there called the convention of the rights of a child, that that is it. there is a convention of their debts therefore since we have but we are in violation of the treaty. there is a slight problem with that. we have not ratified the convention on the right to the child. that would seem to end the discussion, but they don't and their assertions there. they assert that will come even though we have not ratified it is customary international law, sort of the last bastion of the desperate advocate and we explain why not only is it not customary in international law but what we have no obligation whatsoever to violate the will of the people. about the

convention against torture because i was the lead dod delegate to geneva when we submitted our last periodic report into thought and six. so i am intimately familiar with the convention that they say we are in violation of, which we are not. and finally, i will leave you with this. as you can see in the book, we wrote 243 different d.a. officers around the country. we asked for case digest from

those d.a. offices around the country where the person got life without also building of parole as a sentence. we asked for original court documents. court findings, judges 90s, police reports, to get an accurate picture of the real crime in the real facts that these juveniles did. and what we found was vastly different than the glossed over non-culpable language they include in their reports. and i will leave you with one small snippet of one of the 16 case studies, which is found prominently in some of the activists case reports. and that is the case of ashley jones. ashley judd is a 14 year old juvenile when she committed her crime. she is the cause celeb of many on the left. and yet if you read their description of what she did, your left is sort of scratching your head dosh, why did actually

get the life without the possibility of parole? well, then you can make up your mind. and this is just one of many of the cases sense that they have put out there. this is the entire case of the quote unquote facts at the activists have put out there regarding ashley jones. and then i will be jail the facts as found by the judge. quote, at 14, actually try to escape the violence and abuse by running away with an older boyfriend who shot and killed her grandfather aunt, grandmother and sister who are injured during the events who wanted actually to come home. that, what actually did, according to the other side. and when you read the judge's findings, which can be found on page 26. and i will not read the whole thing. we are running out of time. you find out quite a different

story. ashley jones stabbed her father and pregnant mother in 1998, killing neither, and so she and her younger sister were sent to live with her grandparents and aunt. this was before the event where she got life without parole. in late august of that year, her grandparents were getting tired of her bad behavior and grounded her for staying out all might at a party. they did not approve of her boyfriend, jeremy hart, and told her -- told him not to visit their house, and this made ashley jones angry. and so ashley jones and he decided to kill everyone in the house. set it on fire and take their money. to prepare, ashley jones stole two of her grandfather's guns and smuggle them out of the house today. she mixed together firestarter in anticipation of setting the

house ablaze. this is from the judges findings. it took the young couple today to put their plan into action, and on the evening of august 30, 1999, she kept an eye on her relatives until they had settled in for the evening when she called her boyfriend who arrived around 11:15 at that night and she let him in the house. he was doing the 38 revolver taken from her grandfather. they been snuck into the den where her grandfather was watching tv. hart shot him twice in the face. still alive, he stumbled toward the kitchen. next they visited the bedroom of her aunt and shot her three times. sing that her and was still breathing, ashley judd hitter in the head with a portable heater, stabbed her in the chest and attempted to set the room on fire. the gunshots awakened jones' grandmother and she got out of bed. that was when jones and hart entered the bedroom and shot her once in the shoulder. and with the last bullet jones and then hart return to the den

and discovered their grandfather was to live. with nice from the kitchen they stabbed him over and over again and left one knife embedded in his back. these are the judges findings. ashley jones portal lighter fluid and listen to him groan as he burned alive. the noise attracted jones' tenure old sister, mary. to the kitchen. from acey ducey that her grandfather was burning. soon after the wounded kid called out to her dying husband and ashley jones stabbed her mother in the face with an ice pick, poured lighter fluid on her ancestor on fire and watch her burn. she ended up stabbing her 10 year old sister numerous times and left everyone to die. she then took $300 from her grandparents matters and took the keys to their cadillac and the boyfriend and girlfriend drove off for a fun night of

