For our first fieldwork, we decided to interview Pauline Ross. Pauline Ross was the Attorney State of New York for many years and was a prosecutor at the Department of Justice. With her having experienced many cases, she saw patterns in the judicial system. We asked questions ranging from how she has seen the justice system in her eyes, to cases that she covered.

During the interview with her, we got to learn many things about how prisons are made up of people who are lower class and talked about how she has seen how high prison bail is for prisoners and because of this, they might not be able to pay it. This can lead to people spending a high amount of money to be free or to stay in prison or Rikers which has terrible conditions.

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While interviewing Robert Gangi, we asked if we could court-monitor his organization, PROP. This organization helps count race statistics in court and end bias in court systems. On February 12th, we went to 100 Centre Street, which houses the New York County Criminal Court. We arrived at 10:00, met many people from PROP, and settled into court.

During the cases, we recorded many facts like their race, gender, what they were being accused of, and their sentence. We saw many tragic cases throughout the day. One case was about a man being sentenced and was sent to Rikers Island. One surprising fact we saw inside the court was that 7/10 people having their case that day were African American, and one person was white.

At the end of the day, we met up with Robert Gangi for a closing statement, with him discussing what we saw and the statistics we got. With us learning many things about the court, we gained new insight into the justice system and how its flaws are biased and unfair for many people.

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For our fieldwork, we watched the documentary 13th, which is an eye-opening documentary created by Ava Duvernay that shows the timeline of racism in the justice system and the real world. This shows how long racism has changed forms and found loopholes in the law.

One way that racism has found loopholes is by the war on drugs. In the documentary, we learned many things about the Nixon campaign, and the major thing was how the war on drugs was set up. During Nixon’s election, the war on drugs was fought as a criminal issue, not a health issue. This increased the number of incarceration rates and led people who smoked marijuana to be sent to jail. Because of this, federal spending for local law also increased to almost double the amount because of the mass incarceration. This led to hundreds of thousands of people being sent to jail, and the majority of them were African Americans. Later, the Nixon administration officials admitted that the war on drugs was to get African Americans in jail.

Another way that racism has affected families is with Reagan as president. Reagan’s campaign group made many ads and newsletters that criminalized black families and children of color. During his term, many media depicted black people as evil, which led to more arrests and fear of them. This led to more racism and unjust sentencing.

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Today, we met with Robert Gangi, the founder of the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP). Gangi has been an activist, Public advocate, and community organizer for over 40 years. After working for the Correctional Association for 29 years, he decided to create PROP to end abusive policing techniques that harm many people, including people of color.

While interviewing him, we got to ask many questions about what he does at PROP and how young people care about this issue. One thing that he told us is that since he has been working since the ’60s, he has seen how the political climate has changed and how people fought against Jim Crow laws and the Vietnam War. another thing he noticed during the ’50s is how little activism was happening for young people, which shows how much politicly the United States changed with Nixon being elected and the war on drugs happening, which was a way that Nixon and his party arrested African Americans. The Nixon administration admitted this, which led to a massive prison increase throughout the 70’s and 80’s.

We also got to learn how he got into this career with the District Attorney who worked with the DA office and wanted to change things from the inside. they reached out to Robert and knew about their work, which helped him get into the field.

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