Born in Dubai, she came to the United States to study psychology in 2010, and when she graduated from New York University in 2014, she set her sights on law school. Working with marginalized, oppressed, and vulnerable populations had always appealed to her, and she felt that a law degree would be the best way to effect change on their behalf.

At the suggestion of a classmate, Nagib joined the student group Advocates for the Incarcerated in her first year at Fordham Law. The group revived a tradition of constructing a life-size mockup of a solitary confinement cell at the school and invited formerly incarcerated people to come talk about their experiences. Firsthand stories like these are critical, she said, in getting others to understand what conditions are like in prison.

“No matter how many times people hear about it or how many times you have the conversation, there will always be someone who needs to hear directly from the person who experienced it,” she said.

Nagib quickly realized that she wanted to work on criminal justice reform. She visited Rikers Island dozens of times last fall as part of an externship with the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoner’s Rights Project. She and her colleagues presented workshops and educated incarcerated people on their rights. Nagib said this information is often not passed on by public defenders—a calling that she recently considered, and which she saw up close during a summer internship in New Orleans.

After graduation, Nagib will work with a program that serves people who have been charged with violent crimes and focuses on alternatives to incarceration. It aims to divert people who have been responsible for harm away from jail while being mindful  of survivor needs. The program promotes a racially equitable response to violence, Nagib said, and survivors approve of the approach about 90 percent of the time.

That’s because survivors of harm are pragmatic about what’s most likely to keep them safe, and they tend to understand that sending a person to jail won’t do that, she said. Rather, the incarcerated person will be traumatized, denied access to loved ones, and won’t have the wherewithal to accept accountability for their actions.

“Many people who have been harmed have also had family members or loved ones go to prison, so they know how much that breaks somebody. It’s a combination of pragmatism and a nuanced understanding of how the system works and who it targets,” she said.

What she’ll miss most about Fordham is the space that she and her classmates created for people who want to be challenged and challenge others about criminal justice reform. These difficult conversations are more important than “just patting ourselves on the back because we’re here doing public service work,” she said. “We need to consistently critique ourselves and the choices that we make, to think strategically about what we’re doing and whose voices we’re affirming and whose we’re not.”

“My message is we need to close Rikers Island and we need to close it now, and we need all of your support,” Judge Lippman told the packed crowd of judges, prosecutors, legal scholars, and prison reform activists who convened at the all-day conference, Mass Incarceration: Mercy Matters. The conference was presented by the Franklin H. Williams Judicial Commission, named after the influential 1945 Fordham Law graduate who successfully argued the Groveland case, involving the wrongful conviction of three African-Americans, before the United States Supreme Court. The commission was established in 1991 to educate and advise decision makers in the New York Court System on issues affecting both employees and litigants of color and now comprises over 250 members of color of the New York judiciary.

Lippman’s remarks came during an afternoon panel moderated by David Udell, director of the National Center for Access to Justice (NCAJ) at Fordham Law, titled “The Rikers Report: Reversing the Criminalization of Poverty.” The conference also featured panels on “Mass Incarceration and the Effect on the Community” and “Prosecution of Cases, Racial Bias, and Efforts to Reform the Prison System,” the latter moderated by Fordham Law Professor Tanya K. Hernández.

Glenn E. Martin, president and founder of JustLeadershipUSA and a member of the independent commission, delivered a keynote speech in which he described his own experience in Rikers and the path that led him to his present role as a leader in the movement to close the troubled prison.

Fordham Law Dean Matthew Diller, the Hon. Richard B. Lowe III, chair of the Franklin H. Williams Judicial Commission, and the Hon. Janet DiFiore, chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, each shared introductory remarks. Diller praised the Franklin H. Williams Judicial Commission’s commitment to equal justice and fairness, celebrated the life of the commission’s namesake, and spoke about Fordham’s commitment to access to justice.

In fall 2016, Diller, Lippman, and Udell launched Fordham Law School’s Access to Justice Initiative. The Rikers Report panel was the third public discussion hosted by the initiative in the past year at Fordham Law in which NCAJ has sought to highlight the web of connections that link poverty, racial justice, the civil justice system, the criminal justice system, and the access-to-justice movement.

