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It was daunting for a 140-pound 19-year-old, who had not yet had to shave, to be entering an American prison with a life sentence, especially when the system has no interest in rehabilitating you or helping you reintegrate into society. The greed of the prison industrial complex squeezing slave profits out of imprisoned people through the exploitation of the 13th amendment and the brutal system set up to limit opportunity usually leaves most who walk through the gates hopeless and abandoned.
Dorsey Nunn, a formerly incarcerated individual, co-director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC) and co-founder of All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working to secure their civil and human rights, explains to host Robert Scheer how his prison experience is rare but demonstrates that it is possible to make it out of San Quentin’s cells a changed person, with the hope of helping others.
Nunn’s book, “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection,” co-written with former Los Angeles Times reporter Lee Romney, paints the picture of Nunn’s life. Specifically, it points to how the lived experience and wisdom of his fellow prisoners, some who were veterans of the Black Panthers, such as Geronimo Pratt, and the education he received from reading books by Angela Davis and George Jackson, were fundamental to his story of resilience and resurrection.
Nunn’s story is an indictment not only of what goes on inside prison but what happens afterward in explaining “the box.” That refers to the empty square on a form to be checked on employment, healthcare and childcare documents that ask if you ever committed a felony. Nunn explains the extent to which that box affects someone’s life and resources: “The box is an economic question and we started getting into the fight to ban the box because with employment came healthcare, it became the ability to take care of our kids.” It is a fight that among others has led to some of the most significant reforms of the carceral state.
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This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case, Dorsey Nunn, who’s written a hell of a book, a memoir. It’s called “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection.” And it’s a fast read for people who’ve gotten out of the habit of reading books. He had to painfully learn reading from an impaired education, and it’s written, along with his co-writer, Lee Romney, who’s somebody who worked at the LA Times for a long time. But it’s one of the most insightful books that I’ve read about what some people call the prison, incarceration industrial complex, and I just want to say he is now he, Dorsey, is now in a family home.
And when I say family home, his family moved around for several homes, but this is the one that they ended up with. And then he was, after he went off to prison, he was able to come back and as part of putting his life together and it didn’t come simply, there were reversals. It’s an incredible story. But he actually was able to buy the family home and that’s where you are now, right? Yeah. And I want to tell people, tip people off. This is a very positive book. This is a book, yes, it should disturb you. It’s about a very hard, difficult life. But it’s about winning. It’s about winning on issues that we think, some people think, can’t ever do anything about, like prison reform, rehabilitation, don’t throw away people that you jail, don’t jail them as a whole alternative. And it’s a life of real accomplishment. Changes in the law, getting the people in power to pay attention, including the Obama White House, even sometimes the governor of California. I’m not going to say it’s all been made great, but there are some real victories, we’ll get to them. So I don’t want people to think this is a book about you can’t do anything.
That’s the way people respond. No, and it’s a Heyday book, a publisher that publishes a lot of good books about people’s struggle, particularly Native American books. I’ve been accused of talking too much in these intros and I want to turn it over to you, but I want to make a little historical note. You’re in Menlo Park, for people who don’t know that part of Northern California, it’s also near East Palo Alto. East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park are the opposite to the communities that we know about, Palo Alto where Stanford is, Menlo Park, a very prosperous community, these are two of the most prosperous communities in America.
And yet you’ve got the freeway cutting off what basically has a very small concentrated area of primarily black people. And so why don’t we begin with that? This was not growing up in Detroit. It was growing up in what most people around there thought was the most ideal, wonderful place to live. And I bring it up as an autobiographical note. I actually worked in Menlo Park before you were born. I worked there in the early sixties at Ramparts Magazine. We were housed there and I thought, wow, I’m going out to one of the richest communities I would commute there. And you were on the other side of the tracks. And when people talked about the other sidetracks, they made it almost sound folkloric. That’s where black people live, that’s where the maids live or something. But, whenever I was around Stanford, or in Menlo Park, or in Palo Alto, it was almost never referred to. Who are the human beings who live there?
And in the first very powerful section of your book, you describe growing up under really, truly oppressive, dismal circumstances that the people at Stanford say would have not a glimmer of understanding about. So why don’t you tell us about the first section of the book, until you’re 19 and you’re sent off to prison.
Dorsey Nunn: First of all, I think that my parents came down from South San Francisco, moved here, and they were pursuing the American dream. This was the suburbs and this was the place where we had a backyard. This was the place where they had a bathroom that had a bathtub in it because they, initially when I was born, used to bathe me in a tub. But when we moved down here, I moved in about 1954, 1955, and I was just going to kindergarten, but my family, I could sense the fear that my family was up under because at the same time that we were moving in, there was a mass exodus of white, folks that was in the area, and that’s before I had acquired the language of, white flight. That’s before I acquired the language of blockbusting, redlining and all of that other stuff, because all I was was a kid. And I knew that people walked us to school, not because we could get lost. They walked us to school in part because we could get hurt. At least that’s the fear that I sense. And, one Christmas…
Scheer: Hurt by white people.
Nunn: Hurt by white people. I got articles of Mrs. Bailey being interviewed when they talked about people burning trash on the yards, ‘cause a lot of stuff, once I got out of prison and I was educated, I could actually read about and when I got the first bicycle down here, that was the bicycle that made my day. It was already tweaked out. It looked like real greatness, something that I terribly wanted because I had already learned to ride on a friend’s borrowed bicycle. And then a couple of weeks later, after getting the bike and doing the Christmas holiday, when you was out for two weeks what happened was the police pulled up on us when I was on the corner of, Hamilton and Hollyburn and they chimed siren and they stopped us and stopped me and turned the bike upside down.
