the paperwork. And I requested my medical records and everything from Somerset County, which caused issues for me, because then I had to go on the same psych meds that I already knew would put me in psychosis because I didn't have the records. So they weren't giving me my medical records, any of my PRIA complaints, any of my paperwork, period. And this is how they bury the abuse. They just don't give it up. And they told me to have it subpoenaed by a lawyer. Well, you can't subpoena anything without an open case, and you can't open a case without the paperwork. So it's a catch 22, and they know this. So we need a bill that holds these institutions accountable for every day they stonewall an inmate or a patient on paperwork. There needs to be a financial repercussion for every day they do this. They can't continue to be allowed to do this stuff. I mean, you're six times more likely to get sexually assaulted by a cop than you are a civilian. And I'm not here to say all cops are bad, because for every cop that oppressed me, there was another risking their job to try and make it stop. And that's a problem within itself, and it needs to be addressed. The decent cops, they're getting their job taken from them. They're getting put in dangerous situations, especially the women the women cops that stand up for the inmates are put in danger on the job by other staff members. And it's awful to watch, but we have a lot of things that need to be addressed and holding institutions accountable, whether it's colleges, juvenile detention centers, rehabs. They need to be held accountable. They cannot continue to do their own investigations because they get to choose how the investigation comes out, and they care more about their reputation than they do live. 00:12:51 - Radell Lewis Interesting when I think at the end of the day, that's something I shouldn't be surprised at, because we all know how shady a lot of these institutions are at the end of the day. But it's still very surprising to hear something like that, considering these institutions are supposed to be for the people. In a sense, they're supposed to be the hallmarker of what justice is supposed to emanate. And then they do things that are basically the scum of the scum. They're doing things that are no better than the worst prisoners that you will see in a prison. 00:13:32 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz And it's the military, too. I was in prison with a whole bunch of military veteran women who were thrown away by the military because they stood up to their rapist, or maybe they fought back or got outed somehow. And there's a really bad rape culture in this country, and that's driving a lot of this, too. 60% of women that go to prison have some sort of domestic violence or sexual assault in their background. That's how I ended up in prison. I was a single mom going to college, and my ex assaulted me to the point my skull was showing. And then when I went to the hospital, found out I was pregnant, they pumped me full of opiates and tell me I'm on too small of a dose to get addicted. But since I'm pregnant, if I refuse, then they're going to call CPS on me. This was back 17 years ago when big pharma was still driving those profits home. And the suffering of the American people is a trillion dollar industry. From the prisons to the medical mafia, the insurance companies, the rehabs, it's all just profiting off of our suffering. The rehabs have a 94% failure rate, and they have the most petty rules. Like, my friend's nephew got kicked out because he was drinking a cup of coffee in the wrong part of the building at the wrong time of day. $30,000, no refund. He got out and overdosed. I mean, these are the rehabs, and there's no proof that they even work. And they kick somebody out, and then they fill that bed, it's another $30,000. This is just the money pit of the American people suffering. It's just endless. 00:15:19 - Radell Lewis So I want to start off by making some distinctions, because a lot of times when you talk about, I guess, important or maybe even controversial situations, there are some people who want to get triggered based on subtle things that they stick to them and they want to go like, okay, but this and that. So the distinctions I want to make is first and foremost when it comes down to prisons, right. So a lot of what you're eliciting seems to be for people that are unfortunate in circumstances, whether it's like you said, abuse, I don't know exactly. I know there's like different levels of the prison system, but obviously we and I'm not saying treat them poorly because we have an amendment in the bill rights to say we're not even supposed to be treating prisoners poorly. But I want to make sure we have a distinction between the worst of the worst criminals. 00:16:22 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz I'm not saying let everybody out. That's not what right. 00:16:25 - Radell Lewis That's important. 