Julie Stewartis founder and president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates against mandatory sentencing laws. Stewart started FAMM in 1991 after her brother was sentenced to five years in prison for growing marijuana. FAMM’s advocacy has led to reduced sentences for an estimated 170,000 drug defendants nationwide and has opened debate regarding the problems caused by mandatory sentencing policies. FAMM spends less than $20,000 a year on lobbying and does not give campaign contributions.

Stewart has testified before Congress and the US Sentencing Commission about mandatory sentences and prison overcrowding, and has been interviewed on many national television shows and in local media throughout the country. She is the recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties, the Champion of Justice Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, the Leadership for a Changing World Award from the Ford Foundation, and the Citizen Activist Award from the Gleitsman Foundation.

Before starting FAMM, Stewart worked as director of public affairs at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. She graduated from Mills College in Oakland, California, with a degree in international relations.

Beth Leech: The name of this book is Lobbyists at Work—but do you even consider yourself a lobbyist?

Julie Stewart: Well, technically, I’m not. I have not registered as a lobbyist, although our government affairs counsel has. When I started FAMM, I knew nothing about lobbying. I just knew that what I needed to do was introduce members of Congress to the kinds of people who were going to prison under the laws that they passed. I hoped that by meeting with members of Congress and introducing them to the families of prisoners sentenced under their laws, they would say, “Oh, gee, I’m sorry—we didn’t mean to do that. We’ll change the laws.” So, my strategy was to make them face—in concrete terms—the human cost of the sentences that they had enacted. I don’t think I realized that was “lobbying,” but I suppose it was.

Leech: You’re not a lobbyist in the legal sense, but you are a lobbyist in the practical sense that you’re a policy advocate.

Stewart: Yes, I’m a lobbyist in the sense that I try to persuade legislators to adopt my perspective. I certainly intended to do that from the beginning and still do, but I don’t spend enough time directly lobbying to meet the threshold needed to register.

Leech: What is the perspective you advocate? How would you describe FAMM’s mission?

Stewart: FAMM’s mission is to ensure that the punishment fits the crime and the offender’s role in the crime. Mandatory sentencing has removed the judge’s ability to look at the individual as an individual, see what the crime was and his or her role in the crime, and then determine what the sentence should be given all of that information. So we’re lobbying for individualized sentencing.

We’re lobbying to restore a basic tenet of American justice that most Americans still believe in: if you come before a judge, are found guilty, and are facing sentencing, the judge ought to take into account everything he knows about you, your case, your role, your culpability, your remorse, and your likelihood of rehabilitation, and then fashion a proportionate and fitting sentence.

Leech: That’s not what…

Stewart: That’s not what happens! Right! That’s not what happens when the crime carries a mandatory sentence—when the sentence is based solely on the fact that you’ve committed the crime. Drug crimes commonly carry mandatory minimum sentences. Let’s say you’re convicted of being party to a drug transaction involving fifty grams of crack cocaine. The type of drug and its weight automatically trigger your sentence: you’re going to prison for five years. Prior to changes in the law that FAMM succeeded in effecting a couple of years ago, the sentence for 50 grams of crack cocaine was ten years.

Leech: That’s under federal sentencing?

Stewart: Exactly. The judge would not have been able to say, “But really you were just the girlfriend of the guy who was selling the drugs. You were in the car when the drug transaction happened but you weren’t an active participant. Therefore, I’m just going to give you a year.” The judge would have no choice but to sentence the person to five years—or whatever the mandatory minimum was.

Leech: Did FAMM get involved at all with the issue of unfairness between powder cocaine and crack cocaine?

Stewart: Yes. I started FAMM in 1991. In 1993, we sent a survey to our prisoner members to ask them whether they were serving time for powder cocaine or crack cocaine and, if so, what the quantity and sentence were. From that informal survey we created a chart showing how disparate the sentences were among our members for crack and powder cocaine. So, from very early on, we were concerned about the 100:1disparity between the two drugs. For years, we have fought to make crack cocaine sentences fairer and ideally, to bring them into sentencing parity with powder cocaine, so that for sentencing purposes, cocaine is cocaine is cocaine.

What happened, though, is that as more groups got involved in this, we talked more about the inequity of the one hundred–to-one ratio than we did about the unjust severity of the mandatory crack cocaine sentences, leaving open the possibility that the ratio could be lowered simply by making powder sentences stiffer. Someone on the Hill said to me: “Be careful what you ask for. If you’re complaining about the one hundred–to-one ratio between crack and powder, Congress can say, ‘Fine. We’ll leave crack where it is and we’ll just make the powder penalty worse.’”