Much of the panel’s discussion focused on the fact that innocent people are held in Rikers because they lack sufficient funds to “purchase their freedom.” The panel exchanged views over the report’s recommendations for eliminating money bail altogether, establishing charitable revolving bail funds, relying on technology to determine dangerousness, and eliminating adjournments that have caused people who can’t make bail to languish in Rikers for extended, and often open-ended, periods of time.

Lippman told the audience that he had three requests before he had accepted the position of chair of the independent commission. He asked that the commission 1) be funded privately so there was no potential claims of government interference, 2) be populated by a broad spectrum of society, and 3) could “call it the way we saw it.”

“We understood within the first six months of our operation that mass incarceration just doesn’t work,” Lippman said. “This idea of putting people out of sight and out of mind promotes a culture of violence, brutality, and inhumanity.”

The 97-page Rikers report, A More Just New York City, prompted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vow in late March that he would close the jail complex. Whether Rikers closes in 10 years or much sooner ultimately depends on public officials showing some courage, Lippman stated.

Among the independent commission’s recommendations:

Basic criminal justice reform is needed to reduce the population of Rikers from around 10,000 to 5,000. This includes elimination of money bail and assurance of a speedy trial, renewed investment in youth, diversion of low-level misdemeanors from criminal courts, expansion of services for the mentally ill, and decriminalization of certain non-violent offenses.

Jails should be smaller, closer to the community, and closer to the inmates’ families. If jail populations around the city drop, then that would make it possible to house inmates in more central locations, such as a building attached to a courthouse, and hire fewer correctional officers.

Turn Rikers Island into an economic growth hub. If Rikers were closed, the island could house an extension for LaGuardia airport, have water treatment and solar power facilities, and affordable and commercial housing—all of which could create tens of thousands of jobs.

Build a memorial on Rikers Island. Such a monument would educate future generations about the brutal violence that took place there.

Fordham Law Professor Tanya Hernández moderated the day’s final panel, “Prosecution of Cases, Racial Bias, and Efforts to Reform the Criminal Justice System.” The panel included Bronx County District Attorney Darcel D. Clark, acting Kings County District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, Yale Law Professor Anna VanCleave, and Anthony J. Annucci, acting commissioner for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.

—Ray Legendre

Joining Pfaff in the discussion were Adam J. Foss, co-founder of Prosecutor Impact and a visiting senior fellow at Harvard Law School, and Phillip Atiba Goff, the Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity at John Jay College and the co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity. The trio framed their discussion around Pfaff’s book, which challenges conventional wisdom about the origins of the United States’ unprecedentedly massive prison population and the reforms proposed to reduce it.

“Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree if it’s rainy or sunny, but we can agree that we need to reduce our prison populations,” said Pfaff. “Newt Gingrich, Corey Booker, the ACLU, and the Koch brothers lined up on this issue. Yet in this—being one of the few areas where there’s a bipartisan consensus—our success is fairly minimal.”

In Locked In, Pfaff argues that received ideas concerning mass incarceration have prevented meaningful action. He pointed to the example of nonviolent drug offenses, which, the public views as an essential driver of mass incarceration, but which, Pfaff’s data show, account for a mere 16 percent of the U.S. prison population overall.

Though he advocates justice system reform, Pfaff argues that the explosion in the U.S. prison population between the 1970s and the present owes not to the “dramatic stuff” of public discourse but rather to commonly overlooked facets of the justice system.

“[County prosecutors] are the ones driving this, to a remarkable degree, and to a remarkably overlooked degree,” he said. “And there’s no discussion. No state reform bill has yet to talk about them, yet they are the ones driving this.”

Pfaff says that public prosecutors, who decide which crimes to charge defendants with, have increasingly chosen since the 1990s to bring felony charges rather than significantly less severe misdemeanor charges. Since prosecutors, not judges or juries, typically negotiate plea bargains, prosecutors often choose how long defendants will spend in prison.

