Unlocking Change

[00:00:00] Camping bans / blanket bans in Boulder
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[00:00:00] Trevor Jones:

[00:00:58] Emma Mclean-Riggs: what I wanted for my abuser was not for him to be punished. I wanted what happened to me not to happen to other kids,

So that all kind of led me into like. How do we do something that works? Until we stop putting all of our money and our resources and our time and attention into punishing people, we're never gonna have enough money and resources and time and attention to prevent what's happening.

[00:01:32] Trevor Jones: you did mention some of the things that are, uh.

Actually helpful for making society safer and, uh, more healthy. And, uh, some of those included like reduction of, poverty and we think that there's some moves to potentially make things more difficult for people who are already impoverished.

[00:01:50] Tiffany McCoy: So what are the things that are happening right now that might make being unhoused a crime?

[00:01:55] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Yeah, so we've seen kind of this, um, ongoing battle over [00:02:00] the last few years over what we would call the criminalization of existing in public.

So the criminalization of sleeping with a cover against the elements. These are often called "camping bans." I feel very specific that we should not be calling them camping bans. We should be calling them "blanket bans"; most of them can be invoked by something as simple as a blanket or a tarp rather than a tent.

Um, and making those things usually municipal level crimes, so crimes that carry, um, fines and, uh, often ultimately jail time. And that's certainly true in our state. we are involved in litigation against the city of Boulder over, um, their blanket ban ordinance right now-- a state constitutional challenge, um, to that criminalization.

Um, so we've had, I guess I'll, I'll back up and say this has been kind of a conversation and a battle for, for quite some years now. Um, is this conversation about criminalizing existing in public. There was a, um, great case called Martin versus Boise that said that you cannot criminalize existing in public, um, through blanket bans or sleeping bans.

we lost at the Supreme Court very recently that protection. So Grants Pass, um, was the name of the case held that cities and states can criminalize, um, camping, sleeping on the ground, that kind of thing. Um, and we at the ACLU of Colorado are proceeding with our own case, um, which is based on the Colorado State Constitution and therefore not impacted by Grant's Pass articulating that that is a violation of Colorado's eighth amendment equivalent.

Um. The escalation that we've seen recently is about this recent Trump executive order, which is pushing a narrative about people who are unhoused, um, that we think is very dangerous. That is [00:04:00] urging the expansion of criminalization, but also the expansion of asylums. Um, and when I saw this executive order, I have to tell you, I was like, "Are you kidding me right now?

I have to litigate over asylums? I thought we were done. I thought I was like the next generation of lawyers and didn't have to litigate over asylums and we could do something else." Um, not the case. We're gonna see kind of retrenchment. Um, we're also seeing in DC displacement, criminalization, of our unhoused communities.

Um, and so not only are we seeing what I think is kind of an ex, an explicit moral wrong, which is the criminalization of having nowhere else to go and nothing else, we are also seeing, um. I think an, an exacerbation of that cycle of poverty because obviously if someone already has nothing, they are hit with a $50 fine for sleeping under a tarp.

now that's $50 that as they earn, they need to be paying back to the court and not using to save for a place to live, buy clothing that could protect them better from the elements-- like that sort of downward spiral, um, into increasingly entrenched poverty. So that is another place in which we're, we're seeing really significant attacks on the most vulnerable people in our community is that criminalization of poverty.

[00:05:23] Tiffany McCoy: so with these sleeping bans and you know, like. They don't want you to be covered. Um, do they offer other options? Like what are people supposed to do?

[00:05:33] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Yeah, so our litigation against the city of Boulder, um, is explicitly the combination of their available shelter space and their blanket bans. And they have sort of two types of bans.

Um, they have tent bans, um, and they also have these blanket bans or cover bans. Um. They also do not have sufficient shelter space in Boulder for the entire unhoused population. Just as a, a [00:06:00] sort of numeric truth, there are not enough beds on any given night, um, for everyone who is unhoused. But sort of beyond that, we then have the requirements of the shelters that make them inaccessible for lots of people.

