Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming. Im a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise institute and a columnist at the washington examiner, and i think that youve seen erupt around the country especially this last year a discussion on criminal Justice Reform on over criminalization and all sorts of things we will focus on a specific aspect of that. My thoughts on why i picked this i have libertarian leanings and justice and mercy need to play up. I dont think we will get into a question of are we locking up all the millions of people that we lock up makes our country safer that is a tricky question to debate. Once we put people in prison, are we doing anything to help them or just burning lives. When you having prison sentences that serves a deterrent effect so it serves some good. It keeps criminals off the streets theres some good there. We call these correctional facilities. Are they just making things worse . So given the debate for some extent of criminalization although that will be relevant. Can we change anything going forward. I ask them asked them who they felt within their lives and i write about lobbying and politics and i run a former lobbyist politician. On mine right is my right is a lawyer and fellow republican Congressional Republican study committee. He passed through the revolving door and became a lobbyist in 1999. He wrote a book which was big reading in my house with my brother when he was in law school it was scalias dissent. It was an excellent book to get your final up and running. It is was against mandatory minimums and on my left, jeff smith former Missouri State senator congressional candidate who a lot of us stumbled upon in a documentary called ken mr. Smith still go to washington and he is now an assistant professor at the new school in new york. The reason i bring them here as they both have served time in prison. So before we get to the substance quickly. I was a lobbyist and the leader ended up being the scandal in the bush administration, and i was basically charged with Honest Service fraud. In a federal prison camp in maryland i forgot to mention i said the documentary name is ken mr. Smith still go to washington and what i have in my hand is the brandnew book for sale in the lobby called mr. Smith goes to prison which tells his story very well. Can you quickly tell us . Sure. I was in the senate in missouri and the moderator asked a question i found too intrusive and i took the end. No. [laughter] i will try to convince this as much as i can. Russ carnahan who was a successful twoterm governor and senator and sister and secretary of state. About three weeks before election day to the consultant billed himself as a practitioner of the political dark arts. He told by aides he wanted to put out a postcard detailing my opponent of the race. He wants to do this, should we give him the information and what should the voting record tell him and i replied i dont want to know what you do. So does that mean we should do it . And they said okay so they gave him the voting information which was publicly available. About a week after the campaign my attorney prepared an affidavit for me to sign in response to a federal Election Commission complaint. It provided any knowledge about the postcard even though i knew my aides had that with the person who figured it out and i found a false affidavit. My best friend called me and told me that the man who had done that five years earlier had just been picked up by the feds for mortgage fraud, bank fraud, illegal weapons possession, spousal abuse, cocaine distribution, human distribution i let my aides get mixed up with this monster and my best friend and i said what are we going to do what they come but if they come and knock on our door because this guy says five years earlier i can deliver something to you that a state senator so my best friend and i talk about that for a couple months and little did i know that entire time he was wearing a wire; a chance to stay out of prison was to do something similar and i didnt do that and i was sentenced to a year in federal custody for about ten and a half months. Part of where i want to start here is from your experience and your knowledge professionally, does prison do anything to help criminals and can it can if your dose if it or does it just sort of ruined lives. They should be kept away from civil society. Theres no doubt about that. I dont think anyone would disagree about that. They have a problem where they would keep offending person may be the only solution. For some theres a lot of people that were uneducated. These are not master criminals. If we ratchet up the penalties people will be more inclined to follow the law and that is in the population might not like i met with and read the code to figure out what they were and to costbenefit analyst us. They sold drugs because they wanted extra money. And i should say it captured my experience almost perfectly. There is a method called whitecollar prisons because not only are we whitecollar but there are no whitecollar prisons anymore so most people than my camps for violations serving minimum mandatory for drugs so it was a wide array of people. Some people needed to age out. They had just limited to brain functioning and they needed to grow up and mature. Other people who didnt speak much english and limited education were able to get their ged while they were there and they have helped. For most of the people though it is just killing time and people would say thats okay if youre bored your board doesnt bother me. But it should because while you are sitting there like a can on a shelf in the job market is advancing, technology is advancing, your family is moving on. Everything is changing and you have no responsibility when you were in prison. You may have a job thats a lot of makeshift straw this. Man is a creature that can get used to anything and that is what happens to prisoners youll hear they get institutionalized so you will hear what it takes to become a decent prisoner. You stay out of fights and arguments and you dont touch peoples other laundry so its just that sort of stuff. But you go to the commissary and have a limited amount of things you can buy. You learn that lifestyle. Theres a comfort in that that and when they get close to leaving to get nervous because they are afraid of the