Foss and Goff also picked out prosecutorial discretion as a key driver in increasing the U.S. prison population. Calling on his eight years of experience as a prosecutor in the Juvenile Division of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, Foss said prosecutors often mete out punishments with little understanding of how those punishments will affect the communities from which defendants have been drawn.

“Every single day, around this country, thousands and thousands of times, prosecutors are conducting heart surgery on neighborhoods that they know nothing about,” Foss said.

Goff substantially echoed these sentiments. A social psychologist and neuroscientist whose work focuses on policing equity, Goff praised Pfaff’s book for offering concrete paths to action on criminal justice reform.

“The place you get in trouble is where the relationship between law enforcement and the criminal justice system segregates the pain of enforcement from the pain of victimization,” he said. “And that’s what the book talks about, in a better way than any book prior.”

Pfaff himself expressed his hope that Locked In would help the cause of criminal justice reform by providing new issues on which to take action. He said that resolving misunderstandings about the criminal justice system was the first step towards reform.

“One of the conservative critiques of the Black Lives Matter movement is that they somehow don’t care about crime,” he said. “That’s insane. Black Lives Matter emerges from those groups that feel both the benefit from crime reduction and most closely feel its costs as well. And they’re telling us that these costs are out of balance, that this is not the way you approach this problem.”

—Shane Danaher

She remembers walking down 170th Street with her grandfather and collecting food samples from the storekeepers. She also remembers the years of being chased home from school by the white children, and the day her grandfather’s life was brutally ended, perhaps for no other reason than having been black.

These early years in the Bronx didn’t make her bitter; they made her resilient.

“My brother Rex and I made a pact that as long as we both lived we were going to be survivors,” said Bergland, a retired New York State prison lieutenant whose story is included in Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP) oral archive. “No matter what someone does to you, you have to survive. You learn to be strong.”

Bergland was 4 years old when her family moved to a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the South Bronx. She and her brother were the only black children at PS 88, which often made the pair a target.

When Bergland was 6, her beloved grandfather was murdered for allegedly having an interracial relationship with a white woman.

“They never found out who did it. It was never investigated. He was just another black person,” Bergland said. “My memories of that part of the Bronx aren’t good ones.”

After her grandfather’s death, the family moved to 163rd Street and Tinton Avenue. The neighborhood was more diverse, but racism was still the reality. Bergland remembers being restricted to the take-out window at White Castle, because black people were not allowed inside.

The blatant discrimination never made sense to the little girl, and she found quiet ways to rebel.

“I remember the separate water fountains in Sears that said ‘colored only’ and ‘white only.’ I wanted to see what would happen if I drank out of the white fountain,” Bergland said. “By the grace of God, nothing happened. And the water tasted the same.”

Working for justice

Her keen sense of justice together with an early encounter ignited a lifelong passion for law enforcement. One day, a cousin of Bergland’s robbed a bank on Prospect Avenue and absconded to the Berglands’ house on Tinton Ave. It didn’t take long for the authorities to track him down.

“I was the one who answered the door. I opened it and there were two gentlemen from the FBI standing there. They showed me their credentials, and I was so impressed!” she said. “I decided then that I wanted to go into the FBI.”

At that time, there was a height requirement for women who wanted to be special agents, Bergland said, so she found other trails to blaze in the law enforcement field. She began her career as a store detective for E. J. Korvette department stores, working undercover to catch employees who were stealing. In 1962, after 10 years, she transitioned to the corrections department to work in prisons such as Bedford Hills and Sing Sing.

“I wanted to be able to tell my grandchildren stories,” she said. “And I got plenty of stories to tell them from Sing Sing.”

However, it was an experience at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York that has stayed with her the longest. On her first morning there, she encountered a young black inmate scrubbing the floor. He paused when he saw her.

“He looked up at me and said, ‘Lieutenant, can I ask you a question?’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘Can you stop them from calling us [the n word]?’ I asked him who called him that, and he said everyone did, including officers,” Bergland said.

