Hannah Griff | Criminal Justice Reform, Cancel Culture, And What Portland Has Become | OAP #48
Chase Geiser is joined by Hannah Griff.
Hannah's Website Bio:
My name is Hannah Griff; preferred penname/nickname hhgriff, @yeahrightgirlhg on Twitter. I’m a writer in my mid-twenties, living in my beloved home state of Oregon after a short stint of living in Southern California. I work in law, tote guns, make a lot of jokes (and some insights) on Twitter, and never fail to offer my strong opinion. I have always been a writer, but I started taking a deeper interest in politics during the Obama administration. I started paying attention to the world around me and began writing my thoughts out on Facebook. The responses kept growing and thus, Yeahrightgirl was born in 2015 when I was eighteen.
Over the years I have fallen in love with politics/political science/political theory, and the 2016 election cemented my values and motivations to do this whole writing/politics thing. I have continued learning, researching, expanding and evolving my world views. I have been continuously inspired to share them because many find it hard to pigeonhole me into one political party – but I like it that way. I’m deeply patriotic, economically conservative, and socially left of center. I’m an independent thinker and try as you might, you won’t find that I check all of the boxes for one party or another; my beliefs all come from my personal life experiences and thorough research. I try to facilitate open dialogue about things that are hard to talk about because I believe that we all have something to learn from someone else, even across the aisle. I express what I believe and you will never see me apologize for it.
As I’ve navigated life into my mid-twenties I have learned a lot about myself, my upbringing, my mental health, my relationships, and how my life experiences have shaped not only my politics but my entire outlook on the world. Every person we encounter has their own unique story, their own intricate life full of joy and sorrow and challenges that most people will never know. Therefore in addition to my political pieces, you will find that I write a lot about my struggles with mental health, reflections on abuse I have suffered in the past, my personal spiritual journey, personal downfalls, reflections on things I have overcome in my life, and anything else happening in my life that strikes inspiration. Politics matter, but stories and humanity matter more.
I have a tattoo on my back of a closing line from an unpublished piece I wrote years ago: “For the ones that were never told.” I will always be reminded why I want to do this; the purpose of storytelling, the interconnectedness of the human experience, and my desire to share and connect through my writing. So many stories go untold, so many experiences fade into obscurity, so many meaningful thoughts and opinions go unheard. I want to do my part to tell as many stories as I can during my lifetime, for the ones that were never told
Feel free to read through, argue with me, agree with me, ask me questions, send me an email if you so wish at hannah@yeahrightgirl.com, and find me on Twitter @yeahrightgirlhg.
Thanks for stopping by, enjoy.
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/RealChaseGeiser
Hannah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/yeahrightgirlhg
I didn't find another student who outwardly shared the same views as me until literally my very last term, which was just summer term.
So that just gives you a little hint into Portland State.
I mean, some of the teachers are really great and, you know, teach objectively.
I took a class from, or four classes from the same professor because he was just awesome.
And I knew he was kind of a liberal, but he didn't teach that way.
And I appreciated that because so many teachers and professors would just teach kind of their view into the curriculum as though it was fact.
And, you know, people who aren't as politically tuned in as I am wouldn't necessarily realize that just because of how all the information was presented.
So it was a lot of like battling that.
I had teachers come after me because of my Twitter.
So do you think that like any teachers were vindictive and that they would, you know, kind of dock points from papers and exams because they were familiar with your leaning?
It was very much, I took a lot of community-based classes, doing community work and community projects, researching, you know, local organizations, that kind of thing.
It's very grassroots.
And it does have like an urban slash city vibe just because Portland State is in the city.
I didn't have to take classes that necessarily were tailored to that.
The course, you know, options for that degree were vast.
So you could kind of like choose and pick what you liked to take.
So I took a lot of criminal justice classes, for example.
I grew up in Illinois and that was kind of the way it was when I was growing up is that it was Cook County basically just determined that the state was blue, even though everywhere else in Illinois is, you know, super, a lot of farmers and very rural.
And it was just, it's just one of those things that cities seem to really outweigh the rest of the states.
And it's not, it's unfair, really, because like where I live, I don't live in Portland.
I live out kind of in the farmlands and really so much of farmlands and, you know, ranchers and people who tend to be very, very much conservative.
And I know that, you know, there is this, I've been seeing a big push on social media of just kind of red slash right-wing conservatives in Oregon who are just sick of Portland dictate Portland and Eugene and Salem dictating everything for us.
