Keri Blakinger is a friend of our ministry and support group. She is a staff writer for The Marshall Project whose work focuses on prisons and jails. She previously covered criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, VICE, the New York Daily News and The New York Times. She is The Marshall Project’s first formerly incarcerated reporter. Her memoir, “Corrections in Ink“, comes out in June 2022; I’ve already pre-ordered my copy on Amazon and I can’t wait to read it. – Jeff Grant
When I was in prison, books sometimes felt like the only untainted connection to a past life.
Sure, there were friends and family who visit visited, bringing along our shared memories from the free world. But they also brought with them the knowledge that I was in prison, and I could see in their eyes how it colored every interaction. The people I met in books did not know that about me. And maybe that was part of why treasured I them so much.
During the 21 months I spent behind bars, I read obsessively — sometimes 20 or more books a month. I tore through Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and Alice Walker, checking off title after title at a fever pace as if each finished page were another thread in a literal lifeline to freedom.
When I wasn’t distracting myself with reading, though, I was writing — filling up yellow legal pads and white printer paper. For most of the time I was behind bars, I told myself that I would write a book of my own. That was back in 2012 — but last year I finally did. It’s called Corrections in Ink and it comes out this month. Right now, I’m trying to get as many copies donated to prisoners as I can.
I am pleased to share with you that an article that I authored titled 3 Important Takeaways for Hiring Job-Seekers with Criminal Records was recently published in Entrepreneur (see below).
As you know, overcoming the stigma and discrimination associated with having a conviction history is very near and dear to me, and I am personally invested in helping as many of the 70 million Americans like myself with conviction records secure the professional, educational, housing and other life opportunities we all need to thrive. The reality is that even long after serving our sentences, we are routinely denied gainful employment and thus the ability to meaningfully rebuild our lives. This article speaks to the immense scope of this issue and offers a simple, concrete solution on how we can begin to address it – by providing individuals who have completed their sentences with a clean slate.
A few months ago, I had the privilege of joining the Board of Directors of an organization called the Legal Action Center (LAC). For nearly 50 years, LAC has utilized a range of legal and policy strategies to fight discrimination, restore opportunities, and build health equity for individuals with arrest and conviction records, substance use disorders, and/or HIV/AIDS. Their proven track record of and ongoing commitment to helping tens of thousands of individuals overcome discriminatory barriers so they can support themselves, their families, and contribute to our shared communities is truly inspiring, and I am honored to partner with them in this critical work. The clean slate solution I mentioned above is just one of the many initiatives LAC is working hard to advance.
I cannot stress how important the efforts of organizations like LAC are to individuals like me – and our society at large. I do hope you’ll take a few moments to make a donation to support their mission – a gift of any size can help!
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this message, and please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions you might have.
There are more than 70 million people in our country who have a conviction record. That translates to roughly one in every three Americans. The obstacles that those of us with records face are enormous. You would think that after we have completed our sentences, we should be able to move forward with our lives.
But the reality is that we face a multitude of often lifelong barriers that block us from essentials like steady jobs, educational opportunities, professional licenses, safe homes and more. In fact, the National Institute of Justice estimates 44,000 such barriers. These can severely limit or completely impede the ability of a person with a conviction history. They can’t effectively function in society and participate meaningfully in civic, economic and community life.
First takeaway: People with past convictions face an array of barriers to gainful employment
Due to widespread discrimination and stigma, individuals with conviction records are routinely blocked from employment opportunities. Even after having long ago completed their sentences. Whether a former CEO or trade worker, once an individual is branded with the scarlet letter of a conviction, it doesn’t matter who they were before. Many employers will quickly toss applications from formerly incarcerated individuals aside. The same for potential investors who will deny meetings with entrepreneurs who have records of conviction.
Predictably, the resulting economic insecurity, pain, shame and despair can be devastating. Not just for us as individuals, but for our families as well. People at every level of the workforce are impacted. But, systemic inequities and racially biased policing and prosecution in our country have yielded disproportionate rates of arrest, incarceration and conviction among low-income communities of color nationwide.
Second takeaway: There is a simple solution — provide people with a clean slate
Across the country, states are working to pass legislation that ensures individuals like me who have completed their sentences can have our records automatically cleared. There are many states where application-based sealing is currently an option. But this process is often incredibly burdensome and costly. Therefore preventing a significant number of people who would be eligible from actually having their records cleared. Efforts to automatically clear people’s records, also known as clean slate, help make it possible for all eligible individuals to start fresh. And, without having to navigate bureaucratic hurdles or spend money they don’t have.