And they said it didn’t have serial numbers and they just put it in the car and he told me it was stolen and I walked back to my house and I was depressed and I’m trying to figure it out, first of all, I don’t think that my father would steal a bicycle. And, and I was thinking, did my father buy a stolen bicycle? Did my brother steal a bicycle and give it to me for Christmas? All these things, but at the end of the day, what I actually thought was that my father loved me enough to procure a bicycle that he gave me for Christmas. But in retrospect, when I started looking at things and looking at how I grew up. I have other memories too. I remember white flight and what happened in white flight, people were leaving all kinds of stuff, getting out the neighborhood. It didn’t have to be stolen, they could have left a bicycle just like they left refrigerators and other things because as people were moving, they were moving out in a real, at a brisk rate. My co author, when I started telling her the story, Lee Romney, was the co-author, and she used to be a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, an investigative reporter.
She started checking facts. Then, at a certain point, she checked a hearing that they had in San Francisco in 1960, which was probably, six years after I had moved in or five years after I had moved to East Palo Alto. And what she found that they had the hearing. And I think that some real estate person, real estate realtor, had said that he had did 30 houses or 60 houses in a 30 day period. That was the white flight that I was describing to Lee. But at the point that I was talking to Lee, I had language because I had learned how to read in prison, and so like the first several, contacts I had with the police was more about racism than it was crime. So no matter what the teacher told me when I was in school, the police was telling me I was something else and other people that had left and fled to community have fled to community in a different way. So you know how they talk about the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, that presumption didn’t necessarily apply to me as a kid, didn’t apply to me when I was an adult.
And I think that presumption, that’s being denied fundamentally to Black and brown people may, result in probably 90 percent of the people pleading guilty because they don’t think they can get a fair trial. There was a lot of those people that probably locked up that, after you’ve been sitting in a county jail and being denied bail don’t necessarily mean that you’re guilty. It means that, your decision to actually plead guilty is a reasonable choice between the lesser of two evils.
Scheer: Just to set the history, because we tend to forget history or not know it. There had been actually advances in civil rights as a result of the war, World War II, even though the military was segregated. It brought people into movement, there were a lot of Black people in the military, brown people, and so forth. And in San Francisco, you had actually a progressive union movement, particularly the Longshoremen Warehousemen Union, which was one of the unions in the country that didn’t discriminate, the way a lot of others did.
You had some of that in automobile too. And you had people like Willie Brown, who goes on to be a very powerful politician, coming from Mineola, Texas and seeing the Bay Area as a place where you could be Black and free and so forth. And the hysteria about busing and scaring all these white people and racism entering the discussion turned this upside down. And that’s what the white, just for people not familiar with it, what the white flight was really all about, was scaring people that the coming of Black people into their neighborhood, and it was a total denial of the supposed extension of human rights after the war and the Bay Area was a laboratory of that.
And what happened, and, I would like to get into that. you found yourself on the receiving end of this racism as far as just ordinary youthful life, right? And the schools weren’t good. Suddenly, buy a house, the value of the neighborhood would go down and what have you. So set the stage because we want to get to the prison system, which you have so effectively transformed. But this is where things went awry, right?
Nunn: I think that things went awry there. So while I’m being tried for a capital offense, I’m sitting there thinking, how in the hell did I put myself in this situation? Yeah. Later on, as I started to mature, it wasn’t just the “I” question. It was a question of I may be in this situation, but there is a broader analysis that should be had. And that stemmed from, it wasn’t just white flight, it was tripping educational systems. It was tripping income. It was collapsing the property values. There’s a whole bunch of other things that was happening, and law enforcement wasn’t just functioning just as equal law enforcement.
They were towing the line about, if there was a wall and there was guards at the wall, Bayshore Highway and Highway 101 when you’re crossing that, you cross it into areas. They didn’t ever say that you couldn’t be here, but they definitely can make you feel unwelcome to actually crossing that freeway. And your senses would go up, all of that stuff. And as a result of that, that in part shaped who I thought I was when I was growing up until I was sitting in a jail cell being tried for a capital offense. When I was being tried for a capital offense, I still didn’t have the language. I still hadn’t shaved and I was getting, I was facing at least a life sentence at the minimum, and that’s what wind up, and I, at the point of me going to prison, I had never thought about violence the way that I thought about it in prison.
Scheer: Take us there. You were, so you’re 19 when this happens, right?
Nunn: I’m 19. I’m weighing about 145 pounds and I’m getting ready when they arrested me, because the crime was committed probably in crimes committed in Newark. And when I qualified for residency in Alameda County and in Oakland, because they drug me to the Oakland County Jail to try me…
Scheer: For people who don’t know, Newark is not the Newark of New Jersey. It’s a small town in Northern California.
Nunn: In Northern California also and so they tried me and I was sitting in jail. And, to the most part, I didn’t know anybody in jail. The thing that I used to look out the window and peer out the window at the bars, I would peer out the window and look through the bars because these other guys says, that’s where UAP Newton lived. He lived over there across the lake. and we got all excited. And in fact, the next person that, when I got tried for first degree murder and got convicted, my judge is the name of the judge that the airport is named after, Lionel Wilson. Yeah. And the juvenile hall is named after the second attorney that I had that was tried and his name was Wilmont Sweeney. and that was the most successful black people that I knew.
Scheer: And they were considered progressive leaders in the community. Yeah. And, yet Lionel Wilson was the person who sent you off to prison, right?
Nunn: No, Lionel Wilson didn’t send me off to prison. Lionel Wilson, it wasn’t like I just strode silently into the night. I got found guilty and we started fighting right then we start physically fighting in the courtroom right then. And at that point, if I had ever wore a leather coat in the town, it was a fashion statement. I wasn’t politically conscious. I just knew that, what was going down was going to wreck whatever my life was going to be. And I responded to it when they came back in and said, guilty, we started fighting in the courtroom. It wasn’t like, but that was, for me, a logical approach.
Scheer: But in your case it was really a question of whether you would inform on the person who did it.
