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pennsylvania, nothing stood taller than the jail on the hill. every family had been touched by it. we all had tails of broken men in and out of lockout. black fathers, sons, uncles, perpetually absent from weddings, graduations, birthdays, funerals. i just assumed i would end up there, too. back in high school, my friends and i were already skilled in trading narcotics, breaking and entering. we were taking what we wanted from rich white college boys, unconsciously stealing back what long ago had been taken from us. i always drove the get away car. my best friend, tommy, rode shotgun. we were young and smart rushing fast down roads leading us closer and closer to that ominous jail on the hill. then, i read james baldwin and i discovered that it didn't have to be that way.

baldwins fiery words gave me courage to dream. i applied to college. i left easton for freedom. tommy stayed, spending his whole adult life going in and out of jail. when i heard tommy committed suicide, i decided to try to understand his journey through the prison system, to uncover the whole truth about the all consuming, all powerful all american jail. the prodigal son, i climbed into my car and headed home. it felt right that i was not running away, that for the first time, i was driving full-speed towards the jailhouse on the hill. ♪ ♪

♪ >> this was my house, wow. this was the house i grew up in. so this corner here is where i would catch the school bus on the first day i moved to this house, i was standing on the corner and the paper boy walked by and called me an nigg -- i think it was the first time someone called me an n -- his mother said, don't do that, because those people will burn our house down.

>> like so many determined black women without resources, my mother cleaned the homes of well-to-do white women. she raised me with no help from my father, who had disowned us. i never felt i belonged. i wanted something more than i could see. i wanted to be somewhere far away from that jail on the hill. community college was the first step. then i got a scholarship to study journalism at nyu. the stories i reported propelled me to become an independent filmmaker. >> hello. look at your hair. >> i know. >> looks good. >> thank you. how you doing. i'm good, i'm good. >> back when tommy and i were hanging out, suzy was never far away. tommy and his older sister were unacceptable.

she looked after him, protected him. she was devastated when he took his own life on his 52nd birthday. >> everyday, that was my first phone call of the day, he would talk to me every morning. >> wow. >> knock on the door. >> getting jerica ready for school, talk to me on the way to the bus stop. >> where is -- >> he's here. >> he would have bouts with police. >> he would drink and somebody would call the cops. he would drink and get loud. that drunk and disorder. the cops would come, spray him with mace and handcuff him and all this, now, he's resistant and they put him in the tank. they kept him one time, a year, two years, a year and snaffle. >> what! they didn't charge him with

anything, held him for a year and a half? >> drunk and disorderly. one time the police picked him up overnight and we went over there right away. they said, he's fine, sleeping and when he wakes up we'll let him go. that night they stripped him down buck naked and when they let him go he was all bruised up. >> it must do something on your psychological state of mind. >> it does. >> in and out of prison so many times. >> tommy's daughter, jerica lived with him. everyday he got her ready for school. he cooked all her meals. she was 15 years old when he father committed suicide. now, with tommy gone, jerica struggles to find a reason to go on. >> it was on his birthday, i was coming from philly. >> i ran upstairs to change my

shoes and my friend ran out screaming. i'm like, what happened? >> your dad, your dad. >> i was laughing, what happened? did he scare you? >> no. he's dead. >> what was that like? >> no, i was hospitalized three times. i blacked out. that traumatized me. it didn't make sense. i just talked to him and he was just telling me what he would cook when i get home, to see my dad at home alone on his birthday when he helped everybody, he died alone by himself. everything was gone. >> you have his name tattooed? >> on my arm. i feel like he's still with me. still there. i still talk to myself, talking to him. when i go to church i feel like i'm talking to him sometimes. >> of all my friends growing up, tommy had the most discipline. he wasn't a thug.

it didn't follow that he'd be the one who ended up in so much trouble. but that's the cruel catch of the system. it only takes one time. the more tommy went to jail, the more he started acting like a thug. tommy hung out in the westward of easton. the west ward is home to the poor and black of easton. above the west ward is the juvenile detention center. above that at the very top of the hill is this jail. a beautiful mid-evil castle, the bottomless receptacle for a pipeline carrying black bodies from the west ward to the juvenile detention center, straight into the jail on the hill.

>> we locked out for 23 hours. no reason. >> it's like that, 24/7. >> how many inmates are in this jail? >> currently we have 776 inmates. with you here, it's a little tense, loud, the hair on the back of your neck stands up. you would hear housing not too far away getting a little rowdy. >> what's going on? >> there it is. a few individuals maybe having an altercation right now. we have a few officers want to go check it out right now. we'll see what's going on, you know. so if anything would happen, we happen to have a fight or anything, make sure you step to the side.

>> although i knew the statistics, seeing so many black men in cages made me furious. >> so when did you get in here? >> i just got in today. >> today. i'm obviously familiar with the system and how sometimes corrupt it can be or, you know, how messed up, you know, it can be for something so small to be something so big and something so long lasting, you know. >> tell me about the system. >> well, i mean, it just seems like everything that you do, no matter if you're a good guy, you know, it's inevitable to end up here. it's been such a long process, you know, just coming in and out and just being part of the system now, it's just like you feel like you're never out. you know. >> any recent suicide attempts? >> no, ma'am. >> two years ago, kordei got a

dui. he spent five months in jail for driving under the influence, then, had to pay exorbitant court and jail fees. he missed one payment. then, seven police officers broke down his door and arrested him. >> the process for me has been two years. you can be a good person and it only takes one mistake for you to be in this system and once you're in, you're in. >> kordei wants to leave and get a fresh start elsewhere. he's trapped in easton because of an unending procession of probation and court appearances. > have an 8-month-old son and a 4-year-old, whose father committed suicide, god forbid and i've taken him under my own wing and being a father and mentor to him, showing him the rights and wrong and how to grow up with positive, positivity, you know, being an optimist, you

know, taking the worst situation and turning it around into something good. for me, personally, it also helps me like -- it motivates me to be a better person because i want to be truthful to who i am telling him. i don't want to sell him something i don't believe in. >> i could have easily ended up caught in the system, like, you know -- >> seriously. >> 1 in every 3 black males in america. >> man, you're talking to the choir right now. i understand exactly what you're saying. that sucks for it to be like that but it's the world we live in. you would think after years and years of, you know, integration and, you know, being equal to, you know, the next guy, the guy next to you, it would change, but it doesn't. >> no. >> no. not at all. >> kordei's story is a lot like tommy's.