Leech: Which was not what you wanted.

Stewart: Not at all. No one had ever complained that powder sentences were too light. So we learned early on that when you lobby, you have to be very careful how you ask for what you want.

Leech: How did FAMM get started? Can you tell me that story?

Stewart: Yes. It’s one I know well. I was working at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, as a director of public affairs, when I got a call from my brother. He was calling me from a jail in Spokane, Washington, about eighty miles from where we grew up. He told me that he’d been arrested for growing marijuana and he was in jail. My first thought was, “How stupid of you to be doing this.” My second thought was, “Well, at least it’s only marijuana. It won’t be such a stiff penalty.”

As things unfolded, I learned that, in fact, there is a stiff penalty associated with even marijuana. This was back in 1990 and there wasn’t a lot of information out there about mandatory sentences. There was no Internet that made it easy to find out what mandatory minimums were or what quantity it took to trigger a five- or ten-year sentence. So it took a lot of legwork to figure it all out—including phone calls to a few lawyers who helped me piece it together.

Leech: What quantity are we talking about?

Stewart: He was growing about three hundred sixty-five plants that were about six inches tall when he was arrested. The plants were growing in a house my brother owned but didn’t live in. Two other semi-friends of my brother’s lived there and they had filled the garage with as many of the little plastic plant containers as would fit in that space, which happened to be about three hundred sixty-five. One of the guys who lived there opened the garage door to show the neighbor what they were doing, and the neighbor turned them in.

When the police arrived, the two men who were living at the house said, “Oh, this isn’t ours. It’s Jeff Stewart’s,” even though they were all equally involved in growing the marijuana. One guy was an electrician so he had hung the lights. Anyway, they turned Jeff in and in exchange for their cooperation, they both got probation, even though one of them had a prior felony conviction for a drug offense.

That’s how Jeff got arrested. He was guilty of growing marijuana with the other two men, so he pled guilty. He could have reduced his sentence if he had informed on someone else who was involved in illegal drug activity. He knew somebody who was growing marijuana but he chose not to inform on him because he didn’t want to destroy that man’s life. The guy was a father and married with several children, so Jeff just decided to be what they call in prison a “stand up guy,” and not inform. As a result he had nothing to give the prosecutor for a shorter sentence and he served his full five years in prison. Five years is a very long time behind bars. I feel that one of the things that has been lost in the twenty-one years that I have been running FAMM is that people have become inured to what a five-year prison sentence actually is.

Leech: It’s a long time.

Stewart: It is a long time, but today people think it’s no big deal. The judge understood how long it was, though. At the sentencing he said, “I don’t want to give you this much time, but my hands are tied by these mandatory sentencing laws that Congress passed in 1986.”

Leech: Why did it become a federal issue?

Stewart: Why did small time drug cases become federal cases? Such an excellent question. In the old days, federal cases required some federal nexus–crossing state lines, for instance. In the late eighties and early nineties, it became more a matter of jurisdiction shopping. When the police arrested a person, they took him into the local county jail. Then the state and the federal prosecutors would get together and decide: “Let’s see, who wants this case? Who should take this one?” Almost always, the defendant would get more time if the case went into the federal system rather than the state system. It’s totally unclear to me why Jeff’s case went federal. There was certainly no federal nexus.

I have seen thousands of cases like Jeff’s over the years that are basically local offenses that could have been handled locally, yet they’ve gone federal for no apparent reason other than the defendant would get more time. My brother’s sentencing judge was a senior district judge who had been on the bench for twenty-five years. He voiced his frustration that the prosecutor, basically fresh out of law school, was telling him what sentence to give my brother based on the fact that my brother’s plant count had triggered the automatic five-year prison sentence.

The judge’s comments at sentencing and my own observations of what my brother went through led me to see that the justice system did not work as I had been taught in school or imagined. I came away with the belief that “Something is terribly wrong and somebody needs to let members of Congress know about it.”

Leech: So you decided to become that person.

Stewart: [Laughs.] Well, it was foisted on me a little, but I was a willing victim, I guess. I started talking to lawyers I met here in Washington who knew something about this—one of them worked with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers [NACDL]—and everyone was in agreement that the system was wrong and completely counter to what most Americans believe our justice system is or should be like. So we decided to try to reach out to other families who had been affected by mandatory sentencing laws.

