ABOUT GUESTS:
Billy Cole
As a passionate advocate for reducing recidivism rates, Billy brings a unique perspective to the table. As someone who has experienced the criminal justice system firsthand, he understands the challenges that returning citizens face and is committed to helping them successfully reintegrate into society.
Finding his calling in the nonprofit world, Billy leads Supreme Felons Inc. and works tirelessly to establish partnerships with community resources and provide support to individuals who are reentering society.
His goal is to make a positive impact and help break the cycle of recidivism.
Bryan Foley
Bryan Foley is Vice President of Supreme Felons Inc. and has a burning passion to serve his community. As an instrumental member of the organization, aiming to protect young people from falling into the traps of drugs and crime. Familiar with the vicious cycle of recidivism, Bryan is dedicated to giving back to the community from which he is from.
RESOURCES:
Supreme Felons List of Resources
TRANSCRIPTION:
David Fair: This is 89 one WEMU. And welcome to our weekly exploration of equity and opportunity in our community. I'm David Fair, and this is Washtenaw United. Finding opportunity can be difficult enough. Imagine trying to rebuild a life after a period of incarceration. It can be that much harder. It's one of the reasons we see such high recidivism rates. The organization Supreme Felons says the recidivism rate in Washtenaw County has gone up over 26% since the year 2000. How do we go about lowering that rate and, at the same time, proactively deal with the community and social issues that often lead to incarceration in the first place? Well, that's the work our guests are doing today. Billy Cole is president and executive director of Supreme Felons, and Bryan Foley serves as the organization's vice president. And thank you for the visit today, gentlemen! I appreciate it!
Billy Cole: Our pleasure!
Bryan Foley: It's our honor!
David Fair: Well, Billy, how do you define the mission of Supreme Felons?
Billy Cole: Well, our mission at Supreme Felons is to passionately and honestly serve our community while keeping violence down through grassroot work. We take our approach to support returning citizens and their families while addressing their personal family and professional needs.
David Fair: And how has empathy and compassion play into the success of that mission?
Billy Cole: Empathy is something that, from a personal perspective, you have to incur within. The empathy of understanding your effect on not only yourself, your family and friends within a community, but also feel the fact that you want to do better, that you want to not be the individual in which you were prior to your criminal state of mind.
David Fair: And, Bryan, certainly, there is no excuse for criminal behavior. However, there are reasons for it, and a lot of it is unaddressed trauma. So, how will you at Supreme Felons go about recognizing and then addressing such traumas?
Bryan Foley: Well, first of all, thank you for this opportunity. Understanding and, as Billy just said and where it was said as empathy, I know me when I see me--myself as well as Billy. We came from two-parent households. We were not lacking in any resources whatsoever. But understanding the environment in which we were raised and myself personally trying to identify with actions and behaviors that were going on in the community seeking to be accepted, took me on to a criminal path that has led me up to where I am on this radio station right now, sharing my lived experiences. However, because I see me when I know me, that level of empathy, I'm able to identify and relate and see those traits and behaviors coming on into our youth early on and able to address it and grasp it and try to help bring resolution before our young men and women get involved into a life of crime and also to our recent turn as citizens also, because that being what they are, I'm able to understand where they have been and they know that I have been where they have been, too. They're able to express themselves to me more clearly.
David Fair: You know, Bryan, it's often hard to get out when someone has been placed into the juvenile justice system. It seems to carry into adulthood. And then, in some cases, it simply feels like the system is designed to keep you there once it's got you. How do you look at it when you talk with young people?
Bryan Foley: First of all, you're 100% correct. The criminal justice system is a business, and it's ran as a business. And if you don't have product, if you don't have personnel, then you're not going to profit from what have you. So, what Billy and I do is we sit down and really talk to our young men and women and give them real understanding, really sharing with them life-on-life term, understanding that you're going to become a product of the system. And if you continue on the path that you're doing and understand you set yourself up for failure, you become a product within the belly of the beast.
David Fair: We're talking with Billy Cole and Bryan Foley from Supreme Felons on 89 one WEMU's Washtenaw United. Billy, tell me about the makeup of the people that are doing service work with Supreme Felons. It seems to me that there are likely some members of the team there at one point, like yourself, were incarcerated.
