The board of the boston book festival. The 11th annual boston book festival and i wanted to say a few words about why im here and why the book festival is important. For me of his journeys of emotion and explorations of the lived experiences of people i dont know and probably well never know. It truly is an inclusive community. I hope all of you will be thinking about joining us tomorrow. If you believe in the importance. You saw an animation here. If you want some swag you can go there as well. We are very committed to making sure the book festival is open to everybody. Its my pleasure to say just a few words. It is just on forgiveness. We are honored to have our panelists here today. In the dean of the Radcliffe Radcliffe institute. They will introduce the panel. Good morning everyone. I am the dean of the radcliffe institute. And a professor at the harvard law school. Im just delighted to moderate at this session on violence, justice in forgiveness. The three authors on this panel had written books that are so relevant to our time they ask us to think deeply about the values that should add an animate that. They are so relevant to our time a time of social division a truly credit for answers and solutions as well as analysis. Each of the authors brings perspective to these matters. Now im to briefly introduce each author and the order in which they will speak. She is a brilliant teacher probably get president barack obama called hurt the teacher who changed my life. She done and have done and continues to so much to make the world a better place. Her latest book is when should law forgive. Welcome martha. Aaron kelly is professor of philosophy at test university. Kellys latest book is the blame. Welcome aaron. And finally we had thomas who is Senior Research fellow also senior fellow to the chris thomas worked as chief chief of chief of staff into the office of Justice Programs at the u. S. Department of justice during the Obama Administration there he helped to create the National Forum will be speaking about his new book a bold new plan for peace in the streets. Each author will speak for about ten minutes is an honor to be here with this terrific panel i dont know how many of you saw just a couple weeks ago when the sentencing trial proceeded the Police Officer in dallas who shot him him thinking he was in the apartment. And after the sentence was issued the young brother of the victim said in open court room. I forgive you. The judge later came down and hugged her. I was kind of an extraordinary event. The family for gave him. Others did not. I moved by the instance. When can the legal system itself forgive i worry about the legal system expected or forcing victims to forgive i worry about the per preparation the racial and gender hierarchies in the legal system itself has many tools for letting go of justified resentment or grievance which is my definition of forgiveness. I dont think they are used often enough. In a surprising contrast bankruptcy. I can compare this to the treatment of juvenile defenders in this country. It allows for a fresh start. Criminal law in this country does not. In post conflict situations with the possibility of pardons and context including criminal law i will read briefly because i do have followed directions the special problem bears an analogy. Children and teens are drawn into violent activity in the United States and elsewhere when the few other options. Across the United States they face laws that give up on rehabilitation and even the idea of crafting punishment to fit the crime. They traced to the experiences. Charged at age 15 of attempted carjacking tried as an adult criminal defendant convicted and incarcerated for 11 years. Todd what she describes as a life altering convergence. Michael ended up killed a year after his release in prison they have not proved successful in hopes of building strong relationships in and a sense of community these laborintensive initiatives focused on repairing injuries and preventing the conflicts in the first place. When the former soldier and author visited a juvenile correction facility. They read portions of his book and they told them about having to take orders as he spoke have started knotting in the United States are unforgiving Justice System has produced the highest rate of incarceration in the history of the world. Inadequate legal representation. Mandatory minute minimum sentences. It is not necessary. What is needed is graded knowledge of trauma symptoms. Thank you. [applause]. Is such a pleasure to be here. I will read a couple of paragraphs from the book reveals more aspects. These undesirable aspects mark that person heinous crimes are the paradigm criminal offense of the blaming enterprise. Then we extended this to the grip guilty in an all too generic way. We see a persons choice as a decision to commit a crime. We go over differences in the severity of offenses and we aggravate people who had committed crimes into a single stigmatized social class. Within the class all are condemned even though the tendency is at odds with our pissed professed opinions. That opinion has overrun. Its proper limits. It is time to reconsider the point of criminal justice it argues that when we tune to the Justice System we find surprisingly that delivering blame is not among them. Its enough to declare when its true that people who have been convicted of crimes had acted wrongly and that we have reasons to up hold the rights of people to have that have been harmed or threatened. We need not go beyond these collisions. And to condemn criminal wrongdoing. We cant and should reject the use of criminal punishment as an instrument of public blame. It does not had and should not be given the moral authority to allocate deserved suffering. If we suppose it does we miss represent the scope of the legal verdicts. And we should reorient our moral thinking about criminal law. We are doing