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Kathy's contractions are getting stronger.

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I was always into kids
and imagined myself as a father,

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but I was pretty scared about doing it.

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What's going through my mind are all
those scenes from TV and the movies

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where the expectant dad is
totally bumbling and useless.

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I'm determined to be focused and calm.

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We found out that our baby lay in
the wrong position, with the head up

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rather than down in the uterus.

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Breech births are doubly dangerous for
the baby because the head is inside

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the birth canal longer,

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and the umbilical cord can get wrapped
around the neck and cut off oxygen.

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I was struggling to see if I could get
him to turn around. I mean, he was,

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he had turned into a position that
was no longer headfirst. It was,

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it wasn't even rump first.

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It's dangerous for the mother because
of a chance of greater tearing and bleeding.

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The labor kind of began at around 6:00 PM, and it
really became more intense around 12 midnight.

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The period from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM was painful.

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By 6:00 AM, Kathy had been
in labor for 12 hours.

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I was wondering where the doctor is. I mean,

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we've been there for hours.
At about 5:45 in the morning or something, or...

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the doctor arrived, and she
said, push, just like that. Push.

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You can push now. And I, I–
I just started yelling, and she was saying,

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stop yelling. Use your energy towards
pushing. And I just stopped.

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I stopped yelling, and I used
my energy towards pushing.

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As they wheeled Kathy into the
delivery room with me by her side,

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the obstetrician came rushing in.

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At 6:17 AM, with a big push
and gushes of blood,

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our child was born.

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Other people had had babies underground.

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So, the combination of my kind of
imaginary sense of who we were

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led me to feel, absolutely,
I'm gonna have a baby.

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I did a lot of childcare in the, in
the periods where, in the movement,

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both aboveground and underground.

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I took my son to the babysitter

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and assumed that I would be back

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to pick him up later in the day.

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It's hard to imagine that.

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And yet,

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I think the way in which denial can work

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is that you literally can block out consequences.

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I think that I was completely out of touch.

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One thing that revolutionary groups

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need to function is funds.

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They usually don't get grants

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from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation.

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So we knew there was danger, but we didn't dwell on that.

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White people are much less likely to

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get stopped and questioned by the cops.

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They would be looking for
Black people specifically.

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We felt that if once they got into the
truck, and it was a white couple driving,

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it was very unlikely to be a problem.

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I left my 14-month-old
child at the babysitter.

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I had ruptured a most basic human bond,

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violating a mother's responsibility
to protect and care for her baby.

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We dropped him off together,

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and it was sort of like another day.

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You drop your kid off at the babysitter,
and you go about your, you go to your job,

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and you pick the kid up.

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If I could only replay that day,
I would not have been there.

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I would not have gone.

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I’m gonna need an ambulance.

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Yeah, he just yelled out, “I need an ambulance”.

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Shit. In the back of the mall,
somebody shot at an armored car.

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Individuals were jumping out of the
back of the truck, and firing at us.

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One guard and two policemen died that night.

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In the botched ambush of an armored car...

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Police in the suburban town north of New York
City booked two men and two women.

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Suspect is 37-year-old David Gilbert.

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Among the four suspects arrested was
Katherine Boudin.

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Katherine Boudin, Kathy Boudin.

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Katherine Boudin, a radical
who has been on the run for 11 years.

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A fugitive since 1969.

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On the FBI's most wanted list, one of
the mainstays of the Weather Underground.

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She was a magna cum laude graduate
of Bryn Mawr. Intelligent, idealistic,

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and attractive.

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It appears the robbery was meant to
finance a little-known cell of violent radicals.

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The radical Black organization
called the Black Liberation Army.

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The atmosphere of police dogs,

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and barricades can't possibly
give anybody the impression that she is

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entitled to a presumption of innocence.

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It was intense for five hours.

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Dodging blows, both physical
blows and psychological blows.

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A lot of beating, a lot– threats of death.

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A shotgun pointed into my neck, telling
me it would be the death penalty.

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I don't think when you're arrested,

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that period you face kind of the long-term
meaning of what just happened.

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I was an unarmed passenger waiting
in a getaway car more than a mile away

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from where the robbery was taking place.

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We were being interrogated
separately for about five hours.

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I could look into the room where she was.

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We saw each other for the first
time since everything had come down.

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We weren't able to talk. We
were both surrounded by police,

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but we gave each other

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this look that said everything
in the world about our anguish

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at leaving our toddler son behind.

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With the arrest of Katherine Boudin,

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police believe they've all but broken
up the Weather Underground.

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Members who surfaced in recent years
include Bernardine Dohrn,

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a University of Chicago
valedictorian, William Ayers,

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son of a prominent Chicago executive.

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It was in the afternoon.

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I was bringing the kids from daycare,

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and I saw something, uh, a headline at a newsstand

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and a picture of David.

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I heard it, I heard it on the radio,

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and Bill and I looked at each other.

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And we, um, tried to not go, go,

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uh, completely, uh, break
down in front of the kids.

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We would find a way to go
downstairs and leave the apartment

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so we could talk.

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We've known them for years and
years and years. We were, um,

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travelers for the student movement together.

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We were peace activists together,

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civil rights activists together.

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So everybody was in
crisis, and the next day,

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and we made a box of, uh,

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baby clothes and diapers,

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and decided to go down and
knock on their door.

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They were all on the floor, trying,

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and Jean and Leonard, were trying
to figure out how to diaper him.

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You know, they didn't know what
they were doing. And, uh, Chesa was,

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you know, fretting.

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We have two small kids.
We are child centered. We,

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I work in childcare. We are stable.

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We're a good family. We
can take care of this kid.

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There were political activists
around the case at that time,

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um, who thought that the children
should be raised by a collective

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of that political group.

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And, and Bill and I
said, absolutely not.

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My mother firmly said to me, you
did something very, very terrible,

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but you have to go on. You have to
learn from it. You have a child;

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you have to go on. Tears
were running down my face.

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I already knew it was terrible. Who's
he gonna belong to? And who are the,

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who are the parents, and how long is
it gonna be like this?

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This meant that they were not going to
be out raising their child.

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My name's Chesa Boudin, and I'm
running for district attorney.

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I was with my biological father, David
Gilbert, in his prison visiting room,

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and I said, I'm thinking of
running for district attorney.

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It's impossible, that
would be a no-win situation.

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Took him a second to realize I was being serious.

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One of his concerns was,

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you know, as he put it, his, his
prison's already full enough.

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District attorney is a real big deal,
because they will be making, uh,

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decisions about who lives and who dies.

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And I’m running because I've
seen firsthand personally my whole life,

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how broken our criminal justice system is.

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It's not rehabilitating people
who have been convicted of crimes.

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It's a system of racist mass
incarceration that's actually costing

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taxpayers billions of dollars.

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As a public defender,

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no matter how effective I was
in advocating for my client,

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I would never really be able to change
the system that led to so much crime,

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and so much suffering, and so
much injustice.

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The initial questions that I raised was, how
are you gonna feel inside yourself,

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about playing the role of sending
people to prison, when you've

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really understood that prison
really doesn't help people.

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Growing up,

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where I come from... the DA is like

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the, um, is the enemy. They're
the one that's locking you up.

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They're the ones that's sentencing you.

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I could never have imagined in my life
that I will be actually campaigning

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for, uh, a district attorney.

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My parents were both white
supporters of the

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Black Liberation Army,

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and I grew up my whole life thinking about
the risks and the perils of trying to

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go too far to compensate for white
skin privilege or class privilege.

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On the other hand,

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I also grew up acutely aware of that
privilege and the ways in which so many of

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the people impacted by
parental incarceration,

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the vast majority in this
country are Black and Brown,

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and they don't have access to
the kinds of opportunities,

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second chances or privileges that,
that I was lucky enough to have.

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So, I said to him, I can't wait till
you win so I can denounce you.

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The U.S., with 4% of the world's
population, incarcerates

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25% of the world's prisoners.

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The state of California spends around
$13 billion a year just on our state

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prison system. Um, I think everybody,

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whether you're a Libertarian,
or a Green Party,

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whether you're a Republican or Democrat,

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everybody recognized that we needed a new
approach. It’s a bad use of our limited tax dollars,

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and it's clearly not making us safer.

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I must have been four or five when he joined.

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Malik and Zayd were kind of astonished.

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Malik went through a long period of
saying, Chesa can't have my blanket.

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Chesa can't have my blocks.

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Chesa can't have my ball.

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Chesa can't have my stuffed animals.

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Chesa can't have my shoes.

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Chesa can't have my pants.

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And then he said it, you know,
Chesa can't have my mommy.

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It's a disruption for everybody.

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We're trying to help Zayd
and Malik deal with it.

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We're trying to help Chesa deal with
all the things he's dealing with.

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We're trying to accommodate
Leonard and Jean.

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Were trying to explain to our
parents, you know, it's a mess.

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But I stopped talking, and I
stopped using even the words that

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I had previously been using, and
then I kind of shut, shut out.

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I was pretty severely traumatized.

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Every day, one of us would
say, this isn't working,

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and the other one would say, it's gonna
work. It's fine. And, and, you know,

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so we would kind of, we would
kind of calm each other down.

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I can remember saying,
, we're sinking.

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Fourteen-month olds actually know who their
mom is. They know who their dad is.

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They're at that point in life where
they're boldly exploring the playground,

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always glancing over their shoulder to
make sure mom is there. Mom wasn't there,

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and that's a terrible,
terrible experience.

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00:13:45.115 --> 00:13:50.246
Michael Meeropol and Robbie Meeropol
were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol

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00:13:50.246 --> 00:13:54.333
after the Rosenbergs were
executed. After we got Chesa,

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Robbie called, and he came down to
New York. Um, he and Ellie, his wife,

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00:13:59.171 --> 00:14:02.591
and we talked about Robbie's early experience,

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00:14:02.591 --> 00:14:04.969
and what it was like to lose your parents.

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00:14:08.722 --> 00:14:13.477
And the advice was pretty much,
um, pay close attention to the kid.

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00:14:13.477 --> 00:14:18.816
Give him all your love. Um,
don't deny his his history, but,

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00:14:18.816 --> 00:14:20.818
but embrace him for who he is.

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00:14:22.736 --> 00:14:24.780
The grand jury was investigating

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00:14:25.364 --> 00:14:26.240
the Brinks robbery,

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00:14:26.240 --> 00:14:29.285
and she was subpoenaed to
testify before a grand jury.

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00:14:29.285 --> 00:14:31.829
Being accused of no crime,
and convicted of no crime,

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00:14:31.829 --> 00:14:35.165
that they're gonna put me in
jail for refusing to talk.

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I had a very painful discussion last
night with my three children to try

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00:14:40.170 --> 00:14:44.550
to explain to them why I
didn't wanna go to jail,

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00:14:44.550 --> 00:14:47.177
and I certainly didn't wanna leave them.

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00:14:47.177 --> 00:14:50.723
My mom went to jail
after Chesa was with us.

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00:14:50.723 --> 00:14:54.977
So it wasn't just Chesa
who had parents in prison.

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00:14:54.977 --> 00:15:00.441
We all were dealing with the fact that
we had to visit her in jail together.

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My dad was raising us on his own,

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00:15:03.485 --> 00:15:08.991
and so all three of us were growing up
with our moms, uh, you know, locked up.

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Imagine the complexity. Chesa has
lost his parents, they’re in prison.

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00:15:15.497 --> 00:15:20.628
Now he loses the mother who
took him in, and she's in prison.

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The safety valve now gone. She
did, I dunno, six, seven months,

231
00:15:24.924 --> 00:15:28.510
something like that. But when
we were living through it,

232
00:15:28.510 --> 00:15:30.137
it felt like a life sentence.

233
00:15:37.686 --> 00:15:40.981
We hired Kaylah Williams
to be the campaign manager.

234
00:15:40.981 --> 00:15:46.862
Kaylah had just finished managing
a successful campaign for school board.

235
00:15:46.862 --> 00:15:49.531
When I first started,
I thought, okay, well,

236
00:15:49.531 --> 00:15:54.203
I'll be a flight attendant, and I'll just try
out doing some political stuff on the side.

237
00:15:56.580 --> 00:15:59.708
Róisín Isner, we hired her
to help with fundraising.

238
00:15:59.708 --> 00:16:02.378
She is a native born San Franciscan.

239
00:16:03.087 --> 00:16:05.005
When I was 17 years old,

240
00:16:05.005 --> 00:16:09.468
I was really seriously injured in a
violent crime that left me permanently disabled.

241
00:16:09.468 --> 00:16:14.098
And she's someone who had done three
or four consecutive campaigns with

242
00:16:14.098 --> 00:16:15.557
tremendous success.

243
00:16:15.557 --> 00:16:19.895
She knew everything from field,
to fundraising, to strategy,

244
00:16:19.895 --> 00:16:24.650
technical sides of managing voter
files and volunteer databases.

245
00:16:26.110 --> 00:16:27.653
Then we brought on Kelsey.

246
00:16:29.238 --> 00:16:33.993
I was, um, working as an event
coordinator, and I liked my job,

247
00:16:33.993 --> 00:16:37.037
but I was very unfulfilled in like the bigger, greater sense of it.

248
00:16:37.371 --> 00:16:40.582
I came like all prepared for this
meeting, and within like two minutes,

249
00:16:40.749 --> 00:16:44.128
I was like, okay. And Kaylah goes,
fantastic. Can you start now?

250
00:16:44.128 --> 00:16:47.756
Haven't even looked at my resume
or my cover letter or anything.

251
00:16:47.756 --> 00:16:49.675
And she was like, yeah,
yeah, sure, you're great.

252
00:16:50.467 --> 00:16:54.179
And then I was training the
volunteers for the phone bank.

253
00:16:55.639 --> 00:17:00.185
Then we brought on Vanessa, and they
were our, um, field coordinator.

254
00:17:00.185 --> 00:17:04.940
Learning about ways he wanted
to help undocumented folks,

255
00:17:04.940 --> 00:17:07.026
or folks of color and so on,

256
00:17:07.026 --> 00:17:09.403
really inspired me to join his campaign.

257
00:17:12.823 --> 00:17:14.825
I grew up within this campaign.

258
00:17:14.825 --> 00:17:16.910
Um, I was 19 years old when I was hired,

259
00:17:17.077 --> 00:17:19.663
and I actually turned 20
at a campaign rally.

260
00:17:19.663 --> 00:17:20.789
Let’s give it up for Lali.

261
00:17:23.709 --> 00:17:28.005
I would call volunteers, make sure that
they would be showing up to phone banks,

262
00:17:28.005 --> 00:17:33.052
to literature drops, to door knocking.
Beyoncé was our woman.

263
00:17:33.052 --> 00:17:37.181
She got us through everything.
Girls run the world. Yeah,

264
00:17:37.181 --> 00:17:40.476
girls really run the world, because
I mean, here we are.

265
00:17:56.075 --> 00:18:00.996
They brought Chesa on a visit. They wouldn't let, the guards,

266
00:18:00.996 --> 00:18:04.458
wouldn't let the mother hold the child.

267
00:18:05.501 --> 00:18:08.378
She said, look, you can take
his diaper off. You can inspect.

