We’re sharing a recent interview with Michelle Pitcher of the Texas Observer about living conditions and forced labor in the TDCJ, the Texas prison system. You can reach Michelle at pitcher@texasobserver.org or follow her at @michellepitcher.bsky.social .
- https://www.texasobserver.org/prison-heat-lawsuit-tdcj/
- https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-plantations
- https://www.texasobserver.org/solidarity-prison-labor-union/
Our prior interview with Jason Walker (more of his writings at his blog) can be found here (with a transcript available). And our prior chat with Comrade Z can be found here.
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Transcription
Michelle Pitcher: My name is Michelle Pitcher. My pronouns are she/her, and I’m a reporter with The Texas Observer covering criminal justice issues in the state. For my purposes, that means anything related to policing, courts, jails, prisons, parole, and probation. It’s a really, really big beat, but it’s all-encompassing.
TFSR: Cool. How did you find yourself covering the criminal justice oeuvre, all the intersecting and interlocking parts of that? What does that beat look like?
MP: I’ve always been interested. I grew up in Texas with some incarcerated family members, but I was young and didn’t know much about what was going on. I actually didn’t go into the criminal justice beat until a few years back when I was in journalism school, grad school, and I got a gig with the Marshall Project, which is a national nonprofit newsroom, if you’re not familiar, that focuses specifically on criminal justice. There, I realized that my personal interest, given my background, combined with the importance of covering… I said it’s an all-encompassing beat, and there are just so many facets to it. There’s just such a need to cover it, so I decided that it was what I wanted to focus on after bouncing around beats for a while. The work I do for The Texas Observer—I’ve been here for, I think, exactly two and a half years—it’s less focused on crimes. You’ll see a lot of journalism that’s focused on true crime, but that’s not necessarily what I do. I’m looking more at trends and systemic issues. This past year, I’ve worked a lot on prison conditions in Texas, and I’ve met and spoken with scores of incarcerated people who’ve been able to provide firsthand accounts, which is absolutely crucial to any reporting on this beat. As we’ve seen historically, a lot of criminal justice reporting has been parroting official accounts, be that police reports or prison reports to the legislature, and I think that our ability now to really incorporate the voices of people who are actually experiencing it, the people actually behind bars, you just couldn’t accurately tell a story without it.
TFSR: I think it’s really important, too, to note, as you say, with the parroting. On a regular basis, public reporting on police interactions with the public, to just use a bland term, oftentimes, they’re just reproducing what is in, if not the actual statement by the police department about what an interaction was like. And there’s so much institutional power backing that, and all of the race and class dynamics and gender dynamics that are all tied up in that, too, get brushed under the rug, and all the nuance and individuality of that interaction gets lost. It’s really cool that you’re taking it as not a true crime, not a “we’re covering the crime in the streets”-type perspective, but looking at how this public agency that’s doing an ostensibly public service is interfacing with people and the real impact that individuals experience from that. And particularly, it makes sense when you bring up having had incarcerated family members. I feel like most of the people that I talk to who cover issues of prisons and incarceration or police brutality have either personally had the experience or have loved ones who have gone through the experiences of those systems and feel the need to uplift those voices in some ways.
MP: Yeah, unfortunately, I think you have to take a step or actually think about it to counteract all we’re told with media narratives and even TV and the news and everything, to remember that there’s humanity in prisons and actual people experiencing things. A lot of the time, for people, the forcing function is going through it yourself or having a loved one go through it. But I do also think, just given reader response to the stories that I write, a lot of people are more open to the more empathetic stories, the more person-based stories. And I think people’s eyes have been opened to what’s going on in these systems, especially over the past decade or two. The reader desire is there, too, and I think that it’s really heartening to see that there’s more of a public interest in the people who are experiencing these things.
TFSR: I was hoping to speak with you, in particular, about the articles that you wrote last year concerning prison labor. Can you talk about the economic and political role of forced labor that has historically shaped Texas and how Texas has adapted the practices to the changing legal landscape over time? As a sidebar to this, when I think about Texas, as someone who grew up in California, I think of Texas as somewhere in the southwest. I think about its relationship to Mexico. I don’t think of it as a state that was an active part of, for instance, the Confederacy. At initial thought, the cultural impact of that state, or the cultural framing of that state as an outsider, is “this is something that used to be a part of Mexico,” and slavery isn’t one of the first things that comes to mind. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the part that played in the foundation of the state.