Nunn: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that, I could have easily cut a deal, for a lesser sentence in the event that I had informed. In fact, probably the only time that I seen my father cry. Because he was older. He was older than me naturally as my father, but, he knew, essentially when I was, wrestling in this and decided something, he knew what was the outcome and he cried for his son, and he never told me to snitch, he never insisted on me snitching.
I said, what I’m charged for, basically I’m guilty of and and let somebody else come in and take whatever responsibility they need to take, I didn’t feel like I need to, get there, but at the point that I walked in, walked into prison and I walked into the county jail, I was only thinking in terms of I. And at the point that I got to prison, I had never went into the liquor store and never pulled a tricker. I never did kill anybody. And I had never thought about killing anybody. When I got to prison and I seen what was there, which was more Black people than I went to church with, more Black people than I went to high school with and more Black people that I had went to any concert with and as it was being reaped with the smell of good weed, I hadn’t seen that many Black people in concentration in any particular spot.
Not my high school, not anybody, and the person who, I was hitting a on that second incident where they took me for what I thought was a scrap piece of metal and we was playing hitting rocks with it on the other side of the bridge. it was my friend Nate. And when I first got to prison, Nate called me by name. Hey Darcy! And he was happy to see me. So at DVI, I was fearful. Everybody was larger than I was. Everybody was much more muscular. In fact, some people was, curling my body weight for curls when they had weights on the yard, And so Nate maybe a day later or so, need, he seen me again. Ut, at that time I had already seen somebody that was stabbed. And when I said, man, did you see that? When we stand in a chow line, the dude told me, no. And he said, you didn’t see anything either. That was the affirmation.
Scheer: Is Nate the guy who became a lawyer later?
Nunn: He became a lawyer and he became a lawyer without the benefit of a high school diploma. That’s what I’m saying. it’s like when you ask me the question of what kind of bird can’t fly, we all can fly. Even a convict can fly if you’re in Con Air, but Nate was brilliant and what Nate did for me, not only did he welcome me into that particular environment and made me feel safer, And, all the rest of that stuff. The other stuff that he did was that he spotted me with a Louis L’Amour book and a girly magazine. And he asked me, one day he asked me, just, crazily, man, are you planning on being a cowboy? Cause I was reading, cowboy books, or at least struggling to read cowboy books and it wasn’t like I was reading penthouse for the articles.
I was looking at girly magazines because I just, I was turning 20, and, and what Nate started doing was, giving me other read material until he found out I couldn’t really read that well. And, what he started doing was taking me to the bleachers when we had, yard time. And, he started having me read, read to him. In terms of what he did, he probably, changed the value of, what I placed on myself and change the value of what I placed on the community at large. I can remember, reading Soul on Ice. I can remember reading Malcolm X. I can remember reading Invisible Man. I can remember reading, George Orwell, the Animal House and 1984, I can remember, making the distinction and jumping across lines.
He gave me a book about, Adam Smith, he gave me a variety of things to read, but even more importantly, he gave me opportunity to reason at a certain point, in our conversations, I wasn’t mimicking what I read. I started digesting the material that I was reading.
Scheer: One reason, there’s a lot of reasons to buy this book and read it. “What Kind of a Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection.” And it is really quite incredible where the schools that were in the shadow of Stanford University, that’s East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, you didn’t get an education, but you got it in prison. But we don’t want to make it, it seemed like a cheerful opportunity. Your life was threatened at every minute. You’re a 140 pound kid who hasn’t even shaved yet. You’re in with a prison population of much bigger, weightlifting, everything else. You became a weightlifter yourself. And you present a very frightening picture of what was it, your 11 years there and at San Quentin, this is…
Nunn: Not only am I presenting that in the book, I’m saying that I was, being held at the point where it was the most violent part of prison history, violent part of U.S. Prison history. When I walked into prison, it was less than a year from the Marin County shootout, which, Jonathan Jackson was killed. Rachel McGee was seriously injured and, and, he was shot by the police too. The other part that, came was when George Jackson, shortly thereafter, ran into, his untimely death at San Quentin. The other thing that happened is probably less than 30 days or 40 days from the death of Joyce Jackson was the Attica Rebellion, less than four years after I was there was the, four or five years after I was there, it was the kidnap of Patty Hearst and the demand and the robbing of, the Hearst banks, it was, people being delivered free food in the middle of the film or in other areas.
Walking out in probably 1979, it was, the rebellion in New Mexico. It was, over a hundred, people being stabbed the first year that I was in prison. So it was not just, me. That was a history that was unique. When I got to the yard, the yard was emerging and bubbling with people talking about not only themselves, but how did we all wind up in this situation? What Nate did for me was to, solve a puzzle was how come so many Black people was in prison? And I thought that at a certain point, we were all destined to be in prison, at least all of us that was there, when at a certain point, I was thinking, maybe it’s an employment question, and then when I seen other white people there, the other parts of it is that a lot of them had, political views, that was based in, part on racism.
The other thing that I also thought that a lot of the white peoples that were serving time also represented that there was a class question about this. But at first, until I started to read, and start getting into, political education classes on the yard, because we had political education classes on the yard, we were talking about this stuff, we were actually, wondering how come they didn’t sell natural combs inside of the canteen while we had so many black people with naturals, so all of those, things that we was talking about was, some points of who ultimately made up of me and, and the price of the education, the real price of education was that I made promises the promises I made to other people were educating me that I would return to the community, an asset, not a liability.
The other thing that I committed to myself privately is, I would not forget, like every, every sister, the implementation of the death penalty. The re-implementation of the death penalty at every demonstration, except for two, I helped moderate that demonstration in front of San Quentin. It wasn’t like I just worked in front of San Quentin. I worked in San Quentin trying to dismantle San Quentin. I worked in San Quentin trying to dismantle a structural racism that was in play. You mentioned, probably earlier when we were talking, you mentioned, the prison industrial complex. That’s probably an obscure term out of a Mike Davis book that me, Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Julia Sidesbury, Dylan Rodriguez and a host of other people introduced into public speaking. It was a term in the book that probably sat on the shelf. And what we started doing was actually start talking about the marriage between profit and punishment.
