“The Sing Sing Files” is a must-listen on the horrors of criminal justice | Audible.com
“The Sing Sing Files” is a must-listen on the horrors of the criminal justice system
The veteran "Dateline" reporter has spent more than 20 years bearing witness to the victims of wrongful conviction and mass incarceration. "The Sing Sing Files" is his call to action.
Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.
Alanna McAuliffe: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Alanna McAuliffe, and today I am so grateful to be speaking with award-winning veteran reporter Dan Slepian. Slepian is a longtime producer for NBC's groundbreaking investigative news program Dateline, where he honed a fine lens on the criminal justice system. His extensive work profiling and working towards the exoneration of those wrongfully convicted is chronicled in his new account, . Dan, thank you for being here today.
Dan Slepian: Thank you, Alanna. It's a pleasure.
AM: To begin, I'd first like to acknowledge that for many of our listeners, this will certainly not be the first time they've heard your voice or your reporting on this subject. In fact, your podcast was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. What inspired you to expand this reporting into a full-length book, and how did the process of writing and recording an audiobook differ from that of podcasting?
DS: Wow, there's a lot packed in there. Okay, so, first of all, I appreciate the introduction of people being familiar with my work. I never assume that. I don't know if that's true, but I certainly hope folks take the time to listen to this, because this is the culmination of all of that work, basically, over the past 20-plus years. I have been working in this space, meaning the world of criminal legal reform, we now call it, more than criminal justice reform, because a lot of people don't believe there's much justice in the system when it comes to these issues. But I've been doing this for 20 years, and it's something that found me. I didn't find it. I always thought that the justice system worked just the way it should. And it was actually through the prism of law enforcement, when I was embedded with police, that I learned that there were these two innocent guys in prison, and then it just spiraled from there where one guy led me to a next.
Every time I did a story, there's been several times in the past where I have been asked or have been offered to write a book, and I've always turned that opportunity down because the main character in this book, JJ, he was the one that was leading me to other people. And he was the one that I met 20 years ago, in 2002, and he was the last one out. So, every single time I did a story, there would be a little interest. "You wanna write a book about it?" And the reason I never did is because I didn't want to take the time to look back when I had so much work to do because JJ was still in prison. After JJ was released, then I got a couple of offers again to write a book. And this time I decided to do it because JJ was out.
It's almost embarrassing, I find it somewhat disrespectful of myself to even say this, talking about my own PTSD, my own emotional toll, given where all these guys had to be for decades. But the emotional toll on me, fighting these individual stories—it's not advocating for JJ. It was advocating for the truth, it was advocating for the facts. And when you are facing a system that just brazenly disregards facts like they don't exist, it takes a toll after a while. It's something that I couldn't ignore. And by the time JJ got out, I thought it would be more worthwhile teaching people about what I've learned than taking on any one individual cause. That's why I decided to write the book now, is because of what I've witnessed and what I've learned. And what I think that people will take away from this is complete shock.
"This is, to me, more than a book. This is a call to action. This is the beginning of what I believe is the next incarnation of the civil rights movement."
I sit here today nearly as stunned as I was as I lived this in real time over the course of 20 years. I was reading the audiobook with Ally Demeter, who's an incredible producer at Macmillan Audio, and Canyon, who was audio engineering. I'm sitting in the booth and I'm reading my own book, which I had lived for 20 years and I spent thousands of hours writing, so it's not like it was a surprise to me, but I'd be reading the book and I was, you know, “He knocked on the door and he turned himself in and gave them a list of 13 alibis, and the police did nothing.” What? I'd stop, I'd look at them and be like, "What the…? Do you believe this?” Like it was the first time I'd ever heard it, you know? So, reading the book, I almost was listening to myself as a listener, as an audience member. And I still can't believe some of this stuff.