So I'm hopeful that there can be kind of, you know, a resurgence.
He was like on a date or something and he was getting approached and people, he was just getting slammed and he acted like such a such a tool about it.
Yeah, that's kind of what I, I, you know, I have a small business.
So I loved California in terms of the weather and the beach, but when you have to work 20 hours a day in order to pay the bills, you know, you don't really get to enjoy that stuff.
I mean, I was definitely inspired by all the happenings in the world.
And I was raised by a police officer.
My dad's a cop.
And so I do have a sympathetic side to it, but I also do believe that reform can and does need to happen.
And I think that there's ways that we can go about that that are make so much more sense than defund the police and, oh, let's do community building programs, but what does that even really mean?
Because, you know, we saw that in the awful case of Officer Ella French.
She was on one of those community building service teams and she still died getting shot.
So obviously that wasn't effective.
Their messaging wasn't right.
So I just think that there's a lot that can be explored in terms of more conservative slash liberty minded reform that would benefit everybody that people just, you know, maybe aren't thinking of yet or aren't taking seriously.
So I was really inspired by that because I'm so annoyed by the defund the police and the extreme and the back the blue no matter who and the extreme on both sides because that's not reality.
Everything is gray.
So that needs to be acknowledged and addressed in that manner, I think.
And well, and maybe this is my white privilege, but, you know, my concern isn't really so much with the police as it is with the experience of everything that happens from the time of arrest and being charged to like the end of a trial.
Like I'm just really worried about the due process and whether or not there's actually enough evidence for charges.
And then if you get convicted of something, it becomes an incredibly slippery slope because, you know, there's so many more rules that you have to follow in terms of probation and things like that.
So it's, it's much, it becomes much easier to get in trouble again.
And so it seems like a lot of people just get stuck in this cycle of just repeatedly getting in trouble.
That was something that I studied a lot in my classes was just the, you know, cycle of why people reoffend and end up back in jail again and again and again, because you see these patterns all over the country.
It's not just in certain places.
It's happening everywhere.
So obviously this is an institutional problem.
This is not a criminal problem.
And I think that when it comes to things like that, you know, when I speak of police reform, I think more of like training protocols that are different and along those lines.
But I think that what you're speaking of, like the legal side of it, there's definitely opportunity and need for reform there in a liberty sense completely.
I think conservatives have a tendency to kind of throw the book at people.
And I completely disagree with that.
I'm not, I'm anti-death penalty.
Like, so yeah, I think you're right in that a lot of reform needs to come to the legal side.
And I would definitely be introduced or, you know, interested in being introduced to that side of legal.
I've worked as a paralegal for five years until I put myself through school, not in criminal work, but you know, it's never more than a stone's throw away when you're already in it.
And I would totally be interested in exploring that.
And, you know, it's hard to discern the difference in those types of cases because the police have so much power.
The police are in bed with the prosecutors.
They both have the same job and that's putting someone in jail.
They don't care necessarily what the evidence is as long as they have the person that they think did it.
Sometimes they'll kind of build the evidence around that, you know.
And that happens a lot more than we'd like to believe.
And that take to fix that problem would take, you know, extreme amounts of reform on that level of the police and the prosecution and the judges kind of all being in cahoots.
And then you have the defense lawyer and the criminal on this side.
I've read studies, or I haven't read the studies, but I've read of studies showing that, you know, like a lot of the abuse that occurs in the prison system is more frequently guard on prisoner than it is prisoner on prisoner.
A lot, lots of assaults and, you know, sexual assaults in women's prisons happens a lot.
Lots of like, I don't want to use the word abuse, but very, you know, corporal punishment in male prisons, especially.
Yeah, it's pretty, it's something we kind of all, I think, just we're, we don't see it, so we don't think about it, right?
We're not in those experiences.
So it's not really something we have to consider.
But when you look up the statistics of actually how much it happens and how many cases there are that get reported and how much doesn't happen to advocate for those victims in the prison because they're criminals, you know, that's all an institutional problem too.
I have a friend who was sentenced to three years in prison many years ago, back in the 90s.
And, you know, he was guilty and everything, but he said that the worst part of his experience was actually the time that you spend in jail before you're convicted.
He said the treatment from the guards was like way more intense.
Like they just kind of talk down to you.
They say you're so fucked, you know, and they just like try to make it as they try to terrorize you as much as possible.