In the spring of 1991, the lawyer who worked for NACDL sent a letter to member lawyers asking them to let their clients in prison know that we would be holding a meeting in Washington, DC, and that their families were invited to attend.

About thirty families from as far north as Maine and as far south as Florida attended. We sat in a room in the Rayburn House Office Building and went around the table: “I am here because I have a son serving seventeen years on his first offense for a drug offense.” “I am here because my husband is doing ten years for a drug offense.” “I am here because my brother is doing …”

It was really powerful and very motivating to meet other people who were in the same boat, but who were so much worse off in many ways than I was. First, it was my brother—not my husband or my son. Second, as much as I hate to say it, my brother’s five years paled in comparison to a lot of the other sentences I was hearing described around the table that day. The collective feeling was almost palpable: “This can’t stand. Somebody needs to do something.”

Because I was in DC, because I had been affected, and because I had a small network of lawyers who were already beginning to help me, everyone looked at me and said, “Well, we’ll back you. So let’s start something.”

Leech: So in the beginning, staff-wise, it was just you, right?

Stewart: Yes.

Leech: Did you even get paid?

Stewart: No, for two years I worked for free. Because I was married, I could afford to do that, even though my husband worked in another nonprofit so we weren’t exactly rich! After six months, I hired an assistant to help answer the phone and deal with mail, because we were getting a lot of it.

I left the Cato Institute and started FAMM on September 1, 1991. Shortly after, I was on the Phil Donahue Show. I helped them put together a whole show on sentencing. I introduced them to a husband and wife who were about to go to prison for a heroin conviction, leaving their kids behind, alone with no parents. And I suggested they invite a lawyer on the show who was an expert on drug cases. It was my first experience with a national TV talk show, and I probably wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. But they put FAMM’s address and phone number up on the screen several times, and we were inundated after that. The people who had someone in prison all of a sudden felt, “Wow, this is the place to go. There is someone who cares, someone who gets it, someone who is trying to do something.” So that became the foundation of FAMM: the families who joined right away and the prisoners who heard about us and started mailing us letters and building our cases.

Leech: At that point, were you working out of your home?

Stewart:No, I never did. I had good advice from someone who actually became a board member. He said I should never work out of my home, because when you work from your home it doesn’t have the necessary legitimacy that working in an office does. Also, it is easy to get sidetracked with household duties. So he gave me free space in his office for a couple of months. Then I found a sublet from another organization for $500 a month. So I was able to sublet space for five years at a really reasonable price in a beautiful building in downtown DC.

Leech: At that point, where did the funding come from?

Stewart: Funding came mostly from families. But the biggest chunk of change I got right away, $25,000, came from a man named Richard Dennis. When I left Cato, the president, Ed Crane, gave me his mailing list of people who supported Cato’s work on drug policy reform and said I could contact them. So I mailed letters to them, telling them what I was doing and why, and I got a number of nice responses as well as $1,000 here or $50 there—but I got a $25,000 check from Richard Dennis, who really felt that what I was trying to do was incredibly important.

Rich has a special place in my heart forever, because here he was giving $25,000 to a woman who had an idea of what should be done and hoped she knew how to do it but had no track record! It was a great leap of faith on his part, but I think it was not misplaced. It worked out very well. Rich helped a lot: $25,000 went a long way twenty years ago with no salary and practically no staff, and we made it last a long time.

Leech: Today, how much of your budget ends up coming from donations like that and how much is families’ bits and pieces?

Stewart: Today about half our budget comes from foundations. Next comes individual major donors, like Richard Dennis, who account for forty percent of our budget. We get $100,000 from three or four individuals, and contributions in the $25,000 to $50,000 range from a larger pool of individuals. The final ten percent comes from small donors—meaning prisoners and their wives and families.

Leech: How big is your office today?

Stewart: It’s not huge. We have twelve staff—eight in DC and four around the country. Our budget is about $1.4 million right now. It was higher at one point, when the market was booming and Bernie Madoff hadn’t crashed yet. There was one foundation that was solely funded by Bernie Madoff investments and it gave us $250,000 a year. When he went under, they went under and we lost that money. So we get by. We could do much more if we had more, but sentencing is a difficult issue to get people to focus on unless it has happened to them, or they are particularly libertarian, or they have a social justice conscience that is fine-tuned.

Leech: With a staff of twelve, you obviously can’t get involved with every single case or every single issue that is out there. How do you decide whether you are going to become involved in something?