MP: I was born and raised here in Texas, and we took two years of Texas history throughout the course of public school education. And even from the inside, slavery was extremely downplayed in our state’s history. That’s an interesting point. You learn more about the Alamo than really anything else. Given the idealized version of Texas history, it is something that we look into less and is less of an explored subject in our narratives. But you can really draw a straight line from slavery to today’s prison labor in Texas.
The 13th Amendment, as you probably know, abolished slavery except as a punishment for a crime, and that’s a very explicit exception that’s been exploited throughout Texas’s and other states’ histories. In Texas, after slavery was abolished, the state began to actually lease out prisoners to private companies that were doing work on projects like railroad construction. This practice is known as convict leasing, and it continued for nearly 40 years before reporters and politicians began to actually pay attention to how terrible the conditions were at these sites. Illnesses were rampant, injuries, deaths, and runaways. There was little food, little clothing, terrible hygiene, and all of these things were actually noted in inspector reports and things like that. But it wasn’t until 1910 that the practice was actually shut down. That didn’t end forced labor in the state by any means.
Now, the prison, instead of leasing people out to other entities, would force the same people to just work on their own lands. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice—often called TDCJ, but I’ll try not to use too many acronyms—just started amassing a bunch of agricultural lands, and at least nine of their prisons are actually currently on former plantation sites. A lot of the prisons are located in what’s known as the Sugar Bowl District, which is the area around Houston, where agriculture is really rich and also where a lot of slave labor took place when that was still legal in the state. Really, the forced labor is still there, the profit is still there. The way it looks and the mechanism may be different, but you can’t actually disentangle our current understanding and use of prison labor from the roots in slavery.
TFSR: Instead of enriching individuals who had contracts with the state by allowing them to potentially work to death or to injury, these incarcerated individuals, it’s the state has found a way to incorporate this forced labor in order to, I guess, decrease its own costs of operation throughout this period. Once convict leasing is over, does the state sell the product of, for instance, the agriculture in the Sugar Bowl?
MP: It’s a good question, and I’ll clarify. Basically, after 1910, the functional way that prison labor works hasn’t actually changed much, even to today. It got more mechanized. There was a shift away from agriculture to manufacturing. But then and today, prison labor is used both to offset costs and to produce things for profit. In Texas, there’s actually a sticky little requirement that state agencies purchase goods from the prison system if they’re available, if they’re being made. Legislatures, if you walk into the Texas State Capitol, gavels that you see, desks, chairs, and a lot of other things were actually produced in Texas prisons by prisoners themselves. So, agriculture today is still used mostly to offset the costs to the prison system. Food, livestock, and major crops like cotton are actually still used to create prison textiles, and that goes for bedding and towels and things like that. It keeps costs low on one side. And then, if the workers are producing things that are sellable, it actually brings in revenue,
TFSR: And even though these laws might be off the book officially, as you said, straight line between prewar slavery, war slavery, and then up till today, during the convict lease period, there was the implementation of the Black Codes, right? And then following that, I’m sure elements of Jim Crow or other ways of targeting specific parts of the population for incarceration in order to control and exploit their labor.
MP: Yeah, and just a couple things on that too. If you talk to 10 people in Texas prisons today who are working or have worked, at least seven of them will use the word slavery at some point in their discussion. It’s what the people who are doing the work refer to it as. And I think that hearing that so much just really made that line between slavery and the current prison labor bold. It’s really hard not to see.
TFSR: You’ve named some of the industries that people are employed in or forced to work in. Can you talk about what the conditions are like that you know of?
MP: Yes. This is an area where having the actual incarcerated workers themselves be able to tell me their lived experience is really critical because the official reports from the Texas state prison system have very little to do with how people are actually being treated. I’ve heard of really grueling work in the agriculture fields, and it seems that maybe the worst of it was a couple decades back. I’ve heard really, really terrible stories from the 1980s and the ‘90s from folks who have been released from prison but still can tell really compelling stories about the violence in the agriculture fields, the punishments that they would face if they didn’t make their quotas, things like having to shuck gallons of peanuts with your bare hands. Your hands are already red and raw after working in the fields. Things like balancing on a milk crate for hours on end in public places to test your physical stamina, and also the element of public shaming, the ridicule there.