And then he said that once he actually was convicted and went to the, went to the like the real prison, that it was, it cooled off a little bit.
I think that there's definitely an understanding on pretty much all like a general understanding that county jails are worse than like the federal penitentiaries.
There's like a joke, you know, within the community where it's like, if you get arrested, do a federal crime because you want to go to the federal pen.
you don't want to go to the county jail or, you know, the state jail.
And I don't know why that is, but I know that, you know, it probably has to do with there's more regulations, you know, in federal prisons.
I know that there's still for-profit prisons and there's much less regulation in those.
There's a lot more ability to hide things that happen.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that it has probably just a lot to do with the federal level being involved.
Well, and, you know, I've heard of instances too where, you know, prisoners are in this, I think this kind of came about, I don't know if it came about with like the mob or with trying to prevent gang violence, but it seems very peculiar to me that, you know, it's sort of just up to the prison as to who can visit you.
Because it seems like, you know, if you're sentenced to a long stretch and you're not allowed to say, you know, have your wife visit, you know, every month or whatever, just, you know, for you to have some sort of a relationship with somebody on the outside, that would seem to me like it would kind of cross into the bounds of cruel and unusual punishment that, you know, it's one thing to isolate someone in prison, but to totally isolate them from the relationships in the outside world seems like recidivism rate would go higher in that way too.
But have you, do you know anything about like the laws or the rules behind that?
I mean, can the prison just basically say, no, you can't see this person?
I think the guys from the UK that did it, but it was about addiction and what they did.
I don't think, I don't know if it was Amsterdam.
I can't remember what country it was, but he talks about how this country totally revamped the way that it dealt with addiction.
And then rather than like criminalizing people for drug use, they invested all the resources into making sure that people get as integrated back in the community as quickly as possible.
Well, you know, as soon as they're out of rehab, is there, is there any like research or reform that you've looked into as, as, as far as getting people integrated back?
Because like, if you're convicted of a serious crime, you're really only shot to be successful in terms of like a real career is if you like start your own business when you get out, because you're not going to get hired at any fortune 500 company.
You know, you might be able to get some sort of a, you know, like a lower level job at, you know, minimum wage or whatever.
But what's sort of the thinking that you, that you picked up on how to get people integrated back in the society?
I mean, that's a, that's interesting that you mentioned the decriminalization of the drugs and, you know, getting people help because that is like a central focus of a lot of what I studied was what are the best ways that we can actually put this into effect and, you know, what does it look like in our society?
And unfortunately, I still think that we haven't figured that out yet.
Portland or Oregon, I don't, I can't remember.
I think it was statewide.
Um, on our last or in the last election, we decriminalized heroin, meth, cocaine, um, you know, like hard, hard street drugs.
Um, and I think that the thinking behind it was like, okay, let's help these people rather than put them in jail, but they fell short in that they decriminalized this and then they haven't done anything to help these people.
So you'll see in Portland, if you look up the, um, Instagram account, I think it's literally just named Portland looks like shit.
Um, it, it'll, it shows like neat, just people taking videos of needles that are just strewn about the ground, people just passing out.
And it's so sad because you feel awful for these people that are obviously suffering from addiction, but no one's doing anything to help them except feeding them needles and allowing them to do drugs with no consequences.
So, so that, you know, I was going to say that TED Talk that I watched, the guy cites this study that was done on mice.
And basically, what they did was they took these mice and they would put them in like a boring cage and they would give them water that was laced with cocaine versus regular water.
And he said, in that instance, the mice would always choose the cocaine water.
He's like, but they take, they would take the mice then and they would put them in like, I think they called it like mice heaven or something.
It was basically like all sorts of like mazes and you know, tubes for them to run through, like just total fun stuff that they love and like allow them to like have as much sex as they wanted with other mice.
And they found that when the mice were in that environment, they would choose the regular water over the cocaine water, even when it was offered to them.
And so like, that's sort of like extrapolating that on people.
It's like, you know, maybe the, and he also cited Vietnam, like an overwhelming number of Vietnam soldiers used heroin while they were in Vietnam, but like 95% of them never did it again when they came back.
So it's like, all right, so if addiction is, you know, really this super physical thing, then how did you know, how did 95% of veterans, you know, just kick it as soon as they got back on in the United States?
And so the argument that he made was that the reason people abuse substances is not because they have physical addictions, but because they have like a psychological isolation, like they don't feel connected to their family, they're not enjoying their life.