268
00:18:08.378 --> 00:18:12.174
There's no contraband. No, you
can't touch. And of course,

269
00:18:12.174 --> 00:18:17.638
that time he burst out crying. There was
tremendous anger and hatred towards us.

270
00:18:17.638 --> 00:18:18.639
Uh, you know,

271
00:18:18.639 --> 00:18:23.393
and the anger is understandable,
because three people in that

272
00:18:23.393 --> 00:18:25.312
community had been killed,

273
00:18:25.896 --> 00:18:28.982
and that's horrible, and
shouldn't have happened.

274
00:18:29.691 --> 00:18:33.487
But to take it out on a two-year-old kid
is not right.

275
00:18:33.487 --> 00:18:37.366
We were told, if your child touches
you, your visits will be terminated.

276
00:18:40.035 --> 00:18:42.246
I couldn't touch him.
He couldn't touch me.

277
00:18:56.260 --> 00:19:00.597
The judge found that this
policy, uh, was unconstitutional.

278
00:19:01.932 --> 00:19:06.895
That first moment when Chesa walked in
with my dad, and he, he looked at me,

279
00:19:06.895 --> 00:19:11.024
but really absolutely, there was
no sense of recognition of me.

280
00:19:11.024 --> 00:19:13.443
His mother, who had
breastfed him for a year.

281
00:19:13.443 --> 00:19:15.988
I remember Leonard and Jean
bringing him into the visiting area,

282
00:19:15.988 --> 00:19:18.699
but I thought it was a
big uphill battle.

283
00:19:18.699 --> 00:19:23.287
and he’s, Chesa’s clinging to
Leonard's pants,

284
00:19:23.287 --> 00:19:28.250
and sort of peeking out behind his leg at
us, and then putting his head back

285
00:19:28.250 --> 00:19:31.628
behind Leonard's leg, and then peeking out.

286
00:19:32.796 --> 00:19:35.716
We just got down on our
knees and opened our arms.

287
00:19:35.716 --> 00:19:37.426
That connection was remade.

288
00:19:37.426 --> 00:19:41.180
There was, the connection was there, and
holding him, and playing and all of that

289
00:19:41.180 --> 00:19:45.350
was there. And the visits were fantastic.

290
00:19:55.861 --> 00:19:59.656
On a lot of early mornings, when it was
just me, or me and one other person at a

291
00:19:59.656 --> 00:20:02.242
big BART station with lots
of folks coming and going,

292
00:20:02.242 --> 00:20:06.914
where some days we went to
corners, and nobody showed up.

293
00:20:06.914 --> 00:20:09.583
People honestly didn't think
that we were going to win.

294
00:20:09.583 --> 00:20:12.127
They had very low
expectations of this campaign.

295
00:20:12.127 --> 00:20:16.006
This is a campaign, which, it's
not about him winning per se.

296
00:20:16.006 --> 00:20:20.135
It was really about, “I can be a voice”,

297
00:20:20.135 --> 00:20:25.432
and I can get out there a
different vision of what we can do.

298
00:20:25.432 --> 00:20:26.767
Every day was uphill.

299
00:20:26.767 --> 00:20:30.687
I thought that it would be
almost impossible for anybody,

300
00:20:30.687 --> 00:20:32.731
but I thought that if anybody could do it,

301
00:20:32.731 --> 00:20:34.149
it would probably be him.

302
00:20:34.149 --> 00:20:37.110
I knew he would be able to, you know,

303
00:20:37.110 --> 00:20:40.572
tap into a kind of a network of people
who cared about the things he cared about,

304
00:20:40.572 --> 00:20:42.324
but I thought it was a big uphill battle.

305
00:20:42.324 --> 00:20:47.329
I thought he, he was a long shot. Voting for
Chesa is not voting our fears,

306
00:20:47.329 --> 00:20:51.208
but voting our hopes, because it's gonna
be Chesa who's gonna determine

307
00:20:51.208 --> 00:20:55.212
whether or not, uh, my offsprings,
uh, get a chance, uh,

308
00:20:55.212 --> 00:21:00.509
to live free and not live free. Did I
think that he was a, a, a long shot? Uh,

309
00:21:00.509 --> 00:21:03.887
I wasn't voting Chesa's character
alone. I was voting mine also.

310
00:21:03.887 --> 00:21:06.515
Those mornings were hard, but Chesa is so funny.

311
00:21:06.515 --> 00:21:10.352
He would bake us bread, and like
bring it in a tiny little bag,

312
00:21:10.352 --> 00:21:12.813
went with some stickers on
it, and I was like, okay,

313
00:21:12.813 --> 00:21:15.399
this makes it a little bit better.

314
00:21:15.399 --> 00:21:18.235
Every single morning,
from Monday to Friday,

315
00:21:18.235 --> 00:21:22.197
7:00 AM to 9:00 AM, we would
do morning visibility,

316
00:21:22.197 --> 00:21:25.534
and some days Chesa would
wake up even before then at,

317
00:21:25.534 --> 00:21:29.288
at dawn to go surfing.
, it's crazy.

318
00:21:29.288 --> 00:21:32.165
Go surfing, and then go
home, change, shower,

319
00:21:32.165 --> 00:21:34.710
uh, and meet us at 7:00 AM.

320
00:21:34.710 --> 00:21:38.463
I also knew that I would work harder
than any of the other candidates,

321
00:21:38.463 --> 00:21:43.260
that we would build a grassroots
campaign that mobilized people who

322
00:21:43.260 --> 00:21:45.554
didn't ordinarily get
involved in politics.

323
00:21:45.554 --> 00:21:48.140
I think the list got up to
like a thousand, right? Yeah,

324
00:21:48.140 --> 00:21:50.726
a thousand volunteers is what we had.

325
00:21:54.438 --> 00:21:57.941
Then we started knock, you know, knocking
on more doors, making more phone calls,

326
00:21:57.941 --> 00:22:01.653
ran directly out of the gates,
scrappy as hell.

327
00:22:17.919 --> 00:22:19.921
How does Kathy, um,

328
00:22:19.921 --> 00:22:24.426
continue to play a role in the life
of this precious child of hers?

329
00:22:24.426 --> 00:22:26.595
And how do we, you know,

330
00:22:26.595 --> 00:22:31.141
figure out how he can be fully
here, and also not give up the

331
00:22:31.141 --> 00:22:35.604
reality of, uh, parents who loved him,
who weren't able to take care of him.

332
00:22:35.604 --> 00:22:38.732
We wanted things to look rosy to them,

333
00:22:38.732 --> 00:22:41.735
because we didn't want them to be upset,

334
00:22:41.735 --> 00:22:45.989
and we also didn't want them to think we
were doing a bad job.  I mean,

335
00:22:45.989 --> 00:22:50.702
there were multi, everybody's issues
here are complicated and tangled.

336
00:22:50.702 --> 00:22:54.873
It's very hard, because inevitably
you feel like you're missing this,

337
00:22:54.873 --> 00:22:56.833
and you're missing that,

338
00:22:56.833 --> 00:23:01.880
or that person gets visits all the
time and you don't. Just horrible.

339
00:23:01.880 --> 00:23:06.802
You know, when Kathy walks away
one way, and you walk away, you,

340
00:23:06.802 --> 00:23:08.303
you sit there and watch.

341
00:23:11.598 --> 00:23:14.309
When you're trying to parent from
prison, you sort of say, well,

342
00:23:14.309 --> 00:23:20.023
how can I be like a parent, and give him
guidance and structure and discipline?

343
00:23:20.023 --> 00:23:22.401
That's not the starting point.

344
00:23:22.401 --> 00:23:26.405
The starting point is to express your
love, and for the child to know that he or she

345
00:23:26.405 --> 00:23:28.615
is completely lovable.

346
00:23:31.952 --> 00:23:36.415
We all got that advice. That the more he
could have a secure relationship with,

347
00:23:36.415 --> 00:23:38.834
with them, it would help
the relationship with us.

348
00:23:38.834 --> 00:23:40.710
And the more we had a
secure relationship with us,

349
00:23:40.710 --> 00:23:41.878
it would help the relationship with them.

350
00:23:41.878 --> 00:23:44.673
And it wasn't like a competitive
thing, but it's not easy.

351
00:23:46.925 --> 00:23:48.635
The temper tantrums, you know,

352
00:23:48.635 --> 00:23:52.222
they were rages, and sometimes
they lasted for two days. I mean,

353
00:23:52.222 --> 00:23:54.641
we're not talking 20
minutes here or there.

354
00:23:55.809 --> 00:23:59.020
Sitting in the corner, looking
at the corner, banging his head,

355
00:23:59.020 --> 00:24:00.480
and we were worried.

356
00:24:00.480 --> 00:24:02.941
He was traumatized. There's
no question about it.

357
00:24:05.110 --> 00:24:08.196
Realizing that he had all these issues
that he was dealing with, and just feeling

358
00:24:08.196 --> 00:24:09.781
tremendous guilt around it.

359
00:24:09.781 --> 00:24:13.785
Well, how do I deal with that sense
of loss and pain and anger?

360
00:24:17.372 --> 00:24:22.252
So, all of a sudden, he takes
off and runs down the aisle,

361
00:24:22.252 --> 00:24:26.965
as fast as his legs would carry him.
He said, you can run that fast,

362
00:24:26.965 --> 00:24:30.844
right? So I said, yeah. He said, you
probably can run even faster than that.

363
00:24:30.844 --> 00:24:32.512
I said, yeah. He said,

364
00:24:32.512 --> 00:24:37.225
couldn't we break that window, and you
just run out and get away? So I said,

365
00:24:38.101 --> 00:24:41.813
I bet you, you imagine that if I did that,

366
00:24:41.813 --> 00:24:46.443
I could come to your place and
live. He said, yes, yes.

367
00:24:46.443 --> 00:24:47.694
And I explained, you know,

368
00:24:47.694 --> 00:24:52.532
that wouldn't work, as much as I would
love to do that and be with you. No,

369
00:24:52.532 --> 00:24:54.242
that wouldn't work.

370
00:24:58.538 --> 00:25:02.375
At some point, I said to Chesa, I wonder
why you, you, you don't call me mommy.

371
00:25:02.375 --> 00:25:07.339
And he was like, you know,
well, you're not there.

372
00:25:07.339 --> 00:25:10.091
You know, mommy is a word that,
that you call out when you,

373
00:25:10.091 --> 00:25:14.012
you need something or you're in
pain, or you're, you need someone to,

374
00:25:14.012 --> 00:25:16.139
to help you and you, and you're not there.

375
00:25:16.139 --> 00:25:21.436
I didn't want him to feel any
being torn, and instead of saying,

376
00:25:21.436 --> 00:25:24.773
Dad David or Dad Bill, it's
just, just call me David.

377
00:25:24.773 --> 00:25:30.487
I taught in a daycare center, where all
three of my kids attended that daycare center.

378
00:25:30.487 --> 00:25:33.865
So, they called me Bill,
because everybody called me Bill.

379
00:25:33.865 --> 00:25:38.578
So, my kids to this day call me
Bill, unless they wanted money,

380
00:25:38.578 --> 00:25:40.413
then they called me Poppy.

381
00:25:41.164 --> 00:25:46.294
There are many moments in which the question
of what was my relationship to him,

382
00:25:46.294 --> 00:25:51.216
as a mother, relative to the
relationship that say Bernardine had,

383
00:25:51.216 --> 00:25:52.592
as a mother.

384
00:26:28.503 --> 00:26:31.047
Each 20 minute phone
call would be a chapter,

385
00:26:31.047 --> 00:26:33.508
and at the beginning of the
next call with the other parent,

386
00:26:33.508 --> 00:26:35.719
they would ask me to
update them on, you know,

387
00:26:35.719 --> 00:26:37.304
how far we'd gotten in
the adventure story.

388
00:26:37.304 --> 00:26:39.681
And then they'd take it
and sort of pass the baton.

389
00:26:51.693 --> 00:26:53.445
I remember boating down the Amazon River,

390
00:26:53.445 --> 00:26:56.531
and they were exposing me to things
like indigenous rights,

391
00:26:56.531 --> 00:27:00.410
and environmental protection. And, and
those stories were fun.

392
00:27:00.410 --> 00:27:02.912
How do you maintain a connection
with people that you're apart from?

393
00:27:02.912 --> 00:27:07.250
And people have to do that around the
world, when families are broken, destroyed,

394
00:27:07.250 --> 00:27:11.421
separated, immigration
displacement, all of it.

395
00:27:13.548 --> 00:27:15.884
People try to stick together.

396
00:27:17.427 --> 00:27:21.723
As a child, trying to have a
phone call is, is, is challenging.

397
00:27:21.723 --> 00:27:26.061
It's challenging even if you don't have
trauma and mixed feelings about the

398
00:27:26.061 --> 00:27:28.980
person you're on the other
end of the phone with.

399
00:27:29.439 --> 00:27:33.485
I didn't have the luxury
when I was growing up, of,

400
00:27:33.485 --> 00:27:37.405
of just being able to wait until
they came to see me.

401
00:27:37.405 --> 00:27:41.910
Kathy, she would make pillows
or once made, uh, for me,

402
00:27:41.910 --> 00:27:45.080
and both of my brothers, made a, a set
of slippers. One of us had a baseball,

403
00:27:45.080 --> 00:27:48.917
one a basketball, one a football
kind of motif on the slippers. Uh,

404
00:27:48.917 --> 00:27:52.879
cassette tapes that she would record of,
of herself reading me books. You know,

405
00:27:52.879 --> 00:27:56.883
The Count of Monte Cristo, or the
Three Musketeers, or Little Women.

406
00:27:58.677 --> 00:28:00.303
There were programs like that at,

407
00:28:00.303 --> 00:28:04.933
at her prison, that really don't exist in
most prisons anywhere in this country.

408
00:28:04.933 --> 00:28:06.226
And she was able to,

409
00:28:06.226 --> 00:28:09.771
to use those programs to be physically
present, and feel a little bit closer to

410
00:28:09.771 --> 00:28:10.939
someone you love and miss.

411
00:28:12.732 --> 00:28:16.820
One of the things about being in prison,
is there's all these regulations,

412
00:28:16.820 --> 00:28:19.864
like there's a line of vending machines,

413
00:28:19.864 --> 00:28:23.868
but if you're a person that's
incarcerated, you can't go over that line.

414
00:28:23.868 --> 00:28:28.289
People would move chairs over for the
young kids that were three, so that they

415
00:28:28.289 --> 00:28:31.710
could stand up, and they could put the
money in the slot, because you weren't

416
00:28:31.710 --> 00:28:35.004
allowed to do it. And there was
such a reversal of roles. I mean,

417
00:28:35.004 --> 00:28:37.799
you were really infantilized,
and the child was, you know,

418
00:28:37.799 --> 00:28:40.385
having to play the adult role.
Even if the child was three or four.

419
00:28:40.385 --> 00:28:43.138
I met Chesa, uh, because both our,

420
00:28:43.138 --> 00:28:45.640
both of our moms were at Bedford Hills.

421
00:28:45.640 --> 00:28:49.561
Sometimes he would throw a toy
across the visiting floor, you know,

422
00:28:49.561 --> 00:28:54.149
he would scream while playing with
others. He wasn't a bad kid,

423
00:28:54.149 --> 00:28:58.903
he was very hurt as a child, over the
experience with his parents being

424
00:28:58.903 --> 00:29:00.864
incarcerated and being so young.