So families have to split up. There's no sort of family shelter option. Um, Boulder's shelter in particular has particular hours that you have to show up to be eligible for overnight shelter. Um, for folks who have jobs, who are, there are plenty of unhoused people who work regular jobs and still can't afford to live, particularly in jurisdictions like Boulder.

For folks who have. Jobs, they can't, um, come to the shelter at that particular hour. Um, there are folks with disabilities that make being in congregate settings like that impossible to access. If someone is, for example, a veteran with very severe PTSD around sleeping and there's a lot of noise that may not be a, a safe situation for that person.

So not only is there sort of this sheer numeric question, there's also all of these access barriers, um, that Boulder is not, um, ameliorating. So our lawsuit said in a situation where a person literally has nowhere else to go, there's no shelter bed, there's nowhere else to go. For us, we've been thinking a lot about like, what, what is Boulder in January like, right?

Mm-hmm. If a person chooses to sleep without a cover in Boulder in January, they will die. They will freeze to death. Um, and is it that person's obligation to freeze to death, um, rather than use a a tarp? Right. Um, and so we have said that as cruel and unusual punishment, you cannot criminalize people merely for the exact act of existing, which is what Boulder is doing.

Um, now, and we are in front of the court of appeals now, we'll see what they think of that argument.

[00:07:45] Tiffany McCoy: so there are some things, well, one thing in particular that has changed since before I went into prison, which is when you go into places that have bathrooms, like fast food places, there's codes to get into the bathrooms.

So I also wonder if [00:08:00] that is like. Something that is making it difficult for people to like find somewhere to use the bathroom now.

[00:08:06] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Yeah, I think that's definitely the case, is people just don't have access to sanitation. Whether that's like a place to use the bathroom or whether that's like a place to, you know, wash up, like wash your face, wash your hands, do whatever it is you need to do because of that kind of private property constriction.

And I think what we see as a result of that is, of course what happens, you know, you don't suddenly, uh, not need to use the bathroom because it's illegal for you to do so in public, right? Mm-hmm. Um, so what happens is, is people have to, um, use the bathroom outside and that creates these, um, situations in the encampments that, that folks are really, um, I would say a lot of, uh, housed people are very worried about is like the sanitation at the encampments.

Um, and, and what I always say is that's a policy choice. We have chosen as a policy choice not to make public restrooms available. We have chosen as a policy choice not to make free trash collection for people who, um, do not have property or rentals, um, accessible to people. And so we have chosen that those byproducts of existence are there in public,

[00:09:14] What motivates Emma?[00:09:14] Emma's life journey into law
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[00:09:14] Trevor Jones: I always wonder what. Drive someone to do this at all. Like what in you was like, I want to fight these kind of things in the world?

[00:09:25] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Great question. I had a sort of weird, I think I had a sort of weird, um, trajectory. So I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and um, when I sort of grew up and went to college, um, I had what I would say is like a very, um, classic trajectory for like a certain subset of people who've had that experience.

I started working at a domestic violence shelter. I started as a janitor actually when I was 18 in the domestic violence shelter. And then eventually I was an advocate, um, working with, uh, women who had been abused by their partners and their children. I was [00:10:00] also a rape victim advocate for the district attorney's office at that time, and I was sort of in that victim support space.

Um. And then I had a really, I would say like radicalizing experience in that I, um, for my senior thesis in college, um, observed a restraining order courtroom. So a courtroom where all they did was domestic violence, restraining orders. And, and I was studying that courtroom and kind of what they did. And I saw the same women over and over again and it was mostly women, um, coming in to say, um, the person had, uh, abused them through the restraining order or was continuing to stalk them, or they would drop the restraining order and come in and get another one.

Um, you know, I kind of saw this churn and I also saw both parties in a relationship coming in asking for restraining orders. And I think that sort of triggered within me this question of like, is this working? Is this thing that we're doing, that all of us spend all day in this courtroom doing? Is it working?

And I started reading about sexual abuse in particular, and particularly child sexual abuse because I was really curious about what had happened to me. And I think the, the deep question for me was, why? Why my perpetrator had done this to me. and what I started to learn is that the ways in which we legally respond to violence, particularly against women and children, but lots of violence, um, are not working.

