Transcript of BONUS | M. Gessen on "The Opinions" New

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

I'm M. Gessen, 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 Idiots 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 2 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, spent 37 years in prison for driving the getaway car in a Brinks robbery that left 3 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, The Idiot, I hit a point where it was difficult for me to develop the character of my own cousin, Allan, the one who is 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 manage 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's 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, you know, 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 books my mother's letters, and, you know, she would describe the birds she could see from her cell.

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.

She'll be so happy to hear this.

And your relationship is so close. But I think to a lot of people listening to this, and certainly for me thinking about my cousin, who again, took out a hit on the mother of his children, 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 whose parents are inside? Because it's easy perhaps to think, well, if someone's caused great harm, they've abdicated their right to be in their child's life, including the fact that sometimes that harm, as in your case, takes place within the 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 leavable. 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.

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 to, 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 this 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.

00:07:24

I know that, at least for some time, both of your parents were in prison. 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 no, their fury 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 this was too much upset for a child. And so I speak from that experience when I say the absence can be worse because it was true that I didn't understand what had happened with my father, and I did feel more abandoned.

You said a phrase, you said that something is too much upset for a child. You know, that's logic that instinctively makes sense to me, right? 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. His life, the whole family can rally to help that happen. When we think about prisons are 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 carceral 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 about that.

Very critical.

But I think that something happened to me when I was reporting this podcast that shocked me. And I talk about it on the podcast that I've always thought of myself as somebody who is opposed to carceral justice, somebody who is really critical of the adversarial process. And then I found myself in the courtroom watching Alan's, my cousin's hearing. And rooting for the prosecutor and wanting this guy to go to prison for as long as possible, which, 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 sort 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 is as though it was in total concert with the carceral system. And you're nodding. I feel like 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 a certain kind of sense of vengeance within the parole board. And so I don't actually think that the law is keeping those more primal impulses in check, unfortunately. The other thing I would say is that I think you are 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, you know, 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 wouldn't turn on the, you know, 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.

Well, staying with this theme of vengeance for a second. No, I mean, you alluded to your experience in the state of New York. 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 9 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 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, 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 were 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 who's visiting someone in prison. You know, I never had to think I was the only kid this 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 5 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 grandmothers who get up at 4:00 AM to take a 7-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.

00:18:45

One might get the, I think, mistaken impression that you are advocating for sort of letting sleeping dogs lie or leaving things behind because, you know, everybody just does terrible things and you get past them. But I suspect it's a little more complicated than that. And when I was working on the podcast, you really kind of woke me up at a certain point because I was so focused on what Allan 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 produce 6 episodes of the thus-far 5-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 Allan and Priscilla and their children, and for all of you. I think that figuring out How to be with people after they've 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 Allan 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 Allan'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 feel out of control. And I think very often One part of that reality they're in 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— I think 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, or I know, I really believe that children are identified with their parents. You know, when someone says, "Where is your father?" and you say, "Prison," the shame of that moment is your shame. 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, you know, once you have someone in a family go into prison, you enter a sort of ecosystem, 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, right? 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.

How do you think about your relationship with him now?

I think maybe this comes back to where your fifth episode ends, around the question of accountability, um, which I did struggle with, you know, accountability as this kind of ultimatum that was delivered to your cousin. 'Confess 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 gonna confess to a crime. If you think it puts your relationship with your children in 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've 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 healthcare 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 disbarred, so how can everyone help him eventually do work his kids can feel proud of? I feel grateful that fundamentally, I've 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 6th episode of my 5-episode podcast. And this is where I think I hand it 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 reenter the family, you're going to have to fess up to what you did," which he continues to deny. And I gather you think that's wrong.

Well, I think that's a moment in the process. As you maybe can tell, I'm not in 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 eyeshot of other people, including surveilling guards. On the phone, I spoke to her on a recorded line or 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 they're in. 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 end-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 for, in particular, his children, 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—

He's so annoying.

No, I don't think it's annoying at all. I think it's very challenging. And I want to 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 a custody agreement with her while he was also taking out a hit on her. And now he's lying that he was set up by the FBI. And I just want to acknowledge your point about an active appeal, but I also think it's a decision one makes, right? 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, I get 6 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 lies habitually? And I'm just going to 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 he seemed to be, because I was so full of empathy for him. And then I came across this letter that he wrote, not to me, but to friends and family, who weren't me, but a fairly wide 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 fear is 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 you want 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. If you don't trust him in regards to Priscilla, then be there. Help take care of Priscilla. I'm 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 logics 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 in you disqualifies you totally. That to me is a logic that feels inhumane. It's just not true to the multiplicity and contradictions of how people are. Have you ever told a lie?

Yes.

Yeah. Have you ever manipulated people?

Yes.

Yes, of course. Right? And so this too 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, of allegedly taking a hit out on your ex, but the truth is we're all capable of harm. And we know that. And in fact, sometimes our kind of unhandled ways of dealing with our own capacities for harm is 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 as satisfying as possible. My mother and grandmother, there are 1,000 things they could have talked about that they were never going to 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.

00:35:29

Well, Harriet Clarke, 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.

00:35:55

Thank you.

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