c-span. so we will be archiving the video for this event so you'll have an opportunity to view it later if you would like at brookings.edu. we would welcome questions or comments that you have. we set up a twitter feed #cjreform so you can post any comments you have during the forum. so the united states has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. our prisons are overcrowded and there are racial disparities in convictions and sentencing. we need to reform our criminal justice system and develop alternatives to the existing policies. today we're going to be discussing criminal justice reform and how to approach that issue. to help us think about that subject, i'm pleased to welcome governor terry mcauliffe to brookings. many of you know him as a governor of the commonwealth and life-long entrepreneur. he has worked to create jobs and build a 21st century economy. he also is committed to bettering the lives of ordinary people. after the tragic violence at charlottesville, he spoke out forcefully against hatred and bigotry. and just over the weekend, he hosted a family day at a juvenile correction center which brought together inmates and family members. he's been a trailblazer in restoring civil voting rights for those released from prison. during his time in office, he has restored voting rights to thousands of ex-felons in virginia. please join me in welcoming governor mcauliffe to the brookings institution. [ applause ] >> thank you. good morning, everybody. it's great to be back at the brookings institution. appreciate you all coming out today. darryl, i thank you for that introduction. we have some great panelists here with us today. i appreciate all you're done. good morning. it's a privilege to be among those that share my passion for such an important issue that faces our country. it's fitting that we're gathered here today on the 54th anniversary of the march on washington. i first want to recognize the four people who have been very instrumental in working with me today. if they could stand up. my secretary of public safety is here. my deputy secretary. tracy is from the secretary of the commonwealth and my secretary of the commonwealth is coming, but i don't see her here yet. these folks have really done a job. virginia has led the nation on so many of these very important issues. i do want to thank the team that we've assembled. one month ago i may have given a very different speech. today i speak with you with a strength in resolve of what we've seen over the past several weeks. for many of us, we found it disgusting. deplorable. not acceptable in this great country. we saw hatred, bigotry, and deeply rooted racism on display in charlottesville and across the nation. the grief and shock at the senseless deaths of a 32-year-old woman who was out exercising her constitutional right and was killed by a terrorist driving a car. to the two state troopers in virginia whom we lost, both individuals very close to me personally, trooper bates had been part of my private security detail, my executive protection unit. lieutenant cohen was the pilot of the helicopter i've flown on for the past 3 1/2 years. heartbreaking to visit the families. to see karen and her two children. to see amanda bates and go visit her in her home and see had with her two children. husband not coming home. father not coming home. and to the family who lost their daughter, our thoughts and condolences to all of them. also, the swift and unequivocal outpouring of love and solidarity from the vast majority of our citizens. that unabashed and disgusting display that we saw of white supremacist and neo-nazis that followed afterwards was shocking to so many of us. as i said in charlottesville that saturday night, there is no place for nazis, for white supremacist or klansmen in virginia. you are not wanted. go home. your hatred is not in virginia. we don't want you in america. these people as they paraded down our streets pretending they were patriots. they are not patriots. they are cowards. patriots are virginians like barbara johns a 16-year-old woman in prince edward county, virginia, in the '50s. young african-american woman who took her class of 400 people and said we will not come back until we have equal school facilities. patriots are the young men and women that wear the cloth of our country to protect the liberties that we enjoy so much. charlottesville was a painful and vivid reminder that although we have made significant progress, we still have so much work to do. it's also forcing those whose privilege has allowed them to remain silent, to reconcile two different views of america. let us be clear. this isn't a debate about monuments. these folks weren't just protesting the name of preserving southern heritage. they want to maintain inequality in everything that they do from criminal justice to education to housing, and they want to elevate racism to the highest form. so far, unfortunately, the pendulum has swung in their direction. african-americans, particularly men, are incarcerated at an alarming rate that is disproportionate. african-american children are more likely to live and attend school in an area of concentrated poverty. its school, disciplined and suspended. they've been the target of legislatures around the country that pursued policies intended to rob them of their most basic dignity and civic duty, the right to vote. it's no secret that virginia has adopted and perpetuates some of those same policies and practices. we know that our history is far from perfect in virginia. but that is exactly why i believe that virginia should serve as an example to other states looking to take on reform. when i first became governor, it was clear that one place that badly needed attention and resources was our juvenile justice system. we were spending 40% of our funds on just 10% of the youth in our state correction system and nearly 80% were rearrested within three years. to house just one juvenile, it cost virginia $155,553 per year. and that does not include the education services which total $31,644 a year for a total of $187,000. and yet 80% were rearrested within three years. i was proud to be the first virginia governor to ever visit one of our juvenile facilities, and in fact i've now visited both. i had the opportunity to speak with a group of teenage boys at one of virginia's oversized maximum security adult style facilities. the group asked me why is it, governor, that the recidivism rate is so high. in fact, the longer they stayed incarcerated, the more likely they were to re-offend. the boys knew the system was working against them instead of working for them. so i decided to close down both of these outdated institutions and replace them with smaller community based centers that focus on therapy, training and educati education. today, i am proud to say that our population of incarcerated youth has been cut now by two-thirds from nearly 600 to just over 200 today. i've directed the millions in savings from this declining institutional population to be reinvested to support the new centers and create an effective statewide system of evidence based services and supports aimed at preventing incarceration in the first place. to date, i'm proud to say we have not found at the other state that's been able to replicate what we've been able to do in virginia. i'm proud that we have secured funding that we now offer free travel to families to visit their children. with the new regional options, 75% of our youth will now live within an hour's drive of their fami family. today, unfortunately, that number is only 25%. all of these steps will strike the right balance between public safety, cost effective as and rehabilitation. and they support our ultimate goal of giving these kids a shot at a better life when they leave. just yesterday, as darryl mentioned, i visited the juvenile correction center, one that i'm closing, just outside of richmond for a family day festival. it was a day for them to celebrate with their families the progress and success they've had and give them a couple hours to feel like a regular kid. i was amazed by their incredible talent. one group even performed a spot-on rendition of songs from "hamilton" and we heard stories from former incarcerated youth finding success in their new lives because of schools we've been able to provide them. i met a young man recently released from the facility where he had spent the last five years of his life. but while some people might see a troubled youth. i saw someone who has the respect and admiration of his peers and his mentors. he is an avid reader and a poet. while incourse rate arcerated h mentor and now with 24 college credits already under his belt, he walked out last month with a college acceptance letter in his hand. that's exceptional. [ applause ] because when i became governor, there were no college courses available to them. today, these youths are taking up to seven college courses including earning their high school deputy loiplomas or geds. this marks the first time in virginia history that such robust educational offerings have been made that speaks to our dedicated team at the department of juvenile justice and great ed koucators that wor with these youth. i believe that each of these young men and women deserve a chance to succeed when they leave the confines of juvenile detention. for our juvenile justice agency that work starts the moment that they enter our care. but for our education department, for example, that works starts much earlier. like many states, far too many of our virginia students spend time outside the classroom as a result of disciplinary action. we've heard of stories of students being handcuffed and arrested and the data clearly shows that african-american children and students with disabilities are disciplined at a much higher rate. according to the virginia department of education, african-american students make up 24% of the student population. and yet, they account for 53% of the school discipline. and while recent data show a decline in the overall number of suspensions and expulsions, these numbers, folks, are still far too high and continue to disproportionately impact certain students. unacceptable. there's no room in the commonwealth of virginia for excessive discriminatory treatment of our students. that's why i announced a statewide initiative. classrooms, not courtrooms. it's why i directed my children's cabinet to reduce the number of students who are referred to law enforcement experiencing unnecessary school suspensions and expulsions and suffering under disproportionate disciplinary practices. as a result, our agencies have been hard at work to support the local efforts to stop this practice. in june, we unveiled a new model memorandum of understanding for all of our local partners that all had to sign, and we now have a new rewritten virginia school law enforcement partnership guide. there are very strict guidelines now when someone can be disciplined. and i recently signed legislation directing the virginia board of education to establish new alternatives to short-term and long-term suspensions. together, these steps will contribute to a healthier and more productive learning environment for all of our children, and i hope it will prevent our young people from entering the juvenile justice system in the first place. these community focused efforts aren't just important for early intervention and prevention, they're also critical to adults who are reentering society after they have gone through a period of be incarceration. having a sense of community is critical to making this transition a successful one. we all know that. just as important, our adult re-entry population needs the skills and preparation to be successful in today's economy. in virginia we've taken steps to offer college credit course work and career and technical training in all of our facilities. this prepares them for a smooth transition into the new virginia economy that we've