425
00:29:01.114 --> 00:29:04.576
You could tell that he was hurt, and
he needed attention. He needed care,

426
00:29:04.576 --> 00:29:10.457
he needed to be healed. We shared the
same pain. We shared the same hurt.

427
00:29:18.506 --> 00:29:23.344
I knew when I decided to run for
office, that people would attack me

428
00:29:23.344 --> 00:29:24.637
through my parents.

429
00:29:27.098 --> 00:29:31.144
This goes clear back three
generations. His grandfather,

430
00:29:31.144 --> 00:29:32.353
Leonard Boudin,

431
00:29:32.353 --> 00:29:37.275
the infamous communist party
attorney for his biological mother,

432
00:29:37.275 --> 00:29:38.735
Kathy Boudin,

433
00:29:38.735 --> 00:29:43.740
was one of the most infamous of
the Weather Underground terrorists who

434
00:29:43.740 --> 00:29:48.036
set off bombs and carried out other
terrorist acts, robberies, kidnapping,

435
00:29:48.077 --> 00:29:52.749
murder, but also his adopted
parents who raised him,

436
00:29:52.749 --> 00:29:57.170
who were also Weather Underground
terrorists, Bill Ayers,

437
00:29:57.170 --> 00:29:59.255
and Bernadine Dohrn.

438
00:29:59.255 --> 00:30:01.966
Something that I've been very
open about since I was a child.

439
00:30:01.966 --> 00:30:05.011
It made sense given what a

440
00:30:06.054 --> 00:30:09.891
critical role my parents' incarceration
played in my childhood, and my decision

441
00:30:09.891 --> 00:30:11.601
to become a lawyer, and to
become a public defender,

442
00:30:11.601 --> 00:30:14.771
and then to run for district
attorney, that I would talk about it.

443
00:30:14.771 --> 00:30:18.525
I have spent Mother's Day behind bars,
with my mother in her prison visiting room.

444
00:30:18.525 --> 00:30:23.446
I spent last weekend with my father in
his prison, where he's serving a 75-year sentence.

445
00:30:23.446 --> 00:30:28.451
I'm here today because I know that the
way the criminal justice system works today,

446
00:30:28.451 --> 00:30:30.078
is not just.

447
00:30:30.078 --> 00:30:32.121
He could have hid it. He could
have stayed in the closet.

448
00:30:32.121 --> 00:30:33.706
He didn't have to say all of that stuff.

449
00:30:33.706 --> 00:30:36.793
We led with that. We, we weren't running
away from it. We didn't hide from that.

450
00:30:36.793 --> 00:30:39.337
This is part of his story, and it
gives him a valuable perspective.

451
00:30:39.337 --> 00:30:44.300
One of the great geniuses of the way
he ran that race is to put it all out there

452
00:30:44.300 --> 00:30:47.971
right away and to say like, this
is who I am. This is who my parents are.

453
00:30:47.971 --> 00:30:49.889
This is why I'm running.

454
00:30:50.932 --> 00:30:56.020
To share that story, and for him to
understand the psychological, you know,

455
00:30:56.020 --> 00:31:00.191
uh, background of what that
is, it was profound to me.

456
00:31:00.900 --> 00:31:05.905
In what world does it make sense
to have the son of terrorists,

457
00:31:05.905 --> 00:31:10.618
a communist, in charge of a DA's office?

458
00:31:12.620 --> 00:31:16.040
It's always personal when people attack
you because of your, your family.

459
00:31:16.040 --> 00:31:18.793
It's not fun, of course. Um,

460
00:31:18.793 --> 00:31:22.338
but it's sadly part of the reality when,

461
00:31:22.338 --> 00:31:24.007
when you go into politics in this country,

462
00:31:24.007 --> 00:31:25.633
even if your parents aren't incarcerated,

463
00:31:25.633 --> 00:31:29.345
people are gonna attack you
for everything they can.

464
00:31:41.357 --> 00:31:43.234
As a very young child,

465
00:31:43.234 --> 00:31:46.029
trying to understand what the Weather Underground was,

466
00:31:46.029 --> 00:31:49.574
or the Black Liberation Army was,
or what a Brinks truck is even,

467
00:31:49.574 --> 00:31:52.285
or what it means to commit a
robbery, is a difficult thing.

468
00:31:52.285 --> 00:31:55.663
A lot of parents struggle to have a
conversation about sex or drugs with their kids.

469
00:31:55.663 --> 00:31:58.791
It's like trying to explain to a
child why somebody gets, you know,

470
00:31:58.791 --> 00:32:02.462
pregnant, or it's like they
could absorb a certain amount.

471
00:32:43.419 --> 00:32:45.713
There's no way to be committed to non-violence

472
00:32:45.713 --> 00:32:47.465
in the middle of the most violent society

473
00:32:47.465 --> 00:32:48.675
that history's ever created.

474
00:32:55.431 --> 00:32:58.059
It was a question of what had to be done

475
00:32:58.059 --> 00:33:00.353
to stop the much greater violence

476
00:33:00.353 --> 00:33:01.729
that was going on.

477
00:33:07.485 --> 00:33:08.861
The role of white Americans

478
00:33:08.861 --> 00:33:12.115
was to find ourselves in alliance with the Vietnamese,

479
00:33:12.115 --> 00:33:16.202
in alliance with the Black struggle for self-determination.

480
00:33:21.916 --> 00:33:26.379
We were so angry and upset by
the toll that racism was taking.

481
00:33:26.379 --> 00:33:30.925
You know how all the activists we admired
had been killed or put in prison.

482
00:33:39.642 --> 00:33:43.396
We we re trying to issue a
screaming, screaming reply.

483
00:33:43.396 --> 00:33:47.817
Six thousand people a week were being
murdered by our government.

484
00:33:47.817 --> 00:33:51.029
Six thousand a week with no end in sight.

485
00:33:56.993 --> 00:34:01.247
Our goal was to not hurt any people,
and a lot of work went into that.

486
00:34:01.247 --> 00:34:06.085
But we wanted to pick targets
that showed to the public who was

487
00:34:06.085 --> 00:34:08.087
responsible for what was really going on.

488
00:34:16.471 --> 00:34:20.725
There were years where on every single
prison visit, I would ask them questions,

489
00:34:20.725 --> 00:34:23.728
sometimes the same question
to see how they answered,

490
00:34:24.520 --> 00:34:28.232
and to try to come to terms with it
from the perspective that I had.

491
00:34:28.232 --> 00:34:31.402
Now, as a 10-year-old, or a
12-year-old, or a 14-year-old.

492
00:34:33.446 --> 00:34:36.949
I think for a while we were telling a
Robin Hood story, like we were stealing from

493
00:34:36.949 --> 00:34:38.826
the rich to give to the poor.

494
00:34:39.285 --> 00:34:43.831
But that kind of also romanticized it.

495
00:34:43.831 --> 00:34:45.291
It had got started with Kathy,

496
00:34:45.291 --> 00:34:51.005
who is more critical of what we had done
and what happened earlier than I was.

497
00:34:51.005 --> 00:34:53.674
She felt an obligation to explain to him,

498
00:34:55.426 --> 00:34:58.513
that even in fighting for a just
cause, you can screw, you know,

499
00:34:58.513 --> 00:35:01.307
do something really wrong. And first,

500
00:35:01.307 --> 00:35:04.644
I was very reluctant to say
anything about it, because

501
00:35:05.812 --> 00:35:10.483
it's such a heavy, heavy
situation. And step by step,

502
00:35:10.483 --> 00:35:12.610
I talked a little bit more about

503
00:35:14.695 --> 00:35:17.365
the sorrow that people had been killed.

504
00:35:17.365 --> 00:35:22.411
We’d remember that those families don't
get to have trailer visits, and we do.

505
00:35:22.411 --> 00:35:27.208
And in successive discussions,
it got a little bit more into

506
00:35:27.208 --> 00:35:29.877
what we were thinking
we were trying to do.

507
00:35:29.877 --> 00:35:32.505
What we did was off track and harmful.

508
00:35:32.713 --> 00:35:36.425
We felt that the murder of Fred

509
00:35:36.425 --> 00:35:41.973
required us to be more grave,

510
00:35:41.973 --> 00:35:47.353
more serious, more determined
to raise the stakes,

511
00:35:47.478 --> 00:35:50.606
uh, and not just be the white people who,

512
00:35:50.606 --> 00:35:55.153
who rung their hands when Black
people were being murdered.

513
00:35:55.153 --> 00:35:56.821
When Fred was killed,

514
00:35:56.821 --> 00:36:00.867
this was the true kind of
exposure of state power.

515
00:36:00.867 --> 00:36:05.371
This was really the way America
was. It was willing to kill, uh,

516
00:36:05.371 --> 00:36:09.041
and murder, not just, uh,
uh, thousands of miles away,

517
00:36:09.041 --> 00:36:11.252
but right on the West Side of Chicago.

518
00:36:12.128 --> 00:36:14.714
My first seven years of activism,

519
00:36:14.714 --> 00:36:18.593
I was philosophically a pacifist, and
we had to move to the next stage.

520
00:36:18.634 --> 00:36:21.846
And the next stage was something
we had no experience with at all.

521
00:36:21.846 --> 00:36:24.891
To building an underground
and taking on armed struggle.

522
00:36:26.934 --> 00:36:31.606
We thought of it as putting our bodies
between the bullets of the police

523
00:36:31.606 --> 00:36:34.775
and Black freedom fighters in solidarity.

524
00:36:37.195 --> 00:36:42.450
We changed our identities, we
changed our appearances slightly,

525
00:36:43.326 --> 00:36:47.455
and we weren't going to participate
openly in the political world anymore.

526
00:36:47.455 --> 00:36:52.126
We were gonna participate as people
who were fugitives from the law,

527
00:36:52.126 --> 00:36:54.462
and that's what it
meant to be underground.

528
00:36:57.298 --> 00:37:02.220
And it shows how much in our anguish about

529
00:37:02.220 --> 00:37:04.889
dealing with the horrors of the society,

530
00:37:04.931 --> 00:37:09.769
and finding a way for white people
to align with the Black struggle

531
00:37:09.769 --> 00:37:14.357
and to fight back in our anguish, but also

532
00:37:15.149 --> 00:37:19.153
with a certain amount of arrogance and

533
00:37:19.987 --> 00:37:24.033
ego that we could be the ones
who made this giant difference.

534
00:37:24.033 --> 00:37:27.328
Sometimes I'd say things like,
if only I could've talked,

535
00:37:27.328 --> 00:37:31.415
I would've told them not to go. I'd say,

536
00:37:31.415 --> 00:37:36.003
maybe if I'd been more lovable,
they wouldn't have risked losing me.

537
00:37:36.003 --> 00:37:40.508
But as a two-year-old, a three-year-old,
a four-year-old, it's hard not to feel

538
00:37:41.842 --> 00:37:46.180
that it's because of you, or some
deficiencies, something you did wrong.

539
00:37:46.180 --> 00:37:48.182
Many, many parents who are incarcerated,

540
00:37:48.182 --> 00:37:53.229
families of those who are
incarcerated try to protect the child

541
00:37:53.229 --> 00:37:55.690
from the hard, difficult truth.

542
00:37:56.440 --> 00:37:59.110
They pretend that, instead
of a jail or a prison,

543
00:37:59.110 --> 00:38:04.323
their parent is in a university
or a hospital, or some other

544
00:38:04.323 --> 00:38:10.037
fantastical lie. And kids are smart
enough to figure it out. Sooner or later,

545
00:38:10.037 --> 00:38:12.415
everyone knows they've been lied to.

546
00:38:12.415 --> 00:38:17.044
He was a child who was so pained by having

547
00:38:17.044 --> 00:38:23.134
parents disappear. Really led me to think

548
00:38:23.134 --> 00:38:27.471
much more about what it meant for the
families of the men who were killed.

549
00:38:27.471 --> 00:38:31.267
In very beginning, I was sort
of wrapped up in, you know,

550
00:38:31.267 --> 00:38:35.021
there's a war going on between oppressed
people and the state, and the police

551
00:38:35.021 --> 00:38:38.941
represent, you know, the state, and
we don't want anybody to get hurt,

552
00:38:38.941 --> 00:38:41.402
but there's a war going on.

553
00:38:41.402 --> 00:38:45.323
I had to wean myself out
of that, and Chesa

554
00:38:45.323 --> 00:38:49.994
and what he was grappling with
helped me wean myself out of that.

555
00:38:49.994 --> 00:38:54.332
So many people get killed horribly and
unnecessarily in this world through

556
00:38:54.332 --> 00:38:58.586
hunger, through wars that
shouldn't happen, through abuse,

557
00:38:58.586 --> 00:39:03.341
but that doesn't excuse my
responsibility in the role

558
00:39:03.341 --> 00:39:06.344
and what happened when
three people got killed.

559
00:39:06.344 --> 00:39:11.057
It took me a while to move out
of that combative mentality.

560
00:39:11.891 --> 00:39:18.147
Him grappling with it, as much as anything
he said, was very important to me.

561
00:39:18.147 --> 00:39:20.024
And he made me, you know,

562
00:39:20.024 --> 00:39:24.987
being with him, much more aware that
the officers and the, the guard who were

563
00:39:24.987 --> 00:39:28.407
killed had children, and they
didn't get to do visits.

564
00:39:28.407 --> 00:39:32.745
That was the other part
of parenting from prison,

565
00:39:32.745 --> 00:39:35.331
was to be honest about mistakes.

566
00:39:37.917 --> 00:39:41.754
I also would often ask,
well, why did both of you go?

567
00:39:41.754 --> 00:39:45.925
You had to know that there was some
risk, that even if nobody got hurt,

568
00:39:45.925 --> 00:39:49.845
that you would get arrested.
And that if you got arrested,

569
00:39:49.845 --> 00:39:54.558
you wouldn't be able to come home to
me. Only one person can drive a car.

570
00:39:54.558 --> 00:39:59.355
Why did you both go? Why
didn't one of you stay?

571
00:39:59.355 --> 00:40:00.898
Really, we shouldn't have been there at all.

572
00:40:00.898 --> 00:40:05.403
But it was completely inexcusable and
against our protocols that there were

573
00:40:05.403 --> 00:40:07.488
two of us there.

574
00:40:07.488 --> 00:40:12.076
So I let him know that that was
wrong and that, somewhat in our

575
00:40:12.076 --> 00:40:15.287
anguish and somewhat in our
conceit, we went off track.

576
00:40:15.287 --> 00:40:18.541
When people have caused serious harm,

577
00:40:18.541 --> 00:40:20.251
they carry that with
them their whole lives,

578
00:40:20.251 --> 00:40:23.587
and I know that my father and my mother
carry the harm they cause with them.

579
00:40:23.587 --> 00:40:26.132
It's something that they think
about, that they grapple with,

580
00:40:26.132 --> 00:40:30.177
and that they try to mitigate through
good deeds and care and love for those

581
00:40:30.177 --> 00:40:31.804
around them every single day.

582
00:40:31.804 --> 00:40:36.308
I was propelled into a life that
would forever be defined by remorse.