i know it would have been my story, too, if i hadn't got out of easton. i got out but my friends didn't. growing up, i was very aware of being different. long before i admitted the truth to myself, i bore the shame of home mophobic bullying. -- homophobic bullying. i was called faggot. my grandfather called me a cisse. as young as i was i knew no one in easton would accept this thing about me. my safety, my very survival depended on how well i could hide my sexuality from everyone, even tommy. when i packed up and left home, it was in search of other people like me. in the 1980s, every closeted kid in every small town in america

knew that gay people lived and breathed in the openly queer pulse of new york city. when i left easton i never looked back. the irony is homosexual may have saved my life. >> we thank you, lord, for the resilience of the human spirit, for the resilience out of the ashes we rise. >> church was always a big part of our life growing up. tommy played the drums in the band and i sang in the choir. my biological father was deacon from another church. when my father and mother met they were both marrieder to people. they had an affair. my father chose not to acknowledge me as his son. i felt abandoned by him.

after my mother left easton, i had no reason to go back. being there brings back all the demons i thought i left behind. >> hi. >> remember me? >> good to see you. >> he's there 13 years. >> you're a correctional officer? where were you? near sing-sing. >> yes. >> after church, i had lunch with tommy's family. how many of you know someone who's been in jail? >> everybody. >> i've been in jail. >> yeah. >> wait a minute. you've been in jail? >> yeah. >> the county jail? >> we've got county. >> mass incarceration has become an accepted part of life for poor people and black people in

america. it is so entrenched in our nation's identity we take it for granted and accept it as the norm. its roots are buried deep in our troubled history. when slavery was abolished in america in 1865, the united states congress created the 13th amendment to the constitution, which essentially redefined the parameters of slavery. neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been dully convicted exists in the united states. this clause has allowed americans to continue to enslave black people and poor people for over 150 years. today, america has the highest incarceration rate in the world. our jails and prisons are mostly filled with poor people and people of color.

i needed to see how this inhumane system worked. >> hey, paul. roger. nice to see you. paul wright, one of the most important advocates for prison reform has himself served time in prison. >> i spent 17 years in prison myself. i've known thousands of people over the years that have been in prison. i've yet to hear a person say, you know what, prison was really good for me and i fared very well. >> you spent 17 years incarcerated? >> i did. i was really surprised when i went to prison at basically the brutalization and dehumanization prisoners are subjected to. i thought about then 1990, 27 years later i still believe, if americans knew what was happening in prisons and jails

with their tax money they would demand reform and change. >> the united states has the highest incarceration rate in the world. since the 1980s, the rate has skyrocketed. how did we get to this point? >> you get tomas incarceration not by crime levels or crimes people are committing but criminalizing behavior and conduct. >> why is that? >> it took the united states from 1776 to 1990 to lock up its first million people. then the prison population doubled between 1990 and 2000. it took us 10 years to lock up our second million. we have widening gaps of inequality in this country. i vie mass incarceration as a tool of social control. >> what are they controlling? >> poor people. the criminal justice system in this country, its only function is to control and detain poor

people. >> what's the threat of poor people? >> social change and political change. poor men of color particularly are the foot soldiers of revolution in the world and in this country they're viewed as a threat. our current incarceration crisis has its ugly roots in the '60s and '70s. john ehrlichman, counsel to president nixon admitted that. the nixon white house had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people. we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be against war or black but by getting the public associate the hippies with them and blacks, that's what they did. >> it's a continuation of the deprivation poor black people

suffered in this country for the last five years. >> under president barack obama's administration with bipartisan support we had just begun to address the disproportionate number of poor black people behind bars. the numbers were starting to declined and his attorney general made it his mission to reduce prison populations. >> i will restore law and order to our country. >> today, there is a new president in the white house. he has a very different idea in mind. >> when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of the paddy wagon, you see them thrown in rough, i said, please don't be too nice, like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand, like don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody, don't hit their head, i said, you can take the hand away, okay?

>> donald trump has decided mass incarceration is a good thing and we need to increase the number of people in prison and increase prison sentences and turn back the clock on prison reform. many in his own republican party disagree with him. but his attorney general, jeff sessions, a relic from the racially segregated jim crow era of the south. >> today i announced i sent a memo to each of our united states attorney last night establishing a charging and sentencing policy for this department of justice. but it is important to note, unlike previous charging memoranda, i have given our prosecutors desperation to avoid sentences that would result in an injustice. this is a key part of president trump's promise -- >> sessions has told federal

prosecutors to ask for the most serious charges and harshest sentences against defendants. >> your opponents against mandatory minimums or tough sentencing is it disproportionately affects the minority communities but they most disproportionately affect the crime in those communities. they're the victims umm ultimately is what we're trying to stop. tough on crime ultimately benefits the communities victimized by crime the most. >> what about reducing prison populations? is that an issue, as i know that was for holder? >> i think our issue is reducing crime. i don't think we're trying to get to a result beyond that. i think that making sure that families throughout america are face from the most violent and dangerous criminals, that is our number one priority. that's what we're focused on.

>> what the department of justice fails to acknowledge is that studies have shown prosecutors are 75% more likely to charge black defendants with offenses that carry mandatory minimums. though minority communities may be started this does not justify the fact following conviction black defendants receive harsher sentences for similar crimes. it makes me so angry he chooses not to acknowledge our criminal justice system overlooks the crime in white suburban communities. instead, he chooses to only highlight crimes in communities of color. these racially microand macro aggressions only prove the prison systems is biased against minorities and even more biased against poor communities of color.