all worked so hard to build. we're proud to have one of highest numbers of geds among adults in correctional facilities and i'm proud over the last three years because of these efforts today virginia can boast the lowest recidivism rate of any state in the united states of america. [ applause ] these measures point to the success of the historic transformation under way in virginia, but we cannot stop there. as i alluded to earlier, insidious policies to hamper our citizens including the life-long label as a criminal in the name of public safety and justice. the burden of that label can be life altering after you've served your time. to learn more about that firsthand, i invited four virginians to have dinner with me last week at the governor's mansion. they were students, faith leaders and professionals. they came from every walk of life. each had their own unique pathway to success today. but the one common thread among them was their wish not to be defined by a mistake that they had made so many years earlier. that's because each of these virginians had been convicted of a crime and had all received a pardon from me. while most had long since moved on from their mistakes that they made, one of my guests hadn't even made a mistake in the first place. his name was robert paul davis. when he was 18 years old, he was wrongly convicted of a double murder after being forced to confess to a crime that he did not commit. on the day i signed his pardon, i ordered his immediate release from prison. he had spent 13 years of of his life behind bars. in fact, i've pardoned many virginians who never should have been charged in the first place. in may of 2015 i granted an absolute pardon to 58-year-old michael mcalister who had been wrongly convicted of attempted tape and abduction of a young mother in richmond in 1986. after more than 28 years in prison, he was finally exonerated as a true criminal. a serial rapist who bore an uncanny resemblance to michael came forward and confessed his role. and in march and i just pardoned a group of men called the norfolk four. these four men were wrongly convicted. after being cohearsed into falsely admitting guilt to the detectives on the case. today that police investigator is in prison for extortion and lying to the fbi about investigations. sadly, this decades long process has irrevokably changed the lives of these four men. i cannot give them back our lives. it's not just for people who are wrongly convicted. also at my dinner last week was a 64-year-old reverend, an army veteran who unfortunately had been hurt while he was in vietnam. severely became addicted to drugs. came home and at 23 years old was convicted of marijuana position. that 43-year-old felony conviction followed him until the day he received a pardon from me. and it always bothered him and prevented him from getting certain jobs. through my pardon power i made sure that they knew that the commonwealth of virginia would never, ever define these individuals as criminals. executive clemency is an important power and responsibility of any governor. i've actually taken it to the next step. i've also taken executive action to ban the criminal background check on state job applications. and i've fought to end the ridiculous policy where in virginia we would strip your driver's license for people who could not pay your court fines and fees. you've got court fines and fees so you take their driver's license so they can't drive to work to make money to pay the courts fines and fees. is that not ridiculous? i found this one so baffling. and i remind our legislators that, you know, there is no metro system in martinville -- in our rural communities the only way they can get to work is to drive. i'm proud this year i've seened this bills that makes it much more difficult for our courts to suspend driver's licenses, and to give them more options to get their driver's license back if suspended. in addition as governor i've also led the fight for the past several years to raise the minimum threshold level. i'm embarrassed to say this but today in virginia if you are convicted of stealing anything worth more than $200 or more, you are now a felon in virginia for life. if $200 seems low to you, that's because it is. virginia now ranks 50th out of 50 states. tied with new jersey. i'll leave that there. think about it. the $200 floor was first set-in 1980, 40 years ago. it means that a kid who just turned 18, steals a pair of air jordans or takes an iphone is now a felon in virginia. and that label will be with that individual for the rest of his or her life. in 2016 i called for raising the minimum felony threshold to $500. unfortunately, that never even made it out of committee. but if you knew anything about me, i was not deterred. so we went back at this year's ledge slasive session and proposed this modt increase again from $200 to $500. just to keep up with inflation that's where it would be. unfortunately, it was rejected again. just yesterday i signed a pardon for a 47-year-old man. his name was paul, who at 24 stole cash of more than $200 from a cash register at the department store he worked. he had a new baby, he had a broken down car and he had no money. today he owns a thriving plumbing business, but his felony conviction sometimes prevents him from doing business on any military bases. paul was wrong to steal that money, of course, but it doesn't mean that a mistake he made nearly 25 years ago should follow him forever. in virginia that felony conviction also permanently strips you of your civil and voting rights for life unless restored by a governor. that draconian process was the basis for the most contentious battle i've had as governor. when i came into office 40 states restored their rights. i setout to bring virginia in line with the rest of the country. in april 14, just three months after i took office, we made some changes. we shortened the request form from 14 pages to one, got rid of the notary public, got rid of the waiting process. we stream lined the process so everybody had the same eligibility requirements. we systematically removed these burdensome practices. for me that was not enough. so on april 22, 2016, i stood on the steps of the virginia state capitol which was designed in 1785 by thomas jefferson, and i issued an executive order to -- it was my proudest day as governor. we must ensure the rights of every citizen which must also include those among us who have made mistakes, serve their time, returned to our communities to make the most of their second chance. unfortunately, when they do get out, their criminal record follows them as they look for work and housing, which are the basic necessities to help you have a second chance. and in virginia it's a mistake that stays with them even when they try to partake in democracy by voting. and there's a reason why, folks. 115 years ago a felon disinfrnchisement, a poll tax, and a literacy test were written into virginia's constitution. it is ironic that in this great country with our imperfect history, we would punish those who made a bad decision for the rest of their lives. where would be as a country if we were onlied judged by mistakes. why then do we perpetually judge the mistakes of our citizens who maybe got lost along the way? you show me someone who's never made a mistake, and i'll show you a liar. these are the questions that i've asked myself as i've traveled around virginia and heard story after story from people who had been denied their basic rights for years, and some of them had never been allowed to vote in a single election. there's a reason why this happened. that 115 years ago a state senator by the name of glass put these into our constitution. stood exactly where i stood 115 years ago, and to quote him precisely, we're doing this, quote, to eliminate the darky from being a political force in virginia. think about that for a second, folks. so on that april day i was proud to restore the rights like folks of terry garrett. terry made mistakes, she served her time, she turned her life around. in addition to being a loving mother and grandmother is now aermented community leader and a sponsor to recovering addicts and former offenders. yet as you know terry remained a second class citizen. before april last year, this mother and grandmother did not have the right to vote even though she had turned her life around and had a second chance to help others in need, especially those facing addiction. it was a sad legacy for the commonwealth of virginia. this policy was among the many jim crow era intimidation tactics that had been used to block people of color from ever voting again. as governor i could not anticipate this grave injustice. but like with so many other paths of injustice, ours were not without obstacles. virginia state legislator sued me arguing i did not have the authority to do a blanket restoration. on july 22nd, the virginia supreme court ruled against us not based on tonsituticonstitut grounds but because they quote, no governor had ever done this before. i went to georgetown law school. i went full time day. while i was there i ran three companies. i wasn't in the building much, but even with my legal limited knowledge i knew i had the authority to do this. i think the statute of limitations is passed on how much time you're supposed to spend in law school. so think about this, terry got her rights back, over joyed and here the virginia supreme court, they ruled against us and she lost her right to vote again. i talked around that day. she was devastated. she couldn't talk. however, we weren't done fighting. on august 22, 2016, i stood in front of virginia's historic civil rights monument and initiated the new process of restoring rights. they had told me if the governor's going to do it he has to sign every single one of them individually. i said line them up. i'll sign every 1 of them individually if that's what it takes. so guess what happened, they didn't like that. once again i was sued. this time the virginia assembly of republicans sued me for contempt of court. i now for the honor as the first virginia governor to be sued for contempt of court. this time the virginia supreme court sided in my favor and said he's doing it right by doing it individually and terry garrett got her rights back again that day. and last year interest the first time in her life he walked into a voting booth to cast that ballot. with that vote she officially regained her place in society and showed us how powerful a second chance can be. terry fulfilled this hard fought civil duty with pride, something that nearly 100 million eligible americans did not exercise last november. earlier this year i invited terry to join me for my annual state of the commonwealth address to the virginia general assembly in our state capitol. terry stood in the balcony with tears streaming down her face as i honored her in a room with the very same people who actually thought her a second class citizen and actually sued me to keep it that way. these are our families, our friends, they are our neighbors. they send our children and grandchildren to our schools. they attend our churches, and they pay taxes. and now they can once again have a say in how their communities will grow. this is not just virginia problem. nearly 6 million americans with felonies around the country today cannot vote. think about that. 6 million americans. these are people just like terry who served their time and are ready for a second chance only to be shutout from their community, the community that they contribute to. when people return to their communities after being incarcerated, we want them and we need them to make the most of their second chance. progress is rarely easy, and i knew this would be the start of a hard fought battle but clearly one worth fight mchg as i look back on the past year and a half, i'm proud of the remarkable accomplishments we've achieved because we never gave up on that fight. we stood up to take action