Stewart: In some ways, we’re at an advantage to be so narrowly focused on sentencing reform. It keeps us focused laser-like on sentencing and not getting drawn into the related areas that could easily lead to mission-creep: drug policy reform, prison conditions, juvenile justice, etc. While all of those issues are important, we can’t afford to diffuse our limited resources and energy in too many directions. It would limit our effectiveness.

As to how we pick and choose which sentencing issues to get involved in, it’s partly by opportunity. We’re doing a lot of work on clemency right now. “Clemency” involves both presidential pardons and commutations of sentences. A pardon is issued once a prisoner has done her time and gotten out. The president pardons her so that she can, for example, vote again. What FAMM is concerned about are commutations of sentence for the people who are serving outrageously long mandatory sentences and have no other recourse for shortening their sentences. For instance, President Clinton granted a commutation to a woman who had an eighty-five-year sentence for a drug crime she committed when she was twenty-four. She would have died in prison, but for that commutation.

So we get involved when an opportunity presents itself, as it did with Clinton. I knew that he had commuted two people in July 1999, and I expected in his lame duck months that he would commute more. So we put together a list of twenty-one people serving time for nonviolent drug offenses and sent them to the White House, and lobbied every way we could to persuade the president to grant commutations. He granted seventeen of them.

Leech: So when you have an issue like that, and you are trying to lobby the president and the White House, what in particular do you do?

Stewart:The Office of the Pardon Attorney [OPA] told us to go to the White House with our cases, so we sent them to the White House Counsel’s office. We enlisted donors of ours and anybody else who knew the president or might be able to influence him to try to talk to him about these cases. We also recruited members of Congress to support some of the petitions. Senator [Orrin] Hatch, for instance, supported one.

Leech: More recently, FAMM staged an event at the National Press Club that attracted a lot of media attention.

Stewart: Yes. In May 2012, ProPublica did a really great exposé on misconduct at the Office of the Pardon Attorney that was detrimental to applications for sentence commutations. FAMM leveraged that exposé into a briefing and panel discussion that we held at the National Press Club to call for a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation of OPA practices. In addition to the ProPublica reporter and a former staff attorney at the OPA, we had speakers on the panel who put a human face on this issue: a woman whose commutation petitions were denied three times and the mother of a prisoner who was the focus of the ProPublica exposé.

What FAMM does is unique: we bring individuals and their stories to the members of Congress so they can see how their laws impact real people’s lives. Over the course of FAMM’s life, there have been times when we’ve gotten into doing more formal reports and studies, but in the last few years, it’s been clear to me that what we do uniquely well is put the human face on sentencing laws. We tell the stories well and the prisoners and their families tell them well. Their narratives drive our arguments and make them compelling. For example, we arranged congressional meetings for the woman whose commutation petitions were denied three times and the mother of the prisoner who was the focus of the ProPublica report. We accompanied them on visits to meet with staffers from Senators [Jefferson] Sessions and [Richard] Durbin’s offices, and Representatives Bobby Scott and John Conyers.

Leech: How do you choose which members of Congress these people should meet with?

Stewart: The mother of Clarence Aaron, the man who was featured in the ProPublica exposé, lives in Alabama. Senator Sessions is her senator, and he’s on Judiciary and he’s a former US attorney from that state. So he knows this issue and it was important for her to meet with him because she is his constituent. Senator Durbin is very interested in clemency and we want him to hold a hearing, so that’s why we visited his office. So there’s always a strategic reason. In the House, Bobby Scott has been our champion on these issues forever. He is very interested in all of this and wants to know more and wants to meet the people affected by our sentencing laws. And John Conyers is the chair of the House Subcommittee on Crime.

Leech: What was your goal with these meetings? What did you hope to have come out in the end?

Stewart: With Sessions, we want him to write a letter to the president on behalf of Clarence Aaron, his constituent’s son. With Durbin, we want him to hold a hearing on clemency. Also, the more you introduce them to the people who are affected by mandatory sentences, the more they picture those people when the issue comes up.

Leech: There are both constituency representation issues and also appeals to their prior knowledge and concerns?

Stewart: Yes—and trying to persuade them to do certain things. In this case, we were lobbying Durbin to hold a hearing.

Leech: Now, it’s interesting to me because the popular view of lobbying is that the biggest donation is the be-all and end-all of who wins and who loses.

Stewart: Well, I’ll tell you, since we have no money, that’s never been an issue for us. Instead of cash, we use people. We don’t have cash to give to anybody, but we have stories. We have people’s stories, and we have the people, and we bring them to Washington to meet with certain members of Congress who can, in fact, help—whether by introducing a bill, holding a hearing, writing a letter to the president, or whatever the goal is of the particular meeting.