So that was one part of it. And then another part of it was how unbelievably emotional certain sections were for me. Like, literally couldn't get through them. Had to leave the recording booth, went into the bathroom to compose myself, came back, tried again, couldn't do it, had to go to the bathroom to compose myself. By reading it, I was reliving it in my mind. There were three pages in particular that took me about an hour to get through. So, it was a very, very enlightening, surprising, cathartic, sad, and it made me really angry, too, all over again. So, I hope that answers the first set of questions that you had.
AM: I mean, absolutely. And it's very heartening and moving to hear that your experience in compiling, reporting, and recording your audiobook was so similar to my experience as a listener. I mean, shocking is the right word, there are just these kind of gutting, repetitive miscarriages of justice, time and time again. As a listener of your book, I am already familiar with JJ Velazquez, who you mentioned in your last answer. And he really is the heart and soul of this story. I was wondering if you could give prospective listeners who may not yet be familiar with his story a little bit more information about him and his story.
DS: So, I met JJ Velazquez in November of 2002. I had been working on another story for Dateline, about two other guys that were wrongfully convicted. And JJ's mother was waiting in the lobby for me, but I was there shooting the story of these other guys. I walked in and JJ's mother was waiting in the lobby holding the hands of her grandchildren, JJ's children, and stopped me and said, "Are you Dan?" I said, "Yeah.” “Can you help us? My son JJ, he's innocent."
JJ was in the same unit, shared a wall with the other guy I was doing a story about, knew I was coming and asked his mother to wait for me. I had no idea. I'd never heard of his case. I didn't know if he was innocent or guilty, but what I paid attention to, what hit me in my gut, was his youngest son, Jacob, holding his grandmother's hand. He barely came up to her waist, and he was looking at me with these huge eyes. There was something about that moment that made me feel like I had to pay attention. I mean, I had no idea if he was innocent or guilty.
Without going through all the details of JJ's case, the end part of JJ’s story, the end is JJ is 100 percent innocent of a murder that he was convicted of, the killing of a retired New York City police officer during a botched burglary in Harlem on January 27th, 1998. So, he was innocent of the murder for which he was a convicted of. That was the murder of Albert Ward, who was a retired police officer running an illegal numbers parlor in Harlem. And there were nine eyewitnesses. All said the shooter was a light-skinned Black man. JJ is a light-skinned Hispanic man. His picture should not have even been in the photo array. The reason he became a suspect is because a couple of days after the crime, one of the eyewitnesses, who was a 20-year-old drug dealer who was doing a drug deal in the place, police found him a couple of days later. He had 10 bags of heroin in his underwear. They brought him into the precinct.
He said the shooter was a light-skinned Black man. They put the heroin on the table in front of him. He looked at more than 1,800 mugshots over the course of hours and hours of people who had been arrested in that area, matching the description that he had given. He started by looking at light-skinned Black men. Somehow, he ended up looking at light-skinned Hispanic men. And then eventually he said, after many hours, saw a picture of JJ, "That's your guy, but his eyes looked different in the picture." He was allowed to leave with his heroin uncharged.
JJ's picture was in that database not because he was ever convicted of a crime, because he wasn't. The picture should not have been in the database. The reason it was there is because a year earlier, JJ had been arrested, he had been accused of shoplifting at the Gap. He wasn't, he had receipts for everything. But the guy, the cop who followed him out, found a little bit of drugs in the glove compartment of his car, and he was arrested for that. It was thrown out because it was an illegal search and seizure. And the photo of his arrest should have been expunged from the police database. But it wasn't. And that's the reason Augustus Brown ended up picking him out. By the time [JJ] goes to trial, 18 months later or so, Augustus Brown didn't want to testify, this main eyewitness. He was in trouble with the law himself. The police put him in jail for six days until he testified. And since then, he's completely recanted as the whole case against JJ has come tumbling down.