that will become a hallmark of significance in civil rights. and today because of this work i'm proud to stand here and say we've restored the rights of more than 100,000 virginians who now have a second chance. i now have the honor of restoring -- our work must continue until every person is assured their basic human and basic civil rights. no voter should ever be barred from fulfilling their civic duty. no person should ever fall through the cracks of broken criminal justice system. no child should be subjected to failing schools simply because of their family's economic status. our efforts to date have started a long over due conversation about how we view justice and how we can live up to our own american ideals. but we cannot continue that conversation without acknowledging how we got here in the first place. so, yes, let's teardown those monuments and put them in the museums, the battlefields and the cemetery where they truly belong. but let us also teardown the insidious policies that keep racism alive in our institutions. we must actually live the american legacy that we all seek to honor by ensuring that every single time in this country has an equal shot to succeed, that every single man and woman who's made a mistake has a chance to make it right and that every american has a place to call home. that's what we work hard to do in virginia under my watch. it's just the start of a transformation that could take generations to be fully realized. that's why i hope this successful work continues. it's an issue that cuts across economic status, race, origin, age and political party. incarceration and disenfranchisement has torn apart far too many families for far too long. and they've been used as legal tools to suppress the political and economic rise of of our african-american friends and neighbors. folks, it's pastime for criminal justice reform. it is time for a criminal justice revolution. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> i want to thank the governor for his thoughtful presentation. we appreciate him taking time out of his busy schedule. he had to leave because he has to run to his next event and was unable to stay longer. woo do have a panel of experts to continue our discussion. a political activist and organizer for campaign zebra which seeks to end police violence. joining him on the panel will be shaun huckwood an associate professor of law at georgetown law center. he's the author of law man, my story -- as far as i know he's the first bank robber to speak at the brookings institution. also on the panel is the vice president for national community alliances at each teach for america. she's also a co-founder of campaign zero. clint smith is a dock toral candidate of education. he's given ted talks on the danger of silence and how to raise a black son in america. so i will turn things over to start the conversation. >> thank you. and thank you everybody for coming. i'm excited to be here and moderate this incredible panel. brittany was appointed to the ferguson commission in ferguson, and she was one of the original people outlet there who researchers and studies the civil rights movement in this work and also done work in prisons. and shawn a scholar and former bank robber has written about how he changed the system with anything from sentencing to the speedy trial act. the first question posed is a reflection on the governor's speech. we have just as a country come off the heels of initial incident in charlottesville. and there's been a lot of conversation about that. i'd be interested to know what your take is especially as we talk about the climate of race and criminal just reform. and we'll start with you, brittany. >> well, thanks so much for that question and hosting this important conversation and having us. i've got two kind of main reflections on the speech. one is that i appreciate the recognition of charlottesville as an important moment. but we have to recognize that it's a moment in a long series of moments that's part of a system here, right? and that what we see were some of the most vile evidence of white supremacy, racism and kind of the indoctrination of hatred in this country. and yet we see that act out every single day in our criminal justice system, in schools, on the streets and things we're protesting against. so i think it's really important that we frame this conversation properly in a broader system of white supremacy that does actually impact all of us every single day because it is woven into the fabric of this very country from policing on down. the other thing the governor mentioned that i think is important for this conversation is about how much this starts in schools. and we often discuss the prison pipeline. that phrase has become very well-known, thankfully. but the insidious ways this acts out for young people, i think we don't talk about enough. it's not just about how you can enter the system as a child but how you internalize the behaviors. they're especially criminal if you have brown skin, they're especially criminal if you have -- as the governor mentioned black students being pushed into school suspension and other disciplinary measures at alarming rates. but it's also important to recognize training not just police officers buts teachers and principals doesn't actually cover all this stuff. so i hope that's something we can talk about today. >> thank you. >> i was heartened by a lot of what the guvhair had to say. i was thinking about the social science and for me as someone thinking about this, you often see a disconnect between what is politically expedient and politically palatable and what is actually proven to be effective. and what of the things that the governor mentioned that i don't want to flip under the radar is that they've improved and made it easier and stream lined processes by which families of the young people can visit them. that's one of the things to do that both the juvenile ties in the criminal context and family context is aligned. while i work predominantly with many who are serving life sentences, 95% of people who end up in prison or jail are eventually released. so it's important for us to think not simply how it operates on the front end but also recognizing so much of this work has to be bundendone on the bac. it potentially seems really silly but was i clearly implemented with an intention of making it difficult for people to navigate effectively once they got out. and it doesn't make any sense you wouldn't have access to a car to get to the job that you needed nord to provide for yourself to make sure you don't end up resitivating once again. i taught high school english for several years before i taught graduate school. so i taught 15, 16-year-olds. spending time in a prison completely disabuses you of any preconceived notions of one, what a prison is, and two, who the people in that prison are. we have so many caricatures of who we believe people in prison to be. and implicitly or explicitly arbtrally don't recognize the stance of which the person is born. for me being in prison was a daily reminder of the arbitrary nature of the zip code i was born into, the schools i had the opportunity to attend, it could have easily been me on the other side of the bar. i think that's really important. and it's important for any of us concerned with these issues to recognize this is not simply -- we're not doing necessarily favors to anyone. it is simply that we have to recognize that most of us in this room have been put in positions where the trajectory of our lives has been put on a different path than the social and economic lives of those typically put in prison are under. >> shawn. >> thanks for having me. they're not any different than you. that's the big idea. and i was encouraged by two things that the governor said. one, that criminal justice reform is vital. the system is an absolute mess. you cannot believe america is the land of liberty and home of the free on one hand and then on the other realize that we incarcerate more of our citizens than almost any other country on the planet. it's counter productive as well. a system where we send people to prison as a first response rather than a last resort, and a system that when we send people to prison the longer they serve, the less likely they are to get out and not commit new crimes doesn't really benefit anyone including taxpayers and crime victims. and that's the big irony. our prisons are so awful that people have a hard time recovering from prison. everyone makes change. i was 21 when i committed my crimes, and i've made pretty profound change now at the age of 42. we know people can change. why do we think prisoners can't? and if the answer is because they're serving more time in prison, that says more about the system than it does as them as individuals. so there's lots of room for improving. from sentencing to prison reform. it's not easy for prisoners to be incarcerated for a decade and then released with very little job training with respect for a miracle to happen. when i got out of prison in 2008, 2009 i had never been on the internet, never seen an ipad, an iphone. one of the problems i had with them was i had a reference letter from a really wonderful attorney, one of the best attorneys in the united states. i thought this reference letter could help me get a job. and they said please send us a pdf. didn't know what a pdf was. and you know what, no one else in the halfway house did either. that one little hiccup that we don't think about can be life changing for people getting out of prison. and the recidivism rates are as great in some places as 3 or 5%. there's definitely a need for reform, but the thing i was encouraged most by what the governor said is that this is not just simply good government and what system do we want because it's the most beneficial to the most of us. it's also about justice. it's justice to give people second chances. it's justice that once they serve their time we don't continue to punish that person for the rest of their lives. because if you follow the legal system long enough there are over 5,000 federal criminal rules and statutes that contain criminal penalties. there are thousands more in the states. chances are all of you have committed a federal felony. at some point in your life and you have no idea. so to think that we will judge a person for the rest of their life based on a bad day, a bad week or a bad year, as a matter of justice that's simply wrong. we want to help people when they get out become productive citizens. but in order to do that, we've got to make some serious changes. but i was glad to hear that the governor thinks this idea of second chances was not just good government but actually justice. >> thank you, shawn. this is the only panel i've been on where everybody's been a teacher at some point. when i reflect on the governor's speech i think about what as a felon as he and i talked about before. it is fascinating that the bar is pretty low in some states. i was just at the cook county jail, which is the largest single jail in the country. 