I don't know.
It's like external factors.
And so if you want to solve the addiction problem, you know, decriminalization is probably part of it, but you have to juxtapose, you have to juxtapose that with like massive investment in programs that can reintegrate these people into communities, right?
So take the money that you're saving, but you know, busting them, but then have these programs in place.
And we saw the same thing that you're describing in Portland.
We saw the same thing in Austin where, you know, for a while, they allowed all the homeless people in Austin to camp in the city on any public ground.
And they've recently fixed that.
And, you know, I don't really have so much a problem with that policy if you also have like these programs in place to get these people off the streets as soon as possible, but they had no solution to homelessness.
And so it just consolidated the problem downtown for like a year and a half.
So I don't know.
I just, I'm very interested in how we can solve this problem so that we can get people reintegrated because I really do think that the crime thing is a product of environment and not character in most cases.
You know, like the white crawler crime stuff, like those guys are just shitbags.
But if you're, you know, if you got a drug problem, it's usually because something happened, you know, or you're not connected.
So I don't know.
I'm not an expert, but I don't know.
I'm just interested in how we can solve that problem.
It must have been some crime documentary I was watching.
But this guy got arrested and charged and convicted of something that was like, it was something, you know, silly and stupid.
It was a drug charge or something like that.
And it was his first offense.
And he got convicted.
Like, I mean, they threw the book at him pretty hard.
I can't remember the exact details.
And he was explaining after he got out of jail.
He's like, I couldn't get a job anywhere.
And I had fees and fines to pay from my conviction.
And I had to commit 20 more crimes to pay that off because no one would give me a job.
So it's like, we have to, I think that re-entering them into the community, a big, big part of that has to do with creating jobs for them and like getting them into programs that can educate them and give them vocational training.
Because a lot of them commit crimes because they need money and they can't get jobs elsewhere.
And, you know, people won't hire them because they're criminals.
So I think the job aspect is really kind of like, as long as they're mentally, you know, good and everything, that's a big, big step into fixing the process of getting people rehabilitated.
Well, a lot of people have criticized, you know, Reagan for the war on drugs in that, you know, caused a lot of people in minority communities to become incarcerated and then sort of made a lot like a whole generation of people fatherless in a lot of instances.
And, you know, I'm not sure where I land in terms of interpreting what happened or how it happened.
But what are your thoughts in terms of like what happened to the minority communities in the United States?
Because, you know, if you look at pictures of like MLK and back during the civil rights movement, you see, you know, people, minorities in suits protesting.
They're very, there's like the nuclear family.
There's a lot of sort of trad values in those communities.
And it seems like something happened in the 70s that sort of totally flipped the switch in those communities that just made them sort of infested with crime in a lot of instances.
I mean, I think that unfortunately the war on drugs brought a lot of addiction with it, right?
Like people that wouldn't have necessarily been exposed to or done those drugs did because they were suddenly being, you know, this is constantly talked about.
And I think that inflation probably had something to do with it too.
Because just imagine these sort of lower middle class communities that were sort of just barely making ends meet and getting by in the 70s.
And then all of a sudden we kind of go off the gold standard and the value of the dollar is plummeting because the inflation in the 70s is well documented and famous, infamous rather.
And it seems like that might have tipped a lot of these communities over into having to lean on crime, whereas, you know, 10 years prior, the job was actually enough to cut it.
I mean, I bitch about stuff, but at the end of the day, like, I'm just there to stay informed because I think like Twitter is a great resource for staying caught up on politics.
It's about the best one I've ever found.
So I'm there to, you know, do that and bullshit and talk and have fun.
And I make a lot of jokes and people like it, apparently.
I did like really, really early on when I was kind of blowing up like faster in my early thousands.
But I've kind of figured out what I can and can't say.
And while it's annoying to have to, you know, tiptoe around that stuff, I think that I still get my message across pretty well without breaking terms of service.
And like, first, I mean, I hope that it's not anybody's livelihood because things can happen like that.
But I would be, you know, really sad.
People, oh, it's Twitter or whatever.
But like, no, I would, I have a community here.
I have, I've made friends through Twitter.
Like, I have, there's been opportunities for me.
I've met people.
Like, I've made political connections.
I would be absolutely devastated if they just nuked my account for no reason.
But that's why I think it's important to kind of like branch out and like, you know, I try to promote my work elsewhere, but it's kind of hard because Twitter is just like the best place to do it.
