My name is tyra, and im the executive Vice President at new america. Welcome to new america, for those of you who are here for the first time. I am delighted that we are having a very important conversation this afternoon about punishment in the u. S. For those of you that may be unfamiliar with this particular, with the criminal Justice System, youll learn quickly that i think the criminal Justice System is criminal in some of the ways in which it applies justice. We at new america are working even though our society is changing, woo erwere working f thriving individuals, communities, and family. To have the time, stability, necessary to leave productable lives. We work for equitable, accessible and high quality education for all. We work for equal representation in politics and participation in accountable government. And we do that in part by telling stories about whats happening and whats possible. And we also do that by generating big and bold ideas to solutions that i think youll see that today. Our criminal Justice System is in dire need of change. Imprisonment was originally intended to be used as a social deterrent and to protect those from those who commit crimes. It was intended for individuals to pay their debt to society, be rehabilitated, and then returned to society as productive citizens. But instead of doing those things, we have made big business out of mass incarceration. With the u. S. Holding the highest incarceration than anyone else in the world. We disproportionately arrest and incarcerate people of color, and those we have an error rate of 1 out of 9 innocent people convicted, the Death Penalty, the Death Penalty still exists in some states. Though whites and africanamericans use drugs at roughly the same rate, africanamericans are imprisoned six times more than their white counterparts. And because of what you can and cant do once you reenter society, recidivism rates are high. So thats just a teaser for what well get into this afternoon. Well focus on solutions and all that and then some, and so with that, i want to turn it over to our moderator for this afternoon. Dr. Marsha chatland. Marsha is a 2017 eric and one b. Smith fellow here at new america, and shes been a tremendous asset to our community. She also serves as the assistant professor of history and africanamerican studies at georgetown and has also written a book called south side girls growing up in the great migration. Before i send it over to marsha, i should also mention that this conversation is being broadcast via cspan, so you dont want to be seen, now is a good time to dip out. So anyway, with that, ill turn it over. Thank you. Thank you so much. [ applause ] good afternoon. I have the pleasure of moderating a conversation between two individuals who have helped us really look into the depths of this issue of punishment. Ill introduce our panelists and get started with the conversation. Professor howards class changed my life. This is what he and many of my colleagues at georgetown have heard over the years. Mark is professor of government and law at georgetown university. Hes the founding director of the prison and justice initiative, which brings together scholars, practitioners and students to examine the problem of mass incarceration from multiple perspectives. Exa problem of mass incarceration. He also teaches regularly at the correctal institution, a maximum security prison in maryland. His most recent book, do you have a copy of it for us to see is unusually cruel, prisons, purnishments, and the real american exceptional itch. Mark received his b. A. In ethics politics and economics from yale. In Political Science from the university of california at becomely. While being a professor, his jd from georgetown university. Welcome, mark. Thank you. [ applause ] in november of 2017, our second panelists admission to the could be constate bar was so moving and in his words, quote, unlikely, that it warranted a article in the new yorker entitled a boat with prison behind him becomes an attorney. On that day, Reginald Dwayne bets remarked, last time my mom saw me in a court i was sentenced to nine years in prison. I know nobody expected this, least of all, me. He is the husband and father of two sns sons, a boat and memoryist. The author of three books, the recently published, bastards of the reagan era, a question of freedom, and the boatry collection sharks heed reads his own palm. He is enrolled in the College Program in law at the yale law school, earned an jd from the yale law school, mfa for writers and a ba from the university of maryland. Join me in welcoming dwayne to this conversation. Thank you. You are welcome. So mark, i want to get started on your most recent rchb that really takes a comparative look at the criminal Justice System. We hear that our nation overincarcerates its own citizens but when we look at the conditions inside u. S. Prisons from the perspective of other places we deemed developed what did you fine . Right. Well the starting point i think for a lot of studies of mass incarceration in the u. S. Is to look comparatively, at the number of people, the percentage of people incarcerated. Its a lot higher in the u. S. Most people just stop there. What i tried to do in my facebook and in my research is to go much deeper into all sass suspects of the criminal Justice System and then also inside a prison and see what takes place. What i found is an actual horror show, which is to say that at every stage of what i call the criminal justice life cycle, which starts with plea bargaining, with sentencing, then prison conditions, rehabilitation, parole and then reentry, the u. S. Is off the charts. And i would say off the rails. There is something that is distinctively american about this rm follow of punishment which is not just about making society safer sh keeping people out of protecting society by keeping dangerous people off the streets for a short period of time. Of the about punishing people, punishing them severely and personmently. This is something thats different. What i discovered in my work is that there are other countries that do it differently and other countries that do it better. Why are we having this very insular little conversation at the u. S. Where i think many people who look