28 square miles, used to be four plantations put together, which is wild thing. when you see a prisoner jail it completely changes the way you think about it. i want to know how you got here, and then shawn we'll go to you about what are the parts of the criminal justice space. and then brittany what are the parts that we don't think about enough. they've already heard in the news at least like we should decarcerate or bail reform are kind of hot topics today. but how do we round those out in the conversation. >> as the governor alluded to, there's cleary a long history that stems from slavery, the civil war and reconstruction and the onslaught of jim crow shaping what our criminal justice system looks like. and that's something we all intuitively understand and carry with us. but often what we don't do, i mentioned the sort of dissonance around what is politically palatable and what is actually really going to make a huge difference. and wounf the things we often talk about is the sort of standard discourse around incarceration centers around nonviolent offenders. the discourse that the governor talked about, obama talked about and a lot of politicians that we have drug offenders locked up for selling marijuana on the street corner or doing drugs that didn't represent a threat to anybody. and that is true, but the way we talk about it suggests that we simply take away all the nonviolent drug offenders out of prison that incarceration will go away, and that's simply not the case. we have found a different conversation about this sort of very blurry line of what co constitutes a violent and nonviolent crime. a lot of the men who i work with who are serving life sentences are in there for what we wouldn't think as being ostensive. like owning a gun, in many states that constitutes a crime if you're using the gun or not. so part of the difficult conversation we have to have is what beyond nonviolent criminal offenses led us to this moment. i think we're starting to talk about prosecuting more and more often. but this sort of methodology, 90% ends in plea bargain. you had this discretion that was taken away from judges and moved to prosecutors. and ostensively and theoretically that would be a good thing because prosecutors are democratically elected and thus intuitively believe there is more transparency. the reality of the role is the same capacity doesn't exist in the same elect capacity. so we don't know what governors are doing in the same political capacity as others are doing and the nature like that. so part of what weave to recognize is prosecutors have a wide range of discretionary power that is often used to put people away for much longer than they need to be. and the important statistic is by 2030, a third of our prisoners will be over the age of 35 years old. it's not simply that we are putting people in prison long after social science demonstrates they are less and less likely to commit a crime. all the data suggests that after a certain age, around 35, the likelihood of you committing crimes goes down in like a really dramatic manner. and when we're not addressing that you have all the health care costs that are going to be associated with the aging population. you have the cost of staffing and building more prisons. so all of that's to say the reason we got here -- what i want people to take away it's not simply because of nonviolent drug offenses, mixing the war on drugs but because we move from a system in which the discretion existed mostly in the hands of judges and juries and moved almost singularly to prosecutors in a way that often exists in the dark that we can't see. >> thank you. shawn. >> the first would be police. we have lots of issues with policing that has kind of come in ferguson and baltimore and all these other cities. so we've got to reexamine that and what clint just said that we have way to mean criminal laws in this country. it used to we criminal law used to represent something that all of society agreed is wrong. but when you have 7 or 8,000 things that's considered wrong criminal-wise, what it does is when you have something illegal, you give all the power to prosecutors. and state legislators gives these very broadly. the law is whatever the assistant u.s. attorney or the state prosecutor says. and then you have the criminal process area. which i would say the biggest need there is represent of indige indigent defendants. we have miranda and searchers and seizures and a right to a jury trial. if you have a lawyer and one that's not a good lawyer that can weaponinize those rights and apply them to the criminal justice system none of those really matter when you have a criminal defender who has 300 cases per year. and then you move to the next which is sentencing reform. on the whole the united states incarcerates people for far greater and far longer than most countries. and that is definitely an issue. often when i talk about prison reform the first thing i tell people is you want to reform prisons outcomes of people coming out of prison, don't give them a long sentence to begin with. it's very difficult for a prisoner to get up during the day and seize the day and improve themselves for release when you're facing a 20-year sentence. it's even harder if you're 20 years old at the same time. i remember when i looking at the face of a young beat incarcerated for 30 years. i remember thinking i'm going to be in my 30s. that's so old. but that's the mind-set of younger people when the light at the end of the tunnel is so far off. we obviously also have to reform our prisons. for someone coming out of prison, that's like the gold standard. a new warden came in and decided i could come out and get more money if i change the program. so he took the welding program out and started a business management associate degree. because everyone knows people want to hire felons to manage their business when they get out. and so we need to reform prison. and then the last piece is the reentry. there was nothing that the prison i was at prepared me for reentry despite the fact i'd done almost 11 years. simple things like getting a driver's license. why aren't we explaining to people coming out of prison how to do that? when i got to-way house i was told i can't leave until i get a job, and i can't get a job until i get a bank account. ask when i went to get a bank account, the credit agencies had listed me as deceased. and so it took me weeks because i had to hire lawyers so i could get that fixed. and we don't think about these little hurdles, but there's all sorts of small hurdles out there that can trip people out. and if you see a door closed every time you ohm it, eventually people will go back to what they did before. and that's why our recidivism rate is so high. whether it's at a church or a non-profit, something, because when you have community around you you don't want to commit new crimes because you don't want to let those people down. but our current system puts them in aceilation so it's very hard for them to continue ties to the outside world while they're incarcerated. the same for adults that have kids. why don't we want the adults to be able to see their kids more often while they're incarcerated? we just don't do a very good job of preparing any of these things. and that's why our outcomes are so bad. as you can see it's pretty daunting because we need reform basically from start to finish. >> thank you, shawn. >> i think what's so important about shawn's point is that the recognition there's multiple systems composed of this outcome. it's not just about prisons. it's not just about police. it's not just about prosecutors and defenders. it's about all of this. but to make it more daunting, i would add more to our list, which would bring me back to my original point. in my view i kind of see four steps. so there are a lot of children who are essentially born into this country. now, there are children who are literally born into this. there are 12,000 pregnant women in prison in this country. and the mothers are actually shackled while they're given birth, which if you imagine not being able to move your body during one of the most painful experiences of your life. and it makes it much harder for the doctors to deliver a healthy baby. so you've got children literally born into this and also born into communities completely destroyed by massive incarceration, the war on drugs. and you're born into this idea and you start to internalize the people that look like you, the people who live in your neighborhoods are somehow inherently more criminal than the people you see on tv. i went to one of the schools where someone else was in charge but woun of my staff members was there to observe a teacher. and she called me and said i need you to come down here immediately, and i came down to find a 7-year-old handcuffed to a chair. i don't know what a 7-year-old could possibly have done that bad to be handcuffed to a chair. and the story i was told certainly did not meet the bar for that kind of restriction. but we have to recognize the culture of education in this country is one of compliance and not intitle. so it's all about controlling your body and controlling how much you move, then, yeah, it would make sense people handcuffing a 4-year-old to a chair. i talked to a friend of mine yesterday who's sister pulled her son out of the school three years into the school year because the kids wore orange uniforms and her son kept coming home saying i can't sit for the way they want me to sit for 45 minutes, mommy. so, again, this restriction is where we as adults come in thinking -- and yet it's deeply problematic for children. then i come into a institution that tells me the same thing, that gives me the same message. i'm continually internalizing this idea. the governor talked about a criminal justice revolution. well, our young people are discouraged from revolution from the very beginning. so here's what's interesting and amanda ripply has done some really good reporting on this. there are 22 states that have laws on what's called disturbance in schools. and this is what i talk about criminalizing child behavior. because i was at a multiple intelligence private school, my disturbances were seen as creative or something to talk to my mother about during parent/teacher conference and not as criminal. a lot of these videos we've seen gone viral the things that happens in schools where we see officers throwing kids and kids getting shackled and things like that, the things happening behind the scene often the young person who put out the video is admonished for disturbance. they're seeing criminal charges brought against them especially for telling the truth. and if you're discouraged from telling the truth as early as elementary school -- i get worried when i see what's happening around the office of civil rights, how many complaints have been dismissed outright just in the last few weeks. if there's no place to take these things, if there's no one who's actually going to do something about this, then we end up in the exact same system, shawn, that you just described. we created a culture for too many of our young people that give them the idea that this is normal, that this is the way that things have to be. the governor talked about the danger of convention and how we can just get caught up in the cycle because we've always done it this way. and for so long we've always done education this way. and it's extremely dangerous to students, and we're not going to get that revolution we need until we start protecting them and empowering them. >> i actually saw some of that in prison. i tell this story a lot. there's a row of cells, african-american men. they call themselves neighbors. neighbors because they were right next to each other but also neighbors because the feds had come into their neighborhood in milwaukee and basically got them all on this crack conspiracy and gave them 20 year sentences. when i got to the prison they were about halfway through their sentence, and when i was getting ready to come home, so were they. the problem was the last few years, their sons started coming to prison because you take all the dads out of the neighborhoods and what do you expect to happen? so there's always this cycle of people coming in and out, in and out of prison. and we've got to do something to break it because it just devastates families, devastates communities. >> and the reality to shawn's point, milwaukee, is still the most segregated city in the united states. so you can't disentangle the realities of discrimination and the decades and decades of public policy and social amgen earring so it made it that certain communities were prioritized and others were deprioritized upon which generational health and wealth are founded upon. from the trajectory that put someone on a trajectory to end up in prison. so it's important we're thinking