Pete Earley And Ron Honberg Interviewed By Chuck Tarver (Parts 1-3)

A former reporter with The Washington Post, Pete Earley has been a journalist for more than thirty years and has written eight nonfiction books and three novels. His first book, Family of Spies, was about the John Walker spy ring and was made into a five hour miniseries for CBS television. His book, Circumstantial Evidence, helped free a wrongly accused black man from Alabama’s death row. While writing The Hot House, Mr. Earley spent a year inside a maximum security penitentiary as a reporter doing research.

Ron Honberg, J.D. serves as the national director for policy and legal affairs at NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. As director of NAMI’s policy team, Mr. Honberg oversees NAMI’s federal advocacy agenda and the new NAMI Law and Criminal Justice Action Center. He has expertise in a variety of legal and policy issues impacting on people with serious mental illnesses. In recent years, he has worked particularly on issues affecting people with mental illnesses involved with criminal justice systems, including jail diversion, correctional treatment, and community reentry. He was also one of the lead authors in NAMI’s 2006 "Grading the States" report.