partying. and when the news the next morning, the sister survived and ashley said quote i thought i kill that. she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, and the judge when she sentenced ashley said quote she did not express genuine remorse for her actions, although she apologize her words were hollow and insincere. for the more it was brought to the attention of the court that while awaiting her sins and the defendant has threatened other female inmates in the jefferson county jail by telling them she would do the same thing to them that she had done to her family. these are the facts. they are not pretty. but we need to have now an open, honest and forthright discussion going forward. paul. >> i'm going to talk about some things that my life that i have not spoken about in public

before. actually have some questions about you folks out here before i started. i know some people in this group your company of these people by a show of your hand have had family members murdered? >> how may people here are from brooks are associated with groups that are in favor of having parole for juveniles with life sentences? i don't see anybody responding to that. of the people who have had family members murdered, have any of you ever been approached by these groups that want to change the sentencing structure and to allow parole for juveniles? anybody? one. you are the head of an organization. okay. my experience is this. i start my career in alameda

count, a system of very, very aggressive prosecution of crimes. the system of the prosecutors were trained by people, and they played fair. they weren' were ethical but the tough. when i hear examples of these juveniles who have essentially been not guilty of any major crime and they are sentenced to a life without the possibility of parole, and i see human rights groups and we have to help these children, i am saying yes, help them, help them. and yet i look at the fact that i go wait a minute. these facts can't be right i know some of the prosecutors involved. they would never do that. i know the law, and a kid who never used a gun was given a ten-year enhancement which only comes when you have used the gun so the facts are wrong.

and i recognize that the people have done these series of studies on this issue understand what i understand, that there are certain people who have done crimes that are so heinous, that if they are let out, they will do it again. and i understand that if there are people who are given life without parole who don't deserve it, convicted where they are not really guilty, obviously we have to get them out or help them. that somehow kids act on the life without parole system is an attack on all of us, that it is an attack on people who want to be safe. now, i have been an attorney milewide and when i came home on october 15, 2005, i had been representing a woman who was abused from her late teens years by her therapist. she married him, and 25 years

later killed him. and my defense was that the abuse she suffered help justify what she did, maybe not as a full excuse but it was not the same as cold-blooded murder. but when i came home, what i found is my wife lying on the floor, beaten, blood everywhere. sprayed on the walls. furniture moved. what i didn't see was the fact that as she lay there dying but alive, the perpetrator had taken a night and opened up her belly to remove her organs when she was alive. and that when she died, he carved into her back, this time, his symbol, a satanic symbol that he used on his, and i can

tell you that i, when he finally was caught, probably every single person who has suffered the same thing, i wanted to kill him. i wanted him dead. but society doesn't do what i want. society is civilized. and society placed him on trial, gave him a great attorney. a fantastic defense, and he was convicted, and vengeance was never extracted. he was put away for the rest of his life without parole so that he will not hurt anyone again. in time, this security classification will draw. he will be able to marry, have conjugal visits, and communicate with family members and his groupies who think he is a cute man. good looking. just like the night stalker. he has a life, but he will not be able to take a life unless it

is of another prisoner and he is going to have a hard time. >> so vengeance doesn't belong to the victims even though we may want it. justice belongs to society. because what he did was so horrific that if he ever gets out he will do it again. you know, he studied being a serial killer. he read books about it. he planned it. he beat her with a rock slowly so he could watch her die. at the trial, i watched the pretrial hearings. he never showed any remorse, but he showed a great fascination when the pictures of pamela slaughtered were put up on the screen. he was fascinated. i thought i was the only one seeing it but the judge commented on that at sentencing. but who are these people who want to allow somebody like him

to get the least on parole or at least the possibility of release? he put forth a bill that was totally revamp california's sentencing. it would allow somebody like scott to get a parole hearing if he could prove to a judge that he was remorseful. what does remorseful mean? well, we morsel is the word that senator yee used in his bill. but the definition of remorseful. he took a course, when available, in prison to further himself an education. he has contacts with other people when he was in prison. scott keeps contacts. but the people on websites say he is innocent, despite the statements that he made about seeing pamela on the road and reaching out and grabbing his arm is may have she got his dna on her body.