Scheer: You got a terrific education in prison. It was a harrowing experience. And first of all, in this prison industrial complex, we should explain anybody who goes up the 99 or the 5 or the major highways in California, they go from one prison to another. It’s the main economy. In rural California, outside of agriculture. And, there aren’t too many white people picking crops. And, it’s mostly, Brown people. So for white people, the real jobs are the prison jobs in much of California. So this prison industrial complex is not some fantasy.
It’s a reality of the economy. in the most prosperous, important state in the United States, the fifth largest economy in the world, has the prison industrial complex at the center. And these guards that you describe, they’re not there to rehabilitate you, they’re not there to help you become a more law abiding human. no, they’re quite punitive and destructive. And for them, that’s their job. That’s what they’re doing. And, I think your description of life there, yes, I don’t want to sugarcoat it in any way, it’s just horrible. But the fact of the matter is, you did run into people like Geronimo Pratt, who actually had been in the U. S. military, and then had been in the Black Panthers, and had been framed, right? You met all kinds of people in prison, who were studying, who were thinking, who were challenging, and even though you started out as a, 140 pound short kid.
Nunn: And about time I had met Geronimo, I was ripping, phone books in half. I was pushing probably 340 pounds on the bench press. Yeah, these people saved you. Hey, absolutely.
Scheer: And I want to get to the name of your organization because it pays tribute to that.
Nunn: In fact, the name of the organization, first of all, is Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. The other one that I created was a, the political apparatus and political arm of that is, All of Us or None. Named after Bertolt Brecht’s poem. And when, we created that, and I’m bad at naming stuff. At first, I was…
Scheer: let me just interrupt you for a second. You say that’s based on a Bertolt Brecht poem. I suspect many people listening to this show don’t know who the hell Bertolt Brecht was, but one of the great Literary figures, writers and so forth in Germany and, and I was amazed in your book, you’re discussing, Bertolt Brecht and you discuss a lot of people. You got a lot of very important books handed to you in prison or people. So I want to get across to people about this book that you’ve written. I want to push the book. “What Kind of a Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection.” I’m talking to a guy here who not only beefed himself up and got muscles and could tear a phone book in half so he could survive in this environment, but who became truly literate, knowledgeable, an intellectual.
I don’t want to curse you out here or anything, but you were introduced to really important works of politics and literature and everything else. And the level of conversation you describe in the prison is higher than I hear at the university where I teach. I don’t know how many students at our school know who Bertolt Brecht was.
Nunn: Yeah, when I got out of prison, I went straight to Cal State Hayward. And I thought that was my true measure.
Scheer: You’d already racked up a couple of years of college education.
Nunn: I had went from the sixth grade to two years of college, and then I went to a four year university. And, and being that I didn’t know what criminal justice was, I enrolled in criminal justice as a major, and I was surrounded by law enforcement. the other thing that I thought that, books that I read for, entertainment, they weren’t reading at all. So it was like, I had more, challenging conversations with people that was on the prison yard than I did in college, because they actually read and they actually questioned, they actually would challenge ideas.
Here’s one of the things I, you know, I read a book, A Soul on Ice. Which, the first thing I, thought about was. Who in the hell is Elridge Cleaver writing this book for, since all of us sitting in prison is at about the sixth grade level , we had to read the book and then we’d go in there, had to discuss the book. Then I started thinking about, what did Elridge fall for? what was his, commitment offense? And then it, came out to be a sexual commitment offense, I think it was. And I started questioning. What was it about that? So that, that was the point that I make a transition with Nate. Nate was saying, you’re not just mimicking. I’m saying, I’m also exploring who am I supposed to be following?
Scheer: Your book is an invitation to critical thinking. And, I mentioned before Ramparts Magazine was in Menlo Park. Our publisher was there, living there, Ed Keating. And then because of Beverly Axelrod, who was, Eldridge is one of his lawyers, that book actually was published, with McGraw Hill, but with Ramparts, Soul and Ice. And then we moved up to San Francisco. Eldridge actually worked in the office and I knew Eldridge. But in your book, you’re quite critical of Eldridge. You don’t cut him any slack at all. You call him a misogynist.
Nunn: I was critical of Eldridge, that was a gift of people who were educating me. It wasn’t like, like Nate didn’t look down on me because I had the lack of education, what he did was encourage me to get more education.
Scheer: But to think critically.
Nunn: To think critically.
Scheer: You take issue with Eldridge.
Nunn: I took issue with Eldridge. The thing that stood out for me, was that I was somewhat reluctant to go because everybody else that was reading around me political material held him so highly. And then, when I went to the thing and I says, I think Eldridge Cleaver is possibly not only misogynistic. I think that he was possibly a rapist. And I think that some parts of what I had read was, a theory that actually supported some stuff. And, that’s when they had started allowing me to actually read in front of everybody else. It wasn’t like they just rejected it. Other people said, Oh man, I don’t want to hear that.
But it wasn’t like they rejected it. They thought that I had the ability to do a critical analysis. And they thought that I was, like when I read George Jackson book, was contraband. People were copying it, had assignments to copy George Jackson book that was floating around. I read George Jackson book on a legal stationery copied in longhand while I was in some parts of a various situation where people are sliding, the book, what they call fishing and slide it into big banking off a wall, slide it into a sale, three sales down and, you would get a chapter and you would be saying, who got chapter one, who got chapter six? It didn’t all come at me. I had to read it again because it didn’t come in a sequential order. It came as a result of who got finished writing the chapter first, And that’s the value of what it was that we were doing, it’s not only did I run into a Geronimo, I ran into Jalil, I ran into a whole bunch of people that, was there for their politics was formed purely when they were on the streets.