Billy Cole: That's true. Half of our team consists of returning citizens. The other half consist of educational citizens within our community. So, it's about 50/50. But there's one common denominator, and that's the success and the peacefulness within our community.
David Fair: And how much of that has to do with the personalized and individualized messages that can be carried from someone who has a life experience that perhaps people want to avoid?
Billy Cole: Well, I think that can only occur once a person has really made that transformation from that criminal mindset and really understand the blessings of being a citizen within our community, within our society.
David Fair: So, Bryan, if you wouldn't mind, take me into a situation that Supreme Felons has to deal with. Perhaps someone calls you and said, "I need you, and I need you right now!" How can Supreme Felons respond? Do you have an example of how that works?
Bryan Foley: Unfortunately, I have very many examples. But I would like to share with you one that just occurred the other day. I received a call from a mother whose son had been murdered three years ago, and now she has a young son who's acting out on behaviors that were directly related to his brother being murdered. And he's being disrespectful. He's not going to school. He's not doing anything around the house and stealing his mother's money from a bank account. And she's fed up with it to the point that she just doesn't know what to do. And because she knows who Billy and I are and what Supreme Felons Inc. do, she called us up. And Billy and I were on a conference call with her, and we able to get some understanding on the exact nature and why her son was acting out on that. So, we have an appointment to meet with the young man and sit down with him and give some lived experiences that will help bring some resolution to the conflict within the house. But most importantly, with that right there, she was able to share with Billy and I exactly why her son was acting out the way that he was acting out by sharing with us internally what was happening inside of the household.
David Fair: And one visit is not where it will end. You are now going to be involved, right?
Bryan Foley: Absolutely! That's our services! When you come into the office of Supreme Felons, Incorporated, you just don't walk into the door and walk back out. No, we do an assessment on you and find out what your needs are: social, economical, whatever. What we find that all of our clients basically have a lack of needs and a lack of proper resources that should be common and available to all human beings here. So, those are the things that we identify, and then we're able to direct them to the proper sources and resources and help them out on whatever level that may be that they are in need of.
David Fair: Our Washtenaw United conversation with Bryan Foley and Billy Cole from Supreme Felons continues on 89 one WEMU. And, Billy, it can be very difficult to overcome some of the societal perceptions of being a felon: getting a job, getting another chance. It simply doesn't come easy. What keeps the people you were working with from giving up? What kept you from giving up?
Billy Cole: That's a deep question. What kept me from giving up was something other than myself. Through my transformation, I had to understand that there was something more important in my life than actually myself. And I don't want to touch on a lot of religious or spirituality, but the truth of the matter is God is real. God is working in my life as He's working in many others lives. So, understanding that as a common denominator with success allows us to identify with personal issues that don't normally come out.
David Fair: Bryan, do you understand why there is fear among some members of the community about giving a second chance to someone who has been convicted as a felon?
Bryan Foley: Yes, I do! Definitely! One of the things that Billy and myself done is, first of all, you have to take ownership for your own responsibilities and the things that you have done--the societal harms that you have done. And so, when the community that we live in and it's not an isolated or it's not a community that's any different than any other community that's racially classified as Black, right, we're not afraid to tell you that some people are exactly what they're supposed to be. And honestly, we hope the doors never open again. But there's a lot of environmental factors that come into play into the stigma that is placed upon people who have perpetuated crimes. And that is that some of them are not, as we say, they're not remorseful or empathetic to the harm that they have done. And I've addressed the social woes or economical woes or the deeply spiritual void that in their lives that continue to have them act out on the behaviors and being a detriment to the community. As myself being within the community, I know me when I see me. So, the fears that people have in our community, the distrust of people that think they have resolution or have redeemed themselves in the community are valid fears. And those things right there are what makes Supreme Felons as being a viable entity in the community because we are able to address those woes and talk with the people within our community. And Billy and I live a life, and other members of our organization live a life of showing and demonstrating that there is reform through the criminal justice system if you allow, as Billy just said, God to work in your life. We don't use that word shortly.