that's the story, driving on the road. well, i will teo, he told the truth about one thing. as he was slaughtering her, i am sure pamela said this can't be happening. ng her son is

innocent. the mother of the girlfriend, saying he is a nice, young man. the two schoolteachers who could have stopped the crime. one, was the art teacher. e2 art showing the murderous acts that he was going to do towards pamela. he drew them in the abstract. she admitted on the witness stand that the rules in the school, when you see something disturbing like that, you go to the principle, you let the kid did help.

she didn't do it because she thought he was autistic. she doesn't believe he committed a crime. she will be at the parole hearing. the teacher who thought he was cute. the ultimate frisbee teacher. she had a crush on him. like a schoolgirl crush. she thought he was a loner because he is sensitive. did nothing to help him. she will be at the parole hearing. she testified he didn't do it. you know who won't be at that parole hearing? i will not. because i am 54 years old. because having gone through that time period with pamela, my health is not the same as it was. i will not be there at that parole hearing. but these people will, and he will. and if he gets paroled, just rumor that he will be laughing. he will be laughing at this crime that he enjoyed. you will be laughing that as a serial killer, he fooled people and got out. i have represented for many year, and you might think that because i am realistic maybe i'm not such a good defense

attorney. well, i have not lost a case in three, four days i lost one case and for years because i am real with my clients. i am realistic with them. and i know that when they are damaged in certain ways, they don't get better. they can control to some degree what they do, but they don't get better. why is it so easy for us to accept child molesters don't get better. we accept that. it is to. they don't. they control their behavior but with a little out of all, or an opportunity, they don't get better. but you, any of you, would you let a convicted child molester babysit your children know matter how much therapy they went through? no, you wouldn't. would you let a rapist be with your loved ones? no, they don't get better. it is the same cold-blooded murders. and i'm talking about situational murders or, you know, people are acting, maybe

get under turkic distress. but murders to kill because it is what they want to do to suit their purpose, they don't get better. it is a way of being. and what i said to senator d., what i said on my website about this, what i say right now, i said you would release a person who has committed at the kind of murders that we have heard about here. would you invite into your home? judge, my client is innocent. my client could not have done this crime. would you invite into your house? and these people who want to release all juveniles on parole after a certain time, they believe that people change over time and their brain develops and they get better. that is not how it works. i know that from being there. what happens with juveniles who commit these heinous crimes, is that they are so broken that it

manifests at a very young age and start fires. they hurt animals. they hurt people, at an age where other kids are playing ball or in school, doing school activities. if they are that damaged young, nothing miraculously happens to them in a 10, 20, 30 years that they are incarcerated except maybe they can learn how to act more normally. but what i have learned is that when the sheriff deputies or prison guards, giving them a very structured routine, a lot of people who wouldn't be heinous girls on the outside can function somewhat normal. but when you take those controls off of them and put them in life, and life is hard, life takes you, and life hurt you and life puts you down. when things go wrong, people do not have the tools. they lose control and they revert to who they are, do what they did.

and that is not what every single juvenile offender. there is not every single murder, and when you talk about people like scott, it is true. and when you talk about a lot of evil in life without parole, it is true. let me tell you something. when i read these human rights watches, all of these other stories about these kids who are wrongly accused, or wrongly convicted, or way over convicted, if it wasn't real i would laugh. there is one that i read that comes from oakland so i know these people involved. the story goes, this young man and they don't give his last things we can't find the case. this young man heard that his friend was going to commit a robbery. to stop any violence from taking place, he went along. is trampled the gun and shot the store owner. he was then convicted and given life without parole, plus 10 years for use of the gun. well, i know the juvenile