When people have served their time and paid their debt to society, we deserve a second chance. A clean slate, erasure of the paralyzing, proverbial scarlet letter. Through automatic records clearance, this second chance can be fully realized — stable jobs, trade licenses, business ventures and secure homes would all once again be within our reach. Clean slate can give us the opportunity to truly move forward with our lives.
Third takeaway: Clean slate can help us all
Clean slate can give me and others with past conviction records a real chance at healing, justice and meaningful participation in the economy and communities we all share. It can also improve the well-being of entire families and communities. Individuals who want to work hard, support their families and contribute to their neighborhoods and local communities should be able to do so. We all know that children who grow up in poverty are far more likely to remain living in poverty throughout their lives — a brutal cycle known as intergenerational poverty.
Clean slate policies can help break this cycle. Furthermore, the benefit of clean slate policies for our economy at large cannot be overstated. The ACLU estimates that, nationally, excluding individuals with conviction histories from the workforce costs the economy between $78 billion and $87 billion in lost domestic product every year. With clean slate, employers looking to grow their businesses could tap into a huge pool of skilled workers. Without clean slate, we risk indefinitely locking away vast amounts of human potential. Amidst rising labor shortages, the great need for untapped talent is only increasing. Last, but certainly not least, clean slate can help begin to remedy the racial injustice pervading our country by breaking down the unjust barriers. Those that keep far too many Black and Brown Americans from reaching their full potential.
From social justice activists to Fortune 500 companies, clean slate has a diverse and wide array of supporters who believe in its immense potential. In New York, for example, the clean slate campaign has garnered support from top labor unions and business leaders like JPMorgan Chase. Also, faith leaders, survivors of crime, civil rights groups, law firms and health advocates. They all understand that not only is giving people a second chance the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do. As they say, a rising tide raises all ships.
Jeff Grant serves as a private General Counsel and white collar attorney in New York, on authorized Federal matters, and as co-counsel with lawyers throughout the country. Reach him at GrantLaw.com.
Jeff Grant is a white-collar defense attorney in Manhattan.
Jeff Grant
And he has an unusual back story.
More than twenty years ago, Grant lost his law license for dipping into client funds. He became addicted to prescription opioids and tried to kill himself. And he went to prison for more than a year for defrauding the Small Business Administration.
Since those traumas twenty years ago, Grant has undergone a transformation. He went to divinity school and became a minister. He started a ministry called Progressive Prison Ministries. He got his law license back and counsels people being prosecuted for white-collar crimes.
Every Monday, he holds a Zoom meeting with people around the country. It’s like AA for the white-collar community. (Grant himself has been to 10,000 AA meetings. In the early days of his recovery, he was going to three a day.)
In August of 2021, the New Yorker published a glowing profile of Grant’s work titled – “Life After White-Collar Crime – Every week, fallen executives come together, seeking sympathy and a second act,” by Evan Osnos.
“Almost everybody prosecuted for white-collar crime needs a lawyer to trust and someone who can empathize with them and understand the complexities of their problems,” Grant told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last month. “When they are being prosecuted for crime, they have many more problems than just their legal defense. They have bankruptcy issues, tax issues and maybe family issues. They also have spiritual and emotional issues. I try to take a look at the long game and help them forge a path from where they are, in a place of suffering, to a place in the future where they could hopefully have a happy, productive and happy life again. That’s a much larger view than a criminal defense lawyer might look at where they are simply trying to get the best sentence with the least amount of prison time.”
“I’m not saying that’s not important. That’s incredibly important. But the most important thing that I stress is that prison is not the worst thing that could happen to someone who is being prosecuted. Not having a comeback story is the worst thing that can happen. Thus far, the criminal justice system and the world in general has not shown a lot of compassion or empathy for people who have been prosecuted for white-collar crimes.”
“That’s changing as we have formed a community for a white-collar support group we started in 2016. We recently had our 300th meeting online on Zoom. We have been online since the very beginning. We are early adopters of the technology.”
“And we have over 500 members. We average about 40 people online every Monday night. There is a spiritual component. There is certainly an emotional component. But also we share a lot of information that is vital to successfully going through the process. And as a white-collar community, as we gain more information, we are best able to advocate for ourselves and defend ourselves. And we are no longer victims of the system.”