Those accounts that we heard, like I said, were a couple decades back. It seems like the agriculture experience in that field today, because it’s been so mechanized, does look a little different. And in some places, I will say the farm jobs seem to be actually coveted, if the farm is well-run. I spoke with someone at a unit down in Brazoria, and they said that the farm job is a great way to get outside and get the fresh air that you are denied. You see wildlife, and you get to talk with other people on your work squad that you might not experience in other areas of the prison.
There is that element where, when we talk about prison labor, there’s obviously the idea that it’s forced. These people have no say in the matter. It’s unpaid here in Texas, and it can be very, very dangerous. I have also spoken with a good number of people who enjoy their jobs or at least enjoy having something to do. I think that the conversation requires a little bit of nuance, too, because from the outside, we can point to all the problems and say that everyone is suffering, but there are plenty of voices on the inside who say that we would choose to work if it was a choice—it’d be nice to get paid. There are just a lot of variables at play, and also just a lot of very personal opinions, and it’s a subjective matter, but from the objective side, we found that there are a lot of injuries happening. A lot of people feel they’re not well-trained to use heavy equipment. They’re sometimes asked to do jobs that are outside of their purview and then get injured. You can just personally do a quick search of lawsuits against the Texas prison system, and a lot of them will have to do with injuries on work assignments, things like slipping on the floor because they were on maintenance and weren’t given proper footwear, which is something that we came across actually in our reporting. So, just like any workplace, it can be really, really dangerous, but one of the big differences is that free-world workplace protections stop at the prison door. There’s no OSHA, there’s no workers’ comp. If you’re injured, you’re really on your own to deal with it.
TFSR: There was a recent conversation that I had with Phil Wilayto, who works with the Virginia Defenders, about conditions at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, and one of the phrases that stuck in my head—I’m going to paraphrase because I don’t have it memorized— was him talking to a number of incarcerated people, or formerly incarcerated people, who said, “I was sent here as punishment. I wasn’t sent here for punishment.” If the point of incarceration, supposedly, in our society is to take someone out of the conditions that they’re in where they were causing harm, punish them by taking them away from their community, and they do time, and then they get out, then it seems like forcing them to labor and putting them in dangerous situations that could permanently disable them or kill them, in addition to the time that the judge gives them, that’s not one of the conditions of their punishment that’s listed as and you could get maimed and run over by a tractor or whatever. It’s pretty shocking.
MP: Right, and just in the abstract, the idea of the threshold for where we get truly constitutionally angry is cruel and unusual punishment. It’s interesting, too, because a lot of people are shocked by the way that they’re treated when they actually get into Texas prisons. They’re upset by the food, the heat is just really, really terrible, and so many of our units lack air conditioning. I’ve heard about subpar medical care. It’s just really hard to get help when you’re suffering in a Texas prison. One thing that actually surprises me is that in all the letters and messages I receive, you don’t hear a lot of people who feel sorry for themselves because they don’t think that their crime was bad enough. I don’t hear a lot of, “Well, I was only drunk driving, and now I have to live with XYZ.” A lot of people are simply upset at the general conditions, and they’re not saying, “I don’t deserve this.” They’re saying, “No one here deserves this,” which is, I think, a really interesting exercise in empathy for each individual person, just seeing that conditions can be so difficult, it’s hard to imagine anyone “deserving” that situation.
TFSR: Yeah, for sure. You mentioned in that last answer that work in the state of Texas’s prison system is forced. It’s required, right? If you’re assigned a job, you have to do it. And it’s unpaid. What repercussions do people suffer if they refuse a work assignment?
MP: In the past, the repercussions were often violent. You could be lashed, you could be put into a tin building on a hot day and forced to just bake in there with anyone else who was refusing to work. I mentioned that just a few decades back, people were shelling peanuts or balancing on milk crates for hours on end. Today, the punishments are more codified, from what I can tell, based on what people are telling me and just the reports that I’ve seen. You’re more likely to lose privileges, and those privileges include any communication with the outside world. You can lose your custody level. You can get put on a stricter custody level, which inherently means you have fewer opportunities while inside the prison. A lot of folks I’ve talked to have been transferred, and the transfers are a black box. People have told me that they feel they’re being transferred to worse units or places where they have known threats, and they feel that that’s an unofficial way that they’re being punished for refusing to work. But a lot of it right now is the changes in level, the changes in what you’re allowed to do. And Texas technically did away with solitary confinement as a form of punishment a few years back in its policy and on the books, but pretty much everyone I’ve spoken with who has been put into administrative isolation or solitary confinement in the years since has said that it has felt punitive. I think that policy and word changes don’t often translate to actual practice changes.