division, there are two of them that i know. one is a good friend of mine. he doesn't know about the case ricky never would have done that. and the other i had a case with him years ago, a drive-by. my client was in the car. a good kid except he went along with a drive-by. one kid was shot and killed and a young woman, an innocent woman was shot in the face. the deal was, my client testified, and he would be convicted but if he testified and apologized he would get two years in vision quest, sort of a boot camp. this is the same head of the office who supposedly let a kid who just went to a crime scene, to stop crying and get life without parole. no way. and then i know what judge is supposed to be because something in the sentencing the way the judge does things. and i asked the judge, do you know anything about this case? i had never heard about this case. you know, where a kid is not

involved and i would never give a kid like that that kind of sense. and then when i looked again, it was 10 years for the gun. in california, it really use of the gun. so they lied about it. they lied about it. and every single story that i read in this human rights watch group is that the california state senate relied on to vote in favor of this bill seems ridiculous lately. you know, you have first evolved prosecutors who are not animals start as prosecutors. the regular people. they are not these. you would have to bab to try to put a kid who didn't pull a gun in order to stop a crime in prison for the rest of his life. second, you have to have a defense attorney who is totally incompetent. and then you would have to have a jury of 12 people who would vote guilty on something like that. would any of you? no. and then you have to have a judge to say life without parole

or life with parole. you have to have a judge who is also a beast to do that kind of sending. and then you would have to have an appellate lawyer who doesn't raise the issue. and a court of appeals that ignores it. you would have to have so many people being incompetent and cruel. it is just ridiculous. so what is this debate about? why are they using these fake pictures, fake stories to advance a cause? truthfully, i don't have a clue, but i know what they are doing is wrong. i know that we have to stand up against these people. and the bottom line is this. we are all, even people who i don't agree politically on this issue, we are all against injustice. no system works when somebody is unjustly in prison or given a ridiculously harsh sentence. i have never met anybody, a rational person, this debate who wants to partially imprison juveniles to be mean.

we want to imprison people who are going to come out and hurt again. and believe me, people on parole commits crimes again and again more than half of them do. when your release, these kinds of criminals on parole, whether they are adults, smarter, they know how to hide their crimes better, there will be more people like these people in the audience whose hearts are broken, whose families are broken forsake why did you let him out, leave him in jail. we don't get revenge, but nobody else gets hurt. that is why they are here and that is why i am here. >> ladies and gentlemen, this is the time when you have the opportunity to ask questions. and so if you will raise your hand and i will try to see through the slight. right over here. >> would you identify yourself and then ask a question. >> my name is ronald holt. i am a chicago police officer and i am here with cofounder jennifer bishop, and jody

robertson and we are representing the national organization of victims of juvenile lifers. being an 18 year police officer in chicago, i have worked with gangs, at risk youth who have killed and belong to street gangs. they have committed a lot of gun crimes, and other felonies. moreover, my only son who was 16 years old, this is a picture of him, this is his last high school picture. he was 16 years old. making three weeks shy of his 17th birthday. he was gunned down on a bus, protecting a young lady, role-play, for other young people were shot as well. unfortunately blair didn't survive his words. the defender, who murdered him was 16, was sentenced to 100

years in illinois. in an illinois prison on july 20, 2009. in illinois, because of the truth in sentencing, this is an ineffective sending an ineffective licensing. but for the majority of my career i have worked the streets and witnesses constants violence regularly. so my question, my question is how can victims advocates be so divorced from reality from what i see on the streets of chicago regularly? thank you. >> okay. we will ask the panel. how can the people who are advocating these changes be so divorced from reality and who wants to start? >> in my experience, a lot of people on the defense side that i take have trouble with the victims and their feelings. now, when pamela was killed,