at it agree there are problems when the solutions are actually right there. There are better ways of doing it. Thats what i try to draw on in this book and spell out hopefully to lead to some common sense and some practical changes in the u. S. I want to touch upon this issue of the plea bargain. Because we know we are in a crisis in terms of the ability for criminal defendants to get representation. And we understand the ways thats werors have to deliver numbers in order to maintain their positions. So what are some other models outside of the plea bargaining structure that you found compelling . All right, well plea bargaining is something that shocks al of my students when they first take my class. This all watch law and order and they watch movies, in every one of those there is courtroom drama and the zealous public defender making the case for his or her client. Its sort thisle about an and so on. The reality is vastly different. Does anyone know what percentage of criminal cases actually go to trial . 5 . 5 . All right . The rest are handled through plea bargains. And this is something that is just astounding when you think about it. There is a constitutional right in this country to a trial by jury. What happens is if you exercise that right which is to say if you turn down the plea bargain that has been offed to you in a one dimensional way where its basically said heres the deal, take it or go to trial, and guess what, if you go to trial, you are probably going to get double that. There is a case that the Supreme Court sanctions where somebody turned down a plea bargain for five years and got life without paro parole. The Supreme Court said thats okay. He had the chance. He turned down the deal. This is unfathomable. When i tell other countries about how this works some countries a modified form of plea bargaining, and there is an active role of the judge and ensuring the process. Its for more minor cases, shorter term in sentences and so on. But its nothing like what it is like in the u. S. Thats stage one. But that alone is shocking and apauling in my view. Whats the solution to that . Its hard to say. We have so many cases that are coming forward. And there are already incredibly long delayed. So plea bargaining is deemed to be efficient but its incredibly unjust. The solution might be to build more courthouses or not to prosecute so many people to have more diversion, to have more sensible forms of diversion in seeking justice other than we do, the machinery of cranking people through, plea bargaining is the prime mechanism for doing that. Its interesting when we think about the discretionary mechanism that allows for the plea bargain system, and then we think about a mandatory sentencing. I want to take this conferring to you, dwayne, about the other part of this. So after we leave the courthouse and we think about the conditions inside prisons, particularly as they relate to juveniles and adult correctional facilities, which have some of your reflections touched upon in terms of the conditions in which people have to live out these sentences . I found the plea bargain conversation interesting because i think i agree. Im not sure if there should be more trials, but too i actually dont think there should be more trials of but im also not sure of the rate of plea bargains on its own is a problem. Its how they are done. Or even beyond that, its the fact that the amount of time thats available at the start is so intense that there cant be a rational conversation on both end. I have a friend who was offed five years, they offer him manslaughter for five years. Pled not guilty. He lost that trial and ended up getting 53 years. This is a case in which he didnt commit the crime, he maintained his innocence, and two 20 years later a reporter did a story on him and found out that the Police Actually never even interviewed him before charging him with the crime. And that he didnt do it. And at that time he had an iq of about 62, 63, his mother was momently disabled. So i do think there are a lot of problems. But maybe the problem we dont discuss enough is the sentence, the possibility of getting that 60year sentence on the back end. I think thats what perverts the whole plea bargaining process, maybe even more so than a plea bargaining rate. And i said that having pled to a guilty, and i say that having pled guilty to a crime that carries a life sentence. And i do think that part of the conferring has to try to get into the rationalization for why somebody would plea guilty. I pled guilty because i committed the crime. I feel like we have to have room to acknowledge. What does that mean, to have committed a crime . And what does that mean to have pled guilty . I was 16 years old, and i carjacked somebody. And i preface it and always say nobody was hurt. But people were my whole community was hurt. And im sure that the victim of my crime was traumatized and i dont know how long that trauma lasts. I think the question after that what should the punishment be. You ask what is it like for a 16yearold . I know from experience, from representent senting kids, i know from speaking with young people that have been in prison, im like, what does it mean if you are 14, 15, you have never been away from home more than a couple of weeks and suddenly you are tossed into a world that is just completely unlike anything else you have experienced . One of the challenges with even describing that is that one of the things that people want to hear is how violent prisons are. But if i make that argument then that seems to suggest that prisons are the place for these extremely violent people. So i dont want to necessarily make that argument except to say that it was the c. O. S who were violent. It was the Mental Health workers who were absent. It was the medical staff who frequently were unqualified. And sometimes there was a pocket of individuals that could frankly terrorize a prison that were always unaccounted for for reasons around the prison guard to prisoner ratio. The reasons fort around the architecture of the prison and for reasons around the protocol, like how problems were managed at the institution. I think one of our ill end with just saying this. Its amazing to me that its still okay to send juveniles to prison in