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i think most people don't know anything about the criminal justice system, right? they don't know. they're not paying attention, they don't care because it's happening to somebody else and often that person is a different skin color or ethnicity than they are and they just think, they did something wrong, all bets are off.

i also think if you talk to people and say, should you be paying for all your life for one disorderly conduct, or should you be in jail off and on for several years for writing one bad check or not returning one blockbuster movie, nobody knows that. >> what's the motivation to keep the numbers up? >> here's the thing. there's not one person that controls the numbers, right? the path to jail is made up of decisions by lots of different people, most of the time not in coordination with each other. suddenly, the jail is full. >> the bureaucracy of mass incarceration has grown into a monster of many heads. locking up large numbers of people began as a way to control black activists during the civil rights movements in the 1960s.

in the 1980s, black behaviors were criminalized as the war on drugs focused on crack. by the 1990s, with widespread racist fear of super predators, there were so many people incarcerated, prisons became an industry. now, that industry has become so lucrative, so far reaching the moral issue is complicated by the financial issue. after the shooting of michael brown by a police officer in ferguson, the u.s. justice department investigated. they found the local government was using unnecessary fees and fines in order to extract large amounts of money from poor and black people. >> this investigation found a community where local authorities consistently approached law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety but as a way to generate revenue. >> it's not just ferguson. these are the same kind of court

fees that got kordei thrown back in jail in easton. i have met many who simply cannot afford to get out. this modern day practice of punishing people for being poor is reminiscent of the debtor prisons of the past. >> can i ask what you're in for? >> i'm in for dui, my third, and i'm getting out in five days. i served a year. a whole year. >> this time, it's for a second offense, dui. >> how about you? >> i'm here because i owe $545 to domestics, child support. my case is being closed but i lost my job before i could pay the last payment and i'm here for six months now. >> just backwards. crooked county, i think. >> yep. northampton is all about their money. you owe them $5, you better give them $5? there's no help.

how is she supposed to pay child support when she's in jail? >> the reason i was on child support i went to get clean. i was a heroin addict. i was working. my living situation got messed up, i got kicked out, i had to quit my job and now here i am, over $545 an a case that will be closed as soon as i leave here. >> if you don't get the proper help the recidivism rate sky rockets. everybody is in and out, in and out. i think they need to offer more treatment. a lot of treatment centers around here are closing. i think that's a terrible injustice to people because you're not going get better sitting on a burning in a cell. you have to work through everything. it's a vicious cycle. >> it's a cruel cycle that often supplements the budgets of local governments as they extract unnecessary fees from people who can't afford to pay.

the cost of running the criminal justice system is also enormous for the rest of us. state governments pour money into, spending an average of 5% of their local budgets on correctional institutions. the federal government spends a whopping total of $265 billion a year, essentially paid for by taxpayers. who's profiting from the billions of dollars being spent and where does all that money go? one answer i hear a lot. private prisons. the truth isn't what you might think. >> what is the percentage of private prisons in america? >> it's pretty small. basically they're stagnant around 6% of the total northwestern prison population. one of the things, too, this is confusing the symptom with the disease. i think the private prisons are the symptom and only the government drives mass incarceration. private prisons are just feeding

off the process, profiting off the process, but they're not driving it. >> so who is driving it? taxpayers spend $265 billion a year on the criminal justice system. still, the question remains, where does all that money go? >> so tell me what you do and where we are? >> i'm the american director of an association, the only one we're aware of that focuses exclusively on the men and women who operate and work in our nation's jails. right now, we're on the shelf

floor of our conference. this is where vendors showcase their products and services used in jails, everything from clothing to food to medicine, security systems. if you run a jail, like running a city. >> tell me about these chairs. >> one of the manufacturers, norick, produces furniture for sxwrail jails, made out of plastic. >> to wash it down. >> easily maintained, no sharp edges, no way to take something apart and make a weapon out of it. it's a comfortable environment for an inmate. we want to keep inmates comfortable. >> that's not what i thought. >> the private company is just one of many companies that profit from correctional institutions. last year, their revenue was an estimated $22 million. much of it from this industry. i'm starting to see why this

$265 billion a year industry makes it so hard to change the system. >> basically the united states has done a good job of creating a self-perpetuating prisoner machine. their jobs depend on mass incarceration. sinclair lewis said it's hard to explain something to a man when his paycheck depends on him not understanding. >> to be fair, not just private companies. yearly $265 billion of our taxpayers money is for keeping prisons and jails going. wages are $38 billion a year, healthcare costs, $12.3 billion and $2 billion on food. as it is, with all profiteering factions -- >> why do you hate this term?

>> we're not manufacturing automobiles. no one profits from it. we also have shareholders. we're not traded on wall street. >> the company that's part of all of that. >> $265 billion a year in taxpayer spending means a sure profit for companies like securisk, who charge hiked up fees for prisoners to use phones to call their loved ones.

the most economically burrened of our society are weighted without a bread-winner and now gone and overly taxed? >> we're talking about a phone call? >> talking about a phone call. >> the fees inmates pay for everyday services are several times what we pay outside of prison. companies like securus continue to see their profits rise at the expense of disproportionately poor and black inmates. >> there are a number of companies that profit from the poor that end up getting lock up. whether telephone companies from usurious telephone rates. food service companies, there's a lot of money to be made in this industry. this particular account, you

have three mutual funds. we can look online and see what those mutual funds are invested in and see if they are involved in in some way profiting from the prison system. so i'm looking for corrections corp of america. there it is. it seems crazy, doesn't it? >> it's so mind-boggling. >> it's very warped. it may be time to tell your financial advisor there are certain issues you'd rather not be involved in. >> yeah. yeah. to think i'm an investor in that unknowingly is even more disturbing for me. i keep going to people and saying, is this a giant conspiracy? no. everyone -- just the way things are done, from the prosecutors to the d.a.s to the judges to magistrates, they're just all part of a system that works.

it's an industry. >> yes. although, if you look back 10 or 20 years ago or longer, i think it was almost -- they knew kind of how it was going to end up. right? they didn't scale that back. i think there were concerted efforts to not do anything about what was -- >> why do you think that is. institutional structure racism? that's the only explanation i can see.