people i knew in the defense, not as good friends but just as business friends, shunned the. they couldn't go near me. were as prosecutors, might have even had some acrimony and reach out to me. and i think there may be sort of a mindset on the part of that group of people where they dehumanize their victims and dehumanize the families in order to do their jobs. and i think you are feeling the effects of that, which is unfortunate. >> and it is interesting, officer holt, we never met before this obvious it. we would be natural enemies. 20 years as prosecutor and almost 30 years as defense attorney, but we focus on his experience and the fact that the prosecutors did reach out to them. i do think that is a big part of it. and that is, that they have

almost convinced themselves by the way they write about the crimes, about these pictures, that in fact, it's not an important public safety issue. but it is also not an important victims issue. there are two reasons for the senses. one is to ensure the safety of the public. from my perspective, and i have sat in a parole hearings with families and pardons hearings and all the like, the revitalization that happens again and again as it is brought up is very, very difficult. and therefore, one of the reasons for instant someone like me would advocate against or for life without parole is not having those times where there is some right to reject the mice, to bring this up again and to have the family lived through it. i have seen it plenty of times. i truly believe that they, i

don't mean ill on any of those on the other side of this debate, but i don't think they have the whole dynamic of what@b officer holt, if the argument from the other side was we don't want to see life without parole sentences for juvenile killers because as a compassionate society we think other senses

are appropriate. and leave it at that. at least that would be honest. it would send a what warning order to all of the victims that are here and millions of others in the united states, look, this is an issue of compassion. we are a compassionate country. and we don't like it. now, i would respectfully disagree. but instead, this campaign has been less than forthright honest and direct. and it ignores i think paul put it well, the reader divinization that will take place over and over and over in courtrooms and parole board hearings around the country. oftentimes without the victims there or family representatives there because many states don't require a prosecutor to give notice to the victims, nor do they have time to give the officer holt notice to show up.

and so oddly enough i think one of the primary responsibilities of the most prosecutors it to be a human rights attorney, to thank for the rights of everybody, especially the victims. you all know that when you try a case, and general meese and i talked about this, a person who represents himself before the court, you are trying to cases that was. you are protecting the rights of the who doesn't understand the system and you are representing the people, the state, as ably as you can. and so i don't have the foggiest clue either, but i would at least appreciate a more honest approach. >> any questions from the audience? i see a hand. yes, over here. >> from safe foundation. i would like to present a little different perspective. firstly, this is not a debate it seems you've got at least three

speakers out of four, and i haven't heard mr. meese speak and i am sorry about that. but it seems like it is one-sided. i would like to not argue the legal aspects. in fact, not a lawyer, but i do think and your statistics, mr. simpson, in the u.s. leads the war in crime. and since i come from outside this country, lived in this country since 1970, i have found that firstly, the legal system, policing as well as prosecution is pretty brutal in this country. and in my opinion, that is one which creates more criminals in this country. so that maybe one aspect we should give some thought to. the second is somehow the upbringing of people are prudery router i have had friends sometimes to become one, we want

to talk and have a meeting. and if things don't work out, i will shoot you. and i never went with a gun to defend myself, that thank god it was a joke, not real. but there are people in this country, not all again, it should be a small minority i am hoping to are pretty brutal. and you know, when we had those torture pictures, when the congressman or senator said in a meeting, i didn't believe these are americans doing it. there are americans who aren't that covers. some of you have gone through those sufferings, you know there are people like that, particularly this gentleman, dan, who described the process which is pretty brutal. and i don't know how there are people like that, unfortunately. i hope we change our way of upbringing. those are the two issues.