“There is a lot of information sharing. It’s run pretty much like an AA meeting. That’s the core of my sobriety. I have attended over 10,000 AA meetings at this point. On August 10, 2002, I will celebrate 20 years of sobriety.”
Is there a sense among some of your members that they too are victims of corporate crime, that the corporations in some cases have thrown them under the bus for higher ups in the corporation or the corporate criminal itself?
“It is such a complicated answer. The highest level answer I can give you is that everyone I have met who has been prosecuted for a white-collar crime has some kind of influence that has caused them to commit that crime. Whether it’s mental illness, substance abuse, childhood trauma, or social pressure, or business pressure to ride the line or cross over the line into some kind of unethical or criminal behavior.”
“These things generally do not happen in a vacuum. If you go deep enough into their history or their workplace, if you do real mitigation reports to learn the human side and the real intricacies of their business decisions, you find an amazingly rich story that humanizes the people accused.”
“Does corporate America throw its employees under the bus? The answer to that – it depends on the company. For the most part, large companies are represented by large law firms. They are trying to get either non prosecution or deferred prosecution agreements.”
“The corporations have huge resources they are able to apply. And typically when they are investigated, the question of whether any of the individuals of that corporation are going to be prosecuted is certainly up in the air. It’s part of the discussion. But historically, very few individuals are prosecuted up and down the line.”
“There are exceptions. Specific hedge fund traders have been prosecuted for insider trading. Sometimes they come to the attention of prosecutors because of a specific trade or series of trades. Sometimes prosecutors are trying to climb the ladder and get to superiors who they think are guilty of larger crimes or more institutional crimes.”
“It’s industry specific. Federal prosecutors have targeted healthcare companies over the last five years. In the future, it’s clear from the Attorney General’s recent comments in San Francisco that they are going to make individuals more accountable.”
“They are going to focus on new technologies where the law hasn’t quite caught up with the transactions. And they will focus on pandemic fraud prosecutions. SBA loans, PPI loans. I know a lot about that because I went to prison for an SBA loan. They are calculating that maybe as much as $200 billion or a million different loans were fraudulent in some ways. And those can be sizable companies. Those loans ranged from small loans to $10 million loans.”
“We are going to find that over the next five years, the floodgates will open in this area.”
You are saying that what leads these individuals to engage in white-collar crimes is a pathology – something triggered it?
“That’s fair.”
We interviewed Joel Balkan who has written that corporations can be pathological. Is there a sense among the group of individuals that you have dealt with about systemic pathology as opposed to individual pathology?
“Absolutely. You could go company by company and find that kind of systemic pathology. And you can find a generally toxic business environment that has historically honored the wrong things. For the most part, the public corporations operate quarter by quarter. And they do things that you might consider to be unethical, or push their people to do things in order to get quarterly results that might achieve it for a while but ultimately eats away at the fabric of that corporation and of the people who work at that corporation. There are many examples of where the corporate culture itself is so toxic that it has created an environment where for example its sales people are committing acts of bribery in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
“What we are finding in the support group is that people have been asked to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t have done. Or it happens inch by inch so that they wake up one day and they find out they are over the line of ethics and legality. And they are not even sure how they wound up over the line other than the fact that their company has made them do it. They were making poor decisions. And second, the line keeps shifting as to what is ethical and legal.”
“A perfect example of that is insider trading. The last ten or fifteen years, the definition of insider trading keeps changing. How close to that line do you get to satisfy your employers? Almost every employer in the hedge fund industry wants their people to get as close to the line as possible. People in our support groups represent that experience.”
The Justice Department is heading back to the Yates memo calling for a renewed focus on individual wrongdoing in corporate crime prosecutors. Is this a good policy – to focus on individual wrongdoers within the corporation? Does it work in deterring crime?
“I don’t know if it deters crime. The benefits can be so disproportionate to what they perceive the risks to be. Example – you are a young person who has just come out of business school. And in your mind, you think you are going to make $30 million. How much deterrence would these prosecutions have if realistically you were told that one or two percent of the people who engage in this kind of criminal behavior are ever prosecuted?”
“You might view it as a minimal risk. The government doesn’t have the resources to go after enough people for there to be real deterrence.”
If not by criminal prosecution, how should the government deter wrongdoing?
“Let me answer your previous question – do I believe individuals should be prosecuted? The answer I have, both as a minister and as a lawyer, is that everybody should be held responsible for their behavior. Do I think that the prosecutor should understand all of the elements, including the personal elements? Yes. But anybody who overtly committed a crime should be prosecuted.”
