With Our Help, Söring Gives a Largely Fact-Based Speech

Thanks to our timely interventions, Söring is kept on-message.

First thing first: Jens Söring’s speech at the Hannover Regional Court yesterday dealt 100% with his prison experience and his views on American prison policy. It was informative and interesting! I’m glad I went.¹

The audience area was full, and there were at least 3 camera crews in attendance. Dr. Guise-Rübe, President of the Regional Court, gave a brief introduction in which he spoke of murders Söring had “supposedly” committed, but that was the extent of the attempts to challenge his conviction. Söring spoke for about 50 minutes, under questioning from Guise-Rübe, and then the floor was opened for discussion. Guise-Rübe repeatedly reminded the audience that the topic of the speech was American prisons, and all the questions should relate only to that issue.

The Role of the Söering Truth Squad

In other words, I suspect the timely interventions by myself and many other people had a beneficial effect. A few weeks ago, when the speech was announced with the confident assertion that Söring was sentenced for a crime he “didn’t commit”, I feared the worst: Söring would make a few comments about his experiences behind bars, but then segue effortlessly into the bloody sock-print, the femme fatale, the biased judge, and everything else. After all, the official announcement for his speech had labeled him innocent, so he would obviously need to explain why he was nevertheless convicted.

Like other members of the Söring Truth Squad, I groaned in disbelief. Even at this late date, Söring had somehow found a fresh taker for his story, and a judge no less. The rock had rolled down the mountainside yet again, and it was time for Sisyphus to take up his burden. Of course the first job was to get rid of the endorsement of Söring’s innocence. After emails from me and many other people, the Hannover Legal Studies Society gave in almost immediately, and changed the announcement to read that Söring "claims his innocence”.

Yet experience shows that Söring needs no excuse to start reciting his innocence claims, no matter what the supposed subject of his speech. So I began sending emails to Guise-Rübe and other members of the board of directors and the advisory council of the Society. I pointed out Söring’s tendency to always include a plea for his innocence in any speech. And even if Söring did confine himself only to discussing prisons, his point of view is one-sided and filled with exaggerated and unproven claims. I singled out specific inaccurate statements and unproven allegations Söring has made, often with direct quotations, and then showed that they were inaccurate. Of course, I posted this open letter here on my blog, so that everyone could read what I wrote. Söring generally likes to prepare behind the scenes, keeping strict control over what information he discloses to the public. Transparency helps keep him accountable.

Fortunately, all of those emails had the intended effect. None of the organizers ever responded to me — I imagine they were under strict instructions from Guise-Rübe not to respond to any emails about the speech. They were to tie themselves to mast like Ulysses (enough classical analogies in this post for you yet?), and ignore the flood of information, facts, and complaints about Söring inundating their inboxes. They were surely irritated. But at least they got the point that Söring was much more controversial and polarizing than they had been led to believe. I also made sure they knew that although Guise-Rübe seems to believe Söring is being unfairly hounded, Söring himself has filed complaints and even lawsuits against people who have publicly questioned his innocence story, so he can hardly claim to be an innocent martyr to the cause of free speech.

In any event, it seems to have sunk in that allowing Söring to recount his innocence claims in a German courtroom might expose the Society to unfavorable press coverage. So in the infamous interview (g) Guise-Rübe gave on December 9, 2022, to Die Welt, Guise-Rübe duly complained about being “bombarded” with emails which amounted to a “manhunt” against Söring — a victim of a miscarriage of the lawless, politicized, callous American “justice” system — who was now just trying to make an honest living. However, Guise-Rübe also underlined that Söring’s speech would be a “discussion between lawyers” focused “solely on American prisons”.

What did Söring say?

And that’s what it was! Söring confined himself to his experiences and views. I found much of what he said cogent and far more balanced than his Youtube videos. For instance, he mentioned that prison rape in the United States is a serious problem (as it is everywhere), which is true. However, he noted that George W. Bush had signed a law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, intended to combat the problem. And this time, instead of just mentioning that the perpetrators of prison rape were usually black, without any context, he cited an influential Human Rights Watch report from 2001 entitled “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons”, which documents this phenomenon: “Past studies have documented the prevalence of black on white sexual aggression in prison. These findings are further confirmed by Human Rights Watch's own research. Overall, our correspondence and interviews with white, black, and Hispanic inmates convince us that white inmates are disproportionately targeted for abuse.” I’ve never actually challenged Söring on this point, but I do think that this sort of thing needs to be addressed with objective data, not just personal impressions.