TFSR: It’s also worth noting that when you were describing the corporal repercussions that people were facing, at least in the earlier days, changes that before the codification of punishment, if you watch Roots or if you read documents from the era of chattel slavery, those are exactly the methods that were being employed against Black bodies.
MP: And I will also just here plug a really powerful book called Racehoss: Big Emma’s Boy by a man named Albert Race Sample. He had been incarcerated in Texas in the era of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and he writes really descriptively, really compellingly about work in the fields, including some of the punishments that people faced, including the personalities of the guards who were looking over the what’s called hoe squads, and he refers to one is just a traveling executioner who was quite trigger happy if anyone was disrespectful or not doing their job. I talked earlier about how important personal testimony is in these things. I can talk all day about what I’ve read, but if you’re interested in hearing firsthand, I would really recommend Albert Race Sample’s book.
TFSR: Cool, thanks. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. I’ve heard that, too, from people in various facilities around the country talking about how actually work is something that they’re happy to do. It gets them out, it gets them interacting with people, changes up their schedule a bit. It may get them some good time off or, in some instances, a little bit of money for their commissary. I think it’s also worth noting that at certain points in American history, prisons had educational programs for people to participate in, such as counseling or theater or whatever. My understanding is that the general trajectory of that since the ‘80s has been to defund those and make them less available. If people have the opportunity to either watch TV all day or sit in a cell by themselves versus getting out and doing something that feels productive, it’s a hard choice between those things, but the choices are pretty limited.
MP: Yeah, what I’ve heard, too, is we take for granted how much being paid anything is such an essential incentive because it goes without saying that if you work in the “free world,” you’re going to be compensated for it. Because there’s quite little choice in what job you get to do when you’re incarcerated, that removes basically the other incentivizing force, so either compensation or interest in the work. And a lot of folks do get assigned, or they get their electrician certification while inside, or they train as plumbers, and they really learn a trade that they then would like to take out once they’re released. But a good number of people feel like cogs in a machine.
I spoke with someone who had been incarcerated in the latter half of the 20th century—so not a modern anecdote by any means—but we were talking about prison labor, and I said that I had posed a question about forced labor for no pay to the prison system, and they said that they were training people to be productive members of society when they come out. And when I mentioned this to this man, he laughed out loud, asking what skills he had learned in the fields when he was working. He said he couldn’t think of a single useful skill that he learned other than just fear.
I think that today, Texas does have a fair number of educational opportunities. I personally haven’t looked into the efficacy of them, but the little reporting I’ve done on them, they do seem to be available, and there are systems in place to get people into the program. But there are only so many slots in the class where you can get your commercial driver’s license. In any job, you could, if you were interested in it and find something that you could carry forward, but the likelihood that you’re going to be placed in a job that’s actually something that you would like to do moving forward is fairly low.
TFSR: I was interested to learn from your article “Texas’ Plantation Prisons” about the changes in record keeping and public information concerning deaths behind bars in the state. Can you talk about the changes that you map in that article, the political pressures behind various reforms, and what the current state of public information concerning those injuries and deaths behind bars looks like in the TDCJ?
MP: One of the things we found, and maybe the more interesting thing that we discovered early on, is that public records during convict leasing were surprisingly robust, and anyone can actually go read through these reports in Austin at the Texas State Library and Archives right next door to the Capitol. We pulled so many files and looked over thousands of pages of illegible handwriting from the late 1800s, but what you actually found in there was really interesting because there were handwritten reports from inspectors about individual sites where they talked about how many calories people were getting fed a day, and whether there had been outbreaks of illnesses, and what the clothing and shoes looked like on people. Just really candid, unabridged reports from these sites where people were being leased out, and they painted a really terrible picture, and eventually that picture made its way to the public’s eye via some investigative reporting from down in San Antonio and then the legislature.