JJ and I since then, he would write me, he's the subject of my podcast, Letters from Sing Sing, that you mentioned at the beginning. We've had a 20-year relationship, two of the most unlikely people to come together. And we've grown like Ivy for two decades. There is no me without him, and there is no him, I think, without me in some way. He has become one of the closest people in my life. The reason why is because of how much he's taught me. He's taught me how to be a better person. He's taught me how to be a better friend. He's taught me how to be more honest, to have more compassion, to question my own prejudgments, to meet people where they are as opposed to where you want them to be. There's so many things I've learned from him, and to this day, he remains one of the closest people in my life, as are some of the other exonerees as well, actually. So, that's who JJ is.
AM: Beautifully said. Part of what makes the stories of JJ and the other men you follow in The Sing Sing Files so compelling is that we're able to hear their stories in their own words and sometimes even their own voices, from hearing the letters penned to you by JJ in his own voice to hearing his mother's wails of joy and pure relief upon his release. This listen is especially compelling in audio. What was it like compiling these elements and revisiting such emotional moments?
DS: First of all, thank you for taking the time to listen to the book. I appreciate that very, very much. I know people's time is precious and valuable, and that's for everybody listening to this as well. I promise that I was as judicious as possible with my words, and I recognize your time is precious. But this is really, really important, because this is, to me, more than a book. This is a call to action. This is the beginning of what I believe is the next incarnation of the civil rights movement, simply because you are going to be in disbelief, I believe, from what I've heard from other people, as to what you hear. And the fact that people are in disbelief is a wake-up call to me about how far we need to go, because the perversity and pathology of the way this system works is on full display, but people just don't know.
"We're talking about two million people in this country that are locked up. We have 5 percent of the world's population, and we have nearly 20 percent of the world's prison population. One in two families know somebody who's locked up."
So, step one is to listen. And I think that the way we did it, adding some of these elements, will help bring it to life in a way for people that other audio experiences might not. How it was for me to go through all of that? This has been a very difficult journey. It's hard to get away from, but I have a responsibility not to get away from it. I'm a witness and I have a platform. I'm not somebody that has been part of the system. I'm not somebody that has been incarcerated. I'm not Black, I'm not brown. I'm a white straight man with a platform. And after what I witnessed, meaning people in power, guardians of the system who are responsible for all of us. We're not talking about getting, like, the wrong order at Kentucky Fried Chicken, we're talking about people's lives. And for guardians of the system to behave in such a way, either intentionally or not, with a lack of curiosity, with a focus on the adversarial relationship within the system, with a win-at-all-costs philosophy, is enormously dangerous. I think that people need to be educated for change to start. So, as difficult as it is for me to relive a lot of this through this audio, and I have over 1,000 hours of tape over 20 years. I have a box right over here of JJ's letters that he sent to me. It's very difficult for me to read a lot of those.
And this is still happening. I met JJ in 2002 when he had been locked up for four years. It is now 2024. He got out three years ago. But as of today, he is still a convicted killer under the eyes of the law. He got clemency. But to break a little news, I've recently found out—how about this, the first time I'm saying this, we're breaking news on Audible—I've recently found out that the Manhattan District Attorney's office, their new post-conviction justice unit has reviewed JJ's case and is agreeing to vacate his conviction. So, that's going to be happening sometime within weeks of this book coming out, this audiobook.
AM: That's incredible and so long overdue. So, I'm struck by something you mentioned in your reflection on the audio storytelling and the power of hearing these stories in the voices or words of those who were directly impacted by them. And if step one is listening, I am wondering how listeners of your book, who are likewise interested in disrupting the system and kind of shifting the narrative of what you call “the invisible line of decency” that separates those deemed deserving of compassion from those who are not, how can folks get involved? Are there organizations or initiatives that you'd recommend that they can support incarcerated folks and fight for a fairer system through?
DS: It's a difficult question to answer, because there are so many great organizations doing so many things. The one thing I would say is, I'm happy to, by the way, people are shy to reach out, anybody can reach out to me at any time. My email's danslepian@gmail.com. Anybody can use it. If anybody is passionate about trying to figure out where they can fit in, I'm happy to talk to people.