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when someone is convicted and moves from jail to federal or state prison, the government now has legal access to them as a workforce. these prisoners work for almost nothing, making road signs, or mattresses or just about anything the government decides. the easton correctional facility is one of the oldest in new york. here many are enrolled in a prison labor program where inmates work for far below minimum wage. some people see these programs

as a good thing, training inmates for skills they can use when they're released. while others see it as modern day slavery. >> many of your speedometer signs, stop signs, all the road signs you're seeing as you drive down the road on any typical journey, they make many of them right here. what do they get paid? >> the pay rate ranges from 15 cents an hour to 65 cents and hour. >> what's the motivation not paying them minimum wage? >> well, wage and inmate pay rate is set by regulation, but you have to understand, a minimum wage employee in the community, that's assuming that they're meeting all the financial demands of maintaining a household, family, and all the attendant fiscal responsibilities there. purchasing of groceries, housing

costs, transportation costs, healthcare costs. for an inmate whose incarcerated in a correctional facility, those costs are not realized by the inmate. >> for time spent within the penal system, inmates will accumulate fees averaging $13,600. their families suffer huge financial losses in lost wages. by the age of 48, a former inmate will have earned $179,000 less than someone who has never been incarcerated. >> every time the prisoners have gone to court seeking to be paid for their labor, seeking to be compensated for their labor, the court's response is, you're slaves, you're slaves of the state. that's the exact words of court after court after court for the last 120 years. prisoners are slaves of the state and as such they're not

entitled to any compensation at all. >> i read in prison legal news companies like victoria's secret and starbucks have used prison labor. paul wright exposed those stories. >> what percentage of prison labor is corporate america? >> it's actually pretty small. i think this may be bad for your story, but the reality is that there -- at any given time, there's around 5 to 6,000 prisoners employed by the private sector in this country, you figure out of a workforce of 200 million people or 180 million people, that's not huge. >> but the truth is most prisoners aren't working for private companies, they work for the government. cheap labor keeps the prison system running. >> what are they doing? >> they're doing primarily what prisoners do, they run the prisons. so anything that prisoners -- anything that has to get done in

a prison, unless it's security related, usually prisoners are doing it. they're doing plumbing, they're doing maintenance, they're doing custodial and janitorial services, cleaning and cooking food, anything that is needed prisoners do. the prisons save a fortune by making the prisoners run the prison? >> millions, tens of millions. there is a ga over report that said it would cost congress tens of hundreds of millions of dollars each year to pay people for the work the prisoners did. we found the median wage in state prison was 21 cents and hour and in federal, 31 cents

and hour. in many they don't pay anything at all. in texas, georgia, arkansas, alabama, they are not paid anything at all. in some places they're required to work under threat of disciplinary action. if they say, no, i'm not going to work, they can write you up for that, send you to solitary for that. >> that's like slavery. to work for free and put you in solitary if you don't work or write you up for not working, why is that not slavery? >> in the prison labor debate we rarely hear from inmates. >> what do you say when people say they shouldn't have labor programs in prisons? >> i don't agree with that. i could be out there just walking the yard, be out there just angry. this is a buffer. this gives me an incentive to want to do the right thing, to do something different. the pay can be a lot better. >> i'm pretty sure someone is

making money off of it. >> the prison industrial complex could not exist without inmates. the entire prison industry would collapse without large numbers of people to incarcerate. to keep this $265 billion a year industry in place there needs to be a pipeline to provide a steady stream of new people. people who are dispensable. in the history of forced labor in americay those without power have often looked different from those in power. in america, those without power have often looked different from those in power. arresting those people who don't have power is the first step to filling jails and prisons. when police officers put the handcuffs on a young black man, chances are, he has entered the door of no return.

>> peter. roger. >> nice to meet you. >> nice to meet you. > get stopped all the time. when they stop me, they say to me -- the cop always says to me -- the i'm like i have to give my resume in order to make get out of the situation. so what do you think of that? >> it sounds like racism to me. >> what role does race play when. cops pull over someone like me? >> it probably you were pulled over for a traffic violation. race plays a role. this is america. race always plays a role. there's research on it. there's probably less of a role in why you were pulled over. it has probably much more of a role if they ask to search you. it's what happens after the stop is wrote you see a lot of racial

disparity and bias in terms of who cops search and who they don't. >> a recent study in san francisco found that blacks accounted for less than 15% of stops, but over 42% of non-consensual searches. even the whites were more likely to carry contraband. >> the way america is set up, if it's a white kid in a rich white suburb with a well-paid sympathetic police department that has to be more responsive to rich community concerns absolutely the treatment is different. policing is local. the courts are local. so all that matters. and so again, we're talking about systemic problems of income inequality, segregation, those problems are very real. but it seems like we don't want to focus on that. people in rich suburbs don't want to talk about the zoning restrictions they have that are there to keep poor people out and blacks are poor in this

country. those are real issues, but no one looks in the mirror and says how am i contribute iing with t problem. it's about those skrug up. the power of cops is to arrest someone. that's the legal authority we give police. but you can't tell them not to pull over roger because he's driving a nice car in a rural white community. >> you should tell him that. come here, babe.

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once you're arrested, you have to wait in jail until trial. unless you pay bail. tommy's sister suz sit told me that bail was a huge financial burden on their family. i understood more when i saw how bail works. the court sets bail and if you pay it, you get to go free until your trial. but the average bond amount is $55,000. that's measure a year's wages for most people.