“Should they go to jail? Jail is a draconian, inartful way of dealing with crime, rehabilitation and punishment. There are much better alternatives that work in other countries – Germany and Sweden for example. People can be held responsible for their behavior, but we would not be destroying people and grinding them up in the process and leaving them without the possibility of using their experience and education to better society.”
“There is a movement to do better.”
“As for deterrence, deterrence is a strange word. We have moved away from morals and ethics. The root is societal and cultural. Our colleges and universities were formed originally as seminaries and we taught morals and ethics. When they became professional schools and business schools, they traded religious ethics for what they call business ethics. Business ethics haven’t worked. It was a form of self-policing that created a culture that has undermined business. There has been push back recently. Now the business schools and law schools are teaching real courses in ethics and right and wrong, things you should have learned in kindergarten. But it took a lot to get there.”
How is religious ethics different from business ethics?
“Religious ethics is teaching a basic system of right and wrong, about what is healthy, unhealthy. It’s character building. You build your character and come closer to God.”
“Business ethics is about the health of the corporation and delivering value to shareholders. It’s a twisting of ethics to satisfy the needs of the business in the name of capitalism. But they disregard all the other stakeholders – including the planet, poor people, people who need resources but don’t have access to them. I’d like to think that in some ways we are moving back to a more humane and ethical understanding. But if you look at the number of billionaires and the disparity of wealth, we have a lot of work to do.”
A St. Francis style religious ethics would do away with most of the corporate state, wouldn’t it? It would oppose the military industrial complex – large parts of the economy. The healthcare industry would be transformed. Business ethics protects the corporate state while religious ethics would undermine it.
“I agree with that. To become the most powerful country in the world, we had to lose our religious underpinning.”
These 500 white-collar criminals who have gone through your program, how do they view the issue of corporate power and corporate crime?
“Everyone who goes to prison undergoes a transformation whether they know it or not or understand it or not. They come out different. Generally, the people in our white-collar group start off as people who are very material. Then somewhere in the process, they find their spirituality. Most of them commit themselves to a life of more spirituality and less materialism. You won’t find anybody who doesn’t acknowledge that they lived a hollow material life. And now what they want is a more meaningful and joyful life.”
“And it’s not all or nothing. Most people when they come out of prison, they are in survival mode. They are ex CFOs who are now driving for Doordash. Just survival is difficult. They have a new definition of success. The road back is through some spiritual component.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Jeff Grant, see 36 Corporate Crime Reporter 17(11), April 25, 2022, print edition only.]
We are honored to have Brian Cuban as the inaugural speaker in our new White Collar Support Group Tuesday Speaker Series. Brian is a friend who was a guest on our White Collar Week podcast. We sent copies of Brian’s new book, The Ambulance Chaser, to all of our support group members who are currently in prison – they loved it! Stay tuned for more information about upcoming speakers and events. – Jeff
Mon., May 10, 2022, 7 pm ET, 6 pm CT, 5 pm MT, 4 pm PT On Zoom
Open to Support Group Members by RSVP Only
Brian Cuban, the younger brother of Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, is a Dallas-based attorney, author, and person in long-term recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. He is a graduate of Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
His book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales of the Bar, Booze, Blow, and Redemption is an unflinching look at how addiction and other mental health issues destroyed his career as a once successful lawyer, and how he and others in the profession redefined their lives in recovery and found redemption.
Brian has spoken at colleges, universities, conferences, non-profits, and legal events across the United States and in Canada. His columns have appeared—and he has been quoted on these topics—online and in print newspapers around the world. He currently resides in Dallas, Texas with his wife and two cats.
After being accused of the murder of a high school classmate thirty years prior, lawyer Jason Feldman becomes a fugitive from justice to find the one person who can prove his innocence and save the life of his son.
Pittsburgh personal injury lawyer and part-time drug dealer Jason Feldman’s life goals are simple: date hot women, earn enough cash to score cocaine on a regular basis, and care for his dementia-ravaged father. That all changes when a long-lost childhood friend contacts him about the discovery of buried remains belonging to a high school classmate who went missing thirty years prior, and the fragile life Jason’s built over his troubled past is about to come crashing down. Soon, he’s on the run across Pittsburgh and beyond to find his old friend, while trying to figure out whom to trust among Ukrainian mobsters, vegan drug dealers, washed-up sports stars, an Israeli James Bond, and an ex-wife who happens to be the district attorney. The only way he’ll survive is if he overcomes his addictions so he can face his childhood demons.