They were members of the Black Panther Party. They were other people. So like when I’m stepping out on this question about Eldridge, I was stepping out into a circle and I was questioning some of those people. It wasn’t like, hey, man, get the hell out of here. He’s a divine person. That’s it. He was a human being that they seen that was a leader and he had earned something and earned respect. And I still respected Eldridge, even though I don’t necessarily think, the literature that I read was conducive to where we wanted to go.
Scheer: Yeah. The book, again, “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly,” and it’s a play on something that came out of Mike Davis, incredible author and analyst, but it’s the jailbird and it’s a dumb joke because you’re trapped in prison. but there’s a reality to it because you actually learn to fly in prison. No thanks to the guards, by the way, this book is not, we don’t do rehabilitation in America. And I want to say something about the race, by the way, I, just before I started this, I went and looked up the most recent figures or who are the 100, 1,230,000 people currently in state and federal prison, 31 percent are white, 31%, 69 percent are not white, 32 percent are Black, relatively small part of the American population, 23 percent are Hispanic, 10 percent are mixed race, 2 percent are Native American, something like that. So you have the largest, prison population in the world here, and it’s primarily a population of people of color. And no one really addresses that question, nor do we care at all about rehabilitation and so forth. Now, I could go on talking to you for hours.
Nunn: That’s the second assumption that I was denied. The presumption initially was the presumption of innocence.
Scheer: Yeah.
Nunn: The last presumption was the presumption of rehabilitation. It was structural in nature. It was on the applications for jobs. It was on the applications for housing. It was on the application for student loans in terms of FAFSA at one point.
Scheer: It’s what you call the, second box or the box?
Nunn: It was the box. That was the reason that we created a band, a box in the campaign to…
Scheer: Explain to people about the box because the box…
Nunn: The box was asking the question, have you been convicted of a felony? So just imagine if you hadn’t been to prison, just imagine like the prison sentence was like a mortgage payment. Suppose you paid your mortgage all the way off and people were still asking for money. The box is an economic question that actually, and by the way, we started banning the box and getting into the fight to ban the box because with employment came healthcare, it became the ability to take care of our kids. It became the ability to feed our kids. It became something that we, and we only landed at employment first. So here’s where the other box part of it is. In Berkeley, they can’t ask you that about housing. In Oakland, they can’t ask you that about housing. We plan on actually getting people not to ask the question because a certain group of people are being denied access to housing. That comes as a result of, not a bad credit check, but a criminal background check. And we, changing the language and, at first. I wrestled with what we were doing, we changed the narrative. Say for instance, I say criminal, criminal check, my members would say, a conviction history. So we changing the language and we changed it from convict to formerly incarcerated people.
We’re changing the language because just as other people that they were committing acts of war with, the first thing that went was they were defining those people as something less than human. So you can think about what we call the Vietnamese people when you were in the Vietnamese crisis. Think about what we care about, how we characterize Arab people, we saying stuff and we actually, setting up something that actually means that you don’t have to respect that body of people. And by the way, it wasn’t what I went to prison for. The real question is what did I do with the lessons that I learned? The lessons that I learned meant that, when they asked me about banning the box, they asked me if I was crazy. 267 million people stay in the jurisdiction where the box had been banned. When I spoke to the AFL-CIO, what I told them about my father, I told him that my father attended more union meetings than he did the little league games with all of his sons had played.
What I told him was I’m not expecting unions to get me for something that I want for myself. I’m just asking him to open up the door so I can walk into the house to get the stuff myself. The question of ban the box was a question of what I paid for with my taxes, probably because 25 percent of the whole nation works in the government job that I don’t have access to. What it is that what happens when I come home from prison and, and, I just had left people that were strong, that were unbroken, that get out of prison and walk into spaces where there were broken people that I could see. Their dreams had been deferred, their dreams had been diminished, and they weren’t driving.
So when I first walked into the pool hall, talking about Aristotle, they didn’t know nobody even understood what I was talking about. And when they started telling me about the things that I used to do with them in high school, what I was asking was, why are you talking about yesterday? Where are we going right now? When I came up with a drug problem for three years, what I did was when I stopped using drugs, I immediately built Free At Last, which still sits in the middle of East Palo Alto. The basis of, what I had learned to do was, when we built the drug program, we did a couple things. We had three objectives. Our three objectives was to stop the crack epidemic. To stop the AIDS pandemic. And to stop the level of violence in East Palo Alto last year. Years earlier, they had been named the murder capital of the United States. Last year, they didn’t have a murder that was committed in East Palo Alto.
When I think about the Ban the Box, that gets me into the White House. What gets me into the White House and it gets me into the Justice Department on the way to the White House, because we started jamming up the Justice Department when he was talking about second chances. And we were saying, how about calling it something different? And we haven’t achieved that yet. How about calling it opportunities? Because chances is what I take in casinos. Opportunities is what I do and take advantage of when I’m making progress and feed myself. So like It’s certain things about the narrative that’s off.
The other parts…
Scheer: Before you get to the other part, you mentioned the White House. Talk about how you go from San Quentin to the White House.
Nunn: How I go to San Quentin from the White House, was the work that we had been doing had came to the attention of Barack Obama. And it came to the attention of other people. We started thinking about who do we have contact with? And how did we get there? We got there, in part, we first got to, to the, start meeting with the Justice Department.
Scheer: You got Eric Holder, right?
Nunn: I got Eric Holder, but, I got Carol Mason, which was a deputy to Eric Holder.
Scheer: He was the attorney general. Yeah.