Um, we don't have good data that says sex offender registration works. We have very good data that says long periods of incarceration doesn't work, um, and doesn't reduce, um, intimate partner violence except in, and I will say, except insofar as we have very good data that various types of crime, including violent crime, decrease with age.

So we have the simple fact of someone aging, [00:12:00] um, does. Change what they call in the literature, criminogenic behavior. Um, so sometimes you'll see that effect, um, in consort with incarceration. And what most of the data scientists think is, it's not incarceration that's causing that dip. It's the age-crime curve, which is one of, um, the most well-established findings in criminology.

But so I started to realize like, okay, this is not working, this is not working. Um, and I also started to realize that what I wanted for my abuser was not for him to be punished. I wanted what happened to me not to happen to other kids, whether that was at the hands of my abuser, um, or at the hands of somebody else.

So that all kind of led me into like. How do we do something that works? And sort of what I, what I found was like, I don't think we can do something that works until we stop doing this. Until we stop putting all of our money and our resources and our time and attention into punishing people, we're never gonna have enough money and resources and time and attention to prevent what's happening.

And I also, I also will say that I, um, I had had prisons in my periphery as a young person. Um, I had friends who had gone to juvenile prison. Um, I had a couple people in my life who'd spent time in adult facilities, but I was not a person who had a parent who'd been incarcerated or had ever been incarcerated myself.

Um, so I don't know that I thought a lot about prisons and jails. Mm-hmm. And when I ran into this, like what we're doing is not working, um, I obviously had to look at what we were actually doing. So I was paying attention to prisons and jails in a different way. And I think. One thing about being a child that had experienced abuse is, for me, it was primarily the experience of being trapped.

Um, of knowing that I could not [00:14:00] escape this violence that was happening to me. And that, that the person who was abusing me had control over every aspect of my life, where I went, what I ate, how long I slept, all of that. And so I think when I encountered prisons and jails for the first time, there was a part of me that recognized that experience, that was a part of me that went, oh, I have empathy for that experience of being trapped and being subject to this, like really acute violence and being blamed for the violence that is happening to you, right?

Um, in the sense that like, you have done a bad thing and now someone is controlling your whole existence. Um, and so I think for me, uh. In that, in that seeing right, in that seeing of that experience, um, it became really important to me to be focused on, on freedom. Not just because freedom will get us to the place I wanted to be right to, to prevention and to safety for kids, but also because I see what is happening in prisons and jails and that sort of systemic, uh, violence of captivity as an absolute moral wrong.

[00:15:08] Colorado incarceration liberatory work
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[00:15:08] Tiffany McCoy: Thank you so much for sharing that. speaking of prisons and jails, is there something right now that the ACLU is working on with Colorado prisons and jail?

[00:15:18] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Yeah, so, um, we have been doing what I would call liberatory work lately. So we've been trying to reduce the amount of people who get into prisons and jails, and we've been trying to get people out of prisons and jails, and that's kind of been where our focus is.

We've been trying to sort of, um, depopulate the prisons and jails rather than doing lots of conditions work, which sometimes, um, the ACLU across the country has done historically right? And my prioritization of, uh, liberation work has to do with, um, my sort of ideological belief that what we need is more liberation and less clean cells. Even if the conditions were perfect, I would [00:16:00] object to the existence of the institution. So I try not to, to kind of focus on the conditions. That being said, um, people are really suffering and we have to kind of meet people where they are. And, and one of the things that I am investigating lately, is the conditions of people with severe mental illness in our prisons and jails.

Um, we've been in long running litigation, not the ACLU, but, but the state of Colorado has been in long running litigation over, um, people sitting in the, in the jails waiting for restoration to competency and sort of, the lack of, of appropriate state care there. Um, and what we're seeing is that people are sitting in abysmal conditions, solitary confinement in cells where there is rotting food, where there is feces and blood on the walls where people are just being left to scream for 23 hours a day.

I mean, I'm sure I'm not telling either of you anything you don't know. But I am, very interested in very worried about that. So if anyone is watching this who has had an experience, um, in the Colorado prisons and jails, um, either yourself or a loved one or has something to report, I would love to hear from you.