“Life is full of unexpected twists and turns. Also, Life can be fraught with numerous drawbacks. However, regardless of what happens, the most critical aspect is rising again. My guest for today has a life story that is worth discussing. After developing an addiction to prescription opioids and serving nearly fourteen months in federal prison (2006–07) for a white-collar crime committed in 2001 while working as a lawyer, he began his reentry by earning a Master of Divinity in Social Ethics from New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. After graduating from divinity school, he was invited to serve as Associate Minister and Director of Prison Ministries at an inner city church in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He later co-founded Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc., the world’s first ministry solely dedicated to white-collar crime. Jeff Grant, Private General Counsel/White Collar Attorney at GrantLaw, joins today’s episode to share the insights he has learned on his journey from prison to calling.”
Jeff’s First Life – Jeff tells his journey of various twists and turns, none of which he could have predicted would result in such a great life.
Being Sober – Jeff discusses what he believes helped him stay sober when everything seemed to be collapsing around him. Isolation and Community – Jeff provides a comprehensive explanation about his saying, “Isolation damages us, and the answer is community.”
Comeback Story – Whatever the worst-case scenario occurs in our lives, we must have a story of redemption. Jeff explains how he assists someone is preparing to write their comeback story.
Jeff’s advice – Jeff delivers some suggestions for individuals who self-sabotage on how to move ahead.
Entrepreneur’s #4 Most Viewed Article of 2020: I Went to Prison for S.B.A. Loan Fraud: 7 Things to Know When Taking COVID-19 Relief Money: by Jeff Grant, April 2020: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/350337
Bobbi’s Takeaways I hope that you enjoyed that conversation. Here are my 3 insights for thriving:
1. Have some ritual that centers you everyday. Jeff talked about feeling 1% off when he wakes up which is why he goes to an AA meeting every day. I’d never thought about it quite that way, but recently I started a guided meditation practice. If you’ve listened to the podcast, you know that this is something that has felt like a struggle for me. But, I founded a 12 minute guided meditation where I can move around and do stretches, etc. but it is focused on calming the mind and really feeling movement. A few weeks ago, I started doing this every morning upon rising. It’s been super valuable. This past weekend, for some reason, I skipped both Saturday and Sunday and I noticed that today I wasn’t feeling quite as grounded and centered. So, I did my meditation today and things feel more centered. When Jeffrey said that the 1% mis-alignment wasn’t bad but if you let it go on and on pretty soon, you are way out of alignment and not centered at all. It was a good reminder that having a routine that helps me be centered everyday is a great practice.
2. If you are going through something challenging, it is helpful to have a team of people around you who have been there and who understands where you are now.
3. Embrace healthy conflict as Jeff calls it. To me this means being willing to discuss the undiscussable, and to have the courage to bring up things EARLY, before they become a crisis and while they are still small enough to deal with. On an earlier episode, Josh Freidman used the analogy of dealing with things while the train is still in the station – not once it’s worked up a full head of steam.
Corpulent as he was, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, otherwise held fast to his most famous adage of less being more.
Paunchier than he was corpulent, Mies seemed determined to deprive me of a pretty good opening sentence. Such is the way of things when what you want and what is true refuse to jibe.
In either event here’s the rest of the thought:
In contrast to the high priest of modernism’s guiding principle, the current keepers of the movement’s most prominent shrine, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, have determined to take a more maximalist view of things, keeping their less than gimlet-eyed view, focused squarely on the latter half of the clichéd but still cogent maxim, by expanding the museum into every available inch of the north side of West 53rd Street, that their endowment, their trustees’ wallets, and the city’s zoning laws would allow. Mies, I suspect, has been doing a slow roll in his understated grave ever since.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
It had all begun well enough, when the small cabal of wealthy, industrialist’s wives with aspirations towards posterity; determined, in the late 1920s, to erect a museum dedicated to the housing of their growing collection of modern art, called upon Edward Durell Stone to design the original building. Taking up less than a quarter of a block, that was otherwise filled with brownstones; the white unadorned, marble and glass, facade was a pleasing and clear enough statement of intent to set expectations for the radical nature of the work to be found within. Nearly a hundred years later, while still visible; the Stone building has been couched within the expansionist ambitions of subsequent museum leadership, to such an extent that it can now be easily missed by anyone on their way to the main entrance or to Uniqlo, depending upon which direction one is traveling.