00:16:26 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz I deserve that. Three years I was profiting off of people's addictions. I was lost in my own addiction and I needed help. My whole thing is stop traumatizing people while they're in there and stop giving people ridiculous sentences for ghost weight because some snitch said this, this, and they can't even prove it. We just have people in prison. We shouldn't have people in prison for marijuana when now all of a sudden there's a whole lot of the white community making money off of smoke shops and medical marijuana everywhere. You've been locking the black community up and demonizing them and the hippies since the you all want to profit off of it. I think it's a hypocrisy for me. 00:17:18 - Radell Lewis Yeah, I definitely get what you're saying. And because you elicited to this, it'll be easier to make the distinction because people want to compare, like all criminals the same, all prisons the same. That's not true. So we're definitely distinguishing low level drug crimes, even distributing or addiction or usage or anything like that. 00:17:41 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Low level women in self defense. So many women are in prison right now because they finally snapped and defended themselves against an abuser or a sex trafficker and it's disgusting. But they're letting 98% of rapists walk free. Those are the people you should be locking up. Those are the people who are doing the most damage and the most trauma to society. The sex offenders and the corruption and people abusing power. These are the things that need to be addressed. But everything's so corrupt. Those people get away with everything. 00:18:23 - Radell Lewis Yeah, I 100% agree that there is a lot of corruption or there's a lot of unfortunate people who utilize their power in unfortunate ways within, especially from back then till now. So now that this distinction is made that we want to focus on the system that is kind of treating the low level drug crimes, the self defense situations, even like assault, but not like you're a serial killer. Right. Those people, they're discussed for a different day. That way we could focus on this specific situation scenario. So when it comes down to the process of getting entered in this prison system. Can you kind of explain how that works once you kind of get charged and go forward from that? 00:19:18 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yeah, well, I literally went to jail for the same drugs twice because I got busted with the state. So they kicked my hotel room door in, dragged me to jail, handcuffed me. They scanned my eyes, my fingerprints, my hands. Asked me a bunch of intake questions, stripped me down, made sure I wasn't packing anything, give you a change of clothes and some places make you shower and do life treatment. And then they put you in the pod. Unless if you have to go through some places have like a 72 hours where they put you in solitary to see what security level you are. But it really kind of depends how you come in. If you come in kicking and screaming, you're going to be in solitary, you're going to be in the turtle suit. And that's like this 50 pound thing they put over you naked. When people are suicidal or violent, they have a chair they strap people to when they get out of hand. They had one girl in that, and she was naked in it all night, and she was on her period, so she was, like, bleeding everywhere, and they just left her out in the middle of the lobby area. And you have to expect to be treated very much less than human. I mean, they pretty much take your name away and give you a number and that's it. You're an inmate. You're no longer valuable. You're no longer worthy of respect or human decency if you get abused or sexually assaulted. I've literally had conservative women tell me when I got out of prison, if you don't want to get raped by cops, then don't go to prison. 00:21:16 - Radell Lewis Yeah, sometimes one of my big issues with the conservative side is the ignorance that they kind of elicit, thinking that they're the model citizens. One of my big issues with them in that situation where these people who are put in these extreme circumstances, like you said, maybe they're acting frantic. But in terms of the crime, is it the same level crime that you committed or did she do a way worse crime? 00:21:42 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Well, at the time, I had one of the worst, most serious, because I was charged with conspiracy when the Feds picked it up. 00:21:52 - Radell Lewis Okay. 00:21:53 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz I got charged in the state, and then I was done. And then the Feds picked it up two years later, and I had a bunch of code offendants, but I was being held accountable for the same drugs again. So if it's a different jurisdiction, it's kind of like Derek Chauvin, how he got charged in the state and then the Feds picked it up. But I don't think they should be doing that with drug dealers. I did my time and I was done. And then all of a sudden, the Feds picked it up and off I go. 00:22:28 - Radell Lewis Okay. 00:22:28 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yeah. 00:22:30 - Radell Lewis All right. So very interesting. I did not know that. To be fair, I haven't really looked into the distinction in terms of how badly you could be treated for drug dealing, to be fair. Maybe they may look at some in depth organization from the black market that's doing a lot of these crazy things, but a lot of that is also tied to violence and guns as well, is the assumption too. So with that said, I do this exercise for every discussion point before we start getting into the nitty gritty of what the system is and the solutions we can find is if you can lay out a pro and a con for the system at hand, what would those be? 00:23:22 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Well, a