Nunn: And we first went into the Justice Department, I think they gave us some water and we was thinking, man, shouldn’t they, we had the meeting at lunchtime, shouldn’t they break out sandwiches or something. And then, but ultimately what we did was start meeting with the Justice Department and we start saying, who’s on staff that’s in the Justice Department because they were saying the Second Chance Act and nobody that was formerly incarcerated was there. What we left behind was an attorney that was also formerly incarcerated that actually educated themselves and actually got a law degree. His name was Darrell Atkinson and he became the first fellow, for the Justice Department and in the Barack Obama administration. And what he did was told us the target in part, Not Carol, God, I’m slipping her name. Valerie Jarrett. Cause like at a certain point when we slide people’s into position, it’s some other stuff, like when, people actually think about, me in the book, how about some practical lessons?
Do you remember the 1965 Voting Rights Act? How about this? Formerly incarcerated people probably have re-enfranchised more human beings than were re enfranchised by the the 1965 voting right act since then, just on Florida when they did the 2000 election and, they gave us baby Bush. What was the numbers? It was less than a thousand people. And how many people were sitting outside of that system? Millions of people who couldn’t vote because they had a conviction history. In the state of California, and when everything else failed, including, affirmative action, when you had to vote, we also floated during that same period of time, Proposition 17.
We established the rights for 55, 000 prisoners to have a chance at democracy. The other thing is that we are also, under AB 109 we actually enfranchised in California, probably, probably 80, 000 people that was enfranchised here. So at a certain point, a lot of times people talk about rehabilitation. The question that should be, if I’m rehabilitated, shouldn’t I hold the rest of society to that particular level of rehabilitation? Should I not hold society accountable for racism, sexism, classism, which actually is a ill that actually impacts a greater number of people. What is this thing that, you know, and I’m trying to tell something in such a rudimentary way with this book, because I think that if I get too out there, That people may not pick up the book, read the book, or actually think about it in a real critical way.
So it’s like when we talked about, the prison industrial complex, I think that, we was thinking about prison abolition. When I told you about, we talked about the marriage of, of profit and you talk about the prison industrial complex, which is, essentially the practice of, marrying profit and punishment. Here’s the real ugly reality in California. One of the ugly realities in California under article one, section six, you still claim as a society to practice slavery, the right to practice slavery on the government level. They call it involuntary servitude. They mentioned it again in the 13th amendment. So people are still laboring without consent.
Scheer: You describe in the book working in the prison, how much were you paid?
Nunn: The maximum amount of money that I was paid was 32 cents an hour. The maximum amount of money that I was paid for working a month. It’s $32 a month, so at a certain point and the maximum amount of money that they gave me to start this fresh new life with was $200 gate money, and they’ve been giving that probably since the, the early seventies, no account for inflation, no account for anything. And they say, start your life over. One of the things that stood out for me.
Scheer: They dump you back in the old neighborhood with a couple hundred bucks and say start your life over. I want to end this by talking about your leadership, that’s the right word, and I want to tell people about why they should buy the book and read it and pass it around, is that it’s a very positive book. This is not a bummer to read. Yes, the prison conditions are horrible, but that should propel you to action to change it. There’s no excuse for it. we have every major religious leader. The Pope washes the feet of prisoners. People have a soul, the soul is to be valued. That’s what rehabilitation is all about.
And we’ve lost that idea. Cynicism has dominated. Your life is a life of rehabilitation with some reversals and yet you picked yourself up. And I want to get that across to people, because you actually get out of San Quentin. And the last thing in the world I would think you would want to do is go in to San Quentin as a legal aid worker, right? And that’s what you did. Tell people about that. that’s incredible you voluntarily hooked up with this outfit in a little office right there I’ve seen that at the out gate to San Quentin and you’re going in there taking the testimony of people
Nunn: I went in and that’s where I learned my paralegal skills at. At a certain point when I got muscular, I asked myself a question. Did I want to be a piano mover? It’s the same question that Nate asked. Where am I going with your education? Then I figured out, I had been reading the newspaper and everybody kept giving me the, the front page and editorial things. And I can see the political shift. And I said, man, let me get the hell out of here before they actually implement a three strikes and you out and raise the price of butter from seven years to life to 25 years to life.
The other couple of things I learned how to read, not only for the politics, I learned how to read for a couple of the things at the time that I went to prison at 19, I had two children. And I felt that if I had a life sentence that they were going to be the only ones living. The other thing that I learned how to read is that I couldn’t imagine them holding me in prison for a lifetime without actually figuring a way out. So I started trying to read in part to learn who didn’t have extradition treaties with the United States. Because if I actually got out, I was going someplace else other than the United States where they couldn’t get me. In fact, at a certain point, I, went over to Cuba to, meet with Assata, even to discuss questions of domestic violence.
I said, what do they do here? Because I’m trying to still say diffraction and stuff. When I got out, what I built was, when you talk about All of Us or None, we have 30 chapters, only 10 of them exist in California. They spread out all across the United States. when people didn’t want to join All of Us or None, we sit down, and what we did was wrote up, wrote a plank program and what we did was created another, umbrella organization called the Formerly Incarcerated Convicted People and Family Movement. And it’s a larger umbrella when they went to fight for an amendment for in Florida, we shipped a thousand people into Florida. And, within a two hour period, through text messaging, emails, and door knocking, we, touched 87,000 people, that’s a movement. Most people connect individual acts of policy change with a individual act.
Maybe they should look at it that, all through the United States, people are rising up to do away with and challenge the notion of the 13th Amendment and the practice of slavery. So the thing that passed when they passed the rights of voting in Florida, Colorado was the first thing that flipped. They flipped and actually took out, involuntary servitude in their constitution. There have been a number of other states since then that have. So in liberal California, we still haven’t been able to do that. We still haven’t been able to actually, question whether or not, should we actually make a question of maintaining slavery, a question of morals, and do we actually want to actually profit off of slaves?
So at a certain point…
Scheer: I, even though I read the book, explain that. To people who haven’t read the book, what you’re talking about here. It’s a very important concept that, we can go a little longer. I just would like you to lay that out. What, Colorado did that California has refused to do.