With a free afternoon and an as of yet expired membership, I walked up Fifth Avenue to visit the reopened institution and acquaint myself with the newly designed museum and re-curated collection.
The original Edward Durell Stone Building, 1939.
Upon passing through the new airport-style security entrance, I was carried unceremoniously to the fourth floor by the still cramped escalators where I negotiated my way through the artwork of the latter half of the 20th century. As a result of the fully rejiggered arrangement of the heretofore reliably staid collection, I was left disoriented in a space that had long since been comforting in its familiarity. In an attempt to regain my bearings, I sought refuge among the Rothkos and a particularly fine Krasner. Unfortunately, I wasn’t left feeling any steadier.
The Stone building, 2021
There is a newly acquired funhouse quality to the galleries. The effect is the result of art being hung in a manner where one painting appears to be reflected back upon itself in the form of another painting from an entirely different era bearing a visual relationship to the older work; and which is hung in opposition to it, causing your eyes to reverberate jarringly between the two. The effect can leave one standing in the middle of the gallery immobilized inside of an eye rattling, dissonance-inducing loop
The disorienting juxtapositions are exacerbated by the physical nature of the expansion itself. Having expanded the gallery space 50,000 square feet since the last growth spurt, which itself grew the available exhibition space by nearly 40,000 square feet. The scale of the museum can now leave one feeling that the artwork extends off into a far-away horizon. Having walked a distance that felt perilously close to exercise, I thought that I might have landed inside an old Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, wondering if I was going to exit on the shores of the Hudson or possibly somewhere in California.
Up until this most recent iteration, MoMA’s permanent collection was ordered chronologically and segregated according to discipline, allowing one to view the works of the collection within their milieu and the epoch in which they were created. Given this stabilizing framework, the viewer could discern the logical underpinnings of the movements that informed the century’s latter half. While these organizing principles can still be observed throughout the galleries, they have since taken on an elasticity, warping the narrative thread and blurring the previously cohesive flow of work.
If it had once been thrilling to walk the galleries in anticipation of seeing the likes of DeKooning, Pollack, Kline and Motherwell et.al., sequenced in room after room, all glaring at each other from opposing gallery walls, as though they were back at the Cedar Tavern drunk and duking it out, challenging each other for artistic primacy and for the right to each other’s women; the energy has now been dissipated with a good deal of the pugilistic dynamic having been directed to neutral corners.
Gone, sadly, are the dedicated galleries for photography, prints and drawing, all of which have now been incorporated into the painting galleries, adding to the already disjointed and crowded nature of the display. Gone also is the pleasure of being able to sequester oneself within the history of a single medium, to be fully immersed within the lone discipline and explore, uninterrupted, its chronology, rather than having to negotiate a collection of disparate works interspersed throughout the broader collection. .
I exited the museum, with my head spinning and the symptoms of my fairly severe ADD inflamed. Characteristic of the affliction is the ease with which one is susceptible to overstimulation. A state of mind that I was experiencing throughout my tour of the new curatorial direction of the permanent collection. My condition hadn’t been helped any, by the expanded museum having been piled to the rafters with work and by the substitution of the formerly regimented, chronological orderliness for juxtapositional chaos. By superimposing works of varying media, eras and cultural context from which the viewer is intended to draw broad associations regarding influences, zeitgeists and contexts; the museum had left me feeling unmoored and with the uncanny sense that the familiar works, which for so long had hung austerely in their designated places, had suddenly been thrust, unaccompanied, into a boisterous cocktail party, drink clutched nervously in hand, hoping to see a familiar face to rescue them from the chaos.
I don’t go to see art as much as I would like and unless I’m visiting a permanent collection, I mostly come up against names and works that are unfamiliar to me. My days of complete immersion in the artworld and of being informed as to its vagaries, are long in the past and don’t register with me as they once might have. But having once lived in that world, I retain a thread of attachment to it and am not without the capacity for forming opinions. What I’ve come to recognize in my recent travels to the shrine on West Fifty Third Street, is that those who are in charge of steering the vision of what is seen and what is said, have looked squarely into the face of Mies’s dictum and rejected it wholesale. In having taken a more expansive curatorial route there is now recognition that the “less” in Mies’s dictum, in the case of the history of the museum’s collection, has equated to orthodoxy and the exclusion of a broad swath of artists; both of which are ideas that are anathema to the ideals from which Modernism was sprung.
