Summary(0:18) Arrest and probation violation -- (1:00) Importance of his family’s support in the success of his re-entry -- (2:18) Negative effects of prison on his personality -- (2:44) The need to keep one’s guard up in prison and becoming desensitized to trauma -- (3:04) Difficulty with showing emotion -- (5:19) Feeling protected by his Asian American identity within prison -- (5:57) The role of ethnicity in finding employment and easing his re-entry process -- (7:13) Establishing an identity separate from his prison experience -- (8:39) What he learned about society from his prison experience -- (9:57) Working for the Vera Institute of Justice -- (11:38) The way his prison experience informs his current work -- (12:50) Suggestions for improving the justice system -- (14:13) Flaws in the notion of rehabilitation.
NoteAudio interview conducted on December 8, 2016, by Carmen Lopez at Central Library. Collected through Our Streets, Our Stories, an oral history project of Brooklyn Public Library. This project is a partnership with Services for Older Adults and the Brooklyn Collection.
SubjectImprisonment ; Probation ; Arrest ; Parole ; Prisons--New York (State) ; Psychic trauma ; Asian Americans ; Employment ; Ethnicity ; Oppression ; Punishment ; Rehabilitation
RightsThis work is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Users are free to share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is given to the source and new material created with this work is shared under the same conditions.
TitleOral history interview conducted with John Bae on 2016 December 08.