the united states. Frequently we talk about this as it is a new owe occurrence. The j tretic reality is that we have been treating juveniles as adults since the mid 1800s and sending them to prison since that time. What people dont understand. They want to anchor the conversation around people who committed the most Violent Crimes, what is in the part of the conversation is frequently children who havent committed Violent Crimes and end up in prison with adults could tragically change their life for all kinds of reasons. Comparatively, this is also somewhere where the u. S. Stands out. Other countries dont sentence juveniles as adults to inkree creditably lengthy prison terms. What happens when we hear about how we treat children with life without parole and incredibly long sentences is somewhere where they say this country has lost its mind. I had a client who was 15. Because he was 15 he was being tried as an adult. Because he was 15 he couldnt be in lobup with adults during the trial, during the court process. When you go to court its not as if you show up and you have got a time slot. So if the you get there on time, you get in and you get out. You show up at 7 30 in the morning and you remain there until like 3 30, 4 00 in the afternoon. Because this kid was only 15, couldnt be in lock up with all the adults. Where was he . Basically, in a solitary confinement cell. And i had forgotten i had forgotten just how how difficult it is to find a way to occupy your mind at 15 until i went to see him. And we went into the cell, me and my supervisor and an attorney, to talk to him. We actually had nothing to talk to him about. Because it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to plead guilty. We had very little to talk to him about because all the evidence suggested he did it, he told us he did it. And that complicates the plea bargaining process because how should we think about those cases. The point is we were in that cell for 23 minutes talk approximating nothing because it looked like he was broken. In fact he was upset because his mother hadnt been answering his phone calls. So i think when we think about what the system does is one way to think about it on a sort of broad level but its a different way to say, what does this mean . He hasnt been convicted of any crime. Once he does plead guilty, if he does plead guilty he will probably get time serves. What does it mean for him that he went back and forth to court and each item he had to sit in a single cell by himself for eight hours. Im glad you touched on the solitary confinement. This is something you have written about before. I think we have left the idea that this is about rehabilitation and at the same time there are people who fine mechanisms to remain connected and grounded through the process. So in a sense, solitary confinement is one of many kind of excessive forms of punishment that has been rationalized within this system. So from both of your perfectives the critique of solitary confinement, is there a global kind of response to that . And is there any way that we can make sure that people on the outside of this can really advocate to stop this pro. Do you wa stop this practi . . If you look comparatively, other countries in the world consider it for you are too. Period. Its very simple. There are exceptions where there is a particularly violent act in a prison where somebody is separated under a day, two days. Every evident is made to reintegrate that person. In this country, when somebody gets sent to solitary it is a minimum of a monday. Then you have a process where people go in for a lon period of time and they start acting out. So if they are acting out, what happens . They get more solitary. So we create this process where we are causing psychological damage, and then as a result of that, we are giving them the exact same thing thats creating even more psychological damage. Then you have people who leave solitary and go right out on the street. It makes no sense. Thats what happened in colorado, which is a good case, because the guy was locked up. He had been in solitary a number of years, and he was released directly. The interesting thing, though, is that i wish i knew his name. I hate to talk about somebody and not know their name but the then director of department of corrections was reducing the number of people in solitary, part of a number of states, including mississippi and washington state, that had been working to reduce the numbers in solitary confinement. They released this guy who had been in solitary confinement for years and the guy goes and murders the director of the department of corrections. It was interesting, i do remember this guys name, rick remainish took his place. The question became, what will rick remainish do in the face this tragedy . Because you could easily ramp up solitary confine men given this. I mean, actually, it seems like thats the only choice, to be frank. I was certain he was going to ramp up solitary confinement, but what he did was he went to solitary confinement and there is a New York Times op ed article he wrote about it, which is interesting to me. I spent more than a year in solitary could be finement. This grown man who was a cop, i met him a few times, a tough guy, cop, aboutan in the department of corrections for years. He could only do it for 20 hours. He continued to decrease the numbers of solitary confinement after having experienced it. What happens in the context of this conversation is we imagine that the crime that got commitmented lasts not just forever for the purposes of you having a criminal record but its justification forever for whatever happens to you. We dont even need to imagine what it means to suffer through solitary confinement, to suffer through like improper, improper hygiene, improper medical treatment, horrible food. You dont have to did that yourself because you deserve it for having committed that crime. He said, no. Before i make a decision on what to do with this, let me understand what it means to be in the hole. And i heard him the last time i was in a room with him, it was i wonder if i can say this. But i was at a conference. It was like a meeting of correctional administrators. And the problem that they were addressing was how to decrease