“That kind of hatred was much more than anything I’d received when I was a little girl. They didn’t call us names—they just didn’t like us,” she said.

Bergland, who was the prison’s first black female watch commander, approached the captain with the inmate’s concern. Her advocacy launched a conversation about the racially charged language being used. Eventually she prevailed—the staff was prohibited from using racial slurs.

“It was good to feel that I was helpful in some way to them,” Bergland said. “After that, the black inmates would see me and say ‘Hi Ma,’ and I would say ‘Hey son.’”

Preserving black history

She retired after 30 years, but remains active in the Bronx community and with her family—one daughter, four grandsons, and a newborn great-grandchild. She is a deacon at the Community Church of Morrisania and was instrumental in creating an African-American pictorial museum, a collection of images and artifacts from her mission trips with the church to West Africa.

“People need to be taught. Black history should not be forgotten. You have to know where you came from so you know where you’re going,” said Bergland, who recently celebrated her 80th birthday.

“It’s not just black history; it’s all of our history.”

At a poster session on Dec. 16 at Fordham’s Westchester campus, students from
Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service presented information and petitions for topics they hope to change—from the DREAM Act and legalized prostitution to geriatric prison reform and Native American rights.

Jonathan Wilson and three other classmates made their case for changing the narrative around guns, from one of control to one of safety.

“The problem is the rhetoric of gun control and Second Amendment rights that is always brought up when commonsense gun laws are brought to the table,” he said.

The group wore shirts with the phrase “Locked and Unloaded,” to call attention to Nicholas’s Law, which was passed in June by the New York State Assembly and is under consideration by the New York State Senate. It’s named for Nicholas Naumkin, a 12-year-old boy from the town of Wilton who was killed by a friend who used his father’s loaded handgun.

“There really was no penalty for the parent, so this is about making it stricter so the law gets enforced. You can have a gun in your home, but we want it locked and unloaded when it’s not in your possession,” said Wilson, whose own half-sister accidentally killed herself with her parents’ gun when he was 7.

Karen Zokas, whose group focused on food insecurity, solicited donations for the Westchester Food Bank, and invited people to write on paper plates what it meant to them to be hungry. The issue, she said, is relevant to clinical social work that she plans to practice upon graduation, because if people are hungry it’s impossible to think about their own mental health. And it’s a lot more widespread than people might think.

“Twenty-thousand children under the age of 5 are passing away in this country because they don’t have enough nutrients. That’s a lot,” she said.

Even wealthy Westchester County is not immune. Fellow classmate Samantha Leushner noted that research has found that one out of five residents is hungry there.

“You have to focus on that word ‘hungry.’ Its not just food insecurity, but literally [that]you’re going to bed and your stomach is rumbling and you might feel nauseous,” she said.

A group focused on criminal justice reform named itself the Fordham Social Work Criminal Justice Network. The group has established partnerships with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions.

Member Gretta Heaney said she was shocked and ashamed at how ignorant she was about the subject before she came to Fordham. Books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (The New Press, 2010) inspired her to take action.

“For many of us who care about social justice, there’s a lot we don’t know about. There’s a lot of ignorance about how the system works—the suffering, the discriminatory policies,” she said.

“I was just oblivious to it. So it’s a real raising of consciousness.”

All the students are enrolled in the class Social Policy II: Policy Practice and Human Rights Advocacy. Marciana Popescu, PhD, associate professor of social work, one of three faculty members teaching it, said the fair exemplified raising awareness and developing networks beyond the classroom.

“They get to experience what it means to be an advocate, and they also learn how to present their work shortly, concisely,” she said.

“You only have a few minutes when people stop by your table. How can you maximize your time to say ‘This is the issue,’ and ‘This is why you should sign.’ That’s part of their professional development.”

Pictures of family mix with military service medals and images of “Skylark,” the B-24 on which he served as an engineer during World War II. There are citations from the many groups that have honored him for his work, both in the courtroom and the community. And there are mementos of his student days at Fordham, including a photo of him in cap and gown, smiling broadly, arm-in-arm with his mom on graduation day, 1948.