583
00:40:36.308 --> 00:40:40.646
It is a way of life. It's
like the skin on your body–

584
00:40:40.646 --> 00:40:43.274
something that you wear forever.

585
00:40:51.282 --> 00:40:56.370
We wanted to reach out to people of
color who have been directly affected

586
00:40:56.370 --> 00:40:58.456
by rise of mass incarceration.

587
00:40:58.456 --> 00:41:03.169
The criminal justice system most
directly impacts people of color.

588
00:41:03.169 --> 00:41:07.298
I knew that since my earliest prison
visits, when I was waiting in line at the

589
00:41:07.298 --> 00:41:10.468
metal detectors to get processed
in to visit my parents.

590
00:41:10.551 --> 00:41:13.137
And I noticed, even before I
had a political consciousness,

591
00:41:13.137 --> 00:41:15.181
that the lines in front
of those metal detectors,

592
00:41:15.181 --> 00:41:19.018
the lines at those steel gates were
mostly Black and Brown women and children.

593
00:41:19.018 --> 00:41:22.396
I knew that the people who had the
most lived experience with the

594
00:41:22.396 --> 00:41:24.732
criminal justice system were people of color.

595
00:41:24.732 --> 00:41:27.151
I'm a child of a formerly incarcerated person

596
00:41:27.151 --> 00:41:28.444
that went to the county jail.

597
00:41:28.444 --> 00:41:30.488
You need to be supported by people

598
00:41:30.488 --> 00:41:32.406
who actually think

599
00:41:32.406 --> 00:41:35.117
that justice is not defined by punishment.

600
00:41:35.659 --> 00:41:39.872
Justice is defined by
alternatives to incarceration.

601
00:41:39.872 --> 00:41:44.543
Justice is defined by who
gets a chance to actually, uh,

602
00:41:44.543 --> 00:41:46.086
have a chance.

603
00:41:46.086 --> 00:41:47.922
There's going to be a DA regardless.

604
00:41:47.922 --> 00:41:52.718
We have a opportunity to determine who is

605
00:41:52.718 --> 00:41:54.011
in that office.

606
00:41:54.011 --> 00:41:58.265
We are done with the days where there's
one system of justice for the police and

607
00:41:58.265 --> 00:42:00.017
another one for working folks.

608
00:42:00.017 --> 00:42:05.814
Horror, as those in tonight's town hall meeting
saw for the first time the video of Keita O'Neil

609
00:42:05.814 --> 00:42:08.776
being shot by a San Francisco police officer.

610
00:42:08.776 --> 00:42:11.820
When Chesa came, it was a fresh air.

611
00:42:11.820 --> 00:42:16.408
It was a time where someone
might actually charge a police

612
00:42:16.408 --> 00:42:18.536
officer for killing someone.

613
00:42:18.536 --> 00:42:20.913
We need to make sure that it
doesn't matter where you work,

614
00:42:20.913 --> 00:42:23.707
what uniform you wear,
that you follow the law.

615
00:42:23.707 --> 00:42:28.170
We are sick and tired of being silent.

616
00:42:28.170 --> 00:42:30.172
Our people are dying.

617
00:42:30.172 --> 00:42:32.466
It's murder. It, it–I mean, there's
no other way to look at this,

618
00:42:32.466 --> 00:42:34.593
but it's murder. Stop. Stop.
You wanna get it again?

619
00:42:34.593 --> 00:42:36.470
Give me your hand.

620
00:42:36.470 --> 00:42:39.056
It turns out O'Neill was not armed.

621
00:42:39.056 --> 00:42:43.060
He was beautiful. You know,
hey, he loved his mama.

622
00:42:43.060 --> 00:42:44.770
Sources tell ABC7 News

623
00:42:44.770 --> 00:42:48.524
the suspect, Keita O'Neil,
did not have a gun.

624
00:42:48.524 --> 00:42:49.733
String of fatal,

625
00:42:49.733 --> 00:42:50.859
officer-involved shootings

626
00:42:50.859 --> 00:42:51.819
have created a rift

627
00:42:51.819 --> 00:42:53.529
with public trust in the past.

628
00:42:53.529 --> 00:42:56.156
Hands up! Don’t shoot! Hands up! Don’t shoot!

629
00:42:56.156 --> 00:43:00.494
All I can tell you is my
sister, who lost her son,

630
00:43:00.494 --> 00:43:04.164
just watching her cry,

631
00:43:04.164 --> 00:43:08.711
watching her cry over him, talking to him,

632
00:43:08.711 --> 00:43:10.379
just her reactions,

633
00:43:10.379 --> 00:43:13.465
hearing him, how it upsets her.

634
00:43:13.465 --> 00:43:18.429
I love my son. This is her
only child; no grandchildren.

635
00:43:18.429 --> 00:43:20.222
It's devastating. I mean,

636
00:43:20.222 --> 00:43:25.853
it's so insulting to me how the life

637
00:43:25.853 --> 00:43:30.858
of a Black man is so less valued than

638
00:43:30.858 --> 00:43:32.192
a white man.

639
00:43:32.192 --> 00:43:33.652
I think everyone can look at our,

640
00:43:33.652 --> 00:43:37.865
our justice system currently and see that
it's really flawed, and they know that

641
00:43:37.865 --> 00:43:42.369
it needs to change. He campaigned
with like a strong message of like,

642
00:43:42.369 --> 00:43:45.247
we can make that change, and we
can inspire hope, and we can make,

643
00:43:45.247 --> 00:43:46.874
make the city safe for everyone.

644
00:43:46.874 --> 00:43:48.417
In Chesa Boudin,

645
00:43:48.417 --> 00:43:50.252
I knew that he was someone

646
00:43:50.252 --> 00:43:53.422
who broke bread, and sat in visiting rooms

647
00:43:53.422 --> 00:43:56.508
with other prisoners, and learned their stories,

648
00:43:56.508 --> 00:43:57.968
and knew how systems were

649
00:43:57.968 --> 00:43:59.595
stacked up against them.

650
00:43:59.595 --> 00:44:02.014
He understood systemic racism.

651
00:44:02.431 --> 00:44:04.266
When I'm elected district attorney,

652
00:44:04.266 --> 00:44:08.187
people who have been on the front lines
of the issue for police accountability–

653
00:44:08.187 --> 00:44:12.274
people who've been marching and demanding
justice–will not be on the front steps

654
00:44:12.274 --> 00:44:14.985
of the Hall of Justice.
They'll be inside with me.

655
00:44:27.665 --> 00:44:29.333
When Chesa moved to Chicago,

656
00:44:29.333 --> 00:44:30.751
and Bill and Bernardine, you know,

657
00:44:30.751 --> 00:44:33.754
with the family, that was
very, very, very hard for me.

658
00:44:34.046 --> 00:44:38.926
Taking Chesa, you know, 900 miles
away was of course a difficult move.

659
00:44:38.926 --> 00:44:43.847
We also knew that it was
essential for us to pursue what we

660
00:44:43.847 --> 00:44:46.141
needed to pursue in terms
of our own, you know,

661
00:44:46.141 --> 00:44:48.602
professional lives and, and personal lives.

662
00:44:48.602 --> 00:44:52.940
And that was not a decision
that we gave them a vote in.

663
00:44:58.987 --> 00:45:00.531
I remember a moment.

664
00:45:01.323 --> 00:45:04.326
He was supposed to get on a plane, and
then there was delay and they had to

665
00:45:04.326 --> 00:45:09.331
switch planes. And so Bernardine
or Bill came and picked him up.

666
00:45:09.331 --> 00:45:13.335
And then, when I called, what
happened, Bernadine said to me,

667
00:45:13.335 --> 00:45:17.756
he's talked about when he comes in the
prison and the gates cling shut behind him–

668
00:45:17.756 --> 00:45:22.886
how scary that is. And he
deals with it, 'cause he loves you.

669
00:45:23.721 --> 00:45:28.684
But to deal, at his age, with the change
in planes and the different arrangements

670
00:45:28.684 --> 00:45:33.605
and all that, he just cried
and said, come get me. Uh,

671
00:45:33.605 --> 00:45:37.067
and I said, you know, wow, I understand.

672
00:45:37.067 --> 00:45:40.571
Appreciate so much what he
goes through to get to see me.

673
00:45:40.571 --> 00:45:43.866
Chesa had often just got home
from a two and a half-day trip.

674
00:45:43.866 --> 00:45:46.702
That must have been
unbelievably emotionally taxing.

675
00:45:46.994 --> 00:45:52.291
There was a sadness or a bleakness to
those moments, and he didn't talk about it much.

676
00:45:59.631 --> 00:46:02.968
Anytime there's an adoption,
something is broken.

677
00:46:02.968 --> 00:46:07.473
How do you account for that suffering?
How do you account for that grief?

678
00:46:07.473 --> 00:46:09.892
How do you account for that trauma?

679
00:46:14.646 --> 00:46:17.816
I started feeling devastated
that I had, you know,

680
00:46:17.816 --> 00:46:21.445
that my choices had caused those
problems. It was bad enough what happened,

681
00:46:21.862 --> 00:46:23.238
but I think that

682
00:46:24.448 --> 00:46:29.119
then seeing and hearing about these
problems and imagine him being

683
00:46:29.411 --> 00:46:33.582
somebody kind of crippled for life
by them, it was a really, really,

684
00:46:33.582 --> 00:46:35.626
really terrible time.

685
00:46:38.045 --> 00:46:41.298
We decided we ought to
consult a psychiatrist.

686
00:46:41.882 --> 00:46:42.508
Yeah.

687
00:46:42.508 --> 00:46:45.427
Uh, Bennett Leventhal,
a Jew from Louisiana.

688
00:46:45.427 --> 00:46:48.931
I love that motherfucker.
Love him!

689
00:46:51.225 --> 00:46:52.810
I didn't really know anything

690
00:46:52.810 --> 00:46:55.687
about Bill, Bernardine, Kathy,

691
00:46:55.687 --> 00:46:59.149
David, Leonard. I didn't know
anything about any of these people.

692
00:46:59.399 --> 00:47:01.109
I just knew there was a child who was

693
00:47:01.109 --> 00:47:04.571
moving to live with another family in Chicago.

694
00:47:04.571 --> 00:47:06.865
He must have been about seven,

695
00:47:06.865 --> 00:47:11.036
maybe eight. Initially, he
didn't think he had any problems.

696
00:47:12.037 --> 00:47:15.499
I sort of felt like, I don't, I
don't know why I'm doing this.

697
00:47:15.916 --> 00:47:19.419
And so we might play a game of some kind,

698
00:47:19.878 --> 00:47:23.674
anything that would make him
comfortable, so that then we could, uh,

699
00:47:24.007 --> 00:47:28.554
transform that into a conversation either
about what the theme of the play was

700
00:47:28.554 --> 00:47:31.181
or why he had chosen to
do what he wanted to do.

701
00:47:31.181 --> 00:47:35.143
Sometimes he would talk about what was
happening in his life, and then he would

702
00:47:35.143 --> 00:47:38.021
tell me how he behaved and
might act things out.

703
00:47:38.021 --> 00:47:39.064
And often the themes,

704
00:47:39.064 --> 00:47:42.609
as you'd expect, would revolve around my
parents, and the complexity around my,

705
00:47:42.609 --> 00:47:47.531
my family, and what it meant to go in
and out of prisons in order to have

706
00:47:47.531 --> 00:47:51.785
a relationship with one set of parents,
and what it meant to have to leave my

707
00:47:51.785 --> 00:47:55.163
other family in order to go on those
visits, and the things I missed out on–

708
00:47:55.163 --> 00:47:59.167
the birthday parties, or the
movies, or the family dinners.

709
00:47:59.501 --> 00:48:04.464
He very quickly settled into starting
to think about what his situation was

710
00:48:04.464 --> 00:48:10.178
and what his reactions to it were.
The question, what was the trauma?

711
00:48:10.721 --> 00:48:15.267
Was the trauma that his parents were
put in prison as a baby, and he was left

712
00:48:15.726 --> 00:48:18.270
to the world to be sort of cared for?

713
00:48:18.937 --> 00:48:22.649
Or was the trauma that he had to go
visit his parents in prison, or was the

714
00:48:22.649 --> 00:48:26.445
trauma that he had trouble
adapting socially sometimes?

715
00:48:28.780 --> 00:48:31.408
I think it was very helpful to have
some outside psychiatrists

716
00:48:31.408 --> 00:48:34.077
and child psychiatrists be involved in the process.

717
00:48:34.077 --> 00:48:39.166
They helped sort of center what it
was that Chesa needed from all of us.

718
00:48:39.166 --> 00:48:41.084
And I think that that was very helpful.

719
00:48:41.293 --> 00:48:44.379
His commitment to Chesa was absolute,

720
00:48:44.379 --> 00:48:48.884
but he also talked to David, talked
to Kathy, met with Leonard. I mean,

721
00:48:48.884 --> 00:48:53.639
he traveled, and he brought the whole
constellation together, and never thought

722
00:48:53.639 --> 00:48:58.060
that I, I'm just focused on the kid.
The kid exists in a constellation.

723
00:48:59.853 --> 00:49:04.149
David and Kathy were very good
parents, just in their own right.

724
00:49:04.149 --> 00:49:08.278
They had knowledge and skills
that made them good parents.

725
00:49:08.737 --> 00:49:11.448
Now, some people would say, well, wait
a minute, they're horrible parents.

726
00:49:11.448 --> 00:49:15.661
If they got themselves in this situation
when they had a little baby and they

727
00:49:15.661 --> 00:49:19.039
were thinking of themselves
first. Well, maybe that's true.

728
00:49:19.039 --> 00:49:22.084
Maybe that's not true. I'm
not the person to judge that.

729
00:49:22.084 --> 00:49:25.629
What I can tell you is, in the
circumstances they were in,

730
00:49:25.629 --> 00:49:29.758
they had good intuition
about parenting this child.

731
00:49:34.429 --> 00:49:39.184
The official name of it in New
York is Family Reunion Program,

732
00:49:40.227 --> 00:49:45.774
and they literally have little trailer
homes on the prison grounds behind the walls.

733
00:49:47.985 --> 00:49:50.862
It's two nights together
and cooking meals together.

734
00:49:55.283 --> 00:49:58.120
When he came for a trailer
visit, we baked bread,

735
00:49:58.120 --> 00:50:00.539
which was amazing, and I
had never done it before.

736
00:50:00.539 --> 00:50:02.374
And that was like an all-day process.

737
00:50:03.458 --> 00:50:06.086
Being able to just go outside
and throw a ball was amazing.

738
00:50:09.089 --> 00:50:10.173
From the very beginning,

739
00:50:10.173 --> 00:50:14.720
he had jobs to do on the trailer,
to help cook or whatever, uh,

740
00:50:14.720 --> 00:50:16.054
and he was into that,

741
00:50:16.054 --> 00:50:21.268
or pillow fights, or being outdoors
and having races, or playing touch

742
00:50:21.268 --> 00:50:26.523
football or whatever. And to have
longer, more serious conversations.

743
00:50:26.523 --> 00:50:31.445
The visits were so amazingly, qualitatively
different than just visiting in a visiting room.

744
00:50:31.445 --> 00:50:34.573
I didn't get a visit like that till,

745
00:50:35.615 --> 00:50:38.618
I guess I'd been in
prison maybe for 18 years.