this on the front end while people are in prison and on the back end. we talk about these issues where people will look at teachers ibschools and they're saying the teachers are or are not doing this. in prison we call them a trap certain times. we say this is what's happening in prison and this is the recidivism rate. but we're talking talking about the thing that happen before someone even ends up in prison. and it's important we're having these conversations alongside one another rather than separately. >> so we talk what the problem is things and bad. and it's like what do we actually do. still much of the conversation is about the nonviolent population, but we could free all of them and we could still have a problem in a way that people don't talk about. you just being around the crime -- you asked the public is what is a felon where people killed 35 people and blew up a super market can and blew a up a bidding. it's like the most hine s version of what is a crime. it struck me how in the media and in publicly like a ten-year sentence on law and order it's like ten years, and then 20 years, of course i've got 20 years, it's a long time. and the things that's happening during those years, i'm struck by that. people who we don't talk about in public, there are cities across the country and states that don't have public defender systems at all. and we just don't talk about that. so it's just these random private attorneys giving people advice but not in a coordinated way. and if we think about what are we doing on the front end with our kids. and then in things like baltimore where 30% of the adults cannot functionally read. and what does it mean to create opportunity for people when they can't read, right? and if you literally have a captive audience, like no pun intended, they're not going anywhere. for every adult offend, you could do it. but the people that staff most of our prisons and jails, they are not educators normally. they're like mental health professionals, and that's important. but how do we actually have a real conversation where we think about prisons and jails. and jails are before you've been convicted of anything and prisons are after you've been convicted. what are the biggest levers, where should the energy be now? if people ask you what can i do, what's sort of your response to them? >> i think about that question a lot because time is infinite, and i want to do work where i can make an impact. and i can't tell you i feel like a make an impact every time i come back from capitol hill. i come back often thinking is this worth my time. >> i think a lot of people say that. >> yeah, we have had a lot more talk and discussions about criminal justice reform in the last five years than we have since i've been alive. but we also -- i think one thing i think we forget is we have not convinced everybody. and there are people that think my family was included until i got locked up. but the people who go to priens are the evil ones, the really bad ones. and you get to prison and my family would come visit me and they realize on visit oh, these are just normal people for whatever reason made bad mistakes. so i don't think we've convinced people yet, most people in america that we need to change. and i think that's one area we need to do. and we need to get more people who have been to prison out and become leaders in that, out in thetuant. out and tell people i committed a violent crime but i'm not a violent person. turns out the social science which you talked about is the change to me. you don't see any of that filter into our criminal justice practices. we know that people will age out of crime in their 30s and 40s yet we tend to lock up people for 20, 30 years at a pop. even when they aren't actually a danger -- no longer a danger to society. and so i think we need to educate average americans about what the criminal justice system is like. and, you know, as far as places to do that, there's lots of nonprofits and advocacy groups. i'm involved with families against mandatory minimums. i've also done work from the aclu national prison project to prison fellowship, which is the largest prison ministry in the world. so there are lots of places to fit in. but we've got to convince americans first of the problem. and then what we need is one state. one state to jump in and say we're going to redo everything. we're not going to lock up -- yeah, we're not going to lock up everyone. we're going to use prison as a last resort. and we're going to change how we treat prisontheres. and i think if we have one state that does that and has success, that will be the big difference maker. because right now we're just making progress at the margins and what of the population of 2.2 million people, we need big changes. we need big changes. so we've got to convince one jurisdiction to make the change. and i think if one does, the outcomes will be so much better that other states if for nothing else, they'll see the money that we expend, and that it could be spent better place than locking people up for decades. >> we'll be taking questions from the crowd, so think about your questions. sometimes locking people up is sometimes an easy solution for policy makers and not actually think about how do we deal with things on the front end. >> i feel like when i have my kids out, i think it's easy when they mess up to put them in a room. it's actually much more difficult to sit down with them and address the root problem of the behavior. that's exactly what we do with the criminal justice system. and that's exactly why it doesn't work. >> i'm thinking about a couple of things. one, just really want to harken back on part of what we have to do is really push ourselves away from the idea that nonviolent drug offenders, releasing them will often stop incarceration. if we release every nonviolent drug offender from every prison, there would still be 1.7 million people in our jails and prisons. so we move from a fourth of the world's prison population to a fifth of the world's prison population. and i want to be clear those people should not be in prison -- i'm not saying we shouldn't focus on that. but oftentimes we're biopically focusing on that as the expense of the conversation. i give the governor a lot of credit, but it's also important to know he didn't flame folks who were violent offenders because it's a lot more politically difficult to navigate that terrain because of the sort of connotations associated with the idea how you mentioned when people think of felonies. oh, everybody's a murderer or a rapist. and the difficult thing to do is we have to consider what does it mean -- for example, one of the men that i worked with he robbed a mcdonald's when he was 17, shot the cashier. and now he is currently 62 years old. and so the question is should this person who took someone's life when he was 17 years old, clearly that is not okay, clearly there should be some sort of justice for that -- the question is should that person spend the rest of their life in prison with no opportunity to get out, which is the context he finds himself in, serving life without the possibility of parole. when i first in prison i didn't ask any questions about why the people i was working with were in there. my second year teaching in prison i knew what everybody in the room had done. and it's not to say that i'm spending time reading with men who are murderers, and we have to -- but when i working didn' murders. they're not. people cannot be defined by the worst thing they have ever done. especially when they did that thing as a child. should someone be punished throughout the for the rest of their lives for something they did as a child. that's a really important thing to address. one other point i want to make, a lot of people are watching online or c-span or business owners, or work with organizations, or know people who are business owners and work with organizations and often times people are like what i can i do? it's really important to act for the ways that small otherwise not decisions should continue to shape and perpetuate the difficulties that formally incarcerated folks have getting jobs. even if you are the owner of a toy store and somebody comes into for an interview or turns in an application and you see they were convicted of a felony, you have been trained with messages throughout your entire life to suggest that is something you should swipe aside. for you it might be that's just good business, i'm protecting my business, or my family, or my coworkers. i think those are the moments where it's really important to say to kind of step back and sort of check yourself and ask this decision that i'm making -- am i making a wholistic decision based on everything i know about this person and the possibilities they offer as a future employee of my business? or am i making this decision in a way that's predicated upon this person being formally incarcerated and allowing biases that are deeply imbedded within all of us to shape the sort of business decisions i'm making. these are small decisions that many people make that end up contributing to rates and making it more difficult tr formally incarcerated folks to have jobs. >> so three things. i like numbers. you teach you learn how to package these things. the first is properly treat. so as the resident come on this and a will the of criminal justice panels, it is really important to talk about women who are incarcerated. because it often goes undiscussed. 71% of women who are incarcerated have experienced a traumatic event. what is a traumatic event? they were either victims of or exposed to domestic violence. they suffered from substance abuse or they and or they have experienced or suffered from some kind of mental illness that usually has been untreated or under treated. this is what i mean when i'm talking about all the systems being comply sit. when we don't properly treat women they end up in these circumstances. what we know to be true -- this isn't from a spun study. this is directly from department of justice statistics. what we know is that white women are much likely to receive treatment kwh they are discovered to have these things and women of color are much more likely to be criminalized. period end of story. that's like a well yeah, of course. but i think a lot of people are surprised by just the sheer volume of incourse rated women who this probably was preventable. had things been treated correctly on the front end. i think that's one of the really big thijs. the second is properly train folks. i was on the president obama's policing task force. i have to be clear about which president. president obama's policing task force. we talked about training. if we were going to live in a world with police, we need to be having a broader kfgs about whether or not policing as it is now is what we need continue doing. if we'll live in a world with this system our folks have to be trained properly. myself, brian was on the task force. we made sure that when we were talking about training we weren't just talking about cops and aumps officers. we were talk abouts teachers, administrators, resource officers and parents who don't really understand what discipline looks like in a school and need to understand what's right in what should be happening for my child and what's actually improper. i'm so used to it i don't question it. if the kind of training those folks are receiving is not culturely responsive. then we're going to continue to see the same problems. especially when we think about how much kids of color and girls or color are adultfied very early. we starlet to see them as more responsible at ages as young as five. so sud rnly the things they do that are child like for everyone else, are somehow much more punishable for those kids. the last thing we have to do -- and i want to bring it back to shon's point is properly humanize foelks. it's easy to lock people away for 20 years their entire life if you don't see them as human. that's