con would be it is very racially oppressive, which, until I went to prison, I really had no idea the extent of the systemic racism in this country. Like, for example, I met a handful of women in prison that had all been sterilized against their will. And this was before Trump filled up the ice camps with refugees. And you heard about the refugee women getting sterilized against their will in these ice camps. Now, this was before that. These were American women. And by the time I met the third one, I realized not a single one of them were white. And I honestly believe that I would have gotten a much longer sentence if I was a black woman or Spanish or something. I really do believe that, and that doesn't sit well with me. I grew up thinking this is land of the free and peace and justice for all, and I just feel so betrayed and just lied to. Basically, I felt like I was under this illusion of white supremacy my whole life, and then I got to wake up to it and really see the cruelty and inequality. Okay, I'm sorry. What was the other part of that question? I can't remember the rest. 00:24:50 - Radell Lewis Pros and cons. 00:24:53 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Pros. There are good programs in there. The Resolve program helped me a lot. I kept relapsing because of my trauma. I had to get my trauma and PTSD in check before I could really tackle my addiction, because that was the reason why I kept relapsing, and I just couldn't handle it. I'd have a panic attack every time I left my house. So the Resolve program really helped me, and it really gave me an understanding of what I was dealing with and what was actually happening to me and why I was reacting the way that I was and why I still was waking up screaming five years later and everything else. And so I think the feds have some really good programs that should be at a state level, but they don't have the funding. And if they did, they wouldn't put it towards inmates. They'd put it towards their bonuses and everything else. For example, when you show up to federal prison. If you don't have your GED, they sign you up for the GED. That's really great if you don't actually have your GED, but they make two grand for every inmate that is enrolled, and then another two grand when they graduate. So you had all these women who couldn't prove that they had graduated high school even though it was in their PSI. They make you get your high school diploma just to get more people into this class. So we had women with bachelor's degrees and doctorates graduating the GED. That's what taxpayers are spending their money on. It's such just an empty pit of money, and they're not even using it for good. They won't even buy us pads and tampons in there. We have to buy our own tampons. They will give us pads. But that's actually one of the bills I helped get passed in Maine. That all jail facilities have to provide tampons and pads free of charge for women. We had women in there making their own tampons out of stuff and getting infections and making themselves sick. You should not have to worry about that. We cannot get these things for ourselves. And then when it is on the commissary, they'll jack the price up three times what it costs on the outside. And again, we were only making $5.25. A package of ramen noodles out here that cost $0.25 cost one dollars 50 in there. They extort us every way they can. 00:27:34 - Radell Lewis Okay, so my next line of questioning is really kind of trying to dive into the prison system a little bit more specifically. So first things first. In terms of the prison system and the punishments, I'm not going to focus on the criminal justice part in terms of the courts and all that stuff and the law or anything, but I'm really going to focus on the punishments associated with the type of prison that you're going in. Do you believe that people associated with drugs should be in prison, or do you believe that a more efficient rehab program should be made for them exclusively? 00:28:18 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz I think a more efficient rehab should be made for them. And again, I'll say it again, if people's basic needs were met, they wouldn't be doing this. Do you know how many people only sell drugs to try and make their rent because they work three jobs and they still can't pay for it? If we had universal health care, which every other well off country does, this kind of thing wouldn't happen. I finally got my life together when Janet Mills took over for Paula Page. She took his governor position, and the first thing she did was expand main care so people like me could get health insurance. I could get the meds I needed. I could go to therapy. I could go to trauma counseling. That was the game changer for me. Just having health care and having access to those resources completely saved my life. When Le Page was in office and I signed my kids over to my father because I made a deal with him. I went to the battered women's shelter and he said, if they can't help you, you got to sign your kids over so they're safe and you're going into seizures anyway from your head injury. You can't take care of them. So I went to the battered women's shelter. They turned me away. So I was now homeless. I had no place to live, couldn't get my kids back, and I couldn't even get properly medicated anymore. And I lost all my prescriptions. And that was the beginning of the end for me when I lost my my main care. And you know, if people could just have access to health care and not have it put them in mountains of debt, we have people working management jobs and they're dying because they don't have their insulin. If people's basic needs would just be met, it would eradicate a lot of the crime. 