Nunn: A, what they did was took the, changed the Colorado constitution. That don’t include, the practice of involuntary servitude, involuntary servitude is…
Scheer: the exemption that permitted involuntary servitude.
Nunn: Yeah, that’s what they did. But, maybe people should say, all right, just like I questioned who was Eldridge writing to. Maybe I should question who the constitution was writing to. Cause that’s equally important, so the constitution, they said involuntary servitude, when they weren’t giving Black people an education, maybe they would have said slavery, everybody would have knew they were saying this is an exception to slavery, So like the reality that we, fighting is because of the prison industrial complex in the practice of mass incarceration can’t sustain itself without free labor.
So like you got all kinds of jobs of all kinds of people that’s actually supporting the system and some parts of what they using to support their system is still slavery. That presumption of innocence when I actually think about it, wasn’t a presumption that Black people ever had, if they ever had it, Then how come we got a lottering laws? We got vagrancy laws. How come we, got all of these other laws, pig stealing laws that came immediately after they freed, ended chattel slavery. They weren’t presuming people were innocent. They was presuming them guilty and they were going to actually practice some things that was going to be survival in nature, to the most part, I am extremely, grateful to running into Michael Sattras. I’m extremely grateful to have an opportunity to work at the prison law office because the next group of white people that I met immediately after getting out of prison, actually gave me an opportunity to grow.
Scheer: I want to mention one scene from your book. This fellow, Michael, and what’s his last name?
Nunn: Michael Satrus.
Scheer: Yeah. And he was running this program to advance the rights of people in the prison. It was right outside of San Quentin. And you went to work there. He gave you a job. You asked him, how does one get a job? And he gave you one in his office. And then he had a newborn baby that he brought back from the hospital, his child. And he said to you, could you hold the baby here? Yeah. Here he’s talking to a, buffed out ex-con who’s just been in his office.
Nunn: Arguing and cussing like a sailor, and he handed me, his firstborn child. And I went from cussing to saying coochie coo. And immediately…
Scheer: But that’s an assertion of your humanity, despite what you did, what you’ve been in prison for a instant affirmation of your human holding.
Nunn: But, the other part of it is the play it all the way down. I thought that, the first time that I wrote a partial part of the manuscript, I submitted it to a different publisher. and I submitted, the writings to Michael Satrus, because a couple of times, like when I was angry, frustrated, and all the rest of that stuff, I called Michael. He let me cuss and, tell me, man, you’re still crazy. But here, go, in fact, when I was fighting voting rights, I said, man, I thought we had the right to vote. Michael said, you do. they’re just not necessarily, enforcing it. And then I get into the fight. So a couple of times I, I can get with Michael and says, man, I know you taught me that this was my right. They’re not enforcing it, but the baby that he held, that he gave me to hold, if I play that whole picture out, when I got rejected by another publisher, Michael said, this is an excellent book.
It needs to be out. He says, can I let my daughter Tina read it? Tina read the book. That was the first, his first born child. And at the time I said, yeah, let Tina read it. Cause I, he had two children and I had already identified. One is going to cost you a lot because she’s in the fashion. The other is like extremely, she’s going to follow your lead in terms of what I can see because I stayed with Michael for a minute in Bolinas, which is probably an extraordinary place to live. and what, what Michael, the daughter that Michael gave me, and he asked me, could she read the book? She was the acquisition, editor for Heyday. So, like at a certain point, she was one…
Scheer: So the baby that you held.. , you
Nunn: bet baby that he gave me to hold the whole, yeah.
At the time later on, she was already, she already knew me as a person. She knew me the whole life as a person. She’s the reason your book is at Heyday. Yeah. Yeah. In part, she, Michael says, let me, Michael came over, cause like probably over the last six years. About a 2.5 million dollar building in the next generation because I know we’re in a protracted struggle, right? So when I first started buying the building Michael came over and said man Do this mean that you’re not gonna ask me for any more money and I says well, this is a fundraiser Did you bring the checkbook right now? And by the way, you sued you the last time we had a suit you sued for policy man, did you think I should have got paid? So like we always had those kind of conversations joking, but the, but, she’s also the person who called me, when I was driving down the freeway, that Michael had died and had to pull over off the freeway because Michael wasn’t just my attorney. Michael was my friend. The day that Michael came to visit me what had went down was that my parents knew that I was extremely angry and I was possibly out of control.
What they used to do inside of prisons when they suspected you for smuggling contraband, they would drag you out, drag you to the hospital, have a group of guards that’s over there that would strip off your clothes after you get in a fight and stick the, they, they, hand, and what they call a digital rectal search. Up your butt to try to look for, what’s it called. The first time that I met Michael, I was so angry in terms of his humanity, what he did was sit there and interviewed me and actually helped me work through a process because what I was thinking about, as soon as I step out this room, I’m going to go tell that person who actually said that stuff. That was absolutely untrue. A new asshole. And he asked me if I did something to him. What happens the next time that it would happen to some other person who was just simply going to visit another loved one or another friend that they did that to. So like when we talk about doing policy change, I start working on administrative policy change as a prisoner, as opposed to having somebody being tied down, beat up and having some security or some doctor actually do a digital rectal search.
What we did was actually created a policy that they would actually turn off your water and, for flushing abilities and give you the ability, to sit in the cell until you defecated. That was the policy that we changed initially, but the thing that was the most important. I think the time that Michael met me on his first interview, he saved me and the other person that was going to injure or kill that’s what he was doing for those four hours when he was talking to me and he actually had me reason, because Michael identified that I care about people.
Scheer: So I’m going to end with one last thing because we have it’s very important and we haven’t talked about it. There was a big victory in California because the federal court intervened to put some restraints on solitary confinement. The treatment of people, particularly in the relation to Pelican Bay, probably the most fearsome prison and where people were just put in the hole in solitary confinement for very long periods. And the federal court declared that to be unconstitutional. And your organization played a pivotal role. I know because I called up Anne Weills, who kept going to Pelican Bay. She’s an attorney, my former wife. And I asked her, you know this guy? And she said, without his organization, she said, I don’t think the courts would have moved on that whole thing. So why don’t we end by talking about, you’ve had a number of victories. That’s a pretty big one.