David Fair: It's really interesting. The Supreme Felons program, in some ways, it's reactive, dealing with traumas that have already occurred and trying to find and help a new path forward. There's also a 360 approach: taking mentorship, neighborhood support, mental health support. And you provide food programs, senior services, all aimed at keeping people out of the system and helping reduce recidivism within the community. So, Billy, you have an event coming up that invites the community to be a participant in the solution, and that is an anti-violence community rally on the 28th.
Billy Cole: Of course! Thank you for bringing that up. We are having an event on the 28th of this month--Stop the Community Gun Violence. It's just a seed of thought to continue to pound in the minds, in the hearts and the souls of those within our community to understand that gun violence in our community is unacceptable. Now, the reality is that there are a small number of those within the community that actually do this type of violence within our community. So, this rally gives us an opportunity to collaborate and engage with not only the community, but those organizations, non-profits and just people sitting on the couch to get up and come out and make a stance against gun violence in our community. And we feel very adamant about that fact alone. And we know that, in order to get this message, we have to start with self. So, we ask anyone, any citizen from any parts of the state to please collaborate with us, and let's make a sincere effort to stop the gun violence in our community and let those within the community know that we are very serious about stopping this epidemic of violence.
David Fair: Bryan, final question. Supreme Felons has the word "felon" right in it. It is a stigma that is often carried with someone for a lifetime after a conviction. At the same time, it is a term that the two of you seem to have embraced because it does not define who you are. So, how do you look at the word "felon"?
Bryan Foley: You're 100% correct because the nature of our crimes, "felon" will never be removed from Billy and I. So, because we have done a 180-degree reversal of our life and we're willing to give back to our community, what we simply have done is taken the word "felon" and apply the word "supreme" to it. Not because we are supreme criminal is because we live above the circumstances and the situation that brought us into the criminal system in the first place. And we no longer perpetuate criminal acts of violence or criminal acts or illegal activities on any level in any way whatsoever. So, we know that cannot be removed from our jacket. But however, for those others who are felons, they are able to embrace who you are. And that does not define who we are when they put the term felons on it. So, we simply put the term Supreme Felons Incorporated on there is because that's not who we are anymore. But because we cannot remove that stigma, we have taken it to move that term to a different understanding and to a different level.
David Fair: Well, I'd like to thank you both for the time and the perspective you chose to share today and for your work in the community. Much appreciated!
Billy Cole: Thank you so much for this opportunity!
Bryan Foley: Thank you for it!
Billy Cole: And thank you to the community for accepting us and the work that we do. It's actually a pleasure and honor to be a service within Washtenaw County!
David Fair: That is Supreme Felons President and Executive Director Billy Cole and Vice President Bryan Foley. You can find more at supremefelons.com or just head to our website at wemu.org. We'll get you to all of the right places, including a link and more information about the upcoming anti-gun and anti-violence rally here in Washtenaw County. Washtenaw United is produced in partnership with the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, and you hear it every Monday. I'm David Fair, and this is your community NPR station, 89 one WEMU FM, Ypsilanti.
UWSEM STATEMENT:
Our Criminal Justice System is known to be made up of several inequities and injustices. Criminal legal reform addresses structural issues in criminal legal systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism.
These structural issues result in Black and brown people, people with low incomes, and people with mental illness being incarcerated at higher rates as compared to the general population.
Why criminal legal reform? The United States incarcerates its citizens more than any other country (source). Today, nearly 10 million Americans—including millions of children—have an immediate family member in jail or prison. More than 4.5 million Americans can’t vote because of a past conviction.
And each year, we lose $87 billion in GDP due to mass incarceration. In Washtenaw County, those numbers are smaller, but the impact on opportunity and life potential is real. According to recently available data, over 1,000 people are incarcerated in our local prison; these individuals are predominantly Black and brown.
Watch this panel discussion from the Dispute Resolution Center and Friends of Restorative Justice in Washtenaw County about the intersectionality of mental disorders, incarceration, and restorative justice featuring Derrick Jackson of the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office and State Rep. Felicia Brabec.
WEMU has partnered with the United Way for Southeastern Michigan to explore the people, organizations, and institutions creating opportunity and equity in our area. And, as part of this ongoing series, you’ll also hear from the people benefiting and growing from the investments being made in the areas of our community where there are gaps in available services. It is a community voice. It is 'Washtenaw United.'
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