But we were really surprised that deaths and punishments were logged in detail, and these reports actually fell off in the first half of the 20th century after convict leasing was done away with. It’s been called a black hole in Texas’s history because it wasn’t until the 1980s that Texas passed a law that said all in-custody deaths had to be reported to the Attorney General’s Office. That’s deaths during arrests in jails or in prisons. These reports are available online. They’re public information. They’re crucial, but they’re also lacking in a lot of detail. Sometimes, there will be a brief summary of the incident. More often, there will just be the generic information of name, place of death, time of death, if there’s a preliminary cause, but most often, you’ll have to try to get hold of an official autopsy report to get any real clarity on what happened when there is an in-custody death here in Texas, particularly in the prisons. And even then, I’ve gotten a 19-page autopsy report where more than 17 of the pages were completely redacted, just black boxes over the page. And so I think that there are a lot of legal avenues where the Texas prison system can withhold information from the public, even about the most extreme cases where someone is dying in custody. What used to be just off-the-cuff reports of each unit unedited that you can still find—they still survive in the archives—information about today is a lot harder to come by, especially specific information. The prison system keeps a lot of aggregate data. I think in the story, I cite the number of total injuries that happened in the kitchens in 2023, but if I wanted to get more information on an incident, I wouldn’t be able to do that.
TFSR: As far as you can tell, what was the motivating factor behind the amount of public record keeping concerning the conditions of workers behind bars, and what of that is lacking now? The means are there for record-keeping to be very easy. What drew you to start covering prison issues, in part, was knowing people who were directly affected by these structures. And you are not alone in that. Lots of people have loved ones, community members, and friends who have gone through or are going through the prison system in this most incarcerated country in the world. Can you talk a little bit about what motivated and drove the relatively decent record-keeping that seemed to put a stop to some of the worst, most egregious violence of the system during the Progressive Era?
MP: Sure. It’s hard to know particularly the motivations from so long ago, but I do think that the existence of the records could show a few things. One of those is that this was an economic experiment that Texas was doing, and they were really interested in all of the financial factors that could go into that, including providing food and clothing to the people and how the financial experiment was going. The really robust records were probably to that end. And around the time that convict leasing really came under scrutiny, there was actually an investigative report from San Antonio that publicized a lot of the really terrible conditions that people were undergoing. And what’s interesting, too, is at the time, it actually wasn’t necessarily a partisan issue. I think that what we saw here in Texas was that people on both sides of the aisle became outraged at the conditions that they were seeing. Whether you looked at it from a financial or humanitarian angle, people were fairly outraged.
TFSR: You mentioned under conditions inside poor medical treatment, if any, and you mentioned air conditioning. And for folks that aren’t in Texas and aren’t in these sweltering conditions, that may not sound like a lot, like, “Oh, they’re a little bit discomforted.” I’ve heard of certain prisoners with known heart issues being rather worried about their condition because of the heat index in Texas prisons. Can you draw out a little bit on what a lack of temperature regulation in those facilities can mean for people?
MP: Heat in Texas is deadly, and so many of our prisons lack air conditioning in people’s housing areas. And this is a matter of comfort. It’s also a matter of safety and, for many people, extreme medical issues. We’ve spoken with people who have told us how you cope with heat on the inside. A lot of these buildings are old brick buildings, so during the day, they’re being baked by the sun. They’re soaking up all this heat, and then at night, they’re releasing it into the cells. You’re not getting any respite at night; you’re in these cells that you might have to flood the toilet to get some water on the floor to cool yourself down, especially if you can’t afford to buy a fan from the commissary. There’s precious little that people can do to actually regulate their body temperature.
On a more macro level, the prison system has said that no one has died from a heat-related cause in over a decade. And that’s not true of the general population in Texas, where there’s widespread access to either air conditioning or cooling centers. And it’s really hard to believe that in these places where people are confined without any means of regulating their body temperature… We have an aging prison population in Texas. Many people are older. They’re extremely vulnerable to heat. They’re on medications that make them vulnerable to heat. They have pre-existing conditions that make them vulnerable to heat. They’re addicted to drugs or substances that make them vulnerable to heat. There are just so many exacerbating factors here in Texas that make our prisons… They’re chock full of people who are more vulnerable than the general population of Texas, and yet, we’re being told that zero people have died from heat over the past 12 or 13 years. And that’s directly contradicted by some of the autopsy reports where hyperthermia has been noted. We’ve seen autopsy reports for the person who died had an internal body temperature of 104° and above at the time of their death. All these things would point to the fact that heat in Texas prisons is deadly, but it’s just being outright denied by the system itself.