Nunn: A, some of the people that, I was serving time with in 1972, as a result of reading George Jackson books and as a result of respecting George Jackson. They wind up being classified, as gang members. They never thought about the political writings and education that we was actually providing was something different than being a gang member. and they, got shipped out to, Pelican Bay. That was after they built Pelican Bay because Pelican Bay wasn’t existing in 1972. And they claimed, it as the worst of the worst. And they sent, when, the case came up, the Asker case, I was a new executive director of a public interest law, law office without a law degree. I had attorneys working for me at the point that I resigned or actually started, transitioning.
I had 32 employees of which four or five were attorneys at this point. And I went up, because they were on hunger strike and, I went up to see some of the people that I knew, from 19 72 and ’73 because they were holding them in a hole. They had been in a hole for, 20, years.
Scheer: They were in solitary confinement for 20, 30 years?
Nunn: Yeah. That’s what they were doing, right? So I went up and, and one of the peoples that I had seen was, PJ, right? And I knew PJ and I said, man, first question, and I was also doing interviews about, in the event that y’all take it all the way, because who is your because kin? Becasue people had, like they didn’t, some of them didn’t have next of kins. They had died over the course of that period of time, and I went up there and seeing somebody that I knew. And the first thing that struck me was he was as dark, almost as dark as I was when he stepped out into the visiting room.
He was extremely light skinned. Because he hadn’t gotten any sun. And I became fearful because I had visited a number of people and who they spoke, who they held up as the hero was Bobby Sands from the Irish Republican army. And I said, man, didn’t he die, on hunger strike? And I said, how far are y’all going? And he said, as far as we, we got to, I will hold out as long as I can. There was two things that made me take the case for my office to get involved was the people that I had interviewed, that I had knew, and I knew that they were serious. The other thing that made me know that I should take that case is because, they had already lost all of their work life.
They had been in a hole all of that time. They couldn’t take rehabilitative programs because there was none available for ’em, none of that stuff. And I figured like we might need to end the practice. That was probably the first major case that I took, when I was a new director. And I was thinking, man, why would I go up into Pelican Bay? Then I started thinking about Pelican Bay. It was labeled as the worst of the worst. And I can remember, the person that they boiled in Pelican Bay. And scald him because, he was smearing feces over itself. And that’s what the, how they were breaking down and decomposing, decompensating mentally in the Irish Republican Army, hunger strike. I read about some of that stuff. And, and what they did was, took a person out, drug him out of a cell. And because he was smearing feces on the wall in itself, they put him in a hot, a vat of water. And it took off his skin and he became, injured. And, as opposed to being the worst of the worst, he was there for being a car thief. And what they did, was called him seriously. And what he had was a emotional, breakdown, a mental breakdown. And, his name was Von Dirch because some of this stuff, I don’t remember. By just the incident, I started remembering it by people’s names of who they did it to. It’s almost not remembering the name of George Floyd.
So if you get real close to it and you get involved, it’s that way. But what we did was, sue to end long term solitary confinement in Pelican Bay, and we won temporarily for several years. Some of those people got out of the hole and was ultimately released to the general population. Now there’s other parts of the story. I grew up with a lot of people and I seen kids, I’m an old man. I seen kids grow up. So one of the people I seen grow up that I met on the way to visiting Gilbert that was in a New York prison, he was Chesa Boudin’s father, who became the district attorney of San Francisco.
So Chesa Boudin, when he became the district attorney of San Francisco, he was doing re sentencing hearings. And then I called Chesa and I said, Hey, can any of these people that’s in San Francisco County, like PJ, can he get a hearing? Because he hasn’t did anything essentially, except for read George Jackson book. And he can’t have been charged directly with a crime in there. And he did almost the identical crime that I was convicted of. And he had been in prison for 30 something years. The other person who, who plays out my first, the first intern at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children is Pamela Price.
So even when we’re putting people in a position that we do political education with them, immediately upon them finding out who they are, they immediately attack the district attorney. So Pamela Price was a district attorney that’s being attacked in Alameda County right now. Chesa Boudin is a district attorney that they had took them out of office and, and they started attacking them immediately. And, when I went to my homeboys, and I was saying, Conrad’s I’m saying, man, we got to fight for the district attorneys also because they have an impact on who’s being sentenced in the structural practice of racism.
And, so the first one, that I fall for and nobody supported me was Terence Hallinan when he ran, and I think that he ran, in opposition of three strikes and the practice of three strikes laws. So at a certain point, what happened when, once again, I asked the question, what happened when people insisted that I be rehabilitated and I’m not so sure that as a result of the practice of racism, sexism, and classism that it is more than just a me question. It’s more of a larger question. And maybe if you see what my accomplishments are or, you can see that, I’m not, I was never the smartest. I was never the brightest. And I never lifted more weight and I never was larger. Maybe it’s other people in prison that are smarter, brighter, and have more to contribute. I did, and I spent a whole lifetime making a contribution. Scheer: There you go. It’s a good way to wrap it up. And the book, is called, “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection,” Dorsey Nunn, readily available Heyday books. Buy it, read it, discuss it, and it will, I warn you, I’ve said it’s a great read and informative. But it’s going to turn you into an activist if you got any capacity for outrage left in you. So check it out. Outrage is a good thing. Keeps you living longer. I can tell you that. I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW, the excellent FM station in Santa Monica, for posting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, and, see you next week. No, I left out a couple of people, sorry. Max Jones, who does the video, who’s producing it and I want to thank the, J.K.W. Foundation for supplying funding for help us do this on a consistent basis. I think it’s been about six years now. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, an independent ScheerPost podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.
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