choices. So, for a lot of people, long sentences without any meaningful programming, and i will address that, because unless you were able to get a drug treatment, were you or you get your ged, theres nothing else available that will help you react when made and that is a problem so when you look at recidivism rates and people come out and reoffend the people who will do the right thing. Some people will be fine and will try to do the right thing. After a few years they are not going to be up to make ends meet. They have their family to support and they are at risk to go back to the lifestyle that sent them there in the first place and so i do want to talk and say theres so much more that can be done on the programming side of things but it has to be coupled in a way that not only do the do more to treat them while youre there because his compassionate and in our interest and reoffending but also we have to shorten the sentences to satisfy some of the ten or 20 years living in that kind of confinement. Connected you see anything where you thought people were being helped or improved or anybody that left sort of better impulse control or more prepared for the world when they came in . I wish i could tell you differently but in my experience , presented a lot to create criminals and almost nothing to rehabilitate people. If im going on for too long just to stop me. But the first way is the prison reinforces peoples tendencies to operate outside of like the rules and outside of the normal economy. When you get roughed up locked up most prisoners are destitute. They get into prison, they dont have someone on the outside to put money in their books. Maybe some of them do for the first year but then people say they kind of forget about them and so the problem with that is you dont have it made coming to your soap computer and cutandpaste to the basics of personal hygiene are when youre looking virtually on top of hundreds of thousands of other people and hygiene is a really important for a lot of reasons i could get into later but the point is if you want to have a normal lifestyle where you make you have to find a helpful indicator range from things that are totally legal like those that develop their artistic talent and those that go portraits of other guys do things the hard little bit less legal like bookies who make book on the prison basketball games to the guys that run barbershops which the business is fine with to those that run tattoo parlors which im fine with. To them the most too bad the most lucrative hospital which is used for smuggling contraband. So, theres all types of and i would tell you i agree with almost everything you said except i found some very skilled men and i would say that in my experience theres not a single concept you could learn that you could learn inside the prison new product launch, quality control, territorial expansion, mismanagement, barriers to interest. I heard every one of these elucidated numerous times using so much different lingo. Unfortunately there was no training at all in the Business World but they have we have learned through success in the drug world, no training to turn those into formal enterprises on the street. There was a computer course that was offered. There were three courses while i was there, one had a prisoner teaching so that prisoner didnt really care that much from most of the time and so if you did in 20 go you didnt have to go into them there was the course because what better way to compare someone for successful reentry than to learn how to code tomatoes and water for two weeks. And then third is a further with the computer skills are supposed because to course for everyone on their way out. Finally, we have been salivating the whole time over this room 12 brandnew computers but no one ever got to go in. It was locked the whole time. I sat out the computers and i was an aggravation and southeast kentucky and the ceo tells us sign in so the sign in the form and hes as we all sit down and hes a youth event button on the bottom rack, push and. So the computer turns on and we sit there for about 90 seconds. A prisoner says custards playing with the mouse and says if you push the shut the f up. So we sat in silence in about 40 minutes and he says youre a member that little button, push it again and didnt get the f back to your cell. But since we had all signed in, they could tell them that we have successfully completed a computer skills course and now the prison could get their stipend from the federal government for having done that. So that i would say was sort of the indicative of the amount of reading the petition going on. So thats where i want to go now is with programming that it does happen. Its supposed to be part of the federal system for the state system and do they try it and what can work . It seems like a good thing they would learn because that is a huge part of what sort of creates a coming apart at some go to computers and others dont. Are they care they are based, are they just can you teach somebody something. Fullstop or is it to lead by the time what would you want to see . These are eight discourses. They are taught by inmates. Most of the program is taught by inmates and so i didnt take hydroponics but i could take a class on Current Events or crochet and get credit and it was all busy work and it was just the Prison Administration wanted to show that they were keeping us busy. When they go to the review you would give them a certificate im so busy working hard rehabilitating youth. They felt so good about this column of the road and on. But i talk about it and i think that its so corrosive because these are people that need to learn the rules. Check was saying there are people that do these things that are i didnt really care about tat. Ust iho its just i thought we have broken the rules and this is the one place where you really wantp to get on board into theri right right thing. The prison doesnt care, so itr dont mind, i dont hands. Luste. The program is lackluster in o terms of the things i fthought. Theres there is tried today, but theren are fewer addicts then peoplee would think. There were only a couple peopleh that work in and reallye strung nt and needed help. Apbably is not necessarily why they committed their crime. Eir they were trying to make money if they were selling drugs were funds, but the thing