00:30:18 - Radell Lewis Okay. When it comes down to it, if those situations if we create a system when it comes down to more affordable health care. I think for the most part I'm always iffy on the efficiency of how we can do this in America. Because one of the big things in America is that we have such an elite medical program, because we focus our resources on a very elite like brain surgeons or whatever. But at the same time, I feel like there is definitely a system we can put in place to make sure that at the very least we can provide some aid to the lower income situations. So that's something I'm willing to dive into, of course, in terms of how we can approach that. But for those people that potentially are offered this type of health care and then still pursue drugs, or still pursue dealing drugs in those situations, how do you think their punitive shimmet should be if rehab is not working? 00:31:29 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz If they're doing it just for the thrill of it and profiting off people's addictions and suffering just because they can, then, yeah, I absolutely think they should be in jail. 00:31:43 - Radell Lewis Okay, so when it comes down to the different levels of prison, when those people who keep on doing it don't really care, those type of examples, we got the rehab situation out the way. I feel like a lot of people do agree that we need a more efficient rehab system put in place in terms of prison. We're finally getting to a place that hopefully every state legalizes marijuana, and then we can definitely go into a lot of different other areas as well. 00:32:23 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz The feds would have to rewrite their entire sentencing system because they literally transform all drugs into marijuana. Like, for example, 1 gram of cocaine equals 200 grams of marijuana. 1 gram of bass salt equals 380 grams of marijuana. And it's ridiculous. It's the stupidest system. It. Doesn't give out justice. 00:32:49 - Radell Lewis What do you mean? They transfer everything to marijuana. 00:32:51 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz What do you mean by that? At the end, when they hold you accountable for your drugs? It is in marijuana. In grams of marijuana. They convert all the drugs into marijuana. It's the dumbest thing. Don't ask me why it does not work, because I've seen one 10th of a gram of basalt do way more damage than 380 grams of marijuana could ever dream of doing. And it just keeps us locked into a system where weed has to be outlawed because they're basing their entire sentencing system on marijuana. 00:33:29 - Radell Lewis Okay, I did not know that. So more and more states are now legalizing recreationally. I feel like at a certain point. 00:33:37 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Feds can still lock people up. The feds are still locking people up for marijuana, even in the legal states. So this is where you get into shady water where if you don't do it exactly how the state wants you to, or if you have one too many plants, the feds will come in and you will go to prison for 1020 years. 00:34:06 - Radell Lewis Yeah, that's definitely excessive. I feel like there is a discussion point in referencing that. I mean, to be fair, even if marijuana is a completely legal, sometimes people do go overboard. So you definitely want to make sure that people are not going crazy with the drug that can make you hide the kite and make you pretty much lazy all day. But when it comes to dealing too, obviously dealing probably will never be okay. You would have to buy it from somewhere. So that's an interesting point, and I didn't know the part about them trying to convert all drugs to marijuana, but. 00:34:40 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Hopefully we do get a point if you want everything out. It's ridiculous. 00:34:47 - Radell Lewis Yeah, I do believe you, for sure. So we'll see how that kind of approaches. It seems as of right now, I don't know, maybe the next well, after this election cycle, however this goes by the next two election cycles, it will be legal federally, and then we go from there in terms of all the weird stuff when it comes to the feds, as you're eliciting. So with that said, like I said, we agree that rehab definitely needs to be more efficient, not only for people under drug usage situations, but people who have mental illness problems as well. So that needs to be a more efficient program altogether that we all agree on. 00:35:36 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz But in terms of the doctors in prison, 60% of them in, I believe it's, Alabama, have lost their medical license. So it's not illegal for doctors with malpractice suits and that have lost their medical license to the medical board to work at prison. And that's what usually happens. And I watch so many people die of very treatable things, and I watch inmates doing miniature surgeries on themselves. I mean, it's absolutely disgusting. You should not have doctors who have malpractice suits and have killed people working with anybody. And, oh, they're also allowed to work on native reservations, too, which is absolutely disgusting to me. They're not allowed to work anywhere else, but they're allowed to work in prisons and native clinics. 