746
00:50:38.618 --> 00:50:42.664
And of course, people think about them
as, as conjugal visits.

747
00:50:42.914 --> 00:50:47.169
But people don’t realize how important
it is for family bonds.

748
00:50:47.502 --> 00:50:49.880
One of my lifelong friends, Emani Davis,

749
00:50:49.880 --> 00:50:54.092
who was a couple years older than me
and who was doing work speaking publicly

750
00:50:54.092 --> 00:50:58.138
about her incarcerated father,
invited me to join her on a panel.

751
00:50:58.138 --> 00:51:02.059
He said that he was gonna be giving
a public speech at a conference about

752
00:51:02.059 --> 00:51:06.563
children of incarcerated parents. And
I was like, you know, wow. So he said,

753
00:51:06.563 --> 00:51:08.440
why don't, why don't, why
don't I rehearse that with you?

754
00:51:08.482 --> 00:51:12.152
And he practiced his speech with me,
and that was really exciting.

755
00:51:12.152 --> 00:51:14.946
When I was younger, I suffered from a
whole range of developmental problems,

756
00:51:14.946 --> 00:51:17.699
learning disabilities, and
an uncontrollable temper.

757
00:51:17.699 --> 00:51:21.453
These difficulties were largely result
of the psychological trauma of having my

758
00:51:21.453 --> 00:51:23.038
parents taken away at such a young age.

759
00:51:23.080 --> 00:51:24.331
There are ten million of us,

760
00:51:24.331 --> 00:51:25.373
we estimate, in this country

761
00:51:25.373 --> 00:51:26.041
at any given time,

762
00:51:26.041 --> 00:51:27.918
and most of us have issues

763
00:51:27.918 --> 00:51:28.794
and are struggling.

764
00:51:28.794 --> 00:51:31.922
We've been called “youth at risk”.
We've been called “juvenile delinquents”,

765
00:51:31.922 --> 00:51:34.132
we’ve been “teen moms”, we've been “drug addicts”.

766
00:51:34.466 --> 00:51:38.595
And the two of them went about
building an organization

767
00:51:38.887 --> 00:51:40.972
of children of incarcerated parents.

768
00:51:40.972 --> 00:51:46.478
The anger and the stigma are really
common amongst children with incarcerated parents.

769
00:51:46.478 --> 00:51:49.481
What's far less common, tragically,

770
00:51:49.481 --> 00:51:52.442
are the supports, and the opportunities,
and the privileges that I had.

771
00:51:52.442 --> 00:51:55.695
Tremendous privilege that many children
with incarcerated parents don't have.

772
00:51:55.695 --> 00:51:57.197
Class privilege.

773
00:52:01.409 --> 00:52:04.246
I grew up in a middle-class family;

774
00:52:04.246 --> 00:52:06.498
at least the extended family
could pay for therapy,

775
00:52:06.498 --> 00:52:08.166
could pay for academic tutors,

776
00:52:08.166 --> 00:52:12.712
could afford to accept the
massively, outrageously expensive

777
00:52:12.712 --> 00:52:17.884
collect prison phone calls so that I
could talk to my parents for as long as I wanted.

778
00:52:19.010 --> 00:52:23.765
The experience Chesa had and
our family had visiting David

779
00:52:23.765 --> 00:52:28.812
over the years was something,
of course, that millions of

780
00:52:28.812 --> 00:52:32.149
families do experience in the
United States. It's our story,

781
00:52:32.149 --> 00:52:35.569
but it's actually a national story.

782
00:52:37.404 --> 00:52:39.447
One of the things that makes us

783
00:52:40.615 --> 00:52:45.370
who we are is our ability to be able to
have gotten through already the kind of

784
00:52:45.370 --> 00:52:49.624
bleeding heart stuff, the, the
miserable stuff, and the victim stuff.

785
00:52:49.624 --> 00:52:51.376
And to be able to actually
move past that to,

786
00:52:51.376 --> 00:52:53.420
to be able to do something like
make policy recommendations.

787
00:52:53.420 --> 00:52:56.339
We don't need other parents.
We need access to our parents.

788
00:52:56.339 --> 00:52:59.593
And our parents need access to services
and programs, so they can be wonderful parents.

789
00:52:59.593 --> 00:53:01.761
Even from prison.

790
00:53:03.930 --> 00:53:07.267
I'm older by 10 minutes. Mm-hmm.

791
00:53:07.267 --> 00:53:11.813
Yeah, sometimes I brag about like
being 10 minutes older.

792
00:53:13.857 --> 00:53:15.650
We had to like talk over the phone

793
00:53:15.650 --> 00:53:18.361
and see him through glass, and that’s what

794
00:53:18.361 --> 00:53:20.405
made us, um, miss him more.

795
00:53:20.405 --> 00:53:25.535
We just had to talk over the phone,
and it was limited to like 15 minutes.

796
00:53:26.620 --> 00:53:29.497
He had to spend time in jail
for something he didn't do,

797
00:53:29.497 --> 00:53:34.711
which kind of like angered us, you
know? He needed, you know, justice,

798
00:53:34.711 --> 00:53:37.672
you know? He won his case, and he got out.

799
00:53:39.090 --> 00:53:40.884
How long has he been away?

800
00:53:42.802 --> 00:53:44.012
A long time.

801
00:53:44.012 --> 00:53:47.265
What's the hardest part
about going to the prison?

802
00:53:48.433 --> 00:53:51.228
When we have to, uh,

803
00:53:52.270 --> 00:53:53.855
leave, and he,

804
00:53:53.855 --> 00:54:00.487
we watch him, and he just waves
goodbye to us when we're in the bus or van.

805
00:54:06.034 --> 00:54:07.035
I wanted my dad at my

806
00:54:07.035 --> 00:54:08.203
eighth grade graduation.

807
00:54:08.203 --> 00:54:11.831
I wanted my dad at my high school
graduation and to see me off to prom,

808
00:54:11.831 --> 00:54:13.041
but he couldn't be there.

809
00:54:13.041 --> 00:54:17.963
I would see other children and
their dads and having happy moments,

810
00:54:17.963 --> 00:54:21.424
and then there was me. I felt
really, really alone. And you,

811
00:54:21.424 --> 00:54:24.719
you feel so separated from everybody else,

812
00:54:24.719 --> 00:54:28.974
especially going to school and not
having support, and then having to go home

813
00:54:28.974 --> 00:54:30.141
and, you know,

814
00:54:30.141 --> 00:54:35.230
see my mother sad and having to figure
out lawyer money and things like that

815
00:54:35.230 --> 00:54:37.565
is very heartbreaking to see.

816
00:54:43.613 --> 00:54:47.701
There is an advantage to getting big
endorsements when people are actually

817
00:54:47.701 --> 00:54:49.035
paying attention.

818
00:54:50.954 --> 00:54:53.331
It got way bigger and way more

819
00:54:53.331 --> 00:54:56.543
ambitious than what anyone originally expected.

820
00:54:56.543 --> 00:55:00.338
It just totally ran off
into this massive, national thing.

821
00:55:01.840 --> 00:55:07.053
Every time that a progressive prosecutor,
or a progressive prosecutor's office,

822
00:55:07.053 --> 00:55:10.473
has another ally in another
city, we are all stronger.

823
00:55:11.599 --> 00:55:15.979
Like, Kim Fox endorsed us,
and, um, Larry Krasner. Um,

824
00:55:15.979 --> 00:55:16.896
and just kind of,

825
00:55:16.896 --> 00:55:21.484
we got to build on this kind of national
movement of folks like who really want

826
00:55:21.484 --> 00:55:24.696
to see change in the, in
our criminal justice system.

827
00:55:24.696 --> 00:55:26.406
The wave of progressive prosecutors,

828
00:55:26.406 --> 00:55:31.494
people running for and winning offices
around the country from coast to coast.

829
00:55:32.704 --> 00:55:37.375
We need change in San Francisco, and
Chesa Boudin is the only candidate

830
00:55:37.375 --> 00:55:39.794
that will bring that change about.

831
00:55:57.854 --> 00:55:59.230
(phone dialing and chatter)

832
00:55:59.230 --> 00:56:02.817
We mobilized letters from people
who've known Kathy her whole life,

833
00:56:02.817 --> 00:56:05.695
people who had been in prison with her.

834
00:56:05.695 --> 00:56:09.866
Letters from prominent actors, actresses, lawyers, politicians.

835
00:56:09.866 --> 00:56:12.327
We had phone calls every other day.

836
00:56:12.327 --> 00:56:13.286
We built a website.

837
00:56:13.286 --> 00:56:16.831
We had massive numbers of people
write letters and sign up to support.

838
00:56:16.831 --> 00:56:20.877
Kathy helped me so much
when I was incarcerated.

839
00:56:20.877 --> 00:56:24.005
I knew immediately I had
to do everything I could.

840
00:56:24.005 --> 00:56:25.715
We were friends since high school,

841
00:56:25.715 --> 00:56:30.428
so I just called every classmate we
had and asked them to write a letter.

842
00:56:30.428 --> 00:56:34.933
In prison, she worked with other mothers
who had left children on the outside.

843
00:56:34.933 --> 00:56:40.897
I met this fabulous sister at
Bedford, and I call her my white dove sister,

844
00:56:40.897 --> 00:56:43.066
and her name is Kathy Boudin.

845
00:56:43.066 --> 00:56:45.110
She put together adult literacy programs,

846
00:56:45.110 --> 00:56:49.239
taught English as a second language, and
helped put together private funding.

847
00:56:49.239 --> 00:56:54.035
I know that Kathy Boudin
has faced up to what she has

848
00:56:54.035 --> 00:56:59.457
done with searching
honesty and feels intense

849
00:56:59.457 --> 00:57:01.709
remorse and sorrow,

850
00:57:01.709 --> 00:57:06.589
which will never leave her.
Sincerely, Noam Chomsky.

851
00:57:06.589 --> 00:57:11.344
If somebody like her, with her impeccable
prison record and the amazing good work

852
00:57:11.344 --> 00:57:14.639
that she's done, who's literally saved
lives through AIDS education work and

853
00:57:14.639 --> 00:57:17.976
parenting work, isn't able to get parole,

854
00:57:17.976 --> 00:57:21.354
then what incentive does anybody
who's incarcerated have to engage in

855
00:57:21.354 --> 00:57:26.359
programming or to hold out hope
for a future beyond the bars?

856
00:57:32.157 --> 00:57:35.577
His goals were to hold police accountable.

857
00:57:35.577 --> 00:57:37.245
They don't want to hear that.

858
00:57:37.245 --> 00:57:39.205
Police Officer’s Association,

859
00:57:39.205 --> 00:57:42.208
the local San Francisco Police Union,

860
00:57:42.709 --> 00:57:45.545
dumped about $700,000 into

861
00:57:45.545 --> 00:57:47.881
really dishonest and vitriolic attacks.

862
00:57:47.881 --> 00:57:52.010
Horrific mailers and TV ads, really
right in the last month of the campaign.

863
00:57:52.010 --> 00:57:57.348
The TV ad where it was just like
“rape”, his face, and then it was “rape”,

864
00:57:57.348 --> 00:58:02.020
“assault, murder”. That was like the line
where I was like, wow, these people,

865
00:58:02.020 --> 00:58:04.689
there's not nothing they wouldn't,
not anything they wouldn't do.

866
00:58:04.689 --> 00:58:09.694
Chesa Boudin said he wouldn't seek
maximum sentences as district attorney,

867
00:58:09.694 --> 00:58:11.070
even for murder.

868
00:58:11.070 --> 00:58:15.158
I wouldn't listen to a word that the
Police Officer's Association says;

869
00:58:15.158 --> 00:58:18.286
in fact they disregard the safety of the community.

870
00:58:18.286 --> 00:58:20.288
Police Officer’s Association believes

871
00:58:20.288 --> 00:58:23.041
shooting first and asking questions later.

872
00:58:23.041 --> 00:58:26.544
The POA’s ad that I saw
is a gross distortion of

873
00:58:26.544 --> 00:58:29.547
Chesa Boudin’s record and views.

874
00:58:29.547 --> 00:58:31.633
They spent in, in,
in just a couple of weeks,

875
00:58:31.633 --> 00:58:34.886
what we spent during the entire campaign.

876
00:58:34.886 --> 00:58:39.682
When I saw that they started
spending millions of dollars

877
00:58:39.682 --> 00:58:43.937
to go against him, I knew
I was on the right side.

878
00:58:43.937 --> 00:58:47.524
Well, the Police Union's been on the
wrong side of every single issue

879
00:58:47.524 --> 00:58:50.527
in recent history in San Francisco politics.

880
00:59:09.754 --> 00:59:14.759
When I walked into the parole
board, it was in a room.

881
00:59:14.759 --> 00:59:19.722
There were three parole people
sitting there, and against

882
00:59:19.722 --> 00:59:22.934
the wall there were like 80 boxes,

883
00:59:22.934 --> 00:59:25.478
cardboard boxes lining up
from the floor to the ceiling.

884
00:59:25.478 --> 00:59:27.272
And the woman that was running
the parole board said, well,

885
00:59:27.272 --> 00:59:30.942
these are just letters with an opinion
about your parole. And she said

886
00:59:30.942 --> 00:59:34.445
most of 'em, of course,
against you. And it was like

887
00:59:34.445 --> 00:59:36.656
it was like–that's how
I began my parole board.

888
00:59:36.656 --> 00:59:40.743
But you have to believe
that you should go home.

889
00:59:41.536 --> 00:59:43.871
Who was I then? Who am I now?

890
00:59:43.871 --> 00:59:47.750
And it's not that I felt optimistic
that I was gonna make the board,

891
00:59:47.750 --> 00:59:52.463
but you have to believe that
that's what should happen to you.

892
00:59:54.299 --> 01:00:00.388
What's the biggest difference between
Kathy today and Kathy when she came into prison?

893
01:00:11.399 --> 01:00:16.821
Try to make us understand what would
motivate you to participate in this kind of crime.

894
01:00:41.596 --> 01:00:44.724
As a child, I wanted to be
a doctor to heal people.

895
01:00:44.724 --> 01:00:49.562
I lost my way, 12 years
underground. Isolation.

896
01:00:49.562 --> 01:00:52.023
Different names, a lost self.

897
01:00:52.607 --> 01:00:56.861
I had arrived at a deeply wrong way
of responding to social problems.

898
01:00:57.779 --> 01:01:01.616
Now, more than 20 years in
prison, I have turned 60.

899
01:01:02.575 --> 01:01:05.495
I think about, “How do
we protect our planet?”.

900
01:01:05.536 --> 01:01:08.706
I look back on my crime and know that
I would never again be involved in

901
01:01:08.706 --> 01:01:12.043
anything that risked human life
in the name of social change.

902
01:01:30.520 --> 01:01:36.859
I was heartbroken when the parole
board declined to grant her freedom in August, 2001.

903
01:01:37.276 --> 01:01:39.946
I think the parole board really
likes to reject people in the beginning.

904
01:01:39.946 --> 01:01:42.365
They, they think it's a way to, uh,

905
01:01:42.365 --> 01:01:46.911
somehow provide dignity to those
who were harmed in the crime.

906
01:01:49.038 --> 01:01:50.790
Rejection.