i thought was missing the most was some sort of behavioral therapy, som sort of psychological work, some therapy. A lot of these folks come fromdo communities where that is frowned upon and there are the o people everywhere who frown on this, but the lack of impulse control, that just that lootional disconnect, a lot ofte the behavior is antisociatsl anw thats whath got them in thisthp position and now they are going through the most antisocial place in the world where you walk around with headphones on screaming your music to know what i know i can tell you to be quiet because no one will screw with you and its just perpetuates the worst behaviors and so i think the fights you see would be overturning the tv channel or someone calling aba foul in a basketball game in hand those are things that you s have these people in a fishbowlo they may not seek this help otherwise, but while you have been there, there are certain things you couldg do to work wih them to get them thinking abouts their thinking patterns andts o thinking about the behaviofr and th the choices they are making andt the roots of those choices. D people do what they were raised to do and they are not thinking inout it otherwise through evenh those of us who tried stillthata struggle it have to nremindthat ourselves why we think that way. These guys are not thinking of any of that and its not cool, sither. The prisoner we had 250 prisoners and onewe trained psychologist and she was aheadps of the drug treatment program. She didnt want to do any more t work than that, s so when i was thereafter a while and i had two young girls i was missingwe t terribly and i knealw other guys were missing their kids and we talked of bell putting together a group for aaa or differentethe support groups and i said letsa put together a fathers groupt o talk about ideas to stay in touch with our kids and how user minutes and use things like finding out the guy who creates pictures that we can send, to anything you can find to staynt close to your children thats what you want to duke and youbud also want to be on to say i had a visit this weekend and am really sad. You dont go cry on your bunkmates shoulder. Be a its a mens prison, so to have a group like that i thought this will be a sure winner and a psychologisti wanted no part ofd it and would not even respond to my emails. So, theres a lot of lip service and talk about familydone and le reunification and how important is to stay close, but not a lot gets done and as jeff said, that co who just said now you can leave, thats the level ofnyt concern. It sort of i checked the box he gave you your computer training and it is a matter if you i goingything. There are things that can be som done that are etnot being done d i understand some states to a better job, but the federal government is very heart far behind. I think you used in your book the phrase convict coated aboutr how you have to behave to not have other prisoners make your h life horrible. But, before you. Ellipsis i want you to sthatay what you cay about programming. Do you think psychological help as possible, helpful, what areyu your thoughts . I agree with everything kevin said. You guys are crocheting works wow, we had that. Prevents . I applied to Current Events. Rses i was put to work i see a couple of you have the book and if you turn the book on the bac you can seea what my job was. I was. I worked in the warehouse on the loading dock and you can see my crew that i worked with. You can probably tell which when i was. Him him anyway, no, i mean, imb not trying to be a martyr. Time you do the crime and you do theh time and you doe the timing yout to the time now they want you ti , not how you want to do the time, so i wont complain aboute my job, but i definitely think had a decades worth of teaching experience and i had been a a state senator and i would have loved to teach courses. A blacky study ma i applied first to teach a black history course because i was a black studies major in collegean and most of the prisoners were black and i thought that would have been interesting. I wanted to teach a currentat events course. And i i applied then, i realized a thing that political ori ideological charge would never fly. So, i applied to teach like aeai Job Interviewing course and resume writing that could teacht guys format that, but t they ignored everything. Although, about three weeks before i gaot out they did finally moved me. Which, was interesting. I had fallen i worked we moved about 35 or 40000 pounds of food ar day into freezers tht are bigger than this room and i fell off the top of a freezer. W then, i dont think they were going to move me, but the t Lieutenant Governor of missourif happened to visit the next dayg and then they figuredh he mighth have come in responsea to mehino falling even though it wuas totally a quince since and thene have juiceed if you behind you, then they did moveth me and set eme to the educationn department and then i wasened hardened at least he wasnt at g going to be long, but i hopeteay that we get to teach and the guy in charge of it said, in may,l i which are education level and i said phd. He said all right, we will starr you off sweeping the classroom, so i swept the classroom for myo last month. One thing int would say not s put too much on the bureau ofg prisons because i was going tobe teach a writing class aas well course because a lot of guys asked me to edit things they were doing in a Court Filings or coursework with correspondence coursess at they w iould ask me to write ani think writing is a lost skill anyway, but imprisoned its pretty miserable, so some guy said why dont you teach it class in writing and thinking, resume, cover letters, basicd ia stuff rtand i have to say part the problem was no one would have come. F a couple of the guys with seeklr bail privately, but they would not come from five to six at night because the prison were not make them. So there were some guysthe interested and but, i dont want to put it all on the prison. The prison should have made the come. Tha the head of education i said he said while he studied anothee class he said that room does seem and hold people. Eopleithin thats electrical class and hei. Said right, theyre not goinger and he said the why my givingth them all certificateser and he said because you dont know ifnd they are there not he sai