00:36:30 - Radell Lewis Are these privately owned or, like, public everywhere? 00:36:36 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yeah, they're all government. Yeah, because that's how it was in the feds. And yeah, I just read a statistic that 60% of the doctors in Alabama have lost their medical licenses. 00:36:53 - Radell Lewis Okay. Yeah, that's actually pretty crazy, especially if they are signing up for these private prisons. It's really hard to really the skepticism behind them being a corporation that makes a prison, I don't really understand that part. 00:37:13 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz How about the judges that own the prisons and they're sentencing people to go to their prison? They're literally making money off of sentencing somebody. 00:37:24 - Radell Lewis Yeah, that obviously seems corrupted in terms of those situations. I don't really agree with the sentiment of private prisons. With that said, if we took out all private prisons, would you be okay with raising taxes and whatnot? Or rerouting the way taxes are used in terms of state funded prisons? 00:37:50 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yes. 00:37:52 - Radell Lewis Okay. All right. So what it so when it comes down to the the people here that are doing the nasty stuff that you were talking about, how would what is the solution that you would have in terms of holding them more accountable for the actions that they are emitting in prisons? 00:38:12 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Are you talking about the inmates or the guard? 00:38:15 - Radell Lewis The guards. 00:38:16 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz The guards. Okay. There needs to be an outside source investigating these prisons, and a lot of times, inmates are too scared to even make a complaint or ask for help or do anything like that because the retaliation game is so real and is so serious, they will try to get you more time. I've watched guards plant stuff on people. I've watched guards push inmates up against the wall just so they could say, oh, they reacted and spray them. It's that level of sadistic cruelty. I mean, I was in solitary, and I had a female sergeant telling me to kill myself while I was in psychosis on the wrong medication. And then it was in the paper that she told this other inmate to kill themselves, and they had to cut that inmate down from a suicide attempt. And she still works there. She's still getting her pension. These officers cannot continue to keep getting in trouble like this and still get a pension. She should not have a pension. Officers that do that much damage should not get to live on a pension. Me and one of the state reps were talking. Maybe there's a way, like, you could have kiosk, like a computer kiosk, and if something happens to an inmate, an inmate can report on there, and it would go to an outside source instead of the jail, because the second you start reporting in the jail, that's when they come for you. That's when they start putting you in solitary for no good reason. And solitary confinement literally slows down the brain from the lack of stimulation. So it makes normal situations. Like, when I got out of solitary after six weeks, people talking over each other would make me panic. And the first thing I would go to in my head was, who do I have to fight to get out of here? Like, that is literally your first instinct. This is what solitary does. You're not rehabilitating people. You are destroying them and traumatizing them and making it so that their brain is rewired, that they cannot deal with normal levels of stimulation without it feeling like chaos. 00:40:40 - Radell Lewis In this situation for them to kind of report to an outside source. And I do see some validity in having kind of like an inspector and making sure everything is kind of status quo to an extent. How would you alleviate potential prisoners that are kind of sending false reports or spam reporting situations? 00:41:06 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz That doesn't really happen. 00:41:10 - Radell Lewis I'm not speaking on the statistics or the logistics of it happening or not happening. I'm speaking on the potential risk that it does happen. 00:41:20 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz I mean, they have cameras everywhere, or at least they're supposed to. They're so innocent. Just show the footage. 00:41:35 - Radell Lewis Okay, so in addition to the reporting having a route to report to an outside source, do you believe there needs to be better security footage in these prisons as well? 00:41:53 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yeah, I do not. Inside the cells where the inmates are going to the bathroom. And that's a problem because all across the country, you have jails that are putting cameras in inappropriate places. And then I remember as an inmate, I was brought to where these security cameras were, and I could see another inmate going to the bathroom, and that's not okay. You're in there with predators. I remember going to Rhode Island State Prison and being like, I couldn't believe how many female sex offenders and child murderers there were in that place. And there are people in there that definitely deserve to be there, and the prison shouldn't expose I had another officer pull my pants open and ask me if I was wearing underwear in front of exposing me to other inmates. And she had this weird thing where she would do that to people. Like, if you did that at a job, you would get fired and sued for sexual harassment. You shouldn't be doing that to another human being. 