Today in the rarefied world of museum curators, where the gatekeepers who have traditionally been the vigilant guardians of the fixed ideals of their institutions, change comes hesitantly and in increments. Arguably, the most influential of all museums, the MoMA, has used their most prestigious platform: the permanent collection, to take a stand for a broader purview of thought and a greater diversity of artists. It would appear that they have thrown their long since stacked deck in the air and celebrated the broad change that is the result and that has been a long time coming.
Recognizing that my own views around art may have long ago calcified into something closer to taste and discernment, it gives me pause to consider that I have come to rely upon the comforts of reliability to inform my museum going experience. My couple of hours spent in the galleries at MoMA were a reminder that discomfort and being challenged were a large part of what brought me into this world years ago. In revitalizing the museum, the leadership at MoMA they have opened the door wide for rediscovery
Brad Spencer is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. We will celebrate our 300th meeting on March 14, 2022, 7 pm ET, 4 pm PT.
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“After my arraignment in August 2021, one of my daughters suggested that I listen to a podcast with Jeff Grant as the guest. That is all it took for me to find the Monday night White Collar Support Group and to visit. I did this for a couple of weeks, and after each time, my mood would sour. My wife noticed that I was in a decidedly less upbeat humor after spending time on the call. I was sure that this would be temporary, and so I stuck with it. Still, I was downcast after each successive call…and I was six or so visits in. When does the pick-me-up actually deliver the lift?
Finally it struck me – Jeff Grant is not a mood-lifter, he is a deliverer of reality. This, in turn, eventually lifts one’s mood. When information can cut away the fog of distortion and magical thinking, then the real work of taking care of oneself can begin. Information is therapeutic if one has the stomach for the real world; if one does not, however, then the future will continue to be illusory and evasive, and who can live in that? Progressive Prison Ministries provides real shelter for courageous people with real problems. God bless PPM.” – Brad Spencer, Alabama
Join the Federal Bar Association SDNY Chapter and Washington State Chapters, along with co-sponsors JAMS, NAMI-NYC, NYCLA, Westchester County Bar Association, for a **FREE CLE** program on how mental disabilities impact the prosecution, defense and disposition of cases, and how the federal courts can be more responsive. The panel consists of seasoned legal and medical experts who will provide an overview on the intersection of mental health and the law. Monday, March 21, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM. This is a hybrid event.
Program Planner: Nancy Morisseau | Agency Attorney, NYC Department of Education; President, Federal Bar Association-SDNY Chapter
Moderator: Elizabeth Kelley, Esq. | Criminal Defense Attorney, L/O Elizabeth Kelley
Panelists: · Jeffrey D. Grant, Esq. | Private General Counsel, GrantLaw, PLLC · Dr. Joette James | Chief Inpatient/Outpatient Neuropsychologist, HSC Pediatric Center; Forensic Psychologist, Private Practice; Assistant Professor, George Washington University Dept. of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences · Miriam Krinsky | Executive Director, Fair and Just Prosecutions · Dr. George Woods | President, International Academy of Law & Mental Health
AGENDA
6:00 – 6:05 PM | Welcome and Introductions · Nancy Morisseau · Elizabeth S. Kelley, Esq.
6:05 – 6:20 PM | Mental Disabilities, Forensic Evaluations and the Courts: A Global Perspective · Dr. George Woods
6:20 – 6:35 PM | Mental Disabilities, Forensic Evaluations and the Courts: Trends in the U.S. · Dr. Joette James
6:35 – 6:50 PM | Trends in the Prosecution of People with Mental Disabilities in the U.S. · Miriam Krinsky 6:50 – 7:00 PM | Mental Disabilities and the Federal Courts: A Returning Citizen’s Perspective · Jeff Grant
White Collar Criminal Justice Community Continues to Expand Resources and Reach
Greenwich, CT (March 14, 2022): Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc., the world’s first ministry devoted to serving the white collar justice community, will hold its 300th consecutive White Collar Support Group meeting online on Zoom this Monday, March 14, 2022. Co-founded by Connecticut resident/NYC white collar attorney and ordained minister, Jeff Grant, Esq. (Jeffrey D. Grant), the ministry’s mission is to help individuals prosecuted for white collar crimes to take responsibility for their actions and the wreckage they caused, make amends, and move forward in new way of life centered on hope, care, compassion, tolerance and empathy. The support group was founded online in 2016 online as a way of reaching out to justice-impacted individuals and families suffering in isolation all over the country and providing them solutions in a supportive community.