comments? >> i agree to do the sense that you are saying if we could just prevent what's going on with people, create a more compassionate society we would be better off. and i wish a lot of contention that it is being let killers on parole, that money would be taken and put into programs when they are young to stop them from committing these crimes later on. >> and i think i could speak for all of us out here, including general meese, that in a perfect world our place would never engage in behavior that we often would be proud of and that we should have a perfect criminal justice system. and that is why i open my comments by saying the real test of a just and civilized society is how well we treat the defendant and the victims in our criminal justice system. but one of the reasons, sir, that i pointed out for comparative analysis between

crimes committed by people in the united states and other countries is to rebut the myth that we are all the same. or that we are the only country -- we all like all other countries in terms of our crimes. and so i went to the repository of people, the un, and look at their statistics and the world health organization statistics, and one given here. although if you take any look at over a ten-year period you will see that the u.s., juveniles, in the u.s. commits crime that dorp those in other countries that are reported. now, i would agree with you completely that there are a lot of crimes that go unreported, especially in many countries around the world. but we just can't put our hands around that in terms of analysis. >> paul, do you have any comments? >> let me just mention by the way this is not billed as a debate. this is built really as a presentation of the reputation of great deal of information

which has been put out by groups on the other side. this is to farrow the presentation of the study which has been going on for the last year and a half. now we will take questions appear in the front row. >> high, i am pennies are with cns news. i wanted to ask if the organizations that are fighting against this for juveniles being sentenced to life without parole, are they listed in your publication, or who are these folks? and how will this affect the supreme court when it comes back in session? >> if i could take out the supreme court was going to rule i would be a rich man. [laughter] >> yes, there are two cases coming out in florida, graham and sullivan are the two defendants named. they are procedurally indifferent posture, and so we are probably are going back to back the same day but the rule

will probably not be joined. yes, we list all of the organizations in our report and in our footnotes. and look, this report will go out to all prosecutors in the country, many key state legislators, many judges and justices around the country, key victims rights groups, state thank takes. and it is available right now as we speak on the heritage website, web dot heritage.org and you will see a probably displayed there and you can download the whole paper or each chapter. into our hope that we have, an honest and straight full debate going for. i thank all his correct and the court will not be tempted to breach the wall between death penalty jurisprudence and non-death penalty, at least that is my hope.

>> one way i can do that the report is helpful, for someone like myself, i had to try to get, i really had to depend on many of the reports coming from the other side because there was no good repository with that information. so this is helpful in that it gives the counter statement of what the real facts are. and a very realistic way. i know i am involved in one of the particular cases, and i know what it was before in some of those other reports. it can be helpful. and may be cited to various courts throughout the country because that's the we need to do to get the information out. >> question over here. >> hi. i am deborah weiss, a former juvenile prosecutor and i just want to say it is really a slippery slope because i have never done death penalty kind of

cases or murder cases, but even for the minor minor offenses, just simple assault or battery or anything like that, i can't say how may times the other side, legally, the entire defense assisted in the juvenile. they are young and i am like so what. so they can't form intent? or even if they do for content it doesn't count because they are below a certain age. i never understood it but i'd did want to say i think it is a slippery slope or the other thing i want to comment on the response to someone said here about our country maybe has more crime because our criminal system and our police officers are so violent. i don't know what countries a person comes from who said that, but i would argue with anything it is the opposite. it is because we have freedom that we have so much hi. when you go to the countries that have a lot less crime, it's because they are afraid of doing anything or they're going to wind up with the police throwing them in jail. and my final comment, just about what you said with the

compassion, you know, that you wish they would say we are a compassionate society, i wish they wouldn't do that. is there is an agent saying that says being kind to the parole is like being cruel to the kind. i am sorry i have comments instead of a question. i usually don't do that. thanks. >> thank you. any other questions that anyone else has? yes, over here. >> robert alt from heritage. i just wanted to see, i don't know him if the panels are familiar with this, but i know one of the major argument someone made in roper, and i'd assume being to the current debate goes to questions, jumping off your question, as to whether or not juveniles are capable of forming intent. is there a different and cerebral development? and sent cully started by saying our great distortion in the offenders by some of the others. if you would be able to talk