JJ and I, as you'll hear in the book, worked on a program called Voices from Within, within the walls of Sing Sing. It spread in the prison and it's spread in its scope. And so now we are a couple of weeks away from having this fully launched as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Voices from Within. And we are going to grow that. So, people can go to voicesfromwithin.org. First of all, I'm not taking my portion of proceeds, profits from this book. I don't want to profit off of my friend's trauma, but I also don't want anyone to question my evangelism. But more importantly, I want to promote healing and what you're asking about, what people can do.
So, at least my portion of the profits, and we're raising money elsewhere, is for Voices from Within. The first program that we're going to attack is going to be called Closer to Justice. And what that is is basically introducing people to the system. What worked for me was proximity. I visited JJ more than 250 times over 20 years. I've been in prisons thousands of days. What changed me was being close. So, my thought was how do we get proximity to the people? So, Closer to Justice, the whole concept is that for any teacher or prosecutor's office or police academy or law professor or journalism, whatever, puts this on their required listening or reading list, the nonprofit, should we raise the money, which I believe we’re going to, will give it to students for free. We will buy it for them. And we will pay honorariums for exonerees or justice-impacted people to speak to their classes in person. So, if people want to donate to that cause or if people want to have someone speak to their class or whatever, go to Voices from Within, get in touch with us and we'll figure it out. But we're not there yet. But that's my idea.
So, the answer is to get in touch with me, come to Voices from Within, or be more mindful. Just be more mindful, because you might be a juror one day with someone's life in your hands. Be an ambassador for justice. Talk to your family about what you've learned. Share this story with someone, because most people will never visit a prison, and you don't think it affects you. But guess what? It does. For a couple of reasons. One, if somebody is wrongfully incarcerated, that means the real killer is free, hurting other people. Number two, you're spending a lot of money, of your taxpayer dollars. And number three is that it's not just about wrongful convictions. And so what this did for me, it was through the prism of wrongful convictions, which melted the ice and poked a hole in Pandora's box, and inside I saw the perversity and pathology of all of mass incarceration. And so whether you think “tough on crime” means locking people up and throwing away the key or not doesn't really matter, because there are facts. And the reality is, locking people up and throwing away the key and without providing anything else, you're paying way more money to make yourself less safe.
A lot about this issue is emotional and people make decisions based on emotion. And what's important is that people learn facts. When they learn the facts, they can have more critical thinking ability to understand, yes, what that person did was bad, but what we're doing to that person is making everything worse. And we're uniquely doing that, by the way, in this world, in this country.
AM: I do want to bring it back, on that note, while we're talking about the perversity of mass incarceration as it applies largely to the US and the way that our prison system functions here, is this central thread throughout your reporting on how mass incarceration has an egregious impact not just on those inside of prison walls, but on their family beyond. And you notably and heartbreakingly follow children who are forced to grow up without their parent’s presence. I'm wondering if you could expand a bit more on the impact of such separations, both as a father yourself and as a journalist with an eye on kind of the larger societal impact.
DS: Yeah, very profound question. Very profound issue. In my view, and there's all sorts of sciences and people, experts will tell you different things, the drivers of crime. There's some things you just can't measure, right? And so having an absent parent who's locked up, whether they did it or not, has a very profound effect on children. I met JJ's kids when they were eight and five. They're now 30 and 27. They had so much promise. They had so much hope. They were cute and innocent and like every other kid, and JJ would write me letters, "Dan, I'm afraid for my children." His older son, when he turned 11, 12, "He's hanging out in the streets. I'm not there for him. I'm afraid he is gonna go to jail."