[00:17:11] What are 'civil liberties'?
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[00:17:11] Trevor Jones: Emma, as an attorney for the ACLU, could you explain to me as a lay person what, civil liberties are and what it is that needs to be protected?

[00:17:24] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Yeah, I think of civil liberties as being, um, our constitutional freedoms. So the things that our legal framework here in the United States, um, protects.

So our right to be secure in our persons and papers, which is the civil liberty that underlies, um, the fourth amendment, the right to be safe from cruel and unusual punishment, the civil liberty that underlies the eighth amendment. The right to, um, speak and write and think freely, which are the civil liberties that underlie the first amendment.

Um, so I think of them as like really our, our constitutional freedoms. And sometimes people are [00:18:00] articulate them as rights. I don't love that framing. Of course, we do have civil rights. Um, I think of them as civil liberties because I believe they are inherent to our personhood. Um, and so it is, it is not that the state has granted us rights, it is that we have liberties and that those liberties are protected by our constitution.

Um. So that's, that's kind of how I frame that.

[00:18:25] ACLU's history, values, intersectionality
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[00:18:25] Tiffany McCoy: Um, I have kind of a interesting question. I remember. Growing up as an African American woman and every time I heard "ACLU," I thought it was like a Black thing, like people who supported Black people and like, did it start off like that or where did I get that from?

[00:18:39] Emma Mclean-Riggs: yes, no, we also have a very, very proud history of, of racial justice work and it sort of depends on who you talk to within the ACLU.

Like, folks have varied ideas about what we should be doing and where we should be doing it and who, um, who we should be putting our resource towards. And, and I see that as such a strength for us. I mean, we have this history at the ACLU of, um, representing people who have, um, very stigmatized opinions and that can look all over the place. We've represented people with, um, opinions about Palestine that people think are very, very far left. Um, and we historically have represented Nazis.

We've represented Nazis in their, um, search to march through the streets in their search for permits, in their search to speak freely. We've represented Nazis in the prisons and their, um, desire to, um, write various things, to do various kinds of rituals. Um, and I am very proud to say that, um, we have this tradition of that kind of defense work,

Um, and, and we have a proud tradition, sort of, I would say, across identities of folks who are marginalized acting to protect the rights of folks who are, um, hateful and bigoted because we [00:20:00] believe that those rights apply to everybody.

So for example, um, I am a gay person. Um, I'm married to a woman and, um, my commitment to the First Amendment is that folks like Focus On The Family, get to say whatever they want to say in terms of government regulation, even if that's, um, hateful against me and, and my family and the values that I hold.

Because I think that First Amendment principle, that freedom of speech, freedom of thought, um, freedom to read is so important and our organization has held that since the very, very beginning. Um, and we're really proud of that.

I'm, I'm really proud that we have all of these histories running together. We have these, this history of like really aggressive honoring of our principles even when we do not honor the folks who we are invoking them for. And also this really cool history of working for racial justice, and for queer justice and all these things that are really values aligned for me.

[00:20:58] Support ACLU / Get involved
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[00:20:58] Ryan Conarro: how does the ACLU receive. Financial assistance or support? Um, can people volunteer? Do you guys have like donation spots? Like

[00:21:07] Emma Mclean-Riggs: what? Yeah. Love talking about this. Um, so people often make the assumption that the ACLU is sort of a very well-funded behemoth in the space.

Um, and we are as non-profits sort of go a big player in the space. Um, we are desperate for funding. We need people's help to do what we do, and it's because the work that we do is really expensive. Um, these types of lawsuits that sort of have this massive scope, very, very expensive. These types of investigations, very, very expensive.

Not just in terms of staff time, but in terms of like experts, you know, copying fees. I am always trying to hustle for money for my, um, records requests that I do. Um. So we really do need folks help. Um, we have a donation page so anyone can, can go and donate. Um, I really encourage you, uh, selfishly, um, for us to [00:22:00] donate to the ACLU of Colorado, specifically the affiliate, um, because we need the money and we haven't seen, um, the same sort of influx that we did in the last administration.

Um. Yes, folks can volunteer. They largely, um, volunteer with our, um, organizing department and I am underqualified in that space. Um, so I will encourage people to contact our organizers. Um, I know that folks kind of fit in in different places depending on what they're interested in and what their skill level is.