00:42:58 - Radell Lewis Okay, so it definitely seems like it's a big thing in terms of these prisons. From your account, of course, that there's unfair to ridiculous amounts of unfair treatment to the prisoners. Of course. I'm sure there's going to be people arguing out there that, like you said, the conservative woman said, oh, yeah, you shouldn't go to prison in the first place. You shouldn't do this. 00:43:25 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Nobody wakes up and wants to do that. I had exhausted all other options. Like I had gone to the shelter, I had gone to CPS, I had gone to everywhere I could for help and it was not good enough. People get to a point where it's just too hard to survive and then you have some crazy tragedy like I had happen, and it completely rips the rug out from underneath you. 00:43:54 - Radell Lewis So in comparison to the American prison system, because I like to gauge where your honest thoughts are in referencing the system. I forget one of the Scandinavian countries goes to a whole different extreme in terms of treating prisoners to even like, if they're a murderer, they'll give them basically a dorm and let them go and leave that. Do you think that is an appropriate way to treat prisoner or do you think that's going a little too far, maybe finding a medium between the two? What do you think? 00:44:27 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz No, there needs to be space. I got to the point where I couldn't even open a door. I would have to psych myself up to open a door because it was so ingrained in me that if I opened a door on my own, I would be met with a SWAT team and with violence. And I knew I was out. I knew it was over with, but still, just like it would literally take me like 20 minutes to get out the door because I would literally have to gas myself up. You don't have to rewire people to the point they can't function. It's Sweden. They do great with their prisons. They don't even have violence in their prisons because they're treated like human beings and they're given their own room, their own space. They can get their own stuff. Basic stimulation. Instead of depriving people of complete compassion and empathy, you're not rehabilitating them, you're turning them into a monster. 00:45:34 - Radell Lewis Interesting. So overall, I do think there's a lot of very fair and productive solutions that was pointed out here in today's discussion. For me personally, when it comes down to the prison system, I do think it's extremely inefficient. Now, I'll be honest, I'm not like one of the more emotional person. Try to always think things through, logic and facts, of course, trying to be objective on what's going on. So there are certain criminals inherently, I don't want them to be like I said, we have an amendment there for a reason. We don't want to torture people. We don't want to have them have people treat these prisoners like they're less than dirt. But there are some people emotionally I just will never feel sorry for. And you elicited some of the worst type of people. Right? But from excluding that from the topic of conversation, at the end of the day, we all should realize that prison, for the most part should be something that rehabilitates prisoners to come back in society. All those other people have a sentence and they'll come back to society. We all know they'll come back into society or they're supposed to come back into society. So the process of them coming back to society should be approached based on how they are treated while they're in prison. So in terms of these situations where it's like a low level assault or maybe a theft or something dealing with drugs, as long as it's not something crazy, then these prisons definitely, I agree, should be much more humane to the prisoners and helping them adjust to establishing themselves back into society. Now, I don't think the Sweden prison system would ever work in America purely because how different we are from Sweden in our culture. But to say that we can't find a system that's more accountable to the correctional officers that you're talking about and a lot more helpful to the prisoners, I feel like is just being dishonest. 00:47:38 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz The juvenile systems are even worse than the adult facilities. When I was at Cumberland, there's only one juvenile detention center in Maine, and it's called Long Creek. And every couple of years or even a couple of months, they're always in the paper for breaking kids arm, sexual assault allegations, and they always just change the person at the top and nothing ever changes. And when I was at Cumberland, they brought this 17 year old girl from there who snapped and stabbed a CEO because she got tired of getting raped. Well, they brought her with us because whenever they can't handle a juvenile, they just bring them with us at Cumberland, the adults. And on Christmas, they told her she was going back. They knew what happened to her. And on Christmas, they decided to terrorize this little girl and tell her