Several years ago, there was a hearing in the Senate on crack cocaine. One of the people who testified was the brother of a woman who was in prison serving a long mandatory sentence for a drug crime. We knew the woman, we’d met the brother, and we suggested to the Senate Judiciary Committee that they invite him to speak, and they did. He came and brought pictures of his sister and pictures of himself with his child, his sister’s niece. Senator Durbin was so taken with this man’s testimony—and the photographs—that he became deeply engaged in helping this woman get a commutation. She was released in 2011. She’s the only person whose sentence President Obama has commuted. If Senator Durbin had not met her brother, she would probably still be in prison.

Leech: So this is his first commutation. How many requests for commutations come across every year?

Stewart: There have been seven thousand commutation requests since Obama took office—and one was granted. That has less to do with his selectivity than it does with the dysfunction of the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

Leech: That’s what you were exposing with the panel discussion.

Stewart: Exactly. But back to the other ways we choose to get involved: we work in certain states with bad sentencing laws. We were involved in Michigan for years after I first started FAMM, because they had a life-without-parole bill for nonviolent drug offenses.

Leech: Were you successful in Michigan?

Stewart:Yes. I couldn’t believe that sentence. First offenders were serving life without parole for being involved with 650 grams of cocaine or heroin. Even possession alone triggered that sentence. Within a four-year period in the mid-1990s, FAMM led a coalition to reform the law so that all the two hundred forty people who were serving life without parole became eligible for parole after fifteen to twenty years, depending on the circumstances of their cases. At this point, I think all of those prisoners have been paroled.

Leech: So that’s why you chose to work in Michigan. And other states?

Stewart: New York also had terrible sentencing laws known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws, but there were so many other groups already working on their reform that FAMM’s added value wasn’t great enough to spend the time and money there, so we played a very peripheral role

.

Florida has terrible mandatory drug sentencing laws, as well as mandatory gun-sentencing laws. The sentences for prescription drug violations are particularly appalling. For instance, if you have your mother’s prescription of Vicodin and you’re caught with it, and she didn’t give it to you, you can go to prison for fifteen to twenty-five years. So our original intent in Florida was to address those sentencing laws, which we are doing.

But we have also jumped on other opportunities in Florida. In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, we learned about other cases in Florida in which people have tried to use the “stand your ground” defense and lost. The prosecutor decides whether or not to grant that defense. When defendants are denied that motion, many have gone to trial because they maintain that they’re innocent. If the jury doesn’t agree and finds the defendant technically guilty of the crime, they are subjected to a mandatory twenty-year sentence under Florida’s 10-20-Life gun law.

For example, a woman named Marissa Alexander shot a gun in her house to defend herself against her abusive husband who had put her in the hospital a couple times. She had every right to be fearful, but he reported her to the police for shooting her gun at him, which she did not actually do. She shot into the wall of the house to scare him away. They arrested her and charged her with aggravated assault. She said, “Wait. I was standing my ground. I was protecting myself here.” They replied, “Nope. We are not going to accept that motion of yours.” So she took her case to trial feeling she was innocent. The jury found her guilty of the technical violation of the law and she was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of twenty years in prison.

Leech: What do you do to address that case?

Stewart: We have a fantastic project director in Florida who is one of our four staff outside of this office, and he jumped all over it. He called Marissa’s lawyer. He called the family. He got involved. It helped that he’s a lawyer himself. He gathered as much information as he could about the case, including the transcripts. He got everything he needed to understand what happened because we do not want to jump all over a case without knowing the facts. We are really careful about that.

Then we got involved in organizing a rally for Marissa and getting media coverage for her sentencing. We wanted it covered so people could better understand the effect of the mandatory gun-sentencing law in Florida. Lots of people in Florida don’t ever think about it. Marissa had a legally registered firearm that she used it to protect herself, and now she is in prison for twenty years. So the mandatory nature of the 10-20-Life gun sentence is what we were objecting to.

As a result, Greg, our director in Florida, has become the go-to guy for the media on the 10-20-Life gun law. He is receiving calls and emails from individuals and their families about other cases similar to Marissa’s. As we build our file of evidence that the law is over the top, Greg will use those cases to help persuade state legislators to introduce a bill to reform Florida’s 10-20-Life gun laws.

Leech: So these are the sorts of issues you spend time on at FAMM. How else do you spend your time at FAMM?

Stewart: Fundraising!