too much with blame. Occupying unless righteous stance. We would be able to affirm and protect our basic rights. This book offers some new ideas to move us forward. My book analyzes the stigma of punishment as a form of public blame that functions to ostracize criminal lawbreakers. Even after they have committed their sentences. They are denied the right to vote public housing. Student loans and licenses needed for many lines of professional work. Furthermore the punishment is on the most disadvantaged members of Society People who are disproportionately poor and black. All of these factors make it very difficult for the formally incarcerated individuals. They are permanently branded as bad people and they lack the opportunity and resources to overcome that stigma. Why are we permanently area alienating millions of americans a retributive philosophy is used unjustifiably to rationalize the practice of punishment as a public form of blame. They are made acceptable by construing them as a matter of delivering just desserts. They are getting what they deserve or so it is thought. Criminal wrong doers deserve retribution. This is a logic of payback. The problem is that many people who get caught up in the criminal Justice System cannot rationally be thought to deserve their fate Mental Illness intellectual disability addiction, trauma and poverty are morally mitigating factors when it comes to assessing how blame where the a person is for bad behavior. But with the exception of extreme forms of Mental Illness that fall into the very narrow legal character of insanity. They are not treated as less blameworthy by the criminal Justice System. People who are battling inter demons and hopeless social circumstances are held to standards of reasonableness. The criteria of legal guilt does not match up well with the moral concept of blame worthiness as i understand it blame is a negative moral response to a wrong doer that they ares got to deserve. It includes emotions and attitudes like anger, disappointment, resentment, hatred and behavior like criticism, rejection and punishment. Blame response to a persons failure to meet behavioral standards of morality and traces the failure to act aspects of the character. To blame someone is to hold them responsible for the faulty personal characteristics in the sense that she is taken it to deserve the negative response in characteristic of blame. They are significant to blame for the insight that they offer into the person the problem is that in many cases a persons wrongful actions say as much about the circumstances and how he has been treated as they do about the atomic number as well. It might seem to be to refine our Legal Practice to make blame more context sensitive. But i argue in the book that rather than try to revive the criminal justice practices to fit with common practices. A fixation on morally condemning individuals is not helping us to resolve it does not help us to see clearly. The connection between crimes and other social justice. If we relinquish the idea that the point of the criminal Justice System is to impose deserved suffering we open a door to the door to thinking about criminal justice. We could be more empathetic towards criminal lawbreakers. We might seek to understand the life circumstances that had influenced them. We might be less fixated on individual responsibility and more cognizant as equal persons entitled to the same basic rights, liberties and opportunities. We might be more reflective, more humble and perhaps more forgiving. [applause]. It is a real pleasure to be here and before i go into my book i just want to into the general premise of the book i just want to highlight a piece of the research that is covered in the book that is relevant to the work of both of my co panelists today. They had sort of known as the godfather of criminology here in the United States. Extremely wellregarded. They published a study which is called the redemption study. They analyzed thousands of criminal history records throughout new york state. They came to a stunning conclusion. It is that there is a point at which people are statistically no more likely to re offend if they have served their sentence and they had stayed clean or out of trouble. That statistical point that redemption point can be anywhere depending on the history of the offender. It can be as short as three years to as long as eight or nine years. But the point is, even for the most serious offenders providing that there is relief from custody there becomes a point where they are statistically no more likely to offend than any of us. I will now read for from my book. Bleeding out. Imagine this. You are a trauma surgeon working the midnight shift in an emergency room in the United States of america. A young man lies before you on a gurney. Judging from the entry and exit rooms most likely sliced the artery one of the largest blood vessels in the body without assistance this young man will die within minutes. As his dr. What do you do . Or more precisely what to do first. The young mans clothes are old and dirty. He may be jobless, homeless lacking a decent education. Do you start to treatment by finding him a job in locating an apartment or helping to get his ged the young men has man has also been involved in some sort of altercation and may be dangerous. Do you put him in restraints alert Hospital Security or call the police of course not. Instead, you take the only sensible and humane course of action at the time. First you stop the bleeding because unless you stop the bleeding nothing else matters. In 2,017,170,002,000 and 84 people were murdered in the United States. That is more than 47 per day. Americans are killed at a rate seven times higher than people and other high Income Countries driven by a gun homicide rate is 25 times higher. As citizens we do not bear this risk equally. The number one victims and violence are