Segregation kept africanamericans out of every other venue. Duke ellington, billie holiday, Louis Armstrong all performed here. You can just imagine it. Than the place shut down in 1968 after the riots and did not open again until the mid90s. Here we are many decades later, and the topic of race and justice in america is just as raw as it has ever been. The gathering was inspired by Tanehisi Coates, who wrote our cover story last month, the case of a black family in the age of mass incarceration. He examined this countrys history of incarceration over the past 50 years and has tried to understand how america has outin carteret did every other country in the world and what it has done to families. Many of the photos illuminated his work on the page. Today, we lift that story to the stage and we will talk honestly about a difficult subject. We will expand the conversation to contemplate the role of the court. We will meet police and learn about life on the front lines. We will explore rehabilitation and the case for help. It is important to say that none of this would be possible without the support of underwriters. I want to thank them. The open society foundation, the choice foundation, the jacob lang foundation. We will get rolling in a moment. , we may be steeped in history at the lincoln theater, but the wifi works. Atlantic live is the network. Racejusord is tice2015. That is our twitter handle too. We will take your questions across the day. With that, it is a delight to let the conversation begin. It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce my colleagues, james bennet and corresponded Tanehisi Coates correspondent Tanehisi Coates. [applause] good morning. Thank you very much for joining us here. Objective in this first conversation of the day is to establish some of the background and set some of the themes. You cannot hear me . I am sorry. How about now . Is the mic kicking in . We may have to shout. Tanehisi ok. James if this becomes unbearably loud, let me know. We will try to set out some of the themes we will be exploring today. With the to start is history of how we found ourselves where we find ourselves. In the piece that margaret referred to a few minutes he intended something very different with that report. When it is first rolled out, Lyndon Johnson said of family breakdown for this most of all, White America must accept responsibility. He says it was in centuries of oppression and persecution of the negro man. So, how is it that is well intended report resulted in mass incarceration . , wow that isd incredible. Daniel Patrick Moynihan can you hear me now . Ok, beautiful. He mentioned that daniel Patrick Moynihan when he wrote the moynihan report, his intentions really were to address the myriad of discrepancies and the divides between black america and White America and he was someone who is very much obsessed with the idea of families. He has looked at families among Irish Catholic communities and employed that approach to africanamerican communities. The report was not authored in father malevolent policy or malevolent investment in africanamerican communities. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was interested in employment programs and all sorts of ways of helping families. Instead, what we got, he was arguing for benevolence and instead what we got was malevolent investment. I think that one of the things that happened and what i argue in the piece is that the society was already angled a certain way. Society already viewed africanamerican families through a particular lens. Aboutereas we often think , in the wake of the 1960s, the state actually retreating out of the lives of africanamerican families and out of the lives of were families. What we wouldt in call the welfare state. In fact, there has actually been more investments, but it has been malevolent investment. You can talk about the fact that in the moynihan report a lot of the solutions that he thought that we should embrace were not actually published within the report. So, we in fact, made our own solutions. No solution has become more prominent. No solution has been more disastrous than this policy of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration as absolution for employment issues and the African American community. A solution that we traced is a Mental Health issues very often in the afternoon africanamerican committee. Until recently, we used it for drug issues in the Africanamerican Community. There was a piece in the New York Times about two weeks ago and it was talking about how harrowing use was rising among white people in this country. An alarming rise of heroin use. I cannot help but note the very sympathetic and benevolent town that was taken when you talked about heroin use among white people and compare that to the time in which i grew up in the 1980s when we were very much worried about crack. I was worried about crack, too. But the tone was not benevolent. It was not sympathetic. In large part, it was an argument for incarceration. I dont think you can separate solutions away from how we view folks. Talk about that a little bit. Crime ratesl were higher in the 1960s and 1970s. That this fear of crime was actually connected to a deeper history, the betrayal of black criminality in this country. When i started doing the article, i lived through the rising crime. There was no disputing that crime rose during i was in was baltimore. I know how my parents understood the neighborhood when they were growing up and when i was growing up. There was no dispute that crime had risen. The one of the mysteries of connecting crime and incarceration is the fact that sorry, everybody. Where were one of the discrepancies for me is when you drop back and you look at the world as a whole during that time, crime did not just rise in africanamerican communities or even in america, it rose in canada. It rose in england. It rose in the nordic countries. This was an international phenomenon. The United States is unique for embracing incarceration as a solution. Why did we do that . I think very much in our thinking is the idea that people are committing crimes, jail is the best way to address it. But that is fisher cohen in reliance on jails. Im talking triple life. Im not completely against jailing people who are dangerous to the community. But the true conan in nature in which we do it is very different. How did we end up with 5 of the worlds population and 25 of the worlds prison population. How did we end up with a situation where we have an incarceration rate of 700 per 100,000. 40 years ago we had an incarceration rate of about 160 per 100,000. Our nearest competitor is russia. But its not really competition. What exactly happens, and i do think that can be separated from the fact that we have a very, very unique population in this country, African Americans, 40 million. In a very unique history with that group of people. We have a video that would like to play quickly now that establishes a lot of the statistics and describes the moment at which we now find ourselves. The narrator is breeze western. Do i speak about who he is. Bruce western is a pioneer. He is a sociologist at harvard. He was at the kennedy school. To write this article, he was the first person i went to talk to. He is very much like a godfather to this piece. I think youll see why in a minute. Kelly ripa video please . Can we world the video please . [video] you are no longer incarcerating individual but entire groups. The rate of incarceration now is about five times higher than it was historically. Historically it was 100 per 100,000. Now it is 500 per 100,000. Worlde in the incarcerates as much as we do. It highlights [indiscernible] men bornnk about black in the 1970s growing up [indiscernible] the chances that they will serve time if they dropped out of high school is about many percent. Going to present for that group of black men with low levels of schooling, where thereis point are 1. 2 million africanamerican children with a parent who is incarcerated. That is about one and nine. The Research Shows that [indiscernible] they have behavioral problems. Depressive symptoms. Also evidence [indiscernible] associated with parental incarceration. It is concentrating more among boys and girls. Theres a very low risk here that becomes an inherited trait. They chose prisons as a way to respond to that problem of crime. There are a whole variety of ways that we can have chosen to respond to that problem. Response ofen the deprivation of liberty. We have chosen the response of the deprivation of liberty for a historically aggrieved group. Will be taking questions from the audience throughout the day. I will open it up to guys in just a moment. The microphone is moving around the room. Take us from where the video left off. Issuednihan report was with the goal of trying to help do something about the problem of family breakdown. Where what were the consequences for the family of the policy that the country wanted pursuing . Isan immediate consequence that what moynihan hope to do was spark a conversation. I mean the consequences of mass incarceration. Of course. They have been devastating. I think bruce just outlined the case. When you are talking about one in 10 parents one and nine children having parents in jail. That is a deprivation of human power within the household. Kids take a lot of energy. If you take a parent out, that is a problem. We have statistics that at this of folks who are arrested and have children, africanamerican males that are arrested, and have children are actually living in the household at the time. Dont think this necessarily have to be conversation about doing nothing. I dont think that is why anybody is saying in terms of when we have times within our communities. But the quickness with which we go to present, the quickness with which we go to the deprivation of liberty because that is what prison is, the quickness with which we go to it for community that historically has been deprived of liberty in this country really, i think, should shame us all. Other questions from the audience . Here we go. My name is mark. My organization is social solutions and we are working on an initiative to reduce the incarceration rate in washington, d. C. , by half in five years. As an avid to you is historian, and your years of researching, reading about Race Relations the United States, specifically to what was the theme that really struck you in your research . What really popped out and surprised you . What startled you and make you afraid . The thing that strikes me is how old it actually is. I think a lot of sites of mass incarceration to some extent begins in the 1960s and 1970s. That is a time when you see the huge increase in just the number of people who are going into the system. The fact of the matter is, dealing with problems in the Africanamerican Community through criminal justice, through the deprivation of liberty, through incarcerating people is actually a very old solution. When folks made arguments for the abolition of slavery, the first thing people would say was you cannot read these people, they are more likely to commit crimes. People want to justify lynching. The first thing they said was that we lynch because this populace is more likely to commit crime. People want to justify how segregation and keeping africanamericans from having access to their neighborhoods that other people in this country had access to, crime was always a part of it. Crime was argument against integration. So, society tells itself repeatedly, over a number of centuries, that society is like an entity or a living person, and if you tell yourself a story about a group of able over a long time frame, eventually it becomes very, very easy to believe. When you see an increase in way, theres a different narrative for Different Group of people because there is already preexisting narrative of africanamericans as criminals. It becomes very easy to respond to incarceration. When it is sad things when you talk about moynihan is you see this guy who at least in the report was trying to be benevolent, believed in an alkaline investment and within 56 years he is in the next administration, making the exact same arguments or lack of an audi. That shows you that you can even get to us somebody was supposed in your side that there was a deep narrative that is already there. One of the really striking things that you unearthed to demonstrate how incarceration has been a system of social control, it is always the varying rates of incarceration and the 20 century in the north versus the south. Again, if we consider 1970 as the baseline. 400,000 in 1970. Currently, we are somewhere in the neighborhood of 700,000. If i could just get back to 1970, everything would be ok. But when you start looking at it longterm, across the course of the 20th entry what you find is the fact that in northern cities , incarceration rates for African Americans have always been really high. They did not need to be high in seven cities because pre1970, the south was essentially a police state. Segregation was the motive social control in the south. The rate ratio of incarceration blackwhite in northern cities like detroit and chicago taken altogether was roughly 8721 ratio black to white. The ratio today is about the same. Even as we have added more people into the system, the basic mechanism has not really changed too much. I think that is a profound challenge for all of us are interested in the conservation. We are not just doing with something that really popped up out of nowhere in the 1970s. Theyre dealing with something much more deeprooted. Dismantled in was the south, the incarceration rate in the south rose to be the same level as in the north. Issues way above the north. Good morning. It is no doubt that mass incarceration has had a devastating effect on the black community and in black neighborhoods. Is with all ofow the information coming out, we ly can see my question is more centered are two point 3 Million People incarcerated, but around 700,000 return annually. Any focust seem to be or any system putting place i had to deal with the 700,000 that return as well as the 70 of those that go back. Because of the fact that there is really no systems being put in place. The recidivism rate that im talking about. My question is, how do we begin affecting that rate and what we need to do to try to we have a huge structural problem. In her book she makes the point that i think every year enough prisoners come out of prison and jail. Every fast food job in america five times over could thats scary. I think about this all the time. He talk about the incarceration but are we going to send these folks back to the same besieged communities gecko folks were incarcerated come for particular communities to face disadvantage on a number of levels across a variety of dimensions and theyre letting people out of jail and sending them back into this communities. It is unfair to the committee also. What we have advanced the conversation i think the idea of lowering the number of people what are we prepared to do. I think this is the testing because ultimately, youre really talking about money. You are talking about investing in those communities. There is no other way to put it there is somee consensus and a consensus to say that where we are right now is a moral and to a large extent economic disaster. Is not just enough to cut the numbers, we actually have to invest in those committees. Are we there yet . I dont know. Good morning. Of e National Coalition if we assume that the activism in black communities and in the set 1970s and 1960s, and the linking of allies with White Communities as well, if we assume that has anything to do with that ramping up of the prison population, how would you compare and contrast what is going on today . Where you have organization such as black lives matter and the alliances beginning between black, brown, and White Communities. Young students particularly. How would compare and contrast that so we have some idea of the hurdles that are before us . It is good to see you. I think we are at a very interesting moments. I think in many ways one can be optimistic about this moment. There is, as i said, broad consensus from black lives matter movement. We are too far gone on the issue of incarceration. I dont know that we are proceeding the depth of the problem yet though. I dont know that we understand how bad it is. Again, we had an perrceration rate of 700 100,000. That is a huge number. It is gigantic. I believe we have on any given day 2. 2 Million People in our prisons and jails. There are roughly four times as many people in china. We have half a million more people its a gigantic, gigantic number. One of the things we hear and we may well here today, ill try to set the tone and say that we should be skeptical when we hear this is the idea that this can happen if we just let out enough nonviolent drug offenders. Im all for letting out nonviolent drug offenders, but a large number of our prisoners are in state jails and state facilities and something on the order of 52 of those people have committed but we would term as violent crime. We have to advance the discussion on that front. We have to ask ourselves, if somebody assault and body, if somebody kill somebody, is it worth taking their life away . Is that something that we want to do . How does that compare with the rest of the world and our own history . Only have situations where we get people of a life terms, what are we actually doing their . Is punishing people as harsh as we can a necessary thing in an essential way. We talk about lowering crime and increasing safety communities. We need to question things at the root level. I dont know if were quite there yet. That segues to the story i would love you to tell to just wrap up for us here. We have a guest in the audience today, odell newton who teaches in your story and maybe you can tell his story. I dont want to embarrass him. I would that really tell the story. For me, there were several pitfalls that i wanted to avoid when i went to the story and i wanted to push folks to not just think about the kids on the corner who got caught with a nickel bag of marijuana and somehow ended up in jail for 20 ye