Leech: What percent of your day or what percent of your week would you say ends up being spent on fundraising?

Stewart: Oh, not enough. We are still small enough that I do a lot of brainstorming and strategizing on the various issues that we are dealing with. I probably should be out of the office fundraising much more than I am. Because there are only eight of us here in DC, a lot of what we do is done in meetings where many of us are involved. Just before this conversation, we were talking about a briefing that we want to hold in a few months with people who Clinton granted commutations to in 2001 before he left office.

Leech: This would be a briefing for the media?

Stewart: For the media and for the Hill. That was actually part of our group discussion just now. What is the purpose of the briefing? Just to influence the media? Or are we also trying to influence staff members of members of Congress when we say: “Sentences are too long. This person should never have been in prison for so long, and here is another one, and here is another one—and they’re just the lucky few who actually got a commutation!”? So we think we should bring them to Washington to do a fundraiser and a briefing on the Hill. We are also asking the people whose sentences were commuted by President Clinton to write letters to President Obama urging him to reform the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

Leech: Could you walk me through your average day—if there is such a thing?

Stewart: No, there is not.

Leech: Well, why don’t you talk about what is happening today, and as you do, point to things that are unusual or usual. When does the day start? How early does the day start?

Stewart: I usually get in around ten—which is kind of lazy of me, but it often takes that long after I get my kids off to school. I first focus on what e-mails have come in and what is on my desk that needs to be taken care of immediately. There are checks to be signed and thank-yous to be signed, things like that. Then today I had a meeting at eleven with our finance and administrative person, and our vice president on our financial situation. We meet once a month to make sure that we are on track financially and to determine where we are in comparison to last year. It always gets me fired up to go out and fundraise! Then, right after our financials meeting, I had an internal meeting following up on our clemency briefing last week: whether we did what we said we were going to do after the briefing—and if not, why not and let’s get going!

And now this interview with you. Next, I might grab some lunch and then I have a meeting at three o’clock with an internal person. One of the reviews I have undertaken in the last couple of months is taking a look at how FAMM is operating. Are we doing what we should be doing? Are we doing it as efficiently as we should? Are some people in the wrong role here? Are there people who have strengths that are not being realized because they are not in a position that allows them to utilize them? Are we asking some people to do things that are just not a natural fit and maybe they could be shifted to a different place?

I’ve learned over the years that you may hire somebody to do one particular job, but as time goes on, it may not be the right fit for them, or maybe it wasn’t even the right fit from the get-go. So, rather than just fire somebody in that situation, if they are committed to our issue, like what we do, are smart, strategic, can write well—whatever the qualities are that I look for—maybe there’s another way to use them. So I have a meeting at three o’clock with a person on our staff to talk about her role. I am sure that will last longer than it should, but let’s say it goes till at least four o’clock.

Then I will probably come back to my desk to try to do the things that I said all day long that I would be doing, such as calling the White House Counsel’s office to find out what they think about clemency. And contacting some of our donors whom I haven’t talked to for a while—including one who promised us $100,000 that hasn’t materialized yet. We have a package of articles and a cover letter that I need to finish that’s going out to our biggest donors—hopefully today and, if not, tomorrow.

Leech: When does the day usually end?

Stewart: Around five thirty.

Leech: Do you have many evening events, or does it stay pretty constrained to the day?

Stewart: It’s mostly during the day. My kids are nine and twelve now. Since I’ve had kids, I’ve definitely been more restricted in my after-work freedom. They are old enough that they don’t need me every minute but my husband is out of town this week, so it’s a little trickier.

Leech: Do you think jobs like yours or policy advocacy positions in general are conducive to family life?

Stewart: I do. I mean, Washington is a crazy workaholic town. But that is probably true of lots of towns.

Leech: No. Washington is special.

Stewart: Everybody in this town thinks that what they do is incredibly important. I think what I do is important, too, but I do realize that if I don’t do it for a day, or a week, or an evening, new mandatory sentences aren’t going to be put in place while I’m off-duty. Something terrible isn’t going to happen. In any event, now I have this great staff and when I am on vacation or out of town, there are other people here who can deal with whatever comes up. So I think we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously that we have to obsess that if we are not at our desks, some bad policy is going to pass. I don’t know—I just feel that Washington takes itself too seriously. So is it conducive to having kids? Sure, but you’ve got to put your priorities in order.

Leech: Did FAMM develop in the way that you expected going into it?