disadvantaged in disenfranchised young africanamerican and latino men. Homicide is a second the second leading cause of death. I is not just the leading cause of death homicide accounts for more deaths than the nine other leading causes of death combined. Every murder causes a measurable of suffering and no statistic can capture a childs loss to potential or grief. But when the cost of murder is estimated they are staggering. Anywhere from 173 to 332 billion in criminal justice and medical costs lost wages earned. In diminished quality of life every year. Thats between 508,000 per american. That is just the price of homicide the human and economic costs of all violent current run even higher. Thankfully, murder on the streets of our cities was a deadly serious problem but is also a solvent one. See mac it is common to say in the area of gun violence that we need more research into the assumption there is that we dont really know what works to reduce gun violence. That is not true in relation to urban gun violence. It is the most studied and most rigorously studied form of gun violence and we have learned a tremendous amount about it. My book is based on over 1400 individual rigorous and those evaluations and weve learned a tremendous amount in this area. I will give you a thumbnail sketch of three major fundamental truths that we now understand about urban violence. Urban violence is highly concentrated meaning that it clusters among small groups of People Places and behaviors. And in any given city here in boston the tiny network of people is responsible for 50, 60 and 70 of shootings. In boston the Regional Intelligence Center said that thats about 300 to 400 people. In new orleans is about 600 people. And this phenomenon of concentration replicates throughout every urban city in the United States and in fact its quite true across the globe as well. Perhaps not surprisingly this issue. The concentrated issue is most amendable to sticky solutions. The next thing we know about urban violence is that it response to both positive and negative incentives. Criminals particularly violent criminals are no different than anyone else. They respond to both sticks and we are finding that positive incentives can play a powerful role in changing their behavior. And what we see in the literature through the 1400 studies is a surprising lack of bias or preference for tough on Crime Solutions or soft on Crime Solutions. And perhaps not surprisingly when you look at cities across the United States there has been no city that has reduced Violent Crime simply by arresting their way out of the problem but also not by programming their way out of the problem. Its been a balanced approach that has been most successful. And then finally, as we have all sort of walked through this collective crisis, we have learned that violence in communities is intimately related to how this communities have the Law Enforcement system. And what we have learned is that there is a phenomenon of legal assent and does them. If people dont believe in the system they wont use it. And that means they wont call 911 they wont serve as witnesses. But most importantly they wont use the system from one of the oldest and most traditional functions which was dispute resolution. The stopping of the vendetta. What happens if you live in these communities and you dont believe that the system is willing or able to help you when someone beats up your cousin you dont call 911, you call your boys and a beating leads to a shooting and finally ultimately to a killing and then the cycle of violence continues. Those fundamental truths healed three fundamental principles if you want that success. If to be focused in balance. You have to improve the perceived legitimacy of your work in the eyes of people who are most impacted by it. I want talk briefly about one strategy that is detailed in the book. There is no single strategy to successfully reduce urban violence. I wanted to highlight the strategy that has perhaps the strongest record of effectiveness detailed in the book. And that is something that is called focused deterrence. And ceasefire or the Group Violence reduction strategy. It was actually implement it with implemented with the help of the carver Harvard Kennedy school. It was partly responsible for what is known as the boston miracle which was the massive reduction in Youth Violence in the mid 90s. The program has been replicated all around the country and a review was performed in 2012 documenting its success. Using a metaanalysis. We then updated that result in 2018 running and that same study again to capture all of the new studies that have been done in the preceding six years. Ultimately the average size. Was an unprecedented port 657. What that translates to in plain englishs is reductions in shootings and killings of 40, 5060 so why is focused deterrence so successful. It is based on those principles that we talked about earlier it is focused, it works only with the highest risk individuals those that are most likely to shoot or d shock. And it focuses on one behavior. Second, it is balance. A group of Service Providers and Law Enforcement join arms and collectively engage these individuals. And they offer a unified message they say we know its you whos doing the shooting and it has to stop. If it stops we are here to help you. If it doesnt stop, we are here to stop you. And then having made those promises. The promise to help and a promise to punish then they may go about making good on those promises. And then ultimately they change the incentives not just for those individuals they get to the significant reductions in violence. And finally, because this group is balanced and its not just Law Enforcement and they are offering a clear choice in because of that choice is offered in a respectful and empathetic way. They plead with these young men and say please, i dont want what happened to my son to