Progressive Prison Ministries’ goal is to provide spiritual solutions and emotional support to those who are feeling alone, isolated, and hopeless. Its objective is to help them find a path to a healthy, spirit-filled place on the other side of what may seem like insurmountable problems.
“I am so grateful for the opportunity to be of service to this hugely misunderstood and greatly under-supported community,” said Jeff Grant. “When we held our first support group meeting in 2016, we had only 4 participants. Now, 6 years later, we are holding our 300th meeting with over 450 members.”
“For years, Jeff Grant has made it his mission to make sure that no one feels the isolation that can come from being a former inmate,” said Bill Baroni, former ‘Bridgegate’ defendant whose conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In addition to providing resources and community, Grant is the leading advocate for ensuring white collar-related issues are included within the ever-evolving debate around the criminal justice system. “When we started the ministry in 2013, people who had been to prison were pariahs with little opportunity to have a second chance,” said Grant. “A decade later, criminal justice reform is an important national conversation; we are proud of our work to enable white collar justice advocates to have a seat at the table.”
To date, the community has been a featured source surrounding white-collar related issues, including a recent profile of Grant and the White Collar Support Group in the New Yorker. Grant’s work has also been featured in major national media Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, Reuters, Forbes, and Greenwich Magazine as well as major podcasts such as The Rich Roll Podcast. Grant has also been a Main Stage presenter at prestigious conferences such as The Nantucket Project. In addition to being a popular interviewee, Grant has helped thousands of his community members navigate their past and push towards re-establishing themselves as productive contributors to society.
With both Law and Master of Divinity degrees, Grant provides a unique perspective of understanding about what and how his community members are coping with and facing ahead of them. Grant himself spent almost 14 months in a Federal prison for a white collar crime he committed in 2001.
According to former Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, who served time in a Federal prison, “Jeff created a network of welcoming, non-judgmental, and understanding men and women that share their similar experiences in an open and nurturing environment.”
The weekly Monday meeting is held online on Zoom beginning at 7 pm ET, 4 pm PT and last approximately 75 minutes. During the meeting, members are given the chance to reflect on their healing process as well as embrace those who are new to the group, which continues to grow with each weekly gathering.
Complementing the weekly meetings include an ongoing blog on Grant’s widely regarded site, prisonist.org, where meetings are recapped, dissected and materials are gathered for community members to continue to work on their own. Grant’s White Collar Week podcast has also become a critical source for his community, providing a platform for those that have gone through the journey to tell their story and provide personal insights into their healing. Guests have included current and former politicians, financial executives, white collar criminal defense attorneys, federal agents, judges, Hollywood producers and more.
Established in 2013 in Greenwich, CT, Progressive Prison Ministries is the world’s first ministry devoted to serving the white collar justice community. More information is available on its website at prisonist.org and on its social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
About Progressive Prison Ministries’ Co-Founders:
Co-founders husband and wife Jeff Grant and Lynn Springer were featured in a twelve-page article in Greenwich Magazine: The Redemption of Jeff Grant. After an addiction to prescription opioids and serving almost 14 months in a Federal prison for a white-collar crime he committed when he was a lawyer, Grant began his own reentry – earning a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City with a focus in Christian Social Ethics. In May 2021, Grant’s law license was reinstated by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.
About GrantLaw, PLLC:
Jeffrey D. Grant, Esq., Private General Counsel/White Collar Attorney, 43 West 43rd Street, Suite 108, New York, New York 10036-7424, GrantLaw.com, [email protected], (212) 859-3512
I joined Fr. Joe and Fr. Rix on their podcast, Recalled, to discuss the 300th meeting of our White Collar Support Group, Mon, March 14th, 7 pm ET, 4 pm PT. Please join us! – Jeff
White Collar Support Group: We are a community of individuals, families and groups with white collar justice issues who have a desire to take responsibility for our actions and the wreckage we caused, make amends, and move forward in new way of life centered on hope, care, compassion, tolerance and empathy. Our experience shows us that many of us are suffering in silence with shame, remorse, and deep regret. Many of us have been stigmatized by our own families, friends and communities, and the business community. Our goal is to learn and evolve into a new spiritual way of life and to reach out in service to others. This is an important thing we are doing! To join our next support group meeting: [email protected].
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