>> most states in the country have what's called a right to bail. that's been proinvestigatored in two ways. money has become not just the primary, but almost the only way that people can get out of jail. so the numb of people who are sitting in jails across the country because they can't afford bail is really, really depressing. what you can do is if a bail is set you can't afford is you can go to a bail bondsman. they will front you the money. say they set it at $50,000. the average person doesn't have that kind of money lying around. they might have $5,000 lying around. if you can pay a bail bondsman 10% of your bail, they will front you the rest. almost every state has a bail bond industry. if you go to a jail, you may have seen this, everywhere

you'll see neon lights for bail bonds. that's what they do. they will go to the court and when people's bail is is set they will front them the money in exchange for a fee. and what happens is these bail bondsman form very powerful lobby. ing interests and they will lobby at the state house. any time you have bail reform, you can be sure that the bail bond industry lobbyists are there pushing to maintain the system how it is. >> from 2002 to 2011, the bail lobby spent $3.1 million to influence lawmakers. it makes sense why the bail lobby wants to stop reform. arrested people pay over $1.4 billion to the bail industry. that's over a billion dollars annually become sucked out of mostly poor industries. . >> you have already figured out

if i can talk you into doing this bill my clients are going to make some money on the bond premiums. >> things do not have to be this way. in fact, the united states is the only country in the world besides the philippines that allows a for profit bail industry. but arrest and bail is only the first step in the pipeline. once you have been arrested, a prosecutor steps in to decide whether to press charges. adam fosz is a former prosecutor in boston and he's seen firsthand how black men get sucked into the prison pipeline. adam knows that while prosecutors are often overlooked, they are actually the key to the problem of mass incarceration. >> the way i prosecuted cases for people in this community, if you ask anyone, they would tell you if anything it made it worse. and it's not because i'm evil or

a bigot or not thinking about these things. i was provided a set of tools when i walked in ask that's all i got. those tools were jail or no jail. it often depends on the color of your skin. >> by a show of hands, how many of you by. the age of 25 had had either acted up in school, went somewhere you're told to stay out of or drank alcohol before you're legal age. all right. how many of you shoplifted, tried an illegal drug or got into a physical fight even with a sibling. now, how many of you ever spent one day in jail for any of those decisions. how many of you sit issing here today think you are a danger to society or should be define d b those actions of youthful indiscretion. >> i don't think i have ever met

anyone who can explain white privilege to white people with as much charm as adam foss. >> i saw this system playing out that affected people that looked like us and in a negative way. i actually got caught selling a lot of weed and i was doing it across state lines. so it was a federal crime, but i was caught by my father in my driveway. and because of who he was in terms of being a respected community member and police officer, nothing happened to me as a result. i got a kick in the ass from dad and had a conversation about that and i was grounded or something, but i didn't need to go to jail or prison. so i just feel like it's unfair that the privilege that i had in having a mentor like my father and having that safeguard is the

difference between me and you. i was adopted. they could have been like no, we'll take this kid. i won the lottery. i got to go home with them and be raised in their schools. college was never a question. despite the fact that neither of my parent hs ever gone. that entire time i was messing up and doing things that these young people were doing but because i had interventions at the time pro social and not punitive and shaming and awful, i got out of that and grew up. it didn't happen when i was 19. it happened when i was 26 years old. went to law school. here i am. >> adam introduced me to julian, a young man who o has already had several rub ins with the law. he currently lives with his mom who raised him alone.

>> julian is dealing with a 2350irfirearm case. >> the details of the arrest are typical in cases involving young black men. julian and the girlfriend were riding in his car when a police officer pulled him over. he accused julian of reckless driving. not thinking he had a choice, julian gave permission to search his car. julian says he didn't know the girl in his car was in possession of a gun. although she says it was his. the da charged him with a felony, illegal possession of a firearm. >> that's how people end up right back in the same position. i don't think it's fair. i think they look at you as black and white. you see what i'm saying?

>> people all the time this is what they do. nobody showed them a different path to get money. you see what i'm saying? nobody gave them a different route. this is all i know how to do. you see what i'm saying? a person that works ain't going to sell no drugs. i'm not doing drugs. that's what they do. i don't know how to exlain. >> if the felony stick, the life he envisioned for himself won't be possible. >> he will be going to jail for 18 months. it just doesn't smell like justice to me. >> julian faces some tough odds. in the 1990s, prosecutors began

prosecuting felony charges at twice the rate they did before. young black men is have a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in their lifetime. to help young men like julian, adam travels all over the country trying to change the way prosecutors think about these cases. >> if we're going to reform this, everybody needs to do something a little different. 2.2 million people in jail or prison. despite making up 14% of the population, african-americans make up almost half of that number. it's not because african-americans commit more crime or a bunch of bigots. it's because bias rules our decision making? we don't make decisions based on data and technology and things that are give. ing us feedback. we make decisions base. ed on our life experiences as

individual prosecutor. >> when people think about mass incarceration, they think about jails and prisons being full of people and people sort of falling out of the windows and doors. that's a definition of mass incarceration. that was also a question of proportionality. in massachusetts, we do very well in terms of the number of people in our prisons. but we are second for a different reason. we are almost the worst in the country. therefore we need to look at the people who have the ability to send people to prison. those are prosecutors. one visit to a homeless shelter or a treatment center or domestic violence shelter to understand thr things we never learned in law school that we have to go out and experience for ourselves. it will make you happier at the

end of the day. it's not beginning to make you unbiassed. but at least it's going to give you more life experience. you'll be able to combat with life experience that you have had. >> his mom is frightened for his future. he had to wear ainb ankle bracet that make it is impossible for him to get a job. but the courts will only remove when julian gets a job. he's trapped in an inhumane cycle that perpetuates his criminalization. it's almost impossible to get out. >> prison is a supply problem. if they don't have the supply, they can't run their business. and they have no way, no way of actually take iing people from

street and putting them in the building. it requires the police. it requires prosecutors. it requires judges and it requires probation officers. the police, prosecutors, judges and probation officers don't make a dime you have prisons. we have no incentive to send people to prison. the reason we do is that's the tool that we were told will make us safer and people better. et we don't profit off send iin people to prison. if we can change what happens down here, police should be trying to reduce crime in their neighborhoods. prosecutors should be trying to improve public safety in their neighborhoods using data and science we know works. probation officers should not be. probation officers. they should be probation liaisons. they should be helping people stay out of jail. >> probation is another reason why so many people are in jail. probation officers used to be like social workers helping inmates make the transition to life on the outside.