she was going back into the custody of her abusers. And she flipped out. They took her to Max and later that night, she broke a razor open and slit her throat. That was better than going back for two weeks. And these children are not believed simply because they're children. And these predators know this. That's why they choose employment at a juvenile detention center because, oh, it's a troubled kid, they're making stuff up. They are never believed. And then you set that child on a path of trauma and what was supposed to help them ended up traumatizing them and make them completely distrust everything in the system, everything in the world. These kids were broken from the system so much worse than I ever was as an adult. And it's everywhere. You heard these Republicans. We got to get armed guards in the schools or armed cops in the schools. You did that and you sent a bunch of black kids to juvenile facilities that weren't doing anything. I think one kid ran down the hall too fast and he got arrested for it. All you did was take these kids out of school and put them in a place where they are going to be abused sexually, physically, mentally and emotionally. 00:49:56 - Radell Lewis That was definitely very enlightening and this kind of sheds light on a few things. Now, I'm going to be honest in reference to one point that you said, I'm actually one of those people that for sure says that we should have a better security in schools. I am 100% there. But I do think that there is a legitimate worry that if you put a racist person in there, they obviously or just put a scumbag in there, they will obviously abuse their power. So that's a legitimate worry for sure. And it's just one of those situations when it comes down to employing people in important positions to hope that they're not a scumbag. It's just one of those things that you really can't account for. But I rather better security than not having security. You just got to vet them better. You just don't hire just anybody. Right? 00:50:51 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yeah. I think there should be psychological evaluations. I think if you have a position of power over anyone's lives, you should have a psychological evaluation. And cops only have like six months of training. Other countries, they make their cops train for two years before they even go out on the streets. And that's the way it should be here. They're literally taught to scream gun even though they haven't seen a gun, because it'll make witnesses around say, oh, he said he saw a gun, so there must have been a gun. They literally do that to throw off witnesses in a traumatic event. 00:51:31 - Radell Lewis Yeah. When it comes to the duration, I don't think that's a problem because when it comes to the military, I used to be in the military and I know for a fact, us in the military with less than six months training, we are way more efficient than a cop. It's just the training they go through is just not efficient. Whatever they're taught in there sometimes is not efficient. Some of them are like, overweight sometimes. The standards in terms of being a police officer, the bar of being someone in the military and someone being a police officer shouldn't be that far apart. It should be relatively close. Sure, military is up here because they got to do a lot more serious stuff, but a cop shouldn't be that far apart in terms of standard. So I agree with the cop system sometimes being extremely inefficient. Some cops take it very seriously, super well trained, super responsible, but then you got the slobs, the people who don't care. The amount of overweight cops I see is actually ridiculous. I stand by that. I shouldn't be seeing that many overweight cops. It's so dumb. Okay, with that said, the things you were talking about, juvie is super enlightening because at the end of the day, there's so much discussion and we're all revolving around children, like you said, revolving around like, mass shootings, for example. And I'm talking about how we should have all these solutions to help these kids. Obviously, mental health is definitely a big part of it, of course. And then there's talk about children revolving the LGBTQ and trans stuff. Everybody cares about children in these situations. Everybody talk about this, this and my kids in this situation. But I'm speaking at you conservatives because I slander the lefties too, but I'm speaking at you conservatives, you act like you care about these children in these all these situations. But as you elicited here, the juvenile system, a system put in place for children, for rehabilitation. This is not to keep kids in punishment. These are to put kids in the right track so they can be a part of a normal society. This system is extremely corrupt, extremely corrupt based on what you were telling me right here. Now, I can't say every single system in every single state is corrupt, but to say I never hear someone from the right, never hear someone from conservative ever talk about this potentially corrupt system with potentially corrupt people not caring about these kids that are going to juvenile hall. So I just want a level consistency because I do care about children. I care about kids. I may not be a parent as of yet, but I have friends that have kids. I'm an older brother of like, five siblings. So I have an innate interest to make sure we are better, especially when I have a kid down the line. But I'm not doing this for political agendas. I'm doing this because there's an actual want for kids to live out a normal, healthy life without type of weird indoctrination or suffering in any way. So that's where I come from. That that's a message to you conservatives. I can talk about lefties all the time, but sometimes people got to talk to you conservatives as well, saying that you all are being whacked too, to be honest. 