White Collar Week, Ep. 16: Bridgeport, CT Mayor Joseph Ganim

Today on the podcast, we have Bridgeport Mayor Joseph Ganim. After five terms as the mayor of the largest city in the state of Connecticut from 1991 to 2003, Joe was brought down in a corruption scandal for which he served six years in a federal prison. After his release from prison, in 2015 Joe ran again for mayor of Bridgeport and he was reelected. He is currently serving his seventh term as mayor.

What I find most fascinating about Joe is his resilience and resourcefulness - his willingness to take risks and subject himself to public scrutiny after all he'd been through. Certainly, his story is a lesson to other people convicted of felonies that life is not over once you go to prison.

Full disclosure: In 2016 and 2017, I served as Co-Chairperson of the Advisory Board to the City of Bridgeport Mayor's Initiative on Reentry Affairs.

So coming up, Mayor Joseph Ganim on White Collar Week. I hope you will join us. - Jeff

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Welcome to White Collar Week with Jeff Grant, a podcast serving the white collar justice community. It’s the isolation that destroys us. The solution is in community.

If you are interested in this podcast, then you are probably already a member of the white collar justice community – even if you don’t quite know it yet. Our community is certainly made up of people being prosecuted, or who have already been prosecuted, for white collar crimes. But it is also made up of the spouses, children and families of those prosecuted for white collar crimes – these are the first victims of white collar crime. And the community also consists of the other victims, both direct and indirect, and those in the wider white collar ecosystem like friends, colleagues, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, law enforcement, academics, researchers. Investigators, mitigation experts, corrections officers, reentry professionals, mental health care professionals, drug and alcohol counselors, – and ministers, chaplains and advocates for criminal and social justice reform. The list goes on and on…

Our mission is to introduce you to other members of the white collar justice community, to hear their very personal stories, and hopefully gain a broader perspective of what this is really all about. Maybe this will inspire some deeper thoughts and introspection? Maybe it will inspire some empathy and compassion for people you might otherwise resent or dismiss? And maybe it will help lift us all out of our own isolation and into community, so we can learn to live again in the sunshine of the spirit.

 

Blessings, לשלום

Jeff

 

Rev. Jeff Grant, J.D., M.Div.

(he, him, his)

Co-founder, Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc., Greenwich CT & Nationwide

Co-host, The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast

Host, White Collar Week

Mailing: P.O. Box 1, Woodbury, CT 06798

Website: prisonist.org

Email: jgrant@prisonist.org

Office: 203-405-6249

Donations (501c3): bit.ly/donate35T9kMZ

 

Not a prison coach, not a prison consultant.