Ever since then, Lucianna has been one of Fordham’s most loyal supporters. “No matter what amount it was, I always gave,” said the 92-year-old attorney, whose gifts to his alma mater now total more than $260,000.

In recent months, Fordham has begun to recognize donors like Lucianna, people who have given to the University for more than 20 years and whose quiet, steady generosity has helped generations of students. These loyal supporters are being distinguished through the newly formed Doty Society, named in honor of the late George E. Doty, FCRH ’38.

Lucianna first enrolled at the University in 1942 but soon left to serve in the U.S. Army Air Forces. He survived an attack on his B-24 aircraft, which was shot down over Yugoslavia. “I’m a very thankful man. I lost 14 of my friends during the war, and I think about them every day,” he says, reciting their names. “They were only 18, 19 years old—they didn’t get a full life.”

After returning to Fordham, he became captain of the track team and went on to Fordham Law School, graduating in 1951. He credits the University for giving him an ethical sense that’s kept him from “stepping over the red line” in his work as a criminal lawyer—and for fostering in him a firm belief in redemption, even for some of the most hardened criminals. “I go to Mass every day,” he says. “It’s hard, but I do it and still make it in to court in time.”

Lucianna and his wife, Dolores, have been married for 60 years, and their daughters have followed in his footsteps: Nancy, FCRH ’83, LAW ’86, has her own law practice, and Diane, LAW ’81, is a partner with her father. (A third daughter, Susan, died of breast cancer in 2007.) And now Lucianna’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Wafer, is a sophomore at the University.

“I have an outstanding debt to Fordham that I can’t forget,” he says. “I’ll keep contributing as long as I can.”

—Ryan Stellabotte and Tom Stoelker

The book, which detailed the challenges faced by two men—a police officer and a teenager—in Brownsville, Brooklyn at the height of New York City’s crack epidemic, has been republished this month by Fordham University Press, along with a new epilogue by Donaldson. The book follows a year in the life of the two men from the opposite sides of the street.

Mark Naison, PhD, professor of African-American Studies and history at Fordham, who wrote the forward for the book, said the re-issue couldn’t come at a better time, given the racial climate in the United States and the friction between police and members of the African-American community.

Naison, who knew Donaldson while he was researching the book, said the bravery that Donaldson exhibited in immersing himself in a dangerous neighborhood was noteworthy. In his forward, Naison described working in the 1980’s for the United Community Centers of East New York. The group promoted an anti violence campaign called “Shield the Children,” a name they chose after a drug dealer picked up a 3-year old from a stroller and used him as a shield in a gun battle.

Most impressively, Naison said, Donaldson, who is now an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, humanizes everyone caught up in a tragic situation, from neighborhood kids who are involved in drug dealing, to police patrolling the area’s public housing projects. He called it a journalistic and anthropological version of the album Illmatic, by the rapper Nas—considered one of the greatest chronicles of life on the street.

“I can’t think of another book that does that. And it’s especially important now, where police issues are on the front of public consciousness after the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and now Sandra Bland in Texas,” he said.

“This (1993) is really the early stages of the drug war, and to some degree, it’s the drug war that creates the police practices that have created all of these racial tensions in our society.”

In the 20-odd years since the first publication, crime has plummeted in New York City (328 murders last year compared to 2245 in 1990), and in a newly written epilogue, Donaldson explores how Brownsville has changed, too. The persons who are the focus of the book—Gary Lemite and Sharron Corley—have since moved away, and the neighbors they left behind now face very different challenges, said Naison.

“There’s less violence. There’s a lot more police. The communities have been rebuilt, there’s lot of new housing, and the business districts are revived. But what you don’t see are all the people who are in jail, and all those who’ve been pushed out of the community by rising rents,” Naison said, pointing out that Ferguson, Missouri, is not central but is a suburb of St. Louis.

Naison said he was glad the book was available again, and plans to use it in his courses.

“People trying to understand where we are, and how we got to this point will benefit from it.”