Stewart: If I had known when I started FAMM how hard it would be to do what I do, I wouldn’t have done it. So there is some truth to the aphorismthat “ignorance is bliss.” I was naïve enough to think that if legislators could see who they were putting to prison for so long that they would say, “Oh, my God, that is not what we meant. We meant to put away just the drug kingpins!” And they’d change the laws. In fact, I wasn’t that misguided, because I started FAMM in 1991, and in 1994, three years later, Congress passed a “safety valve” provision that allows judges in drug cases to ignore the federal mandatory minimum if the defendant meets certain criteria, including being a first offender and nonviolent.

Leech: So that was a big step.

Stewart: It was huge. So I wasn’t totally naïve, because it was true that when we started putting the human faces of their laws in front of members of Congress, they started responding—maybe not out loud, but tacitly recognizing that their laws were incarcerating a lot of people for far longer than they had meant to happen. Instead of just repealing the mandatory minimum laws, they said, “We’ll give the judges a little bit of discretion in certain cases.” But it was a big step. In fact, it applies in about a quarter of the federal drug cases that are sentenced each year. Of the twenty to twenty-five thousand people who are sentenced each year for federal drug crimes, roughly five thousand of them benefit from the 1994 safety valve.

Leech: What in your education, or training, or background has best prepared you for what you do today?

Stewart: The quality I bring to this job that is probably the most useful is that I am a layperson and not a lawyer.

Leech: How so?

Stewart: I came to the sentencing issue with no knowledge of it. That is how most people come to it, unless you’ve learned about it in law school or you’ve somehow been involved in the criminal justice system before. To be able to help other people understand why it’s an important issue, I remind myself how I once knew nothing about this. What was it that made me care? Initially, of course, it was what happened to my brother. But subsequently and more generally, it’s the stories I read or hear from the affected families. The plain language and raw hurt get right to the heart of what’s wrong with the sentencing laws we have.

After twenty-one years I am not, I suppose, a layperson any more. But I continually remind myself what it was like to know nothing about this, and I draw on that memory to help me convince people who know nothing about sentencing why it should matter to them.

Leech: Does your public relations background help you at all? That is what you did for Cato, right?

Stewart: Yes, I did. It does help. It’s funny that it’s actually so much easier here than it was at Cato, at least back when I was there. Cato’s so much bigger now and has a fantastic PR department, but back then it was really hard to get the media to pay attention to the issues that Cato dealt with. They were a little esoteric then. I remember during the one hundredth anniversary of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1990, I was trying to drum up coverage, and the reaction was like: “Yeah, right. Who cares?”

But I found out about a man who owned a paint store and for some reason he was going to be shut down because of something to do with the Sherman Antitrust Act. So I put together a one-page pitch using that person’s story and sent it to the television reporter John Stossel, and within a day he called me.

What that told me is what I’ve already said to you: the human story is the best tack to take. Telling how a law affects an individual person is so compelling. If I hadn’t included that person’s story in the Sherman Antitrust Act pitch to John Stossel, he probably would have just tossed it. But when you show how a law affects individuals, how it effects human being, it begins to make good media sense to a reporter, and especially a TV reporter.

Within the first month of starting FAMM, I got a call from ABC News and they wanted to do a two-minute segment on sentencing for a feature at the end of the news called “The American Agenda.” They came and interviewed me, and we put the whole story together. We gave them the expert, and the family, and everything they needed. I thought, “Wow, it is so easy!” They came to me. I didn’t have to kick the door down to get them to care about issues, which I felt I had to do at Cato. Certainly my experience as a PR person there has been instructive and helpful.

Leech: When you are looking for someone to hire to work at FAMM, what sorts of qualities or what sort of background and experience are you looking for? Let’s say you were hiring a new lobbyist.

Stewart: We actually are. We’re hiring one.

Leech: Okay, there you go.

Stewart: Our lobbyist just left. One of the main requirements is that he or she should be a good writer. I came to value great writing when I worked at Cato. They are excellent writers and editors and I became a much better writer by working there. Sadly, writing well is a skill that way too few people have these days.

Leech: Why are lobbyists important?

Stewart: We did not have an official lobbyist until four years ago. Up until then, I was doing it—not full-time by any stretch of the imagination—but, between myself and our vice president, we would read and stay on top of all the sentencing bills in Congress. What I’m looking for now—which may not have been what I was looking for four years ago—is somebody who has worked on the Hill.

Leech: For a member of Congress?

Stewart: Yes. Again, if I’m painting my ideal picture, it would be someone who worked for a Republican member of Congress.

Leech: Why?