but over the last 20 years, they have become more like law enforcement officers. >> mass incarceration is a result of the war on drugs and sentencing laws. but it's really especially in the jail system. it's probation violations. there's so many people sitting in jail for probation violations, which a lot of the time are not new crimes. so when you go on probation, you have general rules you have to follow. let us know where you live, your phone number, get employment, housing. none of those things if i don't do them are crimes. if i choose to not have a job, that's not a crime. if i choose to hang out with my friends, that's not a crime. if i choose not to get an education or to smoke weed, those aren't crimes. and yet as a prosecutor and as a probation officer, if you do those thing, i can send you to jail. and that's a dirty little secret

we don't talk about is how that functions. >> 76% of prisoner who is are released are rearrested within five years. many for probation violations. >> another thing we don't talk about is you as a person on probation, you pay the government to be supervised. so $65 a month when i was a prosecutor. i think it's up to $90 at this point. when you're a young black male with no employment opportunities and kids and no education and you're caught selling drugs to make money, you go through all this stuff and make it harder for you to get a job, harder for you to get. financial aid, harder to get services. and then tough pay for that. so what do you think is going to happen? how did when we created this system think this will be a good way to keep you from committing crime.

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kid childhood, wish everybody else could have, i used to have to hide beer and beg the cops not to take my dad. >> you would beg the cops not to take your dad? >> yeah, it was bad. the cops would take my dad so i used to cry so they didn't take my dad. when they took my dad, me and my brother would -- i don't know how to explain it. i don't know. it was bad. >> how much time did tommy spend in jail? >> a lot. >> like every month? >> it was more than every month. >> so the jail never got him any help or treatment. they would just throw him in jail. >> they would just throw him in jail. they put him in what they call a bubble up there. if they think you're suicidal.

they put you in a paper gown and you're up there and other people are in there. they can walk past and see you there. but he was in there for quite some time. they kept him medicated. he was so medicated that a lot of times he didn't know his name if you called it. but this went on for years. it went on literally for years. >> in tommy were alive it would break his heart to see what is happening to his daughter. she's millsed so much school he might have to drop out. the psychological trauma of jail isn't just shouldered by the person in prison. the families bare much of it too. watching her weep for her father triggered a deep well of sorrow i shoulder as a black person in america. the system exploited tommy. he might still be alive if the

courts were designed to rehabilitate instead of criminalize. >> how much of your job as a police officer did you spend dealing with mental health issues? >> significant part. sometimes it's hard to tell when it overlaps with alcohol and drugs but also just general family crises. i wish police didn't have to deal with people in mental cris crisis. yes, cops and should be better trained in dealing with mental issues, but at some level, i don't think that should be the officer's job. >> the idea that we have even equated mental health care and linked to mass incarceration is another moral strike against us as supposedly civilized humane

people. can you imagine a worse treatment program than jail. >> the correlation between mental illness and incarceration is truly frightening. the numbers for mental hospitalization plummeted while the incarceration rate of people with mental health issues skyrocketed. >> it shouldn't be the responsibility of justice system actors any way to be the primary, the tirs responder for people with mental illness or people who are self-medicating with alcohol or drugs. because of depression or trauma or all this kind of stuff. it shouldn't be the criminal justice system. that's what we've got. so a lot of the work around reform is how do we make that system better at spotting those folks and finding alternatives to get them out. >> there were people inside of the jail system. i know that seems like an oxymoron. there are individuals that are in bad situations. >> one of my best friends from high school tommy, tommy spent his whole life in and out of the county jail.

he never got any treatment. i didn't understand how that could happen. i wonder how many other tommys there are. >> they should not be spending time inside our institutions. they need to be where help can be provided. we're defacto mental health institution nous. that in itself is troubling. i can say that when i first came into the system in 1995 i was an individual that thought people used the mental health claim to get off the cases and different things of that nature. i had an opportunity to interact with some individuals and member tall illness is real. it's real a. it's a real problem inside our jails. in miami-dade, 62% are classified with some type of mental illness. we figure out a way to treat that issue or divert them into the proper resources in the community, our numbers go down and we can better service those inmates that are inside our system for something other than

that. >> that's a massive number. i had no idea. >> jails serve because there are in our community. there are some bad people out there. i get that. not everyone needs to be in jail. jail should be the last stop for an individual who we have exhausted all means as a society. if you look at it from dollars and cents, would you prefer to pay a jail system $200 a day to house this person and then return them back to you within a matter of days sometimes or would you prefer to spend your money on a diversion nar program where they can get. the treatment and never end up in that street again. >> so it's costing us money. >> it's costing you money. i would argue it cost you more money to house the wrong person inside of a jail system than to get that same individual treatment. >> you must have the only job where if you guys are out of work, it's probably a good thing for society.

>> absolutely. >> isn't that kind of weird? >> that would be a pink slip i will gladly accept. >> i don't want to take john's job away, but what would american jails look like if intent were rehabilitation? it might look like the netherlands. their criminal justice system is so effective that a thinker of prisons remain empty and crime has gone down 30% in the last ten years. >> is it me or it's very peaceful. >> it's very quiet. it's very relaxing. >> that's shocking. >> is it? >> it feels like a nice hotel. the beautiful colors. >> what can we learn from you?

>> the fact that we try to start with reintegration on day one. almost all of them have to go outside. we hope that we can reach them. we also try to reach their mind, wait they think. why are you acting the way you do. >> so you have empathy. >> it's really interesting. the toilet is in the room and it's open. to me it take was your dignity. my friends and family that have been incarcerated and being in prisons, everything is geared toward taking away your self-respect and your dignity. and you leave there with so little self-respect. you're beaten down. >> i think it's important to say

it the punishment is in the length of the sentence but not in the prison circumstances. the prison circumstances must be human. as human as possible. >> america has the highest rate of incarceration. while the netherlands has one of the lowest. that's because the penal system is intent on rehabilitation. dutch inmates keep their right to vote, some welfare benefits and are allowed to go home to spend time with their families. in the netherlands, prisoners keep their rights. in america they are stripped of them. julian is busy getting ready for his trial. in a last ditch empt effort to turn his life around, he and his mom have moved to road island. >> i won't want to be in.

boston because i feel like if i stay in boston, i will be locked up or dead. it's crazy. i got to go. once this is done, i'm done. i'm out of here. i'm not going back to boston. you got to change with them. that's where i'm at mentally. i know i got to change. i can't be out here like i amp i got to fall back and get a job. >> to people in power this young black boy is an invisible man. his court date is in two days. in the justice system young black men like julian are often seen as thugs. his appearance can be used as a factor to decide his fate.