about whether there actually is any credibility to those sorts of arguments, about cerebral development. >> one of the things that we chose not to delve into just because it was outside of our lane, and i'm surely not not a psychiatrist or psychologist, and i wanted to keep the paper to about 100 pages. is this notion that like you pointed out in roper, the juvenile's brains are still underdeveloped that they really can't be held accountable for their actions. i will say that in the roper case, there were two filed on behalf of the government. there were 15 on behalf of the accused. that will be quite different this time around. as you are going see, all prosecutors in the country joined together. state legislators, international law scholars and a lot of other people, including people who

work in psychology and psychiatry. saying that this issue of whether brains are sufficiently developed is sort of a -- it doesn't hold a lot of water. there is a renowned phd psychologist, judy, who is a professor at u. penn who argued in the law journal a couple of years ago criticizing the roper decision. and the first line i think says it all. he says people commit crimes. brains don't. and so are their people, individuals out there who are mentally incompetent or don't have sufficient ability to understand the proceedings before them or assist in their defense? absolutely, and they should not be tried in court at all. they should be held mentally incompetent and incapable of subjecting them to the criminal

process. but we're not talking about them. we're talking about people who think through their crimes, like roper, plan them out and go forward. it also strikes me as a little on, and i think if you think about it, just generally, folks, how can we hear on the one side of the ledger, completely outside of the criminal law context, that young people, 12, 13, 14, can make life most important choices, birth, death, aborting the fetus, perfectly capable of doing that but yet over here in the criminal law context their brains are not sufficiently developed to be held accountable for murdering somebody. there is a disconnect, and i think reasonable people, rational people realize that there comes a point in time into development of the team where they are certainly capable of being held accountable for things that they plan and did.

>> i'm afraid we've come to the end of our time here. i appreciate very much of the questions from the audience, and also the good work by our panel. please join me in thanking our panel for the presentation today. [applause] las. . >> "washington journal"

continues. host: from new york city, philip alcabes, author of "dread." let's get right to it. early in the book, you write that epidemics fascinate us.

te that epidemics fascinate us. host: give it your best shot. describing an epidemic for us. what is it? how should we look at? guest: bitan epidemic is always a story that a society tells itself about a disease outbreak or the threat of a disease outbreak. sometimes we talk about epidemics that do not qualify as diseases in the classical sense. for instance, we talk about an epidemic of obesity nowadays. 10 years ago, we were talking about an epidemic of road rage. those do not seem like diseases in the classical sense, if you think about the plague or colorists. it is a story we tell about a social crisis. maybe that is the best way to put its. host: you also say that

epidemics create opportunities to convey messages. host: this is right at the front of the book. explain more. guest: it often seems to be true that when we face a social problem, when we do not know how to deal with it, we do not know what the best way is to make it go away. we handed over to the public health industry. the way we do that is by calling it an epidemic. i gave an example a minute ago about rage. when people in the 1980's were concerned about what was happening with children in day care centers. you might remember the hysteria about the satanic ritual abuse. more seriously, there has been a continuing problem about domestic violence.

that was considered a police problem for a long time. later, it became a public health problem. i think that we sometimes call things epidemics because we want to hand them over to the public health apparatus. on the other hand, there are real disease outbreaks, like swine flu. host: the author is philip alcabes. u.s. policy for disease control, the main topic here, and we have separate lines for democrats, republicans, and independents. fear and fantasy, you spent a long period of time. it is quite a span of history. what is most common in all of

that history about epidemics? tell us more about the reaction to them. guest: the most common thing is dread. we bring our fears to the way we look at the world around us. those fears are complex. there are lots of pieces to them. the innate dread of death, destruction, and social disintegration is part of it. there's more. there are anxieties that we have about the world. we see an epidemic coming, or someone tells us that one is coming, and we often imagine that this disease outbreak is telling us that we were right to be afraid. in the 19th century, cholera was

the emergencing infectious disease of the day. it had never been seen in western europe or the united states. in the second quarter of the 19th century, in 1831-1832, it caused a terrible outbreak. it came back a few times. the discussion about cholera was always a layered with the social issues of the day. part eagerly toward the irish, who were both in england and ireland. if you read what people were writing about cholera in those days, it was often about the habits of the irish, or about immigration. cholera has nothing to do with speed irish or immigration. it is a waterborne disease caused by bacteria.