And you just kind of have to live with the fact that someday you could wake up and you won't have it anymore.
I blocked somebody on Instagram the other day and I noticed that they changed the blocking feature so that you can not only block them, but block any other accounts that they make in the future.
It's like it's like creepy, but it's a good feature, I guess, you know, from a user standpoint.
But it's like, wow, you can, you can like perma block somebody in a way that, because if they're using the same device, I guess is how they track it or IP.
Like, I mean, obviously, I know it's Apple, so they can do that if they want, but like, they have so much power these days that they can like just do that and nobody gets a say.
I just got um, I just, I've just been kind of tooling around with TikTok for the first time.
And, you know, I was reluctant to do it for a long time because the commies, you know, own it.
But then I, then I realized that the commies pretty much run all the social media platforms.
So I figured it was just moot.
So, so, uh, but the crazy thing about TikTok is even if you have no followers, you can have like the virality potential is so high.
So I, I did like, I don't know, it was maybe my 10th video ever.
I've got like 500 followers.
I had at the time like 300 followers.
It was just a few days ago on TikTok.
I did a video and it got 320,000 views.
Wow.
And I guess, I guess the way the algorithm works is like you can make three different lengths of videos.
You can make up to 15 second videos.
You can make up to one minute videos and you can make up to three minute videos.
And depending on the size of your video, there's an algorithm that requires a minimum like average watch time to determine how many feeds to put it in.
So for example, if you have like a 10-second video, you need to get people to watch it all the way through in order for it to like consider it viral.
But if you have a three-minute one, it's like 50%.
Right.
And so I had like this nine-second video.
And I guess, you know, a great enough number of people who saw it watched it all the way through that TikTok put it in like, you know, more feeds.
And then that worked and then more feeds and more feeds.
And all of a sudden, it's like I'm this 300, you know, subscriber.
I have 300 subscribers on TikTok and I got 320,000 views and I gained 500 followers off of it, you know?
So that's what's exciting to me about TikTok is just the virality potential seems high.
I've just noticed that like Sundays are really slow.
And maybe it's because I have like this boomer Christian crowd that follows me.
Because like the first thing that went viral for me is I did like a, I did a podcast with Tony Schaefer and he like said some, he had like a badass one minute rant about how Attorney General Bill Bark called him and told him to stop investigating election fraud.
And that went viral, but it went viral like on Citizens Free Press.
And so I had like all these sort of like over 60 people that followed me in short order.
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And so now it's like I have really like watching live.
So I was just saying that it's just funny because it's like 5 a.m. is a real hot time for my crowd, you know, and like it's like pretty much after seven o'clock.
My favorite thing is when old people think that certain posts, like a post that you just post, is directed like directly at them and they think that it's like a message to them.
I mean, I have probably 10 half-written novels on my computer.
And just like, I mean, now that I have graduated, I have sort of given myself permission to write more academically about politics because I have the piece of paper to back it up.
So I'd like to explore politics as much as I can.
That is really ideally what I would like to do and just kind of go down this commentary path.
But, you know, one of my biggest inspirations from the very beginning has always been Tommy Laron.
And, you know, we don't agree on everything politically by any means, but just the way that she's kind of made this career for herself and really forged a path for herself.
She's super young.
Her and I, I think, are the exact same age, or she's a couple years older than me.
So just seeing her do what she's done, I'm like, yeah, I could do that.
Like, I want to do that.
So, yeah, I guess that's sort of my ultimate goal.
Well, I'll keep you in mind if I know anybody in the, if I run into anybody that's looking for a writer, because like I could see you totally writing for like a human events or something.
You know, I had Will Chamberlain on the on the podcast a couple of days ago.
He's, I mean, I'm not saying that I don't know him well enough to like plug you, but it just seems to me that you'd be a really good fit at a an outlet like that, you know, sort of like a versioning sort of independent critical thinking type platform.
I think would be really cool for you.
I'd love to, where can people read your writing?
I know you mentioned in the beginning that you write for rogue review.
So in all of my social media, I have a link tree in my bio that links kind of to everything because I have my column on rogue review and then I have my own website.
And then I've like guest written, you know, what's your Twitter handle?
It's Yeah Right Girl, Y E A H Y Right Girl H G and my website is the same.
It's yeahrightgirl.com.
And the biggest chunk of my writing is on my own website.