JJ predicted it all because his son ended up going to jail for a couple of years. And that's not unlike so many other people. It's called the cycle of incarceration. This generational cycle of incarceration. But it's so much more profound than that. And the only way to really understand the ripple effect is by, I think, experiencing it. You see things that you don't think of. When I go visit, when I visited JJ, say, at Sing Sing or any other prison, you stand in line, it's a very onerous process. There's reasons why there's a security process at prisons, but it's stronger, 10 times stronger than the TSA, right? So, there's a lot of tension. And when you're waiting in line, I observe, I look around. Grandmothers with their grandchildren who had just got off a bus for five hours that are walking with bags of food down this huge long hill just to spend a few hours with their loved one. And then guess what? All the food can't go through because this is not allowed and that's not allowed. "But it was allowed last time, it was allowed the last 10 times. Why can't I get it through this time?" Don't ask questions because it doesn't make sense, right?
"I don't know if it's my duty as a journalist to not let go. It is my duty as a human being not to let go. And I never will, because the injustice is too great. The stakes are way too high."
So, the ripple effect emotionally, financially. These are people that are no longer supporting their families, or these are people that can't contribute. It is so much bigger than just the people who are locked up. And what really gets me is the children and the mothers and the grandmothers. Because when you go visit somebody in prison in New York, you go in and you go into the visiting room, you're not allowed to have anything. You're not allowed to have phones, a pen, nothing. And they don't call that person for your visit until you sit down. So, sometimes it would take 45 minutes or an hour for JJ to come out. So, I'm sitting in the visiting room with nothing. I can't get up, I can't text, I don't have my phone, nothing. So, you spend time really looking around and observing, and you realize all these people have families and all of these people carry this with them. It is a huge burden.
And by the way, we're not talking about a handful of people. We're talking about two million people in this country that are locked up. We have 5 percent of the world's population, and we have nearly 20 percent of the world's prison population. One in two families know somebody who's locked up. And what's more is that the way we do this is its own pathology. I'm saying this without exaggeration: When I walked through the cell blocks in almost any prison or Sing Sing or New York State prison, I literally would not board my dogs in a cell that JJ lived in for 24 years. I would not board them for a weekend. That's 100 percent true. Yet society has deemed that this somehow is okay, to warehouse human beings, strip them of their identity, call them by numbers, make them all wear the same uniform. Does this sound familiar in history, when we did this before, right?
Stripping any sort of human dignity. You have no rights. You don't have the right to be human anymore. Other countries don't do that. Germany and Norway don't do that. I toured prisons there. Their officers in corrections are trained in social work. There, you're called by your name. Here, you're called by a number. So, the idea of stripping people of their human dignity has also ripple effects beyond that person. What it says about us as a society, I think, is louder than anything.
AM: Absolutely. And I think that's the value of stories like those housed inside The Sing Sing Files. There's sort of this restoration of humanity, and how it captures these deeply human moments and emotions, and the tremendous toll that it's taken on so many human beings. [In] moments which are chronicled throughout your book, [when] legal avenues to exoneration may have failed, it was media representation and reporting that would keep the story alive in the courts of public opinion and exposed worlds often kept behind closed doors. Do you consider it the duty of the press to step in when our justice system falters? And in your experience, what is the power of journalism to inspire change and reform?
DS: Isn't it disgusting? Isn't it disgusting that my email box is full of people claiming they're innocent? Why are they coming to a TV producer? That's a problem. This has been a very, very tricky line for me to navigate as a journalist. The duty, to me, is to hold people in power to account. My duty is to find the truth, right? I told JJ and all the other men in this book early on, I'm not your friend. I am not your advocate. I am an advocate for the truth. My belief is that when people who are entrusted with governing the system, with positions of great power over people's lives, when they ignore the truth, blatantly ignore facts, and it affects people's lives, I don't know if it's my duty as a journalist to not let go. It is my duty as a human being not to let go. And I never will, because the injustice is too great. The stakes are way too high. That it takes this to exonerate JJ, 23 years. A guy like JJ, of all people. And if it takes this for him, God help everybody behind him. It should not be this hard.