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the judge is the one that administers the final push in the prison pipeline. >> incarceration is sort of embedded in our society. about sort of how we treat people. what a judge who is running for election has to say when he's on the stump. and change iing those is really hard. >> the worst of the worst. rapist let off easily. >> weak on criminals is dangerous. >> it's no secret that being tough on crime looks good at

election time for a judge. a recent study found the more tv election adds there are, the more likely judges are to rule against criminal defendants. >> at this point, i have been locked up ten years in january. and i'm struggling right now with accountability. i'm accountable for what i did. but at this point i'm not the savage that i was when i took this young man's life. i'm educated. i'm civilized. i'm dignified.

and at this point, the sentence is having a reverse effect. >> most of them have life sentences for murder. >> a lot of the films that i have seen on people they'll find the one really compassionate story about somebody that has been wrongfully accused and spent all this time in prison and was exonerated or they will find the person doing 30 years for a bag of weed. those are great stories for the conversation because it gets people think this is crazy that our system operates like this. but there's such a small fraction. we have to expand the conversation to people who did the most violent thing that you can in the course of a two

second decision when it was really me or you and they killed someone, but sitting with those men in that room, i would challenge you to find me one person you would label as a violent person. >> when i went away as a kid, it taught me nothing. it taught me more about the game and made me resent the system as a whole. i learned more doing the streets and gave me more than i ever did. going into counties, fighting day and night, spending time in the hole only made me cold er. it didn't make me no better. sentence me more and more treatment as if i meant nothing made me feel like no one meant nothing. it made me even colder. having to lose brothers, relatives while locked up never helped me.

we took my father and taught me the ways of a prison life. that you take no sorts, that you ride, that you fight. that you trust no one and nobody. truly anti-social world. >> i myself was out in the street corners because i was looking for something i didn't get at home. my mother. is a single parent. she tried her best, but in order to put food in our stomach and clothes on us, she worked hard. so she didn't have the time to give us the emotional support that i was seeking. i was fortunate today to speak to some federal prosecutors and das and after hearing some of our stories that are very

similar, they said i wish i would have known this before. before sending so many people to prison. and to me when that was stated, i believe it was by a federal prosecutor. i was a little bothered by that. i was bothered because of the fact they were ignorant to who the people were that were sentenced. they just looked at them as an inmate, which i hate. i hate that word. i cringe using that word because i feel like we are people. we are just incarcerated. >> the names that they use, k l killer, gang banger, drug dealer, monster, i believe to believe people make these names

so hard because they cannot accept the fact that sitting in this room are artists and poets and doctors and teachers and fathers and brothers and uncles and mentors. they deal with their feelings by hating you, by prejudging you and by labeling you. it's really, really easy to do that when we stick you as far away tr your community as possible, behind walls that we can't et see over and neither can you. >> i'm very sort of shaken by everything that i have heard you guys talk about. i live this very sort of -- i

never think about the world i left behind. and i'm very disconnected with where i came from with my family. i'm disconnected. the community, i'm disconnected. and somehow you all the stories are connecting me back to that and i see this sort of psycycle. i see the same story without father figures and role models and the same story. it just doesn't seem to stop. >> i've been with them for five years now. and i've seen what prison has done to them over the course of

that five years. i mean, they have grown. they have become men. they have really atoned through this justice process. but you can see the effects of prison. that's been five years. those guys have another 50 to 60 to go. of that routine every day, not seeing any other part of the world, no other human beings. not being intimate with a female, not getting a job and make. ing a paycheck and buying something. not having the feeling of actually being remorseful and doing something to pay back what they have done. >> i was in prison because i shot ask killed a drug dealer during an armed robber. he tried to shoot me and i shot him. the point there was to dpet the

point across to me i shouldn't be robbing drug dealers. they could have made that point without 1 years. i think one of the things that, again, it comes down to what's the point of incarceration. we seem to spend a lot of time and money trying to make people a lot worse. i think that comes down to one of the core things is the real purpose of american prisons is really to destroy people. destroy them as individuals, destroy them as functioning members of society. >> at some point in time, the amount of punishment crosses a threshold and becomes vengeance. when it crosses that threshold, it starts to impact us in a way that was not the intent. i'm no longer sorry. i'm no longer remorseful. now i'm angry. and my anger manifests in the violence. now i'm worse than i ever was when i came in. [ music: "bygones" by oliver ]

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my lineage was the vecchios and zuccolis. through ancestry, through dna i found out that i was only 16% italian. he was 34% eastern european. so i went onto ancestry, soon learned that one of our ancestors we thought was italian was eastern european. this is my ancestor who i didn't know about. he looks a little bit like me, yes. ancestry has many paths to discovering your story. get started for free at ancestry.com what was that impact? >> you lose the ability to live in public housing. you lose the about to get a

driver's license and financial aid, public welfare. and the idea behind that was it would deter people from committing crime, but the continues kwebs of it has been people who were touch ed by the criminal justice system come out in it a way worse position so they go back to committing crime. >> if julian goes to jail, it will cost taxpayers $30,000 every year he's incarcerated. >> that's big for me. i don't have people i can just go. talk to. i see adam as a big brother. he got that. he's trying to guide me. somethi>> most of the people ca in the criminal justice system aren't the hardened criminals we imagine. too many are kids who just did something stupid like tommy or i did in high school. the puppeteers of the system would prefer that we see these

kids as super predators, thugs or animals to be caged. >> thank you for having me. >> i have some misgivings about government's effectiveness and wisdom, but government doesn't get everything wrong. every now and again it will get something right. one thing it did get right is it adopted policies in the late '80s. reagan, bush, clinton was a big part of this. we hired many more police. they are going to be more careful about what they do. we have had more aggressive and computer driven policing.