Stewart: Although I don’t think either party is very good on our issue, I think Republicans have the Nixon-goes-to-China magic. If they support sentencing reforms, Democrats are more likely to go along with it. If Democrats support sentencing reforms, Republicans just say, “You’re soft on crime.” So if we can find somebody who at least has some conservative credentials, it would be really helpful. Ideally, they can also read legislation. It’s not as easy as it sounds to analyze a bill.

Leech: How do you judge whether they’re able to do that or not?

Stewart:Well, if they’ve worked on the Hill, they’ve probably analyzed bills. It’s not rocket science but it requires a lot of attention to detail and cross referencing. In addition, I’m looking for someone who is strategic and outside-the-box in her thinking. It’s one thing to wait for a bill to come along and then either support it or oppose it. It’s another thing to create the motion around our issue, get a good bill introduced, and line up bipartisan support for it before it’s even introduced.

So it’s not just, “Okay, we want a bill. Let’s see who among our friends can introduce it.” Right now if Democrats in the House introduce a bill without bipartisan support, it will never get a hearing because the Republicans control the House. You’ve got to think beyond what’s possible at the moment and think about what might be possible if you pushed for it. How do you get around a chairman of the House Judiciary Committee who doesn’t like sentencing reform? Do you try to find somebody who knows him who can talk to him personally about our issues? Do you try to figure out some other way to circumvent him? What is our strategy around that obstacle? I want somebody who can think creatively.

Leech: Right. You mentioned the writing and I was wondering if you could explain why the writing is important.

Stewart: It’s important because we write a lot of pieces that go to the Hill. We write testimony for all kinds of people, whether it’s for me or for someone at FAMM, or someone who’s not at FAMM. When the brother of the woman in prison testified before Senator Durbin, we wrote his testimony for him. We’ve written testimony for a lot of different people. So that would fall on this person’s plate.

Leech: You’re writing testimonies for them because…?

Stewart: Because if the committee chairs aren’t going to invite me or someone else from FAMM to testify, we will suggest other people we think would be good. We call the person and say, “Look, we’re happy to draft your testimony for you. You can use it or not but, if you want us to, we’ll do the first draft.” I know from my own experience when I need to prepare testimony, it’s much easier if somebody does a draft that I can then edit and turn into my own, rather than stare at a blank piece of paper wondering what to write.

Leech: And this allows them to have the technicalities down there in front of them. They don’t have to look up the details and facts and figures themselves.

Stewart: Exactly. But of course, we don’t make it more complicated than the person would naturally know. No one expects a prisoner family member to know all the details of legislation or the number of people in prison or whatever. You write it for the individual.

We also write sign-on letters for our coalitions to show their support on various issues, and we analyze bills and do side-by-side comparisons. If there are a couple of bills out there that are doing more or less the same thing, we dumb them down to make them easy to understand and we share those with staff on the Hill. We do one-pagers on different issues so congressional staffers understand them in the most basic way, because a lot of staff know very little about sentencing. Even Judiciary staffers don’t always understand sentencing. The more accessible we can make the information, the better.

Leech: How about the interpersonal profile of this person you’re looking to hire? Are there specific things you would want the person you’re hiring to have in terms of interpersonal skills? How important are they?

Stewart: Very important! I’m looking for somebody who is … aggressive is too strong of a word … confident enough to be comfortable going up to a member of Congress or staffer and saying, “Hi. I’m so-and-so from FAMM and we really want you to take a look at our bill (or whatever)” and then speaking to the issue with fluency, ease, and knowledge.

Leech: My final question. What advice do you have for someone who wants to be a policy advocate or a lobbyist?

Stewart: My advice is to prepare for the long haul: policy reform is painfully slow. Even with the best advocacy around it, it’s going to be hard going if it’s at all controversial—and even if it’s not controversial, it’s hard to make progress nowadays when Congress has become so partisan and divided. Even if you’ve got a sponsor from one party, it’s really hard to find a sponsor from the other party, and then even harder for both of them to bring along enough people to get the bill passed. Bottom line: don’t expect quick results.

Leech: Okay. Good advice.

Stewart: In contrast to that advice is something I tell prisoners and their families a lot: nothing is set in stone. Everything changes in the long run. I have families whose loved ones are in prison for twenty-five to forty years. I say to them, “Don’t give up, because things do change.” In the twenty-one years that I’ve been doing this, I have seen reforms. We have pushed them. We have worked for them. And we have helped make them happen. Things do, in fact, change if you keep pushing long and hard enough. So don’t give up.