He also mentioned female guards allegedly prostituting themselves to prisoners for money, but did not actually say he had witnessed this happening. Instead, he cited a few instances of this conduct which happened in Rikers and in Baltimore, if I recall correctly. I can’t find any citations, but I am sure than in a nation of 340 million people it’s happened somewhere. Almost everything has! Söring was asked why black inmates are disproportionately represented in prison, and he referenced slavery and Jim Crow. That’s also fair dinkum, there are plenty of American left-wing authors and filmmakers like Michelle Alexander and Ava DuVernay, who make the same connection. I prefer to apply Occam’s Razor and argue that blacks are overrepresented in American prisons because they commit serious violent crimes at rates 8-13 times higher than other population groups (I just cited to a peer-reviewed academic study), which easily accounts for much of the disparity. But this is a legitimate debate.

Söring also modified his claim that he had been sent to solitary confinement for writing a book prison authorities didn’t like. In my emails, I pointed out that this was hardly plausible, since (1) American prison wardens aren’t permitted to punish inmates for what they say, so long as no law is broken and the security of the prison isn’t threatened; and (2) if they actually had sent Söring to solitary for his opinions, Söring would surely have known this was illegal and filed a formal complaint. So Söring changed his tune. He said the book in question was his essay on prison reform: “An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse”. He claimed he was sent to solitary after a positive review of this book was published in a Richmond, Virginia newspaper. He claimed that although it was the law that prisoners had to be given written notice of why they were being sent to solitary, he received none. He also claimed that he was released, also without explanation, after the reporter who had reviewed the book complained to the prison warden. Of course, he provided no proof of any of this.

An audience member pressed Söring about his blanket claim (which Guise-Rübe adopted nearly word-for-word), that there was no therapy or training or education in American prisons. But wait, the audience member asked, hadn’t Elizabeth Haysom learned to train guard dogs, translate into Braille, and do computer-aided design in prison? And hadn’t Söring himself had been allowed to publish numerous books and hold several prison jobs? Again, Söring walked back some of his more extreme statements. He noted that conditions are different in womens’ prisons, which they are. He also conceded that some of what he had said related to the 1990s, when prison overcrowding had stretched the system to its limits, and that conditions had improved in the meantime. He also clarified that most of the training programs were geared at prisoners who had a few years left on their sentences, which wasn’t his case.

Many parts of Söring’s speech were relevant and interesting. He decried “meat rock”, the unappetizing food loaf made of mechanically-separated chicken served in some American prisons. He noted that even though few American prisons were totally privatized (and that they weren’t necessarily the worst ones), the real problem was that services within public prisons were being privatized, and that the people who suffered from this were often the prisoners’ families who were forced to pay exorbitant rates for phone calls or transfer cash into prisoners’ accounts for overpriced commissary items. These are also legitimate complaints. He pointed out that for long stretches of his prison term, prisons were hopelessly understaffed, which is also on-point. As a result, gangs could operated more or less at will, and often monopolized areas of prison life such as access to telephones.

At the end of Söring’s speech, I had no questions for him. I had a few quibbles with some of his points, but they didn’t seem important enough to highlight. I tried to ask Guise-Rübe what his basis of knowledge was for his sweeping attacks on American criminal justice. Had he studied American criminal law? Read the most important casebooks and treatises? Spoken with American judges? Been in an American courtroom? He declined to answer, citing the narrow focus of the speech.

If Söring’s future speeches are like this one, I would encourage people interested in American prison life to go see him speak (assuming they have no moral objection to attending a speech by an unrepentant convicted murderer) — keeping in mind that this is only one person’s experience.

However, I strongly suspect that had the Söring Truth Squad not staged a timely intervention, the speech might well have turned out very differently. Fortunately we did, and it didn’t.

1. I’m especially glad I went because I got to make a day-trip to Hildesheim to see the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, which houses a small but extremely fine collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities, including the amazing statue of Hemiunu, the architect of the Giza pyramid complex.