907
01:01:51.582 --> 01:01:56.045
I think it's really devastating, and it's
devastating 'cause you've done the two things:

908
01:01:56.045 --> 01:02:01.134
you’ve, one, you’ve pulled a little bit away from
the prison identity and the prison

909
01:02:01.134 --> 01:02:05.054
work to try to get out.
And there you are, back in,

910
01:02:05.763 --> 01:02:10.768
and you've also failed with
giving it your best shot.

911
01:02:11.853 --> 01:02:15.690
And how do you keep hope,
and how do you not give up?

912
01:02:19.152 --> 01:02:23.239
You begin dreaming about being home,
and you put yourself outside prison.

913
01:02:23.239 --> 01:02:27.160
And I think putting yourself
back into prison is something

914
01:02:28.077 --> 01:02:31.581
anybody that's been turned down
by the parole board goes through,

915
01:02:31.831 --> 01:02:33.791
'cause you think you're
never gonna make it.

916
01:02:35.334 --> 01:02:37.962
Arguing... Arguing on the phone calls,

917
01:02:37.962 --> 01:02:43.176
arguing when we had went to visit,
and you don't really wanna do that,

918
01:02:43.176 --> 01:02:47.889
'cause it's something else.
I mean, it's a, you know,

919
01:02:47.889 --> 01:02:53.019
it's a friendship, and it's a love
relationship, and you're, but you also,

920
01:02:53.019 --> 01:02:55.855
only she can–she has to be on the team,

921
01:02:55.855 --> 01:02:59.567
on the team and at the head
of the team in order to get out.

922
01:03:01.861 --> 01:03:04.655
I remember Chesa visiting
me and saying, you know,

923
01:03:05.615 --> 01:03:08.701
if you don't fight for
yourself to get out,

924
01:03:09.994 --> 01:03:11.579
other people can't do it.

925
01:03:11.579 --> 01:03:14.624
You have to lead that process,
and you're not leading it now.

926
01:03:14.624 --> 01:03:19.587
And if you don't continue to really
struggle to get out of prison and

927
01:03:19.587 --> 01:03:23.007
feel that you can talk about what
you've done and why you should get out,

928
01:03:23.007 --> 01:03:25.885
I'm gonna write a book about it.

929
01:03:25.885 --> 01:03:26.886
And I was like, no, no, no,

930
01:03:26.886 --> 01:03:29.764
I don't want a book written about me. I
said, don't do that. And he said,

931
01:03:29.764 --> 01:03:34.268
well, if you don't fight for yourself
to get out, I'm going to do it.

932
01:03:35.269 --> 01:03:40.608
And it was an incredible visit.
And, needless to say, it changed me.

933
01:03:41.275 --> 01:03:45.279
And I did a lot of work in the community,
meeting with folks in the town, reaching

934
01:03:45.279 --> 01:03:49.700
out to and making contact with some of
the extended family members of those who

935
01:03:49.700 --> 01:03:53.287
were harmed and, and, and those
who were tragically killed.

936
01:03:53.287 --> 01:03:56.249
I could see him becoming like an organizer
around that. He would meet people,

937
01:03:56.249 --> 01:03:57.166
he would talk about it.

938
01:03:57.166 --> 01:03:58.918
He would figure out whether
somebody could write a letter,

939
01:03:58.918 --> 01:04:01.003
figure out how to educate people.

940
01:04:01.671 --> 01:04:06.926
I think we could have and should
have done a better job at trying to

941
01:04:06.926 --> 01:04:11.848
express remorse collectively as a family
for the harm that was caused to the

942
01:04:11.848 --> 01:04:13.766
three men who were killed
and their families.

943
01:04:13.766 --> 01:04:19.105
It doesn't matter so much whether
you persuade people to support release.

944
01:04:19.105 --> 01:04:22.900
It's not about persuasion;
it's about humanity.

945
01:04:24.610 --> 01:04:29.866
If there's anything I can do to mend the
heartbreak at the center of all these lives,

946
01:04:29.866 --> 01:04:31.033
I must do it.

947
01:04:31.033 --> 01:04:34.620
If there's any role I can play in
facilitating this reconciliation,

948
01:04:34.620 --> 01:04:36.289
I must attempt it.

949
01:04:37.582 --> 01:04:41.669
Twenty-two years ago, I was arrested after a
horrific robbery of a Brinks truck in

950
01:04:41.669 --> 01:04:45.298
Rockland County, New York, that left
three people dead, others injured,

951
01:04:45.298 --> 01:04:49.677
and enormous suffering among
families, community, and police.

952
01:04:50.386 --> 01:04:51.637
At my sentencing,

953
01:04:51.637 --> 01:04:56.142
I turned and apologized to the families
of all of the victims for their pain and loss.

954
01:04:58.144 --> 01:05:02.690
I have made a different way of life,
serving others and building community.

955
01:05:02.690 --> 01:05:06.694
I want to say I am sorry, because those
words are the only ones we have

956
01:05:06.694 --> 01:05:09.196
to ask for forgiveness.

957
01:05:27.381 --> 01:05:30.009
I was driving with my brother across the country

958
01:05:30.009 --> 01:05:33.095
from California back to Chicago

959
01:05:33.095 --> 01:05:35.932
at the time when Kathy went before her parole board,

960
01:05:35.932 --> 01:05:38.434
and it was about a 36 hour drive.

961
01:05:41.270 --> 01:05:46.150
And we're on our cell phones, talking
to each other every half hour.

962
01:05:48.027 --> 01:05:51.072
Then the phone call came that they
were ready to give the decision.

963
01:05:51.697 --> 01:05:52.907
And when I got there,

964
01:05:52.907 --> 01:05:57.578
the parole supervisor gave me an
envelope, and I felt the envelope,

965
01:05:57.578 --> 01:06:00.289
because, what you know is that,
if the envelope is thick,

966
01:06:00.289 --> 01:06:04.001
it has appeals papers in it and
that means you didn't get it.

967
01:06:04.001 --> 01:06:08.756
And if the envelope is thin,
then you think, I think I got it.

968
01:06:10.383 --> 01:06:11.968
So I felt the envelope.

969
01:06:11.968 --> 01:06:16.681
And the crazy thing about it was that
there was a big lump in it, and I couldn't

970
01:06:16.681 --> 01:06:20.059
quite interpret it. I opened it.

971
01:06:21.143 --> 01:06:26.065
Cori called us; she'd been an active
leader of the effort to get my mom out.

972
01:06:26.065 --> 01:06:28.275
She said, are you all right? Are you
somewhere you can talk?

973
01:06:28.275 --> 01:06:29.610
I said, Cori, tell me what happened.

974
01:06:29.610 --> 01:06:36.117
And I just started crying,
and jumping up and down, and screaming.

975
01:06:36.117 --> 01:06:39.787
You know, the first thing
I wanted to do was to call Chesa.

976
01:06:40.454 --> 01:06:44.291
An infamous 1960’s radical
was granted parole today

977
01:06:44.333 --> 01:06:46.377
after 22 years in state prison.

978
01:06:46.377 --> 01:06:47.795
Wearing a white shirt and tennis sneakers,

979
01:06:47.795 --> 01:06:50.756
Kathy Boudin stepped past
the barbed wire to freedom

980
01:06:50.756 --> 01:06:53.509
after serving 22 years for murder.

981
01:06:53.509 --> 01:06:56.762
Turning, she waved towards the inmates
who call her a friend.

982
01:06:56.762 --> 01:07:00.266
The former sixties
radical, herself now 60.

983
01:07:00.266 --> 01:07:04.687
I turned around, and there were hands
waving out a window, and all you could see

984
01:07:04.687 --> 01:07:07.398
was hands. You couldn't see
people, but there were the hands.

985
01:07:08.190 --> 01:07:13.112
All of the women in the prison
at Bedford Hills were at windows,

986
01:07:13.112 --> 01:07:19.201
and were wishing her well, and banging on pots,

987
01:07:19.201 --> 01:07:22.204
and, you know, celebrating with her.

988
01:07:30.629 --> 01:07:34.341
My mom and I had a kind of a tradition
on the trailer visits that we would do of

989
01:07:34.341 --> 01:07:40.639
making smoothies. At the airport, seeing
my mom there standing with the smoothie.

990
01:07:43.059 --> 01:07:47.063
We rode the subway all over the city to
places that were important to her and

991
01:07:47.063 --> 01:07:48.481
important to me.

992
01:07:58.199 --> 01:07:59.867
Kathy and I have toured
her old neighborhood.

993
01:07:59.867 --> 01:08:05.414
She even pointed out to me approximately
where she first met you on Bleecker Street.

994
01:08:08.501 --> 01:08:10.169
We walked through Central Park.

995
01:08:10.169 --> 01:08:13.089
We've eaten at my favorite
Dominican and Mexican restaurants.

996
01:08:13.089 --> 01:08:15.424
Gone swimming at the Columbia pool.

997
01:08:43.202 --> 01:08:47.039
When Kathy got out, my wife
and I had our first baby.

998
01:08:48.791 --> 01:08:52.461
Our baby was about the same
age that Chesa had been when,

999
01:08:52.461 --> 01:08:57.216
when Kathy went to prison.
And sure enough, Kathy,

1000
01:08:57.216 --> 01:09:01.303
you know, became our, our main
babysitter and our adopted grandmother.

1001
01:09:05.307 --> 01:09:06.600
Ah, peekaboo.

1002
01:09:06.600 --> 01:09:09.687
So we got to watch her
experience, you know,

1003
01:09:09.687 --> 01:09:13.482
helping raise a kid past 13, 14 months,

1004
01:09:13.482 --> 01:09:16.443
take care of a kid when
we really needed her help.

1005
01:09:16.443 --> 01:09:21.198
I think that was partly her way of
saying to us and saying to herself like,

1006
01:09:21.198 --> 01:09:23.826
I'm gonna get my
priorities right this time.

1007
01:09:24.535 --> 01:09:29.331
I think from the moment I got
out, the next question was, was David?

1008
01:09:36.964 --> 01:09:39.967
We probably went to bed
at, maybe, like 2:00 AM.

1009
01:09:39.967 --> 01:09:44.471
Volunteers are coming in at 5:00 AM.
We all were so exhausted, we were

1010
01:09:44.471 --> 01:09:46.140
all running on fumes.

1011
01:09:46.140 --> 01:09:48.767
I went to every Black
community in San Francisco.

1012
01:09:48.767 --> 01:09:50.144
Walked up and down streets,

1013
01:09:50.144 --> 01:09:53.564
putting literature in places
that his team didn't even know.

1014
01:09:53.564 --> 01:09:56.150
I was driving volunteers
all over the city.

1015
01:09:56.150 --> 01:09:58.569
Standing on the corner, handing
out leaflets, putting posters up.

1016
01:09:58.569 --> 01:10:02.531
One of the most hotly contested
races is for district attorney, and Joe,

1017
01:10:02.531 --> 01:10:06.785
only about 500 votes separate the top two
candidates right now. But those three

1018
01:10:06.785 --> 01:10:11.498
days were brutal, like really
excruciating, not knowing.

1019
01:10:11.498 --> 01:10:15.669
And it was so nerve wracking.
Waiting and waiting and waiting.

1020
01:10:19.131 --> 01:10:22.301
From Boston to Philadelphia,
from Chicago to St. Louis,

1021
01:10:22.301 --> 01:10:26.013
right here in San Francisco,
we are bulding a movement.

1022
01:10:26.013 --> 01:10:31.310
Chesa, Chesa, Chesa!

1023
01:10:32.478 --> 01:10:37.483
I couldn't believe that we actually
had done it. And it was so like,

1024
01:10:37.483 --> 01:10:42.112
beautiful to be like, oh my God we, we
worked our asses off, and this happened.

1025
01:10:42.112 --> 01:10:45.407
And Chesa's gonna be our
next district attorney.

1026
01:10:45.407 --> 01:10:49.703
It has to be probably one of the
happiest moments of my whole life.

1027
01:10:57.294 --> 01:11:00.297
I cried. I could not believe it.

1028
01:11:00.297 --> 01:11:04.593
You know, the victory celebration
was really ecstatic.

1029
01:11:07.638 --> 01:11:11.934
David heard on his little
battery powered radio in his prison cell.

1030
01:11:11.934 --> 01:11:15.562
Those sorts of life events are the milestones

1031
01:11:15.562 --> 01:11:18.440
that parents miss when they're incarcerated.

1032
01:11:21.527 --> 01:11:26.657
He was exhausted. I think he was, uh, thrilled.
And he also, you know,

1033
01:11:26.657 --> 01:11:29.076
was about to go through a new door.

1034
01:11:29.076 --> 01:11:31.161
And he knew that would be

1035
01:11:31.161 --> 01:11:32.579
much more complicated.

1036
01:11:36.375 --> 01:11:37.960
I, Chesa Boudin,

1037
01:11:37.960 --> 01:11:39.628
I, Chesa Boudin,

1038
01:11:39.628 --> 01:11:41.213
do solemnly swear

1039
01:11:41.213 --> 01:11:42.506
do solemnly swear

1040
01:11:42.506 --> 01:11:44.717
that I will support and defend

1041
01:11:44.717 --> 01:11:46.885
that I will support and defend

1042
01:11:46.885 --> 01:11:49.680
We end cash bail.

1043
01:11:49.680 --> 01:11:53.475
We end a system by which innocent
people can be kept in jail

1044
01:11:53.475 --> 01:11:56.520
simply because they're poor.

1045
01:11:58.522 --> 01:12:01.358
We launched a workers' protection unit.

1046
01:12:01.358 --> 01:12:03.110
We are not going to stand by and watch

1047
01:12:03.110 --> 01:12:07.031
while major companies deprive California taxpayers.

1048
01:12:07.031 --> 01:12:10.576
We've managed to stop using
racist sentencing enhancements,

1049
01:12:10.576 --> 01:12:12.828
ending San Francisco's
use of the death penalty,

1050
01:12:13.662 --> 01:12:16.915
creating an independent Innocence
Commission to make sure nobody is serving

1051
01:12:16.915 --> 01:12:19.501
prison time for a crime
they didn't commit.

1052
01:12:19.501 --> 01:12:21.587
After spending 32 years in prison

1053
01:12:21.587 --> 01:12:23.422
for a murder he did not commit,

1054
01:12:23.422 --> 01:12:26.759
61-year-old Joaquin Ciria set to walk free.

1055
01:12:37.936 --> 01:12:39.146
Get ready, San Francisco.

1056
01:12:39.146 --> 01:12:41.482
There's a new radical DA in town:

1057
01:12:41.482 --> 01:12:42.775
Chesa Boudin.

1058
01:12:42.775 --> 01:12:46.278
...Civilization itself
is coming apart in San Francisco,

1059
01:12:46.278 --> 01:12:49.031
right there in broad daylight
on the city's sidewalks,

1060
01:12:49.031 --> 01:12:51.533
which are littered with junkies,
and feces, and dirty needles.

1061
01:12:51.658 --> 01:12:54.495
Very dangerous policies... Let's talk about it. We
should talk about what's happening.

1062
01:12:55.913 --> 01:12:58.707
This is a dangerous person.

1063
01:13:09.259 --> 01:13:13.430
I am so blessed. I'm so blessed
to have a grandson.