I know it's really helpful in legislative session for us to have volunteers and our, um, organizing and policy department works together, um, a lot. And in terms of how we can help you, um, I just wanna let everybody know that we have a legal intake form on our website. Um, and that intake form will ask you a whole bunch of questions if there's, um, a situation in which you feel like your rights or the rights of someone you care about are being violated.

Um, and we get about 3000 intakes a year. So we get a lot of requests for help. We investigate very few of them, and we take even fewer cases. Because of the way our model works and our capacity. Um, but I want folks to know that that's out there and that you can write to us and that we review every single one of those intakes individually.

So if you write to us, we see it. Um, so yeah, we, we wanna hear from folks who need our help.

[00:23:21] Vision for future?[00:23:21] ‌
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[00:23:21] Trevor Jones: You obviously get up and go to work every morning. You fight this fight and you come talk to people like us. Do you have a vision of what this society could look like or what a just state might be? And if you do have that vision, what does it look like and is there any way for us to get there?

[00:23:43] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't want this answer to sound flip because I take this question really seriously and I think about this question a lot. And: I don't think I'm qualified to answer it.

I try [00:24:00] to maintain a sort of really realistic idea of who I am and what I do, and, and let's be real right now. I am a white attorney living a certain type of life as a US citizen. Um, I've never been incarcerated. I know very little about family separation from a personal perspective. It would be wild if I said, this is my version, this is like my vision for the future and this is what it should look like.

And I have all of this figured out. That would be wild. I don't know enough to do that. Um, and in some ways I, I think about myself as a person with system brain worms. I signed up to be a lawyer. I signed up to think about things in a certain way. Um, I signed up to sort of, um, reason with the system in a certain way.

Um, and law school changes the way you think. It changes the way you imagine it. It changes lots of stuff about your brain. And, and I had a really important mentor, also a lawyer who used to say to me that when you get your law degree, you forfeit your right to lead movements. Your job is to follow movements and assist them.

And that's sort of how I think about myself. I think about my role in the movement as getting the state off of the necks of the people who are gonna build our better world. So when I think about the world that is possible. I, I, of course have some ideas about how that's gonna look. I do not think we can have true justice and true community in a world where we have prisons.

I do not think we can have true justice and true community in a world where we have sexual violence. I think we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to get rid of all that. Um. And that being said, like I really rely on folks like y'all and also folks like our youth, um, the folks coming up behind us to sort of lead the way to, to what is the better world and what is the better world gonna look like?

Both because I think I don't have the lived experience to do it, but if I'm totally honest, I don't think any [00:26:00] of us have the lived experience to do it by ourselves. I think we all sort of need each other to build what that's gonna look like. So, so whenever I'm asked this question, I sort of respond with like, I think it would be really arrogant of me, um, to pop out with, like, this is my vision.

Um, and I, I would say I don't, I don't have one that is, that well formed. What I do have is a lot of faith in our collective process, um, and a lot of faith that people are good and that when we work together and we actually listen to each other, we can create magic. So I really believe that.

[00:26:37] ‌
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[00:26:37] Trevor Jones: So we are coming up on the end of this interview. Is there anything else you would like to add today?

[00:26:43] Emma Mclean-Riggs: Yeah, I just wanna say thank you. I'm really excited to be in this space. Really excited to be talking to the two of you and, um. I just kind of wanna acknowledge the contribution of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to all of this work.

Um, not only in terms of like conversations like the one that we're having, um, but there is a very well known jailhouse lawyer called Calvin Duncan, um, who is now free, but did a lot of his most important legal work, um, from Angola Prison, and is like a huge influence of mine and really structures how I approach, um, the law and talking to people and client interviews.

Um, and so I just wanna say like, I really appreciate you guys having me here and I also wanna uplift, um, our comrades in the prisons and jails and, and say that like there is no prison litigation that has ever been done by a lawyer outside like me that has done anything useful that hasn't had folks on the inside.

Um. Thinking about not only like what they need, but like what they want, like what the solution is.

[00:28:00]

[00:29:12] Ryan Conarro: