Live coverage of the lost Angeles Times festival of books on the campus of the university of southern california. A couple more hours of live coverage ahead. You can get our full schedule at book tv. Org and you can follow us on twitter or facebook to get the behindthescenes photos and other photos of the festival. We are now joined by Bob Streisand are who has written this book, incarceration nation a journey to justice and prison around the world. In your book you write america is the Worlds Largest largest jailer . Guest we are and it is a title we should wear shamefully. We have 5 of the worlds population, but 25 of the world prison population, 2. 3 Million People incarcerated. We spend over 50 billion a year on corrections and when it comes to the Racial Disparities that our system there are more africanamericans under correctional supervision today than there were slaves at the height of slavery in 1850. Host how did we get there . Guest its all really goes back to the war on drugs in many respects, which began in the late 70s and created a series of disparities in sentencing and goes back to tough on crime sentencing laws that made it easier for people to go to jail, easy or for them to stay there and easier for them to stay there for extended period of time. Host you are a native new yorker and there was a period in the 70s where new york was pretty ripe with crime. People were scared. Was there a different solution . Guest well, for when fear is a terrible peer is not something to be ruled by when we make decisions as far as government and as far as these kind of things because fear makes you act rashly and what happened was this fear was played upon and prison was presented en masse incarceration was presented as the only way to deal with crime and we know that there is no correlation between the drop in crime rates and that rising massac operation incarceration. So, we know there are other routes. It did not have to be this route for mass incarceration. Host we are in california, the home of three strikes and youre out. Has that been affected in any way . Guest hardly. California three strikes and youre out with the rocksolid drug laws in new york and all sorts of top sentencing laws that have landed millions of people in jails and prison and under correctional supervision, draining our resources and draining as of the value of these human beings who could be contributing to six sided society. Host Baz Dreisinger is our guest. We will put the phone numbers up in the book is called incarceration nation. 2027488200 eastern and central time zones. 202748 we will begin taking those calls a minute. I think you get the idea of what we are talking about. Baz dreisinger is also an associate professor of english at the John Jay College of criminal justice, which is part of a City University of new york. She is also founder and academic director of a group called prison to college to two cep program, which is what . Guest it is a credit bearing College Program in a prison in upstate new york that allows students to take College Classes on the inside while incarcerated and guaranteed a spot in the university of new york system upon release, so its a College Program prison, but also eight Reentry Program that makes Higher Education the centerpiece of a former incarcerated persons new line. Host which other nations did you look at it why . Guest i visited nine nations. Rwanda, uganda, south africa, jamaica, thailand, brazil, australia, singapore and norway and my overall vision was to part, one was to rethink some of the fundamentals of our criminal Justice System and specifically our prison system by way of other countries and rethink the fundamental concept of which are prison system relies and the other one was that i wanted to broaden our conversation, which i think is certainly a growing public conversation around Massac Carson ration in this crisis of prison. I wanted to broaden the conversation to include the world and to include especially the impact of americas system upon the world in these various countries. So, each of these country represented a particular issue i wanted to explore such as solitary confinement in a federal super max prison in brazil or prisoner reentry in singapore. The role of arts in uganda and jamaica. Forgiveness and restorative justice, which is a fundamental theme of the book in south africa and rwanda. Host there is a special prison philosophy or special prison and norway took what is that prison about . Guest so, norway is getting a lot of attention lately for being progressive and has a reputation for being very progressive as a society in general, but particularly when it comes to social welfare and criminal justice and in norway they have something called the principle of normality, which is sounds simple and yet is anonymously complex and that is that someone in prison norway gets incarcerated and they lose their liberty in their liberty only and they are still part of the community. They still are receiving social welfare from the same community that they left and when they come home they are to be fully reintegrated into society that they went away from and that has resulted in some a very progressive working and founding prisons and norway. In scandinavia throughout scandinavia there is something called the open prison where people are able to go and come from prison and work jobs on the outside, spend weekends with family and come back to prison and really have as close to a normal incarcerated life as much of a paradox is that is as possible and they also have other prisons that are a bit more traditional in that they have a wall. I visited one that had a roll around and its traditional in that respect, but it is gleaming and beautiful and has every form of rehabilitated programming and therefrom jobtraining to a music studio to cooking class, really giving people an opportunity to reinvent themselves and genuinely enact this thing we call rehabilitation. Host should life sentencing frequent around the world . Guest absolutely not. America is inimitable in the way that we give out life sentences. We are actually one of only nine nations to give out life sentences and the Death Penalty. Our sentences are longer than any other country in the world and in most of the countries i visited a life sentence did not even exist. It existed in theory, but once you hit 25 years is considered a life sentence and that includes norway and even countries like brazil and south africa where we might think of prison conditions as much harsher than ours. Again and again, i mean, the Great Sadness of that reality is that again and again studies have shown us that longer sentences dont make us safer. People a jet of crime. They are costing us money and they are feeling years and years of peoples lives for no good reason. Host when you say people age out of crime, what do you mean . Guest in other words we know that people hit a certain point in life where they are less likely to commit crime and thats known as the aging out of crime theory and yet we still keep people in prison in their 50s and 60s when a studies have shown their likelihood to commit crimes again is very low. Host what do you say to a victims family who after maybe 15 years of someone who is convicted of murder is let out . Guest im glad you asked me that because i am asked about victims all the time and i start the book, the journey in rwanda with victims because i firmly believe that the first thing we should talk about when we talk about crime is not the offender, but the victim and i look at rwanda as a way that on alternative to prison System Community course that systems of restitution and reparations were created that benefited the victim instead of necessarily punishing the offender, which is our traditional approach and i went to rwanda and then south africa to really think about this framework and ultimately what i found again and again and also included in the studies i looked at is the idea that our criminal Justice System as it stands now is not benefiting victims as it should, which is actually the fundamental problem with it here victims are not having their needs met. They are not at the center of the Justice System. Sending someone away to prison, which we assume will be healing for the victim is more often than not is not healing for that victim, so i think it is encumbered upon us to think about ways to heal the victim and to allow that victim a better opportunity to be served by a criminal Justice System that is not doing a good job of that now. Host Baz Dreisinger is our guest. Incarceration nation is the name of the book and will he is calling in from new orleans. Lee, youre on the air. Ahead. Caller i was wondering what her position would be about legalization and medical eyes in drugs similar to what has happened in portugal, whether that could have an impact on on the incarceration rates being so high in the United States. Host before we get your answer, what is her her answer what is your answer . Caller i support legalization and i think the portugal approach would probably be the best and build on the best to legalize all drugs and medical eyes a certain portion of and i think that would really have a major impact on incarceration, but im not sure she studied the incarceration issue better than i have, so im not clear. Host thank you, sir. Guest i am in agreement with you. I am in favor of the regulated legalization of most substances and i certainly think and we have seen this again and again in terms of what studies are telling us that this would reduce the recursive incarceration rates dramatically took not just here, but globally. Its important to keep in mind that our drug policy has reverberated through the globe and many countries i have visited, they are countries that have mimicked the us is tough on crime policy when it comes to drugs. But, i will say that it is important to remember also that even if we let all of the drug offenders out of prison, if we changed our laws around drugs, which is critical, we would still have an estimated approximately 1. 5 Million People in prison, still enough to make us up there at the top and so the changes have to extend beyond drug laws and we have to rethink the role rules and regulation around for. We have to rethink all of the ways that we are dealing with quote unquote violent offenders and not just nonviolent offenders. Host where did your interest in this topic come from . Guest a bit about roundabout story, but i was doing a lot of work on the culture of crime and im an english professor and i have written quite a bit about hiphop culture and america Popular Culture and did a series of stories that led to me being invited into prisons to give talks and from the first time that i did that i could not look away. I think being in an educational context in a prison and being among people whose enormous potential uc is not given an opportunity to flourish in the world just depress me profamily that we are losing some of our best citizens and our best potential contributors to society. Host next call. J from portland, oregon. Baz dreisinger is our guest. Caller you gave a pretty good overview of the european model. What particular in the us is the most progressive state . Guest well, i think it would it depends on what we are talking about with regard to what particular issue. Beaumont has some progressive policy around drugs uncertainly the legalization of marijuana in various states from colorado to california where we are makes a tremendous difference, but overall, we are not in a very good place in any state and the reforms that have to happen have to happen in a broad scale nationwide. Host will, torso, oklahoma. Go ahead, will. Caller i appreciate you taking my call. Im in oklahoma and we have very stringent laws. In the state of oklahoma we used to lead the nation i believe in female incarceration. Per capita, of course. We did lead the nation and mail male inmates, not talking about jail, prison, felony convictions and my question is of all [inaudible] the United States, the nation leads incarceration as a whole oklahoma led the incarceration rate. Certain crimes and felonies in other states etc. I spent two years in prison for 2 grams of marijuana. Im not a pro marijuana guy. I got caught and him guilty. For two years i was shocked. I said your honor, seriously and heres what my attorney told me and i wanted to share this with you and i will let you comment. We have to stop locking up people we are mad at and lock up people we are scared of, by the crimes, people crimes against people, Violent Crimes, those are the folks we need to have incarcerated and stop locking up people for these petty crimes, but in the state of oklahoma host will come i think we have that idea. Lets hear from our guest. Guest thank you. I agree with that statement although i would say this, we need to look harder at who we are afraid of our who we think we are afraid of and we knew to remember the people in prison are people in prison and we imagine often times people say what do you do with the rapists and murderers, someone who is habitually committing murder is a very tiny percentage of the prison population. The bulk of what i see in the us and i have seen globally are people who are essentially by way of poverty and racism being produced from prison cells and as a result its not about necessarily their bad choices, but a nation with bad policies that are producing systemic racism and poverty that craze the prison population and this is mirrored throughout the globe whether we are talking about blacks and latinos in the us, blacks and socalled colored folks in south africa, the hill people in thailand, all people who have been failed by our system, so we should be careful around this nonviolent versus Violent Crime division because its a far more complex issue than it sounds. Host Baz Dreisinger, what super max and who is there . Guest super max is a dramatically solitary confinement driven prison that is supposedly for the worst of the worst criminals and i put that in quotation marks. America invented the super max in the 1980s and then this model became imitated around the world and is used in estimated at about a dozen countries and its extreme solitary confinement for 22, 23 hours it day. I visited a federal super max that has been built in brazil in the last decade or so that was literally a living hell on north where people are going insane before your eyes because we know again, from psychological studies around super max that that level of solitary confinement damages you permanently and i also learned there something that mimics the us as well, which is that we say its where the worst of the worst, but often its use as a Political Tool to punish people or something as sort of flight and looking at aggression officers the wrong way can land of someone in solitary confinement and thereby damage their psyche for life and leave us with the liability as being society of welcoming that damaged person back when i come home. Host next call for our guest comes from carol in texas. Hello, carol. Caller hello. Host please go ahead. Caller my question was, what would you recommend states do with crimes that are drugrelated . How should they handle those . Host we talked about that a little bit earlier, but if you would, quickly. Guest i dont dramatically distinguish between dealing with crimes that are drugrelated or not and for one as we talked about earlier im in favor of the legalization of most of substances and a whole different policy around them. Drugs should be treated as a Public Health issue and not a criminal justice issue, but i can add that i think even when it comes to what are categorized as a Violent Crimes i dont see prison as a morally, economically or socially responsible response and if we thought more in terms in this whole host of things we need to rejigger to get our prison system our criminal Justice System where should be, but if we put Community Policing and justice and restitution in a different paradigm at the heart of our system i think our world and the global world would look very differently. Host mark is in seattle. Mark, go ahead with your question or comment. Caller im interested in the way felons have their Voting Rights taken away and im wondering how common that is in the rest of the world. It seems like an additional way to punish people and a strip them of citizenship. Guest great question. I can honestly say that in almost every country i visited at a certain point someone when i was in one of the most awful prisons, the most painful places someone would look at me and Say Something along the lines of, i cant believe in america you still have the Death Penalty or in america i cant believe you have life in prison and one of the things i heard quite a bit was, i cant believe someone comes home from prison and cannot vote in many states in america and that is an extremely rare thing and its shocking to many countries who believe in the idea that when you come home from prison you have your rights restored. Its on a appalling problem thats connected to the larger crisis of reentry altogether, which is that we send people to prison and we stigmatize them for life and that is something again that america does well. Host Baz Dreisinger, what do you think of the recent conversation were having in this country about Prison Reform and the fact that the Koch Brothers have also advocated for some Prison Reform . Guest on the one hand im excited about it. Its wonderful that this is