1064
01:13:13.430 --> 01:13:15.641
I’m getting emails from friends of mine
saying you're gonna be a grandma.

1065
01:13:15.641 --> 01:13:17.393
This is so great, you know.

1066
01:13:17.393 --> 01:13:21.480
She's so eager to be a grandmother
and, and in some ways, of course,

1067
01:13:21.480 --> 01:13:26.777
to go back and avoid the horrible
mistakes that she made when I was a child.

1068
01:13:27.986 --> 01:13:31.073
We hope to be able to
visit my dad with our baby,

1069
01:13:31.073 --> 01:13:34.952
but bringing my own child through those
same metal detectors and those same

1070
01:13:34.952 --> 01:13:38.997
prison gates, who wants to
have kids experience that?

1071
01:13:38.997 --> 01:13:43.961
Who wants to be forced
to know that really ugly

1072
01:13:43.961 --> 01:13:47.464
reality for getting to touch
or know your grandparent?

1073
01:13:47.464 --> 01:13:51.385
My whole life I've sort of known
and assumed he won't get out.

1074
01:13:51.385 --> 01:13:56.014
So, to the extent kids talk with their
parents about what will happen when they die,

1075
01:13:56.014 --> 01:14:01.228
we, we've had those conversations with the
caveat that, assuming he does die in prison,

1076
01:14:01.228 --> 01:14:04.815
we won't have a lot of
control or say over what happens.

1077
01:14:04.815 --> 01:14:09.403
Other folks can talk to their kids or
their grandkids about, um, you know,

1078
01:14:09.403 --> 01:14:12.865
where they want to be or what
music they wanna listen to,

1079
01:14:12.865 --> 01:14:15.868
those sorts of things. We won't have
any control.

1080
01:14:15.868 --> 01:14:20.289
Many prisoners will say, the one thing I hope is
I don't die in prison.

1081
01:14:20.956 --> 01:14:25.919
And you can understand that, because
you want to be among loved ones.

1082
01:14:25.919 --> 01:14:30.215
I always realized it was a good
chance I would die in prison.

1083
01:14:30.215 --> 01:14:34.803
And I would say that's
not the worst thing to me,

1084
01:14:34.803 --> 01:14:38.557
the worst thing would be not living my
life with integrity, and not doing what's

1085
01:14:38.557 --> 01:14:43.729
productive. And if I die in
prison, so be it. But to me,

1086
01:14:43.729 --> 01:14:47.274
if I abandon the integrity,

1087
01:14:47.274 --> 01:14:52.154
if I abandon caring about people, and
what happens if I abandon working on

1088
01:14:52.154 --> 01:14:54.698
these issues, that
would be the big defeat.

1089
01:14:56.700 --> 01:15:00.913
If David dies in prison, and
he may be in his prison cell,

1090
01:15:00.913 --> 01:15:03.624
or he may be in a medical
ward at the prison,

1091
01:15:03.624 --> 01:15:05.584
or he may even be in an outside hospital,

1092
01:15:05.584 --> 01:15:10.547
handcuffed to a bed. We will make every
effort to be there to get him decent

1093
01:15:10.547 --> 01:15:13.091
medical care, to have someone

1094
01:15:14.510 --> 01:15:18.472
who can hold his hand with love,

1095
01:15:19.223 --> 01:15:22.935
strong enough to make him forget

1096
01:15:25.062 --> 01:15:29.358
about the handcuff on his wrist,
connecting him to the hospital bed.

1097
01:15:36.615 --> 01:15:39.326
We have a, a district attorney who
doesn't wanna prosecute people.

1098
01:15:39.326 --> 01:15:41.787
His agenda is decarceration.

1099
01:15:41.787 --> 01:15:44.873
It's like a fire chief who doesn't believe in using water.

1100
01:15:44.873 --> 01:15:46.208
The recall has a vision of

1101
01:15:46.208 --> 01:15:50.337
San Francisco that's really about

1102
01:15:50.671 --> 01:15:54.216
continuing to get rid of people
who are poor, people who are Black,

1103
01:15:54.341 --> 01:15:57.678
um, people that need services.
And it’s basically sort of saying,

1104
01:15:57.678 --> 01:16:00.556
we don't want a San Francisco in
which we care about those people.

1105
01:16:00.556 --> 01:16:05.435
We want those people out. Chesa
represents a different vision of society.

1106
01:16:05.435 --> 01:16:09.856
Blaming Chesa Boudin and people
who want to reduce the U.S.'

1107
01:16:10.065 --> 01:16:11.024
incarceration rate from being

1108
01:16:11.024 --> 01:16:12.025
the highest in the world,

1109
01:16:12.025 --> 01:16:14.111
that has become very useful for the forces

1110
01:16:14.111 --> 01:16:16.238
that explicitly want to take us back

1111
01:16:16.238 --> 01:16:18.532
to mass incarceration.

1112
01:16:18.532 --> 01:16:20.409
I saw far, far too many

1113
01:16:20.409 --> 01:16:23.829
of the children who I grew up
playing in our parents' prison

1114
01:16:23.829 --> 01:16:25.872
visiting rooms end up
themselves incarcerated.

1115
01:16:25.872 --> 01:16:27.583
We've gotta break that cycle.

1116
01:16:27.583 --> 01:16:29.585
That's why one of my first policies

1117
01:16:29.585 --> 01:16:33.422
was the creation of a
Primary Caregiver Diversion Program.

1118
01:16:37.759 --> 01:16:40.721
I was diverted to the
Primary Care Division.

1119
01:16:40.721 --> 01:16:42.681
The Primary Care Division Program

1120
01:16:42.681 --> 01:16:44.766
they basically just gave
me that push I needed,

1121
01:16:44.766 --> 01:16:48.770
you know, to help me do better
with the, the counseling,

1122
01:16:49.104 --> 01:16:51.732
the doctor, medications.

1123
01:16:51.732 --> 01:16:57.154
I wake up at 3:30 AM to
get to work at 4:30.

1124
01:16:57.988 --> 01:17:01.617
Aside from just going to work,
I change the baby's diapers.

1125
01:17:01.617 --> 01:17:04.828
I feed the baby... a father figure
being there for a daughter.

1126
01:17:06.538 --> 01:17:09.124
I did 24 years and 10 months.

1127
01:17:09.458 --> 01:17:12.377
Chesa Boudin, he put in
for my re-sentencing.

1128
01:17:13.086 --> 01:17:17.716
I'm doing case management work.
We help people with reentry from, um,

1129
01:17:17.716 --> 01:17:20.886
incarceration. They hired me
because I have lived experience.

1130
01:17:20.886 --> 01:17:23.889
The district attorney made the
announcement this morning,

1131
01:17:23.889 --> 01:17:25.807
that a former police officer

1132
01:17:25.807 --> 01:17:29.936
will now face criminal charges
for shooting a man in the line of duty.

1133
01:17:30.270 --> 01:17:34.691
No other prior district attorneys has
ever brought charges against the

1134
01:17:34.691 --> 01:17:39.488
San Francisco Police Office, and not in my
modern day history or my mother's who's gone.

1135
01:17:41.365 --> 01:17:43.075
You know, once we deliver
that person to the jail,

1136
01:17:43.075 --> 01:17:44.701
people are back out in the streets.

1137
01:17:44.701 --> 01:17:46.078
All it’s doing is telling
these people out there,

1138
01:17:46.745 --> 01:17:49.081
come to San Francisco and pimp and pander

1139
01:17:49.081 --> 01:17:49.665
your people, because it’s not a crime.

1140
01:17:49.873 --> 01:17:51.041
Yes on H!

1141
01:17:51.041 --> 01:17:53.585
There's no way that we're leaving.
I don’t understand who...

1142
01:17:53.585 --> 01:17:54.711
...They wanna distract us.

1143
01:17:54.711 --> 01:17:55.712
They wanna slow us down.

1144
01:17:56.088 --> 01:17:59.257
They want to exploit tragedies,
to undermine racial justice.

1145
01:17:59.549 --> 01:18:01.968
They wanna make sure that my
time in office is not spent

1146
01:18:02.135 --> 01:18:05.222
following through on the promises
I made the voters of San Francisco

1147
01:18:05.263 --> 01:18:08.934
implementing policies that can
actually make safer communities.

1148
01:18:08.934 --> 01:18:10.519
I refuse to be distracted.

1149
01:18:17.317 --> 01:18:20.946
We've tried every strategy with
every governor that we can think of,

1150
01:18:20.946 --> 01:18:23.240
and that's what organizing is.

1151
01:18:23.240 --> 01:18:28.286
You kind of put yourself at the desk
of the person you're trying to reach.

1152
01:18:28.286 --> 01:18:30.580
Dear Governor Patterson. Dear
Governor Cuomo, my father, my father,

1153
01:18:30.580 --> 01:18:33.709
David Gilbert, David Gilbert was
arrested almost 29 years ago,

1154
01:18:33.709 --> 01:18:36.420
was arrested almost 39 years ago.

1155
01:18:39.715 --> 01:18:42.134
We had letters of support from all over the world,

1156
01:18:42.134 --> 01:18:44.761
including numerous Nobel Peace Prize Laureates,

1157
01:18:44.761 --> 01:18:46.346
other Nobel Laureates.

1158
01:18:46.346 --> 01:18:49.891
We had a letter of support from Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

1159
01:18:49.891 --> 01:18:53.228
the letters from people who
were previously incarcerated with him,

1160
01:18:53.228 --> 01:18:57.941
who talked about his mentorship that helped them
avoid violence and gang activity in prison.

1161
01:18:58.525 --> 01:19:00.444
There were moments when we thought, oh,

1162
01:19:00.444 --> 01:19:02.070
we got a letter to the governor's office,

1163
01:19:02.070 --> 01:19:05.574
and we think there are people there
listening. And then, you know,

1164
01:19:05.574 --> 01:19:08.744
commutation season would come and
go, and everybody would say, oh,

1165
01:19:08.744 --> 01:19:10.495
it didn't happen. And then it felt like,

1166
01:19:10.495 --> 01:19:11.246
of course it didn't happen.

1167
01:19:11.246 --> 01:19:14.040
It was always such a long shot.

1168
01:19:14.040 --> 01:19:17.586
I think Chesa convinced himself each
time that there was a chance, and then it

1169
01:19:17.586 --> 01:19:21.173
didn't happen. And so it was
a, it was a brutal letdown.

1170
01:19:22.257 --> 01:19:27.053
Pretty much all kids want to be able
to find ways to return the love and

1171
01:19:27.053 --> 01:19:31.683
support they've received from those
who brought them into the world.

1172
01:19:32.559 --> 01:19:36.021
Incarceration makes it
uniquely difficult to do that.

1173
01:19:36.480 --> 01:19:42.068
Forty years is enough. How many more
pounds of flesh can you take outta this person?

1174
01:19:42.068 --> 01:19:45.447
You know, you look at a life
sentence with no possibility of parole,

1175
01:19:45.447 --> 01:19:47.616
three 75-year sentences.

1176
01:19:47.616 --> 01:19:50.786
And to me that doesn't sound
like there's wiggle room.

1177
01:19:50.786 --> 01:19:55.248
It sounds like there's that, that
you're looking at dying in prison.

1178
01:19:55.248 --> 01:19:59.878
I'm 44 now. I was four years old when
David went to prison. Instead of

1179
01:19:59.878 --> 01:20:02.297
serving what is really a death sentence,

1180
01:20:02.297 --> 01:20:04.925
give them a chance to be
considered for freedom.

1181
01:20:04.925 --> 01:20:07.761
So, you're trying to work both
on a broader level of change,

1182
01:20:07.761 --> 01:20:11.431
and then you're trying to work on “who is
this person”, and this person being able

1183
01:20:11.431 --> 01:20:13.391
to define himself, which
is what David's been doing.

1184
01:20:13.683 --> 01:20:16.978
But we're not saying that other
people don't deserve to get out.

1185
01:20:16.978 --> 01:20:19.272
We’re trying to change the whole system.

1186
01:20:20.398 --> 01:20:24.778
Dad is one of the kindest, gentlest people I have ever met.

1187
01:20:24.778 --> 01:20:28.532
I know that granting my father
clemency will not be easy.

1188
01:20:29.282 --> 01:20:32.118
Four decades is enough punishment.

1189
01:20:32.869 --> 01:20:35.997
I beg you not to make me
watch my father die in prison.

1190
01:22:01.374 --> 01:22:03.543
We're not dealing with
a grassroots movement.

1191
01:22:03.543 --> 01:22:06.796
We're dealing with a small
number of wealthy individuals,

1192
01:22:06.796 --> 01:22:10.091
many of whom are national
Republican major donors,

1193
01:22:10.091 --> 01:22:13.637
folks who have financial interests in
the real estate industry, and the gig

1194
01:22:13.637 --> 01:22:18.934
economy, and gentrification so that
their investments can go up in value.

1195
01:22:24.856 --> 01:22:29.069
This is a man who gave
Mitch McConnell six million dollars.

1196
01:22:29.778 --> 01:22:33.281
These are challenging times for
San Francisco's district attorney.

1197
01:22:34.616 --> 01:22:39.162
Those with money and power have realized
that they can create elections off cycle.

1198
01:22:39.162 --> 01:22:42.791
They don't need to wait four years, the
way the democratic process is supposed to require.

1199
01:22:42.791 --> 01:22:45.043
They can buy new elections.

1200
01:22:45.585 --> 01:22:49.047
I know you gotta get your money, but
you can't be over here doing this.

1201
01:22:49.422 --> 01:22:50.382
I do it everywhere.

1202
01:22:50.924 --> 01:22:52.467
Recall Chesa Boudin.

1203
01:22:52.467 --> 01:22:57.013
They have invested insane, exorbitant
amounts of money to just spread

1204
01:22:57.013 --> 01:23:00.600
bald-faced lies through television
ads, through newspaper ads.

1205
01:23:00.600 --> 01:23:06.064
So much money put in to blamin’
anything on Chesa Boudin, you know.

1206
01:23:06.481 --> 01:23:09.901
I forgot my bigger coat
at home. It's his fault.

1207
01:23:15.407 --> 01:23:20.286
This is home. And like, I'm gonna
like fight tooth and nail for my home.

1208
01:23:22.580 --> 01:23:25.750
For Chesa Boudin, the polls
don't look good.

1209
01:23:26.292 --> 01:23:28.837
So, I’m gonna go vote right now.

1210
01:23:43.435 --> 01:23:47.480
As I was walking back from a
visit Monday, and a guy who is

1211
01:23:47.480 --> 01:23:50.608
a friend of mine was in the hallway
with me, and he's saying, well,

1212
01:23:50.608 --> 01:23:54.529
this is Cuomo's last day. Maybe
there'll be some good news for you.

1213
01:23:54.529 --> 01:23:57.365
Maybe he'll do the right thing
on the way out the door. I said,

1214
01:23:57.365 --> 01:24:02.078
I appreciate your wishful thinking,
but there's not a chance.

1215
01:24:02.078 --> 01:24:06.624
We were counting the hours. We were saying,
well, we have four more hours. Well,

1216
01:24:06.624 --> 01:24:09.836
we have three more hours. You know, it's
like, well, we still have more hours.

