This week’s guest is Jeff Severns Guntzel, an investigative researcher with 20 years of journalism and humanitarian work under his belt. He joins Brett to talk about the juvenile detention system, prison abolition, activism, good deeds through hardware hacking, and trips to the garbage dump.

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Check out more episodes at systematicpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. Find Brett as @ttscoff on all social media platforms, and follow Systematic at @systmcast on Twitter.

Transcript

Brett

Brett: [00:00:00] [00:00:00]This week’s guest is Jeff Severns Guntzel an investigative researcher with 20 years of journalism and humanitarian work under his belt. How’s it going? Jeff,

[00:00:16] Jeff: [00:00:16] It’s going very well. Thank you.

[00:00:17] Brett: [00:00:17] do you know when the last time you were on the show was

[00:00:21] Jeff: [00:00:21] Oh, I had just left a job in public radio, so I want to say it was like 2013 or something.

[00:00:28] Brett: [00:00:28] 2014, very close.

[00:00:30] Jeff: [00:00:30] 14. Oh God, I should’ve listened back. Or I only have so many things to say.

[00:00:35] Brett: [00:00:35] Well, it’s been long enough that if anyone still remembers the last time you were on, I’m sure they won’t mind a refresher, but we have new stuff to talk about since then, too.

[00:00:45] Jeff: [00:00:45] Yeah, I haven’t heard anything about people still talking about it to this day. So I’m just going to assume we can call this a clean slate.

[00:00:51]Brett: [00:00:51] So this just for listeners this will be the last official episode of [00:01:00] systematic on this. We’ll call it a season. I’m going to take a little break after this. There might be a bonus episode. Jeff May have something to say about that, but at least a month or two we’re gonna go dark and hope to be back soon.

[00:01:14] But anyway, that sounded like I was finishing the show, but

[00:01:18] Jeff: [00:01:18] nah,

[00:01:19] Brett: [00:01:19] I

[00:01:20] Jeff: [00:01:20] it’s just, I buy it as a season finale.

[00:01:23] Brett: [00:01:23] So you have the distinguished honor of being the season’s final guest.

[00:01:30] Jeff: [00:01:30] I thank you.

[00:01:31] Brett: [00:01:31] SSo what do you do for a day job right now?

[00:01:35] Jeff: [00:01:35] What I do for a day job is what I call investigative research. There is a thing called investigative research in the sort of academic research world, which I am not a part of. But it seems to have, it seems to have fizzled a little. So I’m just like borrowing it for a little bit. So I don’t have to explain, like, I’m not a journalist anymore, but I’m still doing journalists, like things with that said I’m not a journalist anymore, but I’m still doing journalist-

[00:02:00] [00:01:59] like things. I started working on a project with a small team of people in Omaha, Nebraska about four years ago. And the purpose of the project is to. Really get inside the experiences of the kids there who are going through the juvenile justice system and their families and their siblings.

[00:02:20] And to really kind of understand how how experience with the system ripples through an individual’s life, but also through their family life and their social life and all of that stuff. Because we don’t spend too much time talking about that. And so the way that project works is I am not interviewing kids.

[00:02:37]Instead we have a team of people. I have these amazing colleagues in Omaha who have been interviewing kids who have experience working with kids who themselves have experience with the system. So that it’s not, I mean, in my case, it’s not a white guy coming in from Minneapolis, gathering up stories, tucking them under my arm.

[00:02:59] And flying [00:03:00] back to Minneapolis, right? Like that model should die. And this model we felt was like going to be something a little different. So we started this project called the lived experience project, and it was initially to collect stories and then figure out what the stories or the kids were telling us should happen next.

[00:03:17]Where my job comes in is, you know, it only took us about a dozen interviews to realize that if we’re going to be having Frank conversations with kids about their experiences in the system, that we’re going to start hearing about ways in which the system harms them.

[00:03:32] And we didn’t want to be in a situation where things like that were being shared with us. And we were just filing it away in our database of interviews. We wanted to be sure that we took those cues when they came, even if they were implicit, like if someone said something subtle about a certain facility, but it kind of matched something subtle.

[00:03:52] Someone else said about a facility, my job was to go, okay, what are the other ways of knowing here? Right? We’re not going to, [00:04:00] we’re not going to put it on this kid to tell us everything that happened, because that puts them in a really It puts them in a potentially dangerous situation and it puts a lot on them.

[00:04:08]When I was, you know, doing reporting the kind of main rule when you got information from a source was, first thing you do is go try to get it from something else so that you can kind of shield your original source of that story or that document or whatever. So I was taking that approach and I had to kind of start from scratch because in a way, like in these interviews, we weren’t learning super specific things, right.

[00:04:32] But we were learning types of harm in the system. We were learning ways you can be harmed. We were learning how kids defined harm, which is very different from kid to kid based on whatever their sort of norms are. And so I, in a way kind of broke off of all of that and just focused on how can I see into this system, which is very opaque.

[00:04:55] And in some cases necessarily opaque, but in some cases, [00:05:00] That opaqueness kind of protects people who are doing harm in the system. So how can I see in? And so my job became working with public documents, pulling whatever data I could about any given facility from like 911 data to tracking down court records that discuss what life was like in that particular facility.

[00:05:19]I would cold call former staff of different facilities. I would talk to state agencies, all that stuff all as a way of sort of. Seeing into the system so that I can start to see patterns and red flags which was something that was not previously possible in Douglas county, juvenile justice system, or actually just wasn’t previously done, I guess.

[00:05:38] And so that’s what I do. I’m like, I’m a journalist in this very, I’m an investigative researcher, investigative journalists in this very narrow sort of scope that is not even my hometown that I’ve been doing for a few years now. And that I really hope when we’ve really kind of nailed down this model can be not s...

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261: Kids in the System with Jeff Severns Guntzel