the thing we really have to grapple with. your family didn't discover until they came to visit you. i have had family members incarcerated. it puts a very different spin on things when you have to recognize i still love you, i still see you as human, i see you as valuable. irrespective of this thing you did. i'm also fighting a lot of folks who don't see you that way. if we don't start looking as at folks who are in these circumstances as fully human and capable, we're not going to get anywhere. >> one of the things that contributes to human saik is proximity. to the extent to which people can come and exist in proximity to those incarcerated or formally incarcerated does a lot to recalibrate the way you understand these institutions and the people who are part of the institutions and there are a million of organizations all you have to do is hop on google that do work around reentry here in dc and the country. around reentry around work with formally incarcerated folks. even a lot of these prisons and jails also have -- attempting to build some more than others robust volunteer programs. you'd be surprised and shocked how if you send an e-mail and show up to a prison and say i am yoga instructor or teach poetry, or i i'm a cook and want to teach a culinary -- they are desperate to give so many words. especially becoming more and more thoughtful ability the issues are desperate to provide any sort of programming they can. especially free programming. to the people in their prisons and so if you have some time and your thinking abtd what i can do how can i contribute, even if you can only go once a year. it really makes a difference for you and your ability to advocate on behalf of the incarcerated community. if you are in proximity. >> in a respectful way. you are offering a service. and not just being a cultural tourist observing people in their worst moments. >> i go into a lot of prisons and a take a lot of people into prison. what they always say is this is changed. not the prisoners but them. when they come into prison. and for prisoners, having volunteers come in kinds of keeps you at the timeered to the real world and not prison. which is very important for rehabilitation purposes. the ones who do best is think about the day i'm coming home, not what's going on here today in the prison. he's rights. you can all go volunteer at any prison. and i would tell you that once you do, you'll probably want to go back more and more. and you'll probably want to invite other people. that's what we really need. we need like armies of volunteers to go in. and in if the government won't provide job taning on how to get a driver's license. we should. i think most of the solutions are going to come from not necessarily from government, but businesses and individuals who -- my wife is sitting up here. she drove me around to like 30 job interviews. 2008 the height of recession. nobody was finding work. i'm the guy that just got out of federal prison. and she was a resource to me that other people didn't have. and everybody thinks that i'm a pick yourself up by the boot straps story. but i'm the opposite of that. i had resources and people that poured grace into my life. that's the difference between me and the person that went back to prison. i like to tell you it's different, but it's not. it's really that simple. >> one of the things we don't talk about a lot, you shon talked about it. is the power the wardens have. you'd be shocked from prison to prison or jail to jail the people that run the prisons have a lot of -- it's not a law it wasn't the governor decree. it was the warden was really religious. so like he did all this stuff. he found god said he should do it. that's interesting. it worked out in the prison favors in most cases. some things shouldn't be at the discretion of like the random sort of warden who is there. so let's be able to take questions. there's a microphone or somebody has a microphone. right here. we'll go to him. >> my name is elliot i want to thank the panel for a good conversation. i have two questions. first i'd like to ask if anyone saw the piece on 60 minutes last night on the reforms in the cook county prison in illinois? >> i was on a plane. >> i'd like to ask about the statement that was on the final that milwaukee is the most segregated community in the united states. i was married in milwaukee in 1972, that was sometime ago. but i'd like to hear if there's anymore evidence on that point. >> thank you. there's great book by a soesologist that won the pull itser. evicted. that's part of his research out lines the ways in which communities segregation and neighborhood segregation contributes to really high homelessness rates and eviction rates that affect people of color and effect women of color. and he often talk abouts how mass incarceration is the system that deeply impacts black men and eviction is this phenomenon that deeply impacts black women. but the research is pretty clear. i think if you google it. it came to the fore after the police violence that was in milwaukee two years or so ago. and there were a lot of articles in the times and different things about it. part of the -- this is not a panel on housing. but it's a essential to understand the ways in which the history of red lining and housing segregation and zoning policies both in historical and contemporary sense shape the dynamics of what different communities look like. and milwaukee is a case study in the way that a community has been constructed through systems of red lining, through systems of certain people being afforded loans to buy houses in certain communities. where certain real estate companies refusing to give to the sell houses to immigrants or black people or wroun brown people in certain communities. inevitably the more segregated and isolated resources become. the more desperate the circumstances of the people within those communities. and thus the rational decisions that people make to are in response to like deeply ir rational and sort of insidious circumstances. >> we're going back here. saw him back here. i'm going to the cook county jail tomorrow to meet with sheriff dart. i know they did just have the 60 minute special. they're doing a lot of interesting things in cook county. in september there's a judge order that the judge down there. will effectively end money bail in most situations or it should is people's hope. that will be interesting. cook county jail is experiencing a decrease in the number of arrestees. it went from 18,000 to 10,000. after mcdonald got killed the arrest rate in chicago has dropped. which is good for for the people not being arrested right now. cook county is a place to look at for a model in some ways. i saw a hand back there. that was you, right? your hand wasn't up. we'll go to you there. in the back. all the way in the back. >> thank you. thank you for this awesome event. i think that one of the things we have to look at is the mind set that prevails. we're guilty until we're proven innocent. not the other way around. and i share the frustration of going to capitol hill far too much times and coming back with nothing. in the specific case i want to talk about is broader. i don't know how you all think we can avoid having ever another kalif broader situation. his only crime was he happened to be a poor black teenager who couldn't raise bail. in the end, he had done nothing wrong. so if you can speak to that for a minute that would be appreciated. >> i literally just wrote down his name. i didn't want it to go unspoken. i had the unique opportunity to honor him. so if you are not familiar with his story. spike tv did a three or four part document on him. which is quite frankly required viewing if you are interested in this topic. a young man falsely accused o of stealing a backpack. was jailed at reichers island for a long time. awaiting trial. so not even having been convicted of anything. suffered an immense amount of abuses. had a very difficult time with reentry. and took his life. and so we find -- i find his story to be not just a particularly tragic example, but one of the greatest heros of this movement. without his willingness to tell his story when efs he was alive, this would have gone undiscussed. i thank you for bringing him up. there are some quick solutions like closing places like rikers ta are necessary. and recognizing them in every single state and closing those. you speak to something more insidious. we spend a lot of time on racial bias issues, on discipline, properly disciplining police on the ways in which police unions protect people from being disciplined and keep folks on the force that shouldn't be on the force. and allow for many broaders to exist rarnd this country. it's got to be a multi-layer approach in that way. that takes on policing, the actual criminal justice system, so defense and prosecutors. and the takes on the nature of jails especially juvenile detention facilities. because as you are still developing as a young person as broader was, the kinds of futile mentality that exists in detention centers for a means of survival often against corrupt guards. which was true in his case. can like completely destroy the rest of your life. and so e we find his case was so tragic. unfortunately there are a lot of broaders in the country. i believe the answer is we have to come from every angle. >> i think what the story also demonstrated second-degree that there's far too low a bar. maybe shon can speak about this. far too low bar for people becoming correctional officers. and the there's a great piece that was in mother jones last year by sean bower. he went under cover as a correctional officer and talk abouts how easy it was. he's like a before he went under cover he was a very well known reporter. and he went under cover and he talked about how easy it was for other people that he worked with who probably shouldn't have been in the positions of power and authority they were. that's inherent to being in incarcerated space. who simply slid under the radar, or the ways in which once they were in there there was like very little accountability in terms of the way they operated and the way they bestoued they authority. and enacted that upon the prison population. so i think that's also something to consider is there's an inherent power bestowed upon those who are correctional officers in prisons and jails throughout the current ri. and we don't often talk about the what it takes or what it doesn't take necessarily to get into that position. if the people are qualified to be in positions where you look at the spike tv document and you see the footage of how the officers were treating broader. and he's like again as a micro. who are we allowing to have in the prisons and how much power and accountability is afforded to the individuals. >> just to be clear. for folks who don't know his story well. the correctional officers in reichers essentially started this thing called the program. which was the gang system in the jail. such they could smuggle in things they wanted to, make the money. but it wasn't the kids that set this up. it was the correction officers. who got jumped. if the kids didn't cooperate. the correctional officers came up with that. >> money bail. people talk about bail reform and it becomes this theoretical thing we can never do. places have already done it. it's a real thing. it can happen. we can close reichers. of the interesting thing is it's essentially the only jail in new york city. which is why everybody goes there. closing it -- i was just with the people leading the close campaign. closing it will essentially require the creation of a jail in every burro. it's been interesting one of the hard things about this work -- sometimes we find ourselves with unlikely foes. you think about the correction officers. a lot of cities the officers are people of color, women, like low wage workers. people are actually fighting against closing the prison because if they close the