So, do I see it as my duty? I do. I do. I can't tell you what my bosses, that they see it as my duty. But I feel that it is my duty as much as it would be in the 1930s if I went to Germany and I came back to America and I needed to tell my friends and family and whoever else I spoke with what's happening, right? That's how I feel. I feel like I have been my own character in a Kafka novel for two decades. I've been walking around for 20 years being like, "Do you freaking believe this?" Everyone's walking around like things are normal. Like, this dude is innocent. I proved it. And no one's paying attention, right? And what I've come to find out is, "Oh, that's how the system works." It is estimated anywhere between, minimum 100,000—and I think it's closer to 200,000—innocent people. As you and I are recording this right now, more than 100,000 people are looking at a cement ceiling, kidnapped from their lives for something they did not do. In more than 30 years—30 years—just over 3,000 people have been exonerated.
So, the idea that this is an epidemic, to me, is obvious and blatant, and it's something that is perhaps a hidden one. That's why I wrote this book. That's why I'm talking to you. That's why I'm going to make it my mission. That's why I call myself an evangelist, because I have to share this information, because too many people are counting on me and others who know about this to do that. It would be a dereliction of duty as a human being for me not to continue to fight based on my own lived experience.
AM: So, to close out our conversation, over the course of your reporting on wrongful convictions and your work with incarcerated folks, you saw your understanding of the issues at play shift and take shape. There's this really compelling moment in your book where you note the process as a kind of education in, quote, "The humanity concealed behind prison walls regardless of someone's innocence or guilt." What do you hope, above all else, that listeners will ultimately take away from the stories that you've told within The Sing Sing Files?
DS: Take what you believe to be true and put it on the shelf. Everything that's intuitive, put it away for a second. Everything that you think makes sense, take your emotion about how you feel about what someone has done to someone else under a moniker called “killer,” and put it away and open your mind. It was hard for me to do that myself. Proximity changed me. Because when you call people killers, "Oh, that's just another killer. He deserves whatever he got. Let them rot in prison. Lock them up and throw away the key." Who are we talking about? Do you even know? People don't even know because what they're thinking is Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Okay, maybe I agree with you about that. Maybe we should lock them up and throw away the key. That is not the United States' prison population. That's a tiny, tiny percentage.
Look, I've been at Dateline for nearly 30 years. I've done stories about people who I believe deserve to be in prison. I do sleep better at night knowing that several people that I've done stories on are in prison, okay. However, to me, what I have learned, and I have learned this through experience with my own eyes, my feet, my hands, my ears, is that the majority of the prison population that I have witnessed are people of color, generally, who were young, maybe in their late teens or early 20s, who made a terrible mistake. Their frontal lobe wasn't developed. They had no education, no hope.
My friend, Dario Pena, dear friend of mine, he works at Columbia now, University. Did 25 years. He was part of the Voices from Within group. When he was a teenager, he was part of a gang. Why? Because he didn't have role models. He didn't have a father figure. His older brother was in a gang, and he thought that was his family. He felt like he was a soldier in a war. And everybody knew the rules, is either kill or be killed. And so when he was convicted of killing a rival gang member, that's not Jeffrey Dahmer, that's a kid, a wayward kid who needs help. And he turns out to be, this case, a brilliant guy who then when his frontal lobe was developed and went to school, he is one of the smartest people I know and is a huge contributor to society. Should we just throw him away? Or do we say, "Why are you thinking this way? Let's give you an education and opportunity. Let's invest in you so you can be a solution and not a problem." So, I don't know if that answers anything. Now, I'm just rambling.
AM: No, absolutely. I mean, I think every piece of this story is so important in conveying a message of compassion and understanding that challenges a system that's been allowed to steal people's lives for far too long. Dan, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you so much for all the work you've done and continue to do.
DS: Alanna, it's been a pleasure talking to you. And once again, I thank you and I appreciate you taking the time to listen to the book. I hope other people do too.
AM: Listeners, you can hear The Sing Sing Files on Audible now.