TFSR: I guess under that prior reporting period, there was a requisite that people who died behind bars were getting looked at by a mortician to check about the conditions of death and report those factors. And at this point, probably death by heat-related injury is higher than what’s known because the prison system isn’t following through on that reporting.
MP: I think that’s why it’s so important to look closely at these things and talk to people and double-check the official line against publicly available data because it’s out there, and we’re fortunate that a lot of people have actually been covering this in Texas, especially because there was a lawsuit expanded this past year about the extreme heat in Texas prisons, particularly for medically vulnerable people. We’re in an era of accountability for heat. It’s just a matter of whether the prison system will spend the money to install the air conditioning.
TFSR: Among others, you spoke with two inside activists that we’ve had on the show before, Jason Renard Walker and Alex Zuniga, aka Comrade Z. Can you talk about what they shared about their experiences in Texas prisons, their organizing and documenting of what they’ve lived through, and what repercussions that they’ve experienced for speaking out?
MP: Jason and Alex were and continue to be extremely helpful sources. One thing that can’t be overstated is how powerful and important their bravery is. Speaking out and talking to the media, all of these things aren’t celebrated by prison officials or even other incarcerated people. Both of these men have told me that they’ve seen extreme retribution over the time that they’ve spent incarcerated. Jason Walker is a journalist himself and has felt that he’s faced violent threats based on his reporting. When I first started speaking with Alex, he was actually up for parole just a few months after we spoke, and he was eventually denied parole. After that, he decided that keeping his head down wasn’t the way forward.
As a journalist, I completely recognize that when I ask someone who’s incarcerated to speak with me, the results of their decision can have monumental impacts on their quality of life. I’ve spoken with people about the potential to lose communication access, to be transferred to other units, and to make enemies among guards or other incarcerated people. To anyone listening, regardless of the state you’re in, whether in Texas or otherwise, documentation is the most important thing because, unfortunately, a lot of people are brave and willing to speak out, damn the consequences. However, individual experiences can be drowned out or flat-out denied by officials. But if you’re documenting things and going through official grievance channels—and I know it’s not the answer for everyone, but filing lawsuits—there’s a lot better chance of someone on the outside, be it a journalist or someone else, to be able to share your story, because there will be that backup. Because when one incarcerated person is trying to share their story, it’s David and Goliath. And I think that Goliath has a lot of power to make it difficult to verify things in your story. Eventually, you come to an impasse, but the more detail you can give, the more records you have, the better chance your story will be widely shared. Over the course of my reporting, I’ve gotten a lot of letters and messages from people about all of the things they’re facing, and staying up-to-date with that is… I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it. One thing I do regret is that we’re such a small shop and I’m one person. And Texas actually has lost some really good criminal justice reporters recently. So I would say to anyone listening that it’s worth sending the message and keeping in touch if you’re willing to speak. I will do my very best to keep up with what’s going on and keep in touch. And it’s just unfortunate that it’s such a big system and there’s so few people out there keeping a close eye on it.
TFSR: The last decade and a half in the US has seen ebbs and flows of inside and outside organizing concerning issues of labor, healthcare, sentencing length, and a myriad of other issues inside prisons and jails at all governmental levels. Through your conversations with incarcerated organizers and outside advocates, do you have a sense of the state of prison organizing as a movement right now in Texas?
MP: Prison labor organizing nationwide is really fascinating. The biggest presence we have here in Texas, even though it’s not necessarily official, is IWOC, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. They’re part of the IWW. It’s an arm of the IWW that is strictly focused on incarcerated workers. The idea is for everyone, including the workers themselves, people on the outside, and prison officials, to understand that there really isn’t all that much difference between someone who is laboring in the prison and someone who is doing a similar job in the “free world” and seeing that solidarity between those workers grow, it’s been up to people organizing lawsuits, getting people to sign petitions, and spreading the word that action is being taken to ask for more accountability, more safety, and things like that.
TFSR: Thanks a lot again for the chat and the work you’re doing. I’m excited to share this with the listenership.
MP: Awesome. Thank you so much.