prison then they're out of a job. or people who want rickers to close but don't want a jail near them. we have to figure out how to make it work. >> i'm a 35 year veteran of the criminal justice system. criminal defense lawyer 20 years a trial judge. in arizona of all places not just arizona, but mar koe pa county. sheriff joe's county. i had to pleasure of riding on an elevator with him going to the lunch. he was on the back and he said that there's one of those liberal judges that just got on. and i said well if there are anymore fashs on board please push the lobby button for me. we'll go to lunch and talk about it. the problem is so daunting, and the task set for reformers is so vast, and difficult, maybe a simpler solution would be to declare the system bankrupt, put it into a bankruptcy type proceeding. chapter 11 maybe reorganization. and charge the policy makers with the task of on a slate a clean board, white board black board whatever, come up with a new system. what would it look like. where would it start, where would it end and everything in between. but the problem is, in my view the state lawmakers and most federal lawmakers are not going to make those changes and decisions. follow the money. until we take big money out of state and federal elections, and publicly finance those elections, i think that will give you a different -- not necessarily a better legislator but a different kind of legislator more interested in pursuing the public interest. d.c. has a chance to adopt fair election law. includes a public funding. and i would hope that you contact your council person to express your and the mayors office, she's on the fence about this. and try it. it's a voluntary system. it has to be now. give it a try. you'd be surprised how different kinds of lawmakers you get into making policy. so bankruptcy maybe a solution. chapter 11 reorganization might be a model to take. >> we'll get them to respond. i have time messed up. we can get your question. >> bankruptcy. are we imagining big enough in terms of how we dismantle system. >> i was thinking about that. the thing we haven't said is what is a world without jail. what does it look like if you make a mistake there's a different path way towards the future. so i don't necessarily -- there were lots of ideas in there that we should examine. >> i just want to say part of what you were eluding to purposefully or not purposefully is a certain conception of prison abolition. that's a conversation that is not often necessarily at this center of this discourse. i this it's important. i understand it generally two ways to understand prison abolition. one is there should be no prisons or jails at all. these institutions shouldn't exist. and one is a more sort of con accept shl recalibration of what prisons and jails are. is that prisons and jails as they currently exist and operate in the capacity they do should not exist. which is similar to what i heard you saying. one thing i just, we don't have enough time to litigate whether prison abolition is a helpful or legitimate means of pursuing criminal justice revolution, but i think it should be at some point. i do want to say that back in 1850, if you were a slave abolitionist, people would look at you like you were crazy. and frederick douglas is universally celebrated now. man, he was he knew exactly -- he was doing such good work. >> glad he's getting recognition. >> recognized more and more. but -- if you go back and read the literature at that time. people thought abolitionist were crazy individuals. this is ridiculous, how could you say we need to let the slaves go. that's not responsible. it's worth considering -- i'm not -- i want to be cheer i'm not making slavery and incarceration analogies. it's worth considering how we look back at individuals who are advocating for what we what at that time is seen as radically irresponsible. public policy initiatives. we look back and say those folks were ahead of their time. sometimes people who are prison abolitionists are not even invited to the room ar part of the conversation because people look at them and say they're not serious about this. or this is a ridiculous thing. it's just worth considering and sort of doing an understanding of the historical context and precedence that exists around questions of abolition and questions of sort of creating a blank slate. because these things have been done before. i want to make sure certain people are not left out of the conversation simply because we think the ideas are not politically feasible. >> shon? >> i think the big opportunity for reform behavioral science and technology. there are so many ways to handle criminal justice. rather than jail and prison. and there's so many cheaper ways. and so many more effective ways. that we really need to reevaluate everything. because the prison systems we have now we know the out comes are horrible. anywhere from 66 to 75% within five years are going to go back. and there's a reason for that. you treat someone like an animal and tell them they are worthless and tell them they are going to reoffend, the time they're arrested through the incarceration. and then the probation officer will even oftentimes act is if it's only a matter of time before you're going back. you get that long enough, you start to believe it. and so we need to reevaluate kind of from the beginning to the very end. because what we're currently doing is not working. >> your question? >> thank you. it's a short comment actually. thank you very much. everybody and shon you stole my point. i am an urban planner and but also technology 20 something years in this country. i think that technology can play a huge role. to support not only behavioral science but newer science and all these studies and if you can write a couple of al gorism. to look into the incarcerated population, one, but also in the incarcerators. because there's a dynamic relationship between the two of them. and third, into trying to find the hidden resources of this population. so you probably discover that 1.7 million would be a lot less after looking into using technology to get insight into this. you can also discover my wife looks -- watches on tv religiously the america got talent. why not incarcerated america has talent. this would be huge resources there. that could be put to work. thank you. >> there are interesting like piper who wrote orange is the new black. she helps make sure there are talks in prison. which is like programming you don't often see. but it is happening across the country. you want to say something? >> to your point about the talent. i was amazed at the waste of talent in prison. there were some people that, you know, had circumstances been differently or had they got mental health treatment or drug and alcohol treatment, they wouldn't be sitting in prison today. they would be out artists, lawyers, doctor, these are people that are no different than you. they just got caught making mistakes. many of them when they were young. and i get that a lot. i have had federal judges, federal prosecutors, police, fbi agents, they always come up to me because they want to say you know what shon, if i got caught for some of the things i did when i was in my 20s. i wouldn't be here either. we as a society seem to be awfully judgmental. and we should be upset about crime. but, it doesn't do us any good to just be upset and angry and punish people and be mad at people and throw them away for decades at a time. when most of us have done things we regret. from our 20s. >> quickly i want to say something about shon's point. i think he's abts luteally right. there's time i spent working in prison you encounter so many people who are incredibly talented sp smart. you work with folks who can know the entire cannon of western philosophy and drop quotes. like when -- i was talking about ice cream and you brought up this. but and it is important for us to be careful not to make that the lipness test for whether or not someone deserves to be in prison or not. there are brilliant, talented people in prison. and this are people who struggle with literacy and have mental learning disabilities and people who are not quoting western cannon. and i think it is -- we have to both hold both of those things at once and recognize both are brilliant people and people who wouldn't contribute in that sort of way to the community, but we have to recognize they are still value in the one's value is not predicated or dependent upon whether or not they were the next picasso or would have been a great wall street banker. i think i want to name it's important to hold both of those at once. >> i've been interested in decision theory and i see a lot of what you're saying has a lot of implications for a very broad discussion. but specifically to your comment about behavioral sciences and technology as a means of addressing some of the issues you've raised, i have been attending a series on some of the draw backs of the uses of technology in identifying cull pa bi pa. as well as the 100 studies that were used for replication purposes. and i'm wondering whether you wouldn't have some caution about the uses of the findings and behavioral sciences, because the there's a broader problem of the statistics that are used the measurements used of towards these findings, and i think that i just i'm worried because in even the neurosciences the finding is that they're very sketchy and many findings are false, actually. so i just wanted to know what exactly your driving there? >> yeah, you're talking more about predicting behavior of individual defendants. using technology. that's not something i actually have thought about in great deal. and it troubles me that judges and prosecutors are using that. the behavioral science i'm talking about is even more basic than that. we know young men 18 to 25 are the primary causes of violent crime. we know they age out. we have the statistics. the statistics are undenial that by the time they hit 35, 45, 55, the chance of them committing new crimes is not great. we know behavioral science. you'll hear about from the attorney general. we need long sentences to deter people. i'm going to sentence you to a long sentence because it will deter everyone else. the deterrence only works if you know about it. let's think about the types of people that commit crimes. drug addiction, alcohol addiction, mental health illness, impulse control issues, and young and immature. or all five in one case. these are not the people that weigh out the consequences of a long sentence. but even if they were, let me just assume the person that has serious mental illness and selling drugs on the corner is going to think about that day what the punishment would be before they commit the crime. they have to find one of 5,000 federal statutes to find the mandatory minimum and maximum punish. and go to a 500 page guideline manual. to think that actually happens is ludicrous. we know what deters people. the thought of getting caught. and you would think that everyone could get on board with we want more police catching people catching crimes because that deters people and we want less incarceration because long sentences people don't know the punishment they're going to face. 11 years i never met one person, not one person, who knew the amount of punishment they were going to face for committing a federal felony. so that's the behavioral science i'm talking about. where we know how human beings behave and react. and yet our criminal justice policies are in opposition to that. and we wonder why they don't work so well. >> it is important to remember to call out the way that science has been used. for people of color and minorties for centuries. black people were born to be criminals a hundred years ago. now we moved passed that. that is real. there's predicted data that's a really problem. like risk assessment. broader is an interesting example. if new york city had done what d.c. has done by getting rid of bail. they