00:54:53 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Yeah. 00:54:57 - Radell Lewis But do you have anything else that you want to bring up, any other solutions in reference to the prison system that you want to elicit? 00:55:05 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz So up in Maine, there was this cop from Calus, and he got arrested for trafficking. He gave a 17 year old girl in high school drugs for her mother, who was giving him sexual favors for the drugs. Now, I called the DA up and was like, why didn't you charge him with a sex crime? He extorted her mental health and her addiction. He's a cop of over 30 years. He knows about addiction, and he's extorting her with drugs. Probably. He got in the evidence locker and he goes, you made some really good points, because I said I was like, as a woman who's been to prison, if a cop were to come on to me, the only thing I'm thinking is, what am I going to jail for when I say no? And that's the truth of it, because they have power over us. So he said the way the law is written, it was consent, but you made some good points, so you should bring that up with the main state representative. So that's kind of how I got into writing bills and proposals for that. But there should be no such thing as consent with a police officer and civilians. They should not be getting sexually gratified on the job anyway. And if you have to use your badge to get laid, you have no game. Just pack it in because that's all you have. You have to bully women into sleeping with you with your badge. Come on. 00:56:39 - Radell Lewis Right? There's really no difference from that versus, what is it called? Fraternization. We know that people with power are not allowed to use their power to do whatever with said person. 00:56:55 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz Oh, but they do, especially in drug courts. And there's one cop in, I'm not going to say where, because it's not my story, but he was pulling women over and giving them really big speeding tickets if they didn't blow him, basically. And you can't do that. These are the things that need to be held accountable for. It should be automatic sexual assault, even if it's consensual, because I know a lot of women who would just submit because they're scared of cops and they don't want to get hurt. So they're not even going to try to say no, they're just going to sleep with the man because they feel like they have to. So, I mean, officers on duty should not be getting sexually gratified on taxpayers money, period. And they hold too much power over us. So it should not be consent. It should be the same as correctional officers. There's no such thing as consent because of the difference of power. 00:57:59 - Radell Lewis Yeah, I 100% agree to that. I think there's really not much to be said. There's a lot of situations with a lot of the things that I feel like, for the most part, when it comes down to America, I'm in one of those kind of opinions that sometimes we focus on the negatives. Too much or focus on the wrong things too much. And don't really focus on overall, how much better we have it than other people or overall, don't focus on other things that are probably more important. And I feel like this situation, although it's like not praising America or anything, I never see anyone talk about our prison system. I never see anyone talk about the inefficiencies behind our prison system. For the most part in politics nowadays, it's talking about well, nowadays it's talking about mostly like trans issues and LGBTQ. Yeah, and then obviously cop stuff, too. But I usually never see anyone talking about prison stuff because I think this is an actual discussion. If any rational person discussed a lot of the things that go wrong in these prison systems. And maybe they want to go into statistics, all that, but in terms of the actions themselves and the accountability that should be had, I think most people would agree rationally that yeah, we need to make it more accountable, we need to make it more efficient and we need to make it more appealing to rehab the individuals that are not crazies. On the other extreme side that we topic of a different discussion for a different day. Yeah. Any last words for wrap it up? 00:59:41 - Elizabeth Mikotowicz If you all want to check out my environmentally friendly clothing brand, here's one of my bags. It's on legalleries.com Elizabeth Mikotowicz, and it comes in plus sizes too, so it's very inclusive and it's very flattering to all body types. 01:00:05 - Radell Lewis All right, excellent. All their information will be on the website, of course, when it comes down to my website, and I think this was a very interesting discussion, very great discussion. A lot of new information that I did learn or kind of enlightened about in consideration for the potential corruptness of prison systems. So with that said, I hope you guys enjoyed the discussion. Of course, we'll be back next Monday. You all have a good one. Rated five stars. Take care and peace.