Podcasts: The Hustler Files
The Hustler Files
The Hustler Files – Storytelling That Will Challenge What You Thought You Knew
Join creator and host Lisa Reilly every Saturday morning from 9:32 AM to 10:00 AM, streaming here on WHMP.com, or find us on your favorite podcast platform. Each week, we bring storytelling with grit, purpose, and possibility to break stigmas, reshape narratives, and amplify the voices of justice-involved individuals, advocates, and change-makers. We’ll explore the criminal justice system, addiction recovery, domestic violence, human trafficking, fair-chance employment, and prison reform through powerful storytelling and candid interviews that bring humanity to issues too often overlooked.
Please reach out with questions or comments to thehustlerfiles@outlook.com
The Hustler Files Ep 54
THE NURTURING FATHERS PROGRAM
Rewind 25 years, and for most men, their parenting role was that of bread winner and disciplinarian, like their father before them, and so on. Mark Perlman, a licensed social worker, and councilor saw an opportunity to change that dynamic while the Executive Director of his wife’s counseling center. As Mark so aptly puts it, “I started writing a program that would offer fathers a workbook guide, but as I wrote the program, I felt as if the subject matter was coming through me, rather than from me’. Mark’s program, and soon to be passed on to one of Mark’s sons, Corey, is being facilitated through counseling agencies, the military, social work curriculums and behind the walls of minimum, medium or maximum prisons, across the United States. Mark’s program takes the voluntary participants on a journey from understanding the roots of their own upbringing to developing attitudes and skills that will ultimately, over the course of the program’s 13 weeks, heal their father wound and change the trajectory of their relationship with their children.
The Hustler Files Ep 53
THE HUMAN IMPACT FROM A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE X 5
In 1989 two horrific crimes took place in New York City. The first was the rape and almost death of the woman who would be come to know as the Central Park jogger. The second was the arrest, interrogations, and ultimate prison sentencing of five Black and Latino teenagers, for that crime. A crime they would later be exonerated for, in 2002. It was during her senior year of college in 2003, while interning for a law firm, that Sarah Burns began the arduous process of unearthing the entire story, initially for her college thesis, to understand why and how these five teenagers could have been so falsely convicted. Almost a decade later, Sarah, simultaneously, along with her husband David McMahon, not only published the book, The Central Park Five; A Chronicle of a City Wilding, but along with her father, documentarian, Ken Burns, produced, wrote, and directed a film by the same name. The Central Park Five documentary received numerous awards in 2012/2013 and is still available to watch via streaming.
The Hustler Files Ep 52
THE COURAGE TO BREAK THROUGH THE SOUNDS OF PRISON SILENCE
Noelle Hanrahan was 57 when she attended law school. As a founding member of Prison Radio dot org, Noelle realized that it wasn’t enough to just be a journalist and broadcast the voices of those incarcerated individuals who were brave enough to speak out about prison treatment and conditions, she needed to find a way to get their release. Prison Radio stories serve as catalysts for policy changes, public awareness campaigns and community activism aimed at addressing systemic issues within the justice system. Across the U.S. there are approximately 5.5 million people under a form of correctional control.
The Hustler Files Ep 51
EVEN BEHIND THE WALL, EDUCATION WITH AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET
Venturing Out is the antithesis of what most women behind the wall at MCI Framingham (Massachusetts) will ever be granted. Yet for Beth Goldstein and Elizabeth Swanson their in-prison initiative, Venturing Out, offers so much more than the literal description of their program. For Beth and Elizabeth, whose day job is as educators at Babson College, to go behind the wall to empower and educate the incarcerated female population with an entrepreneurial mindset in humanities and leadership is a way to have local and personal impact on these women’s lives.
The Hustler Files Ep 50
PAROLE, FACT VS. FICTION
For most adults in the U.S. their only exposure to the criminal justice proceeding, known as parole, is what they see on film. But the actual details behind parole hearings, those who qualify, and the process for those incarcerated to receive their freedom is not for the faint of heart. As Attorney Ryan Schiff says, “In a parole hearing, we as attorney’s must take a back seat and no longer be the Director of the proceeding, like we are with our clients, pre-incarceration”. Another fact, the knowledge of a parole hearing, for an incarcerated individual can be many years away. As Attorney Melissa Celli states, “You can walk into any prison in the United States and ask an incarcerated individual the date of their parole hearing, no matter how far in the future, and they will know it.” Join Melissa and Ryan as they open a door to the true facts behind parole.
