If you're outraged by mass incarceration like I am, you'll want to meet Brian Dolinar
Brian is the man behind Sentences: Writings About Mass Incarceration. Here's our conversation.
Today’s story isn’t about my bro. Instead, I’m shining a light on a fellow Substacker and prison advocate comrade. His name is
and he is the man behind Sentences: Writings About Mass Incarceration.
Brian and I connected after I subscribed to his Substack. I was in search of more prison advocate writers because I wanted to be a part of the conversation and see what folks were talking about. I was immediately drawn to Brian’s Substack because he focuses on mass incarceration—a huge problem.
The one thing I’ve learned in the five years since Isaac’s imprisonment is that too many people are locked up for way too long or for crimes that don’t match the punishment.
Plus, America’s parole system is ridiculously opaque, so the process for release and parole is unjust. In my opinion, it’s kept this way on purpose as just another way to keep the business of prison booming. Prisons want to stay open—they need customers.
James Trent has been locked up for over 20 years
Brian wrote a story that caught my eye. It was about James Trent, who was convicted of killing a four-year-old girl, Christian Nickels, in 1996.
The story touched me because Brian didn’t just write about it, he showed up at James’ clemency hearing. Clemency is a legal process that allows a governor, president, or administrative board to reduce a defendant's sentence or grant a pardon.
We made statements in front of the prisoner review board for why we believe James should be released: he is deeply remorseful; he has been through numerous educational programs, such as a writing class by Northwestern’s Jennifer Lackey, and with the help of bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz, his writings have been published in the New Yorker; and in more than 20 years of incarceration, James has never once received a disciplinary ticket, a rare accomplishment.
I would love for James to have a happy ending, to be a free man, but my gut tells me otherwise. The parole system won’t work in James’ favor, despite the rally of supporters and piles of documentation (not one write-up in 20 years?!) that show he’s a changed man.
Still, it brings me hope that Brian was at James’ hearing and wrote about it. I believe education and stories from publications like Sentences might spark interest from the general public.
I connected with Brian over the phone. I was curious about how he got started in prison advocacy work in the first place.
When we spoke, Brian was helping a friend move from Colorado Springs to Santa Cruz, California. They were en route to their first stop in Grand Junction for the night. I could hear a very unhappy cat in the car, meowing, as we talked.
Here’s our conversation.
Me: Tell me about yourself and your background. You've written books?
BD: I'm a journalist and launched my Substack earlier this year. I did a PhD in cultural studies at Claremont. I worked on two book projects about Black writers during the Depression. I published books. I got an article in the Chicago Tribune about one of my books, and I was even on C-Span.
I taught off and on at the universities in the Cal State system in California, and at the University of Illinois, in Urbana Champaign, where I currently live. But the academic thing never panned out.
And so, I've got great research skills and started applying them this thing we call mass incarceration.
Me: What drew you to that?
BD: I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This was before books like "The New Jim Crow," but we had hip-hop.
It's the 50-year anniversary of hip-hop, so I've been listening to all these old albums again. It's a revelation that we had things like Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," all about a prison break.
As a white kid raised in Kansas, I moved to LA in the late ‘90s. I hung around with Black and brown kids. I noticed that at every turn, the police were there, messing with us. What I'd heard about secondhand, I was increasingly witnessing firsthand.
All kinds of random situations where my Black friend and I were walking down the street, and the police pulled us over to talk about a nearby theft. These situations became increasingly frequent.
In 2005, I was in Chicago with my best friend, who's Black. We were in Inglewood on the west side, a Black neighborhood. We were stopped by white police and illegally searched. My friend ran. I saw the police beat him up in front of me. They grabbed him and threw both of us in a paddy wagon.
My friend had a swollen eye the size of a golf ball. I was sent to the Cook County Jail, which at the time, had a population of 10,000. It was the largest single site, jail facility in the country.
At that point, it became personal. I was becoming more involved with community work in my hometown.
Hearing stories about police, occupying the Black community prompted me to start investigating cases, just as a community journalist. Over the years I got more involved.
I started pen-paling with people in prison and developed a network of people inside prisons who were thinking and writing and experiencing mass incarceration. I started writing my own articles about what was going on behind prison walls and what the people inside were telling me. I also used it as a platform to promote the work and the art of people behind bars.
Me: It sounds like your Substack is almost like a culmination of all the things that you've been doing over the years.
BD: Yeah, it kind of came to me in a dream. I had a dream about forming Sentences. I was working at Prison Legal News, which is a long-standing prison publication circulated widely amongst jailhouse lawyers. When that job came to an end, I was staying with my best friend in Chicago.
I woke up in the middle of the night, anxious about parting ways with Prison Legal News. I had this idea for my own prison publication, which would be called Sentences. I liked the pun of writing sentences and people serving long sentences.
Me: I want to ask you about James Trent. Can you tell me how that came about?
BD: I worked on a prison project called Parole Illinois. It’s an organization that hopes to restore parole (it was abolished in 1978) and to be more fair and equitable.
James Trent, who's got like a 90-year prison sentence, reached out to me about Parole Illinois. We started writing letters to each other.
I learned James had a clemency petition and was able to get a hearing. I helped organize a panel to testify at his petition hearing.
I rallied James’ out-of-state family to come as well—his uncle, sister, and daughter.
We appeared at the hearing in front of the PRB (Prison Review Board) and made our pitch for why James should get out of prison. It was early in the morning. We were in the room with other families also trying to get their loved ones out. We sat and listened to them stand up, one after another, making their emotional appeal.
James is a big guy, he's 6’7 and 300 pounds. But he's a kind of gentle giant, and really believes in a personal philosophy of nonviolence. He's got all the degrees he could possibly get in prison. He's never had a disciplinary ticket.
When it was our turn, we made our case. We were surprised the prosecutor showed up to contest the clemency. The prosecutor went on and on about how bad a person James was and how this was a heinous crime. He said we can’t let everybody in prison out just because they’ve done well and had no disciplinary history. I thought, how amazing it would be if that happened. It would open up the floodgates—exactly what I’m fighting for. We still have too many people incarcerated in Illinois.
Despite the uphill battle for James, he remains very hopeful that he can contribute to the lives of people in his prison, and be a free man someday.
Me: Do you know when he finds out if he's been denied or not?
BD: We'll find out in the next couple of months, but it's kind of unknown. If he's denied we can refile the petition in another year, and go through this again.
This is the situation of mass incarceration today. In this country, we've already dealt with the war on drugs, we've changed sentencing laws for cocaine and crack distribution. We've legalized marijuana in Illinois and set people free for weed charges. We've abolished the death penalty.
And yet we still have 5,000 people who have long-term life sentences in Illinois. The real issue to confront is whether we really believe that anybody can be corrected in our correction system.
Me: I totally agree. I hope your work continues to spread the word and create change. Is there something specific that you want to convey about your publication?
BD: I use Substack as a tool for organizing communities and for covering stories that are not being talked about in the media. I want to show a different kind of story, one that is rooted in community and family. This isn’t the stuff you hear on the local news.
Stories of mass incarceration—if it's happening in our hometowns, it's happening everywhere. These same problems are going on everywhere in this country. There are a lot of opportunities for people to intervene and get involved in their local communities.
Mass incarceration is becoming a personal matter for so many people. And people like yourself, Claire, come to this issue because your brother's incarcerated. Increasingly, everybody's got a friend, cousin, brother, or sister who is in prison. More and more people are becoming aware of this problem that that we have in front of us.
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