1217
01:24:09.836 --> 01:24:12.839
When I went to work on my computer,
I loaded up the governor's, uh,

1218
01:24:12.839 --> 01:24:17.761
press website, because they
announce the commutations there.

1219
01:24:17.761 --> 01:24:22.724
And I was just hitting refresh somewhat
obsessively to see if there was a new

1220
01:24:22.724 --> 01:24:25.977
press release. And every once in a
while there was a new press release,

1221
01:24:25.977 --> 01:24:27.645
but they had to do with

1222
01:24:27.645 --> 01:24:32.525
his farewell speech or the updates
on the hurricane, or updates on,

1223
01:24:32.525 --> 01:24:36.821
uh, you know, Covid. And there was
nothing on the commutation.

1224
01:24:36.821 --> 01:24:38.782
I got an email or a text
from the lawyer saying,

1225
01:24:38.782 --> 01:24:40.575
there's something odd
happening here right now.

1226
01:24:40.575 --> 01:24:43.369
And then 30 seconds later I get
a phone call, and I just break,

1227
01:24:43.369 --> 01:24:48.625
I break down. Then called Chesa, and

1228
01:24:49.209 --> 01:24:53.338
he didn't answer, but I just texted and
said, David’s sentence was just commuted.

1229
01:24:53.338 --> 01:24:54.756
Call me immediately.

1230
01:24:54.756 --> 01:24:58.093
I ran to where Valerie was
working, uh, and I was yelling.

1231
01:24:58.093 --> 01:25:02.055
We fell into each other's arms and,
and then called Kathy.

1232
01:25:02.514 --> 01:25:06.101
And Kathy, by that point, I think
was maybe in the second stage of celebration.

1233
01:25:06.101 --> 01:25:07.519
Almost simultaneously,
David calls me.

1234
01:25:07.519 --> 01:25:10.563
Having no idea that anything
had happened. Exciting! I’m gonna...

1235
01:25:10.563 --> 01:25:13.066
...you’re gonna get out, David, you're
gonna get out, it’s just happened.

1236
01:25:13.066 --> 01:25:16.319
He's commuted  your sentence.
I was sobbing. I couldn't...

1237
01:25:17.362 --> 01:25:21.741
I got a, uh, call from my dad,
and he was, you know, in tears.

1238
01:25:21.741 --> 01:25:23.785
That was October 26th.

1239
01:25:23.785 --> 01:25:28.039
I think the parole
hearing was like the 20th,

1240
01:25:28.039 --> 01:25:31.501
20th or 21st. I should
remember the date, but–

1241
01:25:31.501 --> 01:25:35.922
Seventy-six-year-old David Gilbert will be
released from a correctional facility.

1242
01:25:39.759 --> 01:25:44.973
These officers with vests
on and guns and, and, you know,

1243
01:25:44.973 --> 01:25:47.100
I don't know what they thought, that I

1244
01:25:47.100 --> 01:25:50.145
would try to run away when I'm being paroled.

1245
01:25:50.145 --> 01:25:52.856
So, we stayed in the lobby,
huddled up, and with,

1246
01:25:52.856 --> 01:25:54.941
with a bouquet of flowers in hand,

1247
01:25:54.941 --> 01:25:58.486
looking at every approaching car to
wonder if that was the one

1248
01:25:58.486 --> 01:26:00.864
that was gonna drop him off.

1249
01:26:02.073 --> 01:26:04.909
And we are entering New York City at rush hour,

1250
01:26:05.535 --> 01:26:08.413
and they have their own individual car.

1251
01:26:12.584 --> 01:26:18.214
A car that could be a Department of
Corrections or Division of Parole car.

1252
01:26:21.301 --> 01:26:24.721
And they're pouring greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere,

1253
01:26:25.597 --> 01:26:30.310
the irrationality of
capitalism and individualism.

1254
01:26:30.643 --> 01:26:32.353
There's a car there.

1255
01:26:33.688 --> 01:26:35.356
Pulled up on the curb.

1256
01:26:47.327 --> 01:26:51.831
And I said, can I go embrace
them? And he said, yeah.

1257
01:26:51.831 --> 01:26:57.337
At that point I was no longer a
prisoner. I was a parolee.

1258
01:27:34.123 --> 01:27:36.542
He didn't expect to come home and,

1259
01:27:36.542 --> 01:27:39.796
and have my mother's health
take such a precipitous decline.

1260
01:27:45.593 --> 01:27:50.515
We had a week of joyous grand-parenting
together, and I told Kathy that

1261
01:27:50.515 --> 01:27:55.520
her golden smile was passed on
to Aiden and continues with him.

1262
01:28:01.484 --> 01:28:07.073
We, uh, hoped to make it past the recall,
so that Chesa wouldn't have to deal...

1263
01:28:07.073 --> 01:28:11.327
She wasn't able to speak anymore.
I don't know what she could hear,

1264
01:28:11.327 --> 01:28:16.791
but I got in bed next to
her and said, hold on.

1265
01:28:16.791 --> 01:28:19.794
Chesa’s coming.

1266
01:28:22.839 --> 01:28:26.592
The longtime prison activist
and educator, Kathy Boudin,

1267
01:28:26.592 --> 01:28:29.762
who died at the age of 78, May 1st.

1268
01:28:29.762 --> 01:28:32.807
Kathy Boudin was a former member
of the Weather Underground,

1269
01:28:32.807 --> 01:28:36.394
served 22 years in prison.
After her release, uh,

1270
01:28:36.394 --> 01:28:41.816
Kathy Boudin co-founded the
Center for Justice at Columbia University.

1271
01:28:41.816 --> 01:28:43.484
He and I were able to be with her

1272
01:28:43.484 --> 01:28:45.361
at her bedside when she died,

1273
01:28:45.361 --> 01:28:50.283
listening to the same Nina Simone
album that they listened to

1274
01:28:50.283 --> 01:28:53.161
when she brought me into the world.

1275
01:28:53.161 --> 01:28:56.664
Kathy's dead, but fire doesn't die.

1276
01:28:56.664 --> 01:29:02.837
Light, and heat, and love, and
desire go on and on, and so does she.

1277
01:29:02.837 --> 01:29:05.923
Rest in power. Sister, comrade.

1278
01:29:18.561 --> 01:29:23.483
I loved my mom. If, um,

1279
01:29:24.359 --> 01:29:28.863
if she were here, she'd be, she'd be watching

1280
01:29:30.031 --> 01:29:32.158
your show. Um,

1281
01:29:32.867 --> 01:29:35.787
she loved watching.

1282
01:29:35.787 --> 01:29:37.622
She loved watching your show.

1283
01:29:37.622 --> 01:29:42.293
She was fighting cancer for seven
years, and she lived long enough

1284
01:29:42.293 --> 01:29:47.340
to welcome my son home from
the hospital when he was born.

1285
01:29:47.340 --> 01:29:51.302
She, she lived long enough to welcome
my father home after 40 years in prison.

1286
01:29:51.302 --> 01:29:53.137
And we miss her.

1287
01:30:04.107 --> 01:30:08.861
And everybody said it had a way
of making everybody feel like

1288
01:30:08.861 --> 01:30:12.949
they are family. She didn't just
build movements, she built families.

1289
01:30:13.282 --> 01:30:15.243
Kathy Boudin,

1290
01:30:15.243 --> 01:30:20.123
a sister in the fight for
justice to so many of us

1291
01:30:20.123 --> 01:30:24.419
gathered here today, an
extraordinarily passionate woman.

1292
01:30:24.877 --> 01:30:28.339
Kathy taught us how
important community is.

1293
01:30:33.469 --> 01:30:39.475
She gave us the courage and capacity
to realize we could reinvent ourselves,

1294
01:30:39.475 --> 01:30:43.020
and make amends in meaningful ways.

1295
01:30:43.020 --> 01:30:46.732
If only there were a place where the
living and the dead could meet, to tell

1296
01:30:46.732 --> 01:30:50.862
their tales, to weep,
I would reach for you,

1297
01:30:50.862 --> 01:30:53.281
not so that you could forgive me,

1298
01:30:53.281 --> 01:30:57.952
but so that you could know that I
have no pride for what I have done,

1299
01:30:57.952 --> 01:31:01.998
only the wisdom and
regret that came too late.

1300
01:31:02.331 --> 01:31:07.420
And her legacy will live on through
the work that so many of us are doing.

1301
01:31:07.420 --> 01:31:11.591
Rest in power. My sister
Kathy, I love you.

1302
01:31:13.509 --> 01:31:18.431
We all have a way to contribute to
reimagining what a system of justice would look like.

1303
01:31:23.936 --> 01:31:27.273
We do begin with the race drawing
national attention tonight,

1304
01:31:27.273 --> 01:31:31.027
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is out.

1305
01:31:31.027 --> 01:31:32.195
I know you're excited.

1306
01:31:32.195 --> 01:31:35.615
Finally, S.F. voters had enough and
disposed of their hard left DA

1307
01:31:35.615 --> 01:31:38.618
like a used condom in
the Tenderloin District.

1308
01:31:52.548 --> 01:31:55.218
We have two systems of justice.

1309
01:31:55.218 --> 01:31:57.428
We have one for the wealthy and the well connected,

1310
01:31:57.428 --> 01:31:59.514
and a different one for everybody else.

1311
01:31:59.514 --> 01:32:03.059
And that's exactly what we are fighting to change.

1312
01:32:03.059 --> 01:32:07.980
We are just getting started, because
we knew that fixing a system that has

1313
01:32:07.980 --> 01:32:11.609
failed us, not just for
decades, but for generations,

1314
01:32:11.609 --> 01:32:16.447
was not the work of one year,
or one term, of one man or woman,

1315
01:32:16.447 --> 01:32:18.032
or one office.

1316
01:32:18.032 --> 01:32:19.659
It is work that requires

1317
01:32:19.659 --> 01:32:22.495
a sustained social movement.

1318
01:32:22.495 --> 01:32:26.958
The movement is alive and well from
coast to coast, from north to south.

1319
01:32:26.958 --> 01:32:30.461
This is a movement, not
a moment in history.

1320
01:32:36.259 --> 01:32:37.301
For decades,

1321
01:32:37.301 --> 01:32:39.470
we've had a criminal justice system that

1322
01:32:39.470 --> 01:32:42.139
has devastated Black and Brown community.

1323
01:32:43.391 --> 01:32:44.850
When we invest in those communities,

1324
01:32:44.850 --> 01:32:46.644
then we can dramatically

1325
01:32:46.644 --> 01:32:47.520
reduce the amount of

1326
01:32:47.520 --> 01:32:49.105
people that we incarcerate.

1327
01:32:49.105 --> 01:32:50.439
The collateral damage of locking

1328
01:32:50.439 --> 01:32:53.109
so many people up is enormous.

1329
01:32:53.734 --> 01:32:57.488
We can't keep doing the same old
thing and expect different results.

1330
01:32:58.531 --> 01:33:00.241
We can talk about it all we want,

1331
01:33:00.241 --> 01:33:00.992
but until you're willing

1332
01:33:00.992 --> 01:33:02.577
to lay something down,

1333
01:33:02.577 --> 01:33:04.203
nothing's gonna change.

1334
01:33:04.203 --> 01:33:06.038
Black lives matter!

1335
01:33:06.455 --> 01:33:08.374
We've made a movement happen.

1336
01:33:08.374 --> 01:33:09.250
...Don’t shoot!

1337
01:33:09.417 --> 01:33:10.334
This movement,

1338
01:33:10.334 --> 01:33:11.502
this new wave

1339
01:33:11.502 --> 01:33:12.628
of prosecutors and

1340
01:33:12.628 --> 01:33:14.463
reform-minded leaders,

1341
01:33:14.463 --> 01:33:15.631
is here to stay.

1342
01:33:17.675 --> 01:33:18.843
We have to do the work

1343
01:33:18.843 --> 01:33:21.762
to hold those in office accountable.

1344
01:33:22.430 --> 01:33:23.389
How do you make sure that whoever you

1345
01:33:23.389 --> 01:33:26.809
elected stays true to what they promised?

1346
01:33:27.268 --> 01:33:31.397
You have a lot more power than you know.

1347
01:33:32.523 --> 01:33:34.817
Everybody has a role to play.

1348
01:33:34.984 --> 01:33:37.445
Reform bail, reform bail, reform bail!

1349
01:33:37.445 --> 01:33:39.572
It's a battle between those who believe

1350
01:33:39.572 --> 01:33:41.616
America should be inclusive, diverse,

1351
01:33:41.616 --> 01:33:43.909
and equal for all, and those who don't.

1352
01:33:43.909 --> 01:33:45.328
We're on the right side of history,

1353
01:33:45.328 --> 01:33:46.412
but we have to fight.

1354
01:33:46.412 --> 01:33:48.748
Black lives matter! Black lives matter!

1355
01:33:48.748 --> 01:33:51.709
We believe in care and not cages,

1356
01:33:51.709 --> 01:33:54.253
people and not prisons,

1357
01:33:54.253 --> 01:33:56.714
jobs and not jails.

1358
01:33:57.340 --> 01:33:59.759
I wanna make sure that my kids

1359
01:33:59.759 --> 01:34:02.678
and everyone around has a more fair system

1360
01:34:02.678 --> 01:34:04.305
when they grow up.

1361
01:34:06.349 --> 01:34:09.018
We can break the multi-generational

1362
01:34:09.018 --> 01:34:12.021
cycles of violence, trauma, and arrest

1363
01:34:12.021 --> 01:34:14.065
that has led America to incarcerate

1364
01:34:14.065 --> 01:34:16.692
more people than any other nation.

1365
01:34:17.193 --> 01:34:20.571
The whole world is watching!
The whole world is watching!

1366
01:34:20.571 --> 01:34:22.114
This is our time.

1367
01:34:22.114 --> 01:34:24.116
In the streets, in the state legislatures,

1368
01:34:24.116 --> 01:34:26.452
in our Congress, at the ballot box.

1369
01:34:26.452 --> 01:34:28.579
And that's what this moment demands of us.

1370
01:34:28.579 --> 01:34:30.539
Black lives matter!

1371
01:34:31.999 --> 01:34:34.502
It's time for a new America.

1372
01:34:34.502 --> 01:34:35.670
That's what we're marching for.

1373
01:34:35.670 --> 01:34:37.588
That's what we're uprising for.

1374
01:34:40.675 --> 01:34:43.177
The power of the people is greater than
the people in power.

1375
01:34:43.177 --> 01:34:45.596
When do we want it? Now!

1376
01:34:45.596 --> 01:34:47.723
I'm gonna be an activist
for the rest of my life.

1377
01:34:47.723 --> 01:34:49.225
And now is not the time

1378
01:34:49.225 --> 01:34:51.310
to feel like, okay, our work is done.

1379
01:34:51.310 --> 01:34:53.896
Now is the time we go big.

1380
01:34:53.896 --> 01:34:54.563
When you come after them,

1381
01:34:54.563 --> 01:34:56.941
they’re gonna come after you.

1382
01:34:56.941 --> 01:34:58.776
You’ve gotta continue to build community.

1383
01:34:58.776 --> 01:35:01.445
You've gotta continue the
public education work.

1384
01:35:01.445 --> 01:35:04.657
And you've gotta be principled,
no matter what they throw at you.