The Hustler Files Ep 49
IN JANUARY 2024 PRISON REFORM TAKES ONE STEP FORWARD AND ONE STEP BACK
In January 2024, the criminal justice system progressed for many in Massachusetts and digressed for those on death row in Alabama. In Massachusetts, Attorney Ryan Schiff and others ligated a landmark decision where it is now unconstitutional to sentence any adult, under the age of 21, to life without parole. This new law, in Massachusetts, currently affects 200 incarcerated individuals. The door is now open for them to apply for parole and show that they’ve rehabilitated. This reversal of the current law is based on the advancements in scientific research that the brains of emerging adults, up to age 21, are not yet fully developed. Only one other state, Louisiana, still has a life without parole sentencing for those under the age of 21, for first degree murder. Within 2 weeks of this landmark decision, the State of Alabama executed 58-year-old Kenneth Smith, for murder, with the use of Nitrogen Gas. As David Hoose, a long time Criminal Defense Attorney notes, ‘there is never a good way to kill someone, and right now Nitrogen Gas is the flavor of the month”. So, as we know, once again, how you live or die depends on where you serve your time.
The Hustler Files Ep 48
EMPLOYERS ARE RE-SHAPING BOTH HOW THEY HIRE AND HOW THEY MANAGE FOR AN A-HA MOMENT
With 10 million job roles open, employers today not only need to broaden their search parameters, but they need to retain the employees they hire. Across the U.S. there are organizations popping up to assist employers by re-imagining how they hire and teaching them how to combat the biases that political unrest, structural racism, and increased mental health conditions have levied on the workforce. To the rescue in Chicago is the Chicago Resiliency Network, an initiative of the Corporate Coalition of Chicago. Heralding their charge to help employers, across their region, create workplaces that are better for employees and better for business, is Program Director, Marcos Gonzalez. Marcos and his team lead the employer cohorts through training and simulations that address the hiring of justice involved individuals and explore the root causes of trauma and toxic stress. The outcome, new knowledge, better training, and stronger resiliency practices that best suit their business.
The Hustler Files Ep 47
NEARLY 1 IN 3 U.S. ADULTS IS CUT OUT OF THE LABOR MARKET, BUT HELP IS COMING
The murder of George Floyd was a catalyst for an onslaught of positive change in so many areas of our society, and no more so than in Chicago where business leaders came together to address the economic and racial inequities across all the neighborhoods in the Chicago region. Out of that confab came the Corporate Coalition of Chicago with more than 40 members of the Chicago business community, 23 anchor partners and 5 initiatives to reduce long-standing and continuing inequities and create a thriving economy throughout Chicago. One of these initiatives is centered in Fair Chance Hiring and addressing the talent shortage and the population that faces severe limitations to gaining employment because of a criminal record. This model is being adopted across the U.S. but can it grow fast enough to save our businesses who can’t find employees.
The Hustler Files Ep 46
MEDICAL & LEGAL PARTNERSHIPS ARE BREAKING NEW GROUND
In Episode 45, Attorney Ada Lin of Prisoners’ Legal Services in Boston, Massachusetts discussed the need for the pending House and Senate Bill that would allow for a more compassionate release of those incarcerated individuals who were terminally ill or permanently incapacitated and facing an end-of-life situation. In this episode, Ada Lin returns with Dr. Alice Bukhman, an Emergency Department Medical Director, and Head of Medical Partnerships for Prisoners’ Legal Services to discuss the medical parole need in more detail. Ada and Alice offer a voice for those in need of medical parole, and work with teams of hospital caretakers to improve management of agitated patients, and reduce bias, especially where it concerns a shackling of a patient who is already incapacitated.
The Hustler Files Ep 45
MEDICAL PAROLE, WHERE WOULD YOU STAND?
The Medical Parole House and Senate Bill, in Massachusetts, is described as the following: To ensure that the medical parole works as the Legislature originally intended by providing a measure of public decency toward incarcerated people who are terminally ill or permanently incapacitated while ensuring public safety. This Massachusetts House Bill was written by local Massachusetts House Representative Mindy Domb with the support of Prisoners Legal Services, an organization that considers itself a champion that ‘carries the water’ for current and formerly incarcerated individuals, despite the lawyer ratio of over 3,000 to one. This episode’s conversation may be centered on the State of Massachusetts, but the conversation of Medical Parole is one that is played out, State by State, across the U.S. The key words to finding success for this bill, human decency, and public safety. Where would you stand?