discretion of judges and more generally increasing use of incarceration. it worked. my opponents will point out and they are right about this many more people in prison now than during the '60s and '70s. what they point out was fleekt frequently us is that we have got. en something for that. it's not a mistake. it's just a happenstance that we have so much less crime now than we did in the early 1990s. >> why do you think america -- i'm trying to understand why america has the largest incarceration rate in the world. why do you think that is? >> it's the crime rate. that's what the crime rate afel affects us all. if you want to avoid incarceration, it's actually

easy to do so. and you don't have to be a lawyer and you only have to know four things to avoid incarceration. don't steal stuff, don't cheat people out of their property. stay away from drugs and resolve your dissputs without violence. if people follow those four rules, the prison population in this country will shrink to nothing. and sgl what about the opponents say when you lock someone up, especially someone young. you basically create a criminal, a harsher criminal, let's say. >> what i would say to them is if it were true that being in prison tends to make a person a criminal, then as we had more and more people in prison and then they get et released after five or ten years, we would have more criminals and more crime. but exactly the opposite happened. as we put more people in prison over the last 25 years, we have had less and less crime. >> what role does race play in

the mass incarceration system? because there's 1 in 3 black men. why is it ub balanced? >> it's true that blacks are disproportionately represented in the prison population. there are about 12 or 13% of the overall population in the country and i think from 36 to 40% of the prison population, but i don't believe that's because america is a racist cauldron. there are still racists. it's just not well connected. i don't think -- i think it's the commission of crime. >> why are black people committing more krooim? >> what is needed is the right parenting to teach the right values. i haven't met you before today,

but i would bet a good chunk of change you didn't become ab independent tim maker because your parents just let you run wild and didn't care about checking your homework. >> i had a single mother. i shoplifted. for awhile i actually sold pot. i thought -- i was always fearful that i would end up in the system because of the statistics that were against me. and i wonder if i had gotten caught selling pot if my life would have been different. >> you avoid crime and scrapes with the police because your parents teach you to respect other people, to respect their right to be safe and to resolve your disputes without violence. and get a summer job. when you grow up that way, the chances of you having an

unfortunate interaction with the criminal justice system are extremely low. >> the ideas are popular with the trump administration. i'm terrified of what the criminal justice system will look like after this administration is done. i think it's imperative that people in power hear stories like tommy's or any of the men in the restorative justice program. >> i think that there's a huge disconnect between the political ruling class and ordinary americans on criminal justice reform. >> what's the jail for? come to a decision and then say let's look who we actually got in that jail. if those don't match up, how do we get those people out? there are a whole h of things that can be dont each of these decision points. that can change the face of

jail. >> there's a law of diminishing returns. people have studied this where up to a certain point, after that point it either doesn't deter any further crime or it causes more crime. >> the system of mass incarceration is and it contributes to huge structural problems in our economy. so at the end of the day, over a longer term period, investors, they're not going to be able to profit from this. and so, you know, it's up to investors to also try and change it. >> a lot of the feedback i've gotten is, you're never going to be able to reform the system because it runs on money. and the sad irony is that the people who are making money off of prisons are the people who are making money off of prisons. it's not the other actors in the system who go to work every day, to fundamentally do a good thing. police aren't going to work every day and being like i want to kill black people. they go into a system that was handed to them that has been used to capture and kill black

people since its existence. i and my colleagues didn't go to work and say i'm going to lock up a bunch of black people and get as many convictions as possible. we walked into a system that was set up to achieve that goal. that has really bad metrics. we don't really -- we're not valued for anything else than winning. and then you have this other end of the system which is only designed to make money off of holding bodies. and the bodies that are expendable and the black and brown ones. people care less. if the jails were filled with white kids from the suburbs and they were making those white kids work for no money, how long do you think that that operation would be allowed to last? this is important for people with asthma.

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the prosecutor made the decision to dismiss julien's case today. it's like winning a battle, and the war is still being waged. >> julien's celebration is short lived. soon after they reopened the case against him as a misdemeanor. his future remains uncertain because young men like him are still targeted by the police. it's no wonder that julien is angry at the process. the system is stacked against

him. the next time a police officer pulls him over, adam might not be there to save him. >> it's just really sad to me, the amount of effort that it took for this one young person when i know that it's happening to thousands of people around the country. it's a bittersweet victory. the likelihood he gets employment, because that is not on his record goes up, which means the likelihood he stays out of trouble will go up because one of the number one factors that we've seen as experts in criminal justice reform is that employment really keeps people out of the justice system. julien is under a much brighter sky right now, he just needs to understand that it can fall down at any second.

>> i keep coming back to the jail on the hill. 30 years apart, julien, tommy and i all inherited the same legacy, poor, black, young in a racially hostile country. one of us escaped, the other remains trapped, yet another took his own life. it breaks my heart to know that all over america countless black people, countless poor people, without the power to decide their own fate, are cuffed and carted up a hill to be disappeared from public view. inside, they are stripped of their dignity and denied their humanity. the cumulative cost is enormous. in lost dollars, in lost opportunity, and lost lives. if we allow this cruelty to take place away from our gaze, we compromise our humanity. if we're able to look at it as it is happening and do nothing,

we become inhuman. we cannot turn away from what we have done.

on this episode of "united shades of america" i'm in hawaii, one of the most beautiful places on earth. many people think of hawaii as an unspoiled paradise. if you ask an hawaiian, they have different opinions. yeah, i think they do. my name is w. kamau bell. as a comedian, i've made a living finding humor in the parts of america i don't understand. and now i'm challenging myself to dig deeper. i'm on a mission to reach out and experience all the cultures and beliefs that add color to this