would have replaced it with risk assessment and he still would have been in jail. that's not helpful. you see risk assessment asks questions like has anybody in your family been incarcerated. that's, okay. or like have you live in a high crime neighborhood. well that's a lot of people. those are real problems. i will say from visiting jail and prison, they do collect a ton of data that we're not using for anything. just the amount of data that prisons and jails collect at the intake process. like the day you get booked. the reality is that whatever is happening with you the day -- whatever at tributes you have. you probably had them the day before you got booked. we should be able to figure out how to intervene earlier. and ways that i'm not sure that like the system is set up to do right now. there's shockingly low data about bail. so it's hard across the country to backtrack the -- we can't look at how a judge makes decisions around bail. it's really hard to find the data of like what did a defense attorney ask for and a prosecutor ask for. what did the judge set. the data is not easy to find. there are ways we can use technology and data to be more creative and precise with solutions. really this time the last question is back there. >> i messed up on the time earlier. >> thank you for this panel. my name is joe. i write for a magazine called diverse koring race and equity. i was wondering if you could speak to the relationship between higher ed and criminal justice reform. and some of the concrete steps that colleges and universities can take to contribute to reform. >> yeah, i deal with that issue a lot. because everyone asks, well shon, what was the big thing when you got out that made a difference. post secondary education is a kwaet equalizer. the more a prisoner gets out the more education he receives. the better he's going to be. just like everyone else. but it's even more important for prisoners because going into universities is a really good community for them. to get back on their feet. it's very supportive. and so i encourage a lot of universities to think more about their admissions process. i am advising a lot of people with felony convictions that are on their way to currently and recently graduated law school because we need more of that perspective in the legal profession. it's hugely important. i worked with this place called the post prison education project. seattle rate was 55%. for the people that went there u the programs and this program basically just got donations and distributed that to people coming out of prison. everything from a bus ticket, to college tuition. they had people they were funding in law school. someone in culinary arts. and they had someone in a welding school. that program. the rate 2%. so post secondary education is a great equalizer for prisoners to come out. it gives them legitimacy in the eyes of the public. it's a great community to be involved with. you have teachers that really go to bat for you. the last thing you want to do is commit a new crime and let them down. that is the way forward for a lot of people. the problem is we need the resources and we need the universities to step up to the plate. and admit more people. and there are places that are doing that. university of washington where i went to law school now has much like band the box. they don't ask the question about criminal history that's the way forward for a lot of people. >> i would add in a practical sense, partnerships especially with alternative k through 12 programs. a friend of mine ran a set of schools for a set of alternative schools for young women. and she had come from a more traditional k through 12 background like i did. she wasn't prepared for how many young women have the will to stay, but engaging in traditional education was not an option for them because it meant they couldn't go earn money. so if i can't go earn money in the traditional ways. the temptation is earn money in ways i know aren't good for me. or hook back up with people who can earn me money. there are -- what she started to do essentially she recognized that she needed to give those young women the opportunity to be able to work. and go to school. in a way that happened much more rapidly than counter parts. she tried to discourage them from for profit universities and other folks that prey on those students for obvious reasons. it was hard for her to find institutions of higher education that were willing to put in the resources. the time and talent to actualize that partnership. that's exactly what young folks needed. to get the college credits and get advanced training. to do that simultaneous with working a job. but turn that into further job and career opportunities for their families. i think those prak practical partnerships of what we need more of. >> one of the few remaining universities that certainly massachusetts but across the country that offer ba and associate degrees to those incarcerated. there were a lot more programs that were doing that before the 1994 crime bill. which decimated the educational structure within prison. and the idea was that, was propagated is why should these felons and these convicts have access to college. we shouldn't be paying for them to go to school. despite the evidence that demonstrated that education was one of the most effective means. a corporation did a study that showed that you're 43% less likely to end up back in prison if you have participated in education opportunities while incarcerated. 13% more likely to get a job after. and that number is skewed. it wub higher if there weren't such profound job discrimination on the work force. the mark of a criminal record. but it is difficult to over state the extent to which the 94 crime bill like really just decimated the entire landscape of education. and so many of the universities that were putting professors in a lot of the institutions, simply didn't -- they dlam they didn't have the resources anymore. there wasn't the same federal or state level incentives for them to operate in the prisons. so far less opportunities for prisoners to have access to college. college classes shs masters classes, in a way that had existed before. part of what has to happen, the obama administration were the end of his second term had started a pilot program around grants and prison. that we are unlikely to see continued under the current administration. and you know these are things that when people are considering voting and elections, these are -- so much of what we talked about are small examples o of what the consequences are of certain people being in office. i think sometimes people don't consider the totality of the landscape of executive power. that exists. in when we're like thinking about who to vote for, who not to vote for. what's the same what's different. and i can just say in prisons, that is something that is felt very deeply. the especially people in there for a while. they can tell you what prison has felt like before grants were stripped away and how it feels like a different atmosphere in many prisons after. >> can you a lot of people talked about ban the box. ban the box being a progressive thing and important thing. the research actually the latest research complicates that. i want people to hear that before we end. >> i want to be fair. this is the research that's come out over the last few years is not specific to school -- it's different for college or universities than it is for jobs. what some of the research. >> so ban the box was about not letting employers ask about your criminal record. >> right. there's a box upon which you are -- in which many of the states make you check whether or not you have been convicted of a felony before. >> i have had to do that a few times. >> so it's interesting. it's understood as a bad thing. it's not helpful if you have to constantly remind people you were once in prison and the state is continuing to punish you after you have been let out. which is not fair. it is true and generally understood as something we should try to move away from. what complicates it a bit is some of the research that's been done as of late has suggested that in places where the box is removed, employers will simply assume that the black -- this was a specific study on black men. the black men coming -- since they can't tell whether or not somebody is a formally incarcerated person. since they didn't know they would just assume that more of the black men coming in aplying for jobs were formally incarcerated. they had to make in their mind a judgment call. since i don't know i have to try and figure out if are a former felon or not. and more often than not, they would make dominican republor mt a higher rate than previously. what would happen is the study said that the likelihood of people who are formally incarcerated get ago job once the box is removed had gone up a bit. which is the goal. but the opportunities for black men who weren't incarcerated or hadn't been incarcerated before went down. in a way that didn't, was not -- that made is to black men were less likely to get jobs before the box was banned. it is important -- there are not a lot of neat easy solutions to this work. it's important to reject or question things that look as if hay are easy or as if it's like this sort of easy universal solution. and that's not i want to be clear i'm not saying we should completely forget about ban the box. there's more social science and research to be done. i think is app important study that helps us complicate what this means and goes back to what i was saying before. the state has a lot of responsibility. but this is going to be happening in like the private individual decisions that people make every day in their with their small businesses and organizations, with their corporations. and the box will only go so far to remove bias from people. >> i don't think the box would have helped me. think about it. i don't check the box. but then when it comes resume time, there's a ten year resume gap on mine. that i would not have been able to explain other than to tell them what happened. so i think it's important. sometimes we pat ourselves on the back too quickly when we pass a bill. when instead maybe what we should be doing is just convincing businesses that listen, we want you to affirmatively hire people with felony convictions. and get them to agree to do that. and we would have better and more successful out comes if we could. >> shon, clint, britney, thank you so much for being on the panel. round of applause. thank you for being here today. and we'll see you soon. >>. sunday night on q and a. founder and ceo of open the books on taxpayers dollars are spent and need for government transparent si. >> veterans affairs we have audited their checkbook for four years. last summer we found that during a period where up to a thousand sick veterans died while waiting to see a doctor. that the va spent $20 million on a high end art portfolio. it was 27 foot christmas trees costing the amount like cars. $21,000. it was sculpture priced like five bedroom homes. two sculptures for $700,000. a va center that serves blind veterans. it was a cubed rock sculpture with landscaping for $1.2 million. this is the type of waste that's in our government. sunday night at 8 eastern. on c-span q and a. >> this week the senate health education labor and pension committee holds two hearings on the individual insurance market. on the first day we hear from state insurance commissioners from around the country and on day two governors talk about stabilizing the insurance market in their states. live coverage beginning at 10:00 a.m. eastern. before congress return from their summer recess, members across the country held town halls to hear from citizens. in maryland, senator held one that talked about the current state of healthcare policy and the future of the 2010 affordable care act. this runs just under two

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