but in all the discussion, there was a reflection of the social anxieties' of that day. host: more of the words of our author. the first call for philip alcabes, author of "dread" is from the list, minn.. caller: good morning. this is a great guest. this ties in with the previous guest and the callers, but also in swine flu. in the top people were having about blaming the mexicans yes,

all the fear in people. just afraid of didying. guest: and afraid of plenty of other things. we have our worries about modern life. swine flu is a great example. i wish i could have written this book a few months later. i could have included a lot more interesting information about how we have responded to an incipient epidemic. as the caller mentioned, at the beginning, there were lots of concerns about mexicans. i heard in late april, a reporter from chicago told me that there have been soccer games between the mexican team and another team. people were boycotting the games because they did not want to go near mexicans.

a typical response, alas, that some foreigner has done this to us. it is not mexicans that bros one flew to america. -- it is not that mexicans brought swine flu to america. as the caller suggested, those kind of anxiety ies come out. host: middletown, new york, republican caller. caller: they have proven that this swine flu outbreak was developed -- it does not have the pedigree. it has traces of human, swine flu, and bird flu. they tested it on the ferrets and the ferrets died. they called back and said they never radiated it.

they said they gave homeless people in poland the test vaccine and people died. i was in the army in 1976 in the first outbreak at a military base. it always happens in military bases. like the doctor that says they're going to reduce the world population by 80% and we need another type of 1918 pandemic. they want to reduce the world population. it is all out there if anybody wants to read. thank you. host: thank you. philip alcabes, any reaction? guest: i have heard some, but not all of those rumors about swine flu and its origin. the investigation was done on where the strain of h1n1 came

from. it was conclusively determined that it did not come out of a laboratory. there's an article that was published about six weeks ago with the pedigree of the virus. i can neither recalled to the pedigree or the name exactly when the article came out, but it showed pretty clearly, as the caller suggested, this h1n1 virus has genetic pieces that come from viruses that have infected different species, including pigs and birds. we do not have to imagine some malevolent laboratory worker putting this together. this is what happens in nature. genes of flu viruses recombined. sometimes come across species.

this seems to have evolved in a complicated way, but not a naturunnatural. the caller brought up the 1976 outbreak. that is important and relevant. in 19676, there was concern based on a few cases of h1n1 that seemed to come from a pig virus that was isolated from recruits at fort dix in, new jersey. it became the basis for a nationwide vaccination campaign. in the end, there was no widespread outbreak. there were about 230 cases among recruits. there were 300 cases in greater new jersey. there was no big help break of swine flu. -- there was no big outbreak of swine flu. there was a nationwide vaccination campaign, which seems to have caused some cases

of a syndrome. 1976 is probably relevant to our experience now, although, we are not sure exactly how. the caller mentioned an allegation that eugenicists want to reduce the world's population. if so, a flu virus would not be a good way to do that. the very worst flu outbreak of all time was in 1918, sometimes erroneously called the spanish flu. that killed maybe 600,000 people in the u.s. that means that over 99% of the american population survived it. that, the worst pandemic of all time. something to keep in mind. even what seemed like a really

terrible outbreaks to do not to diminish the population by that much. host: our guest was@@@@@@@@@ a goes, how did that dread, how the communication, how did anxiety manifested self in those days? how did it change in the hundreds of years? guest: we are talking about black ducks, which was in the middle of the 14th century. it came to europe and the 13

forties. -- came to europe in the 1340s. in five years, it killed a quarter or more of the european population. they played was not brand new. it had happened before. it had even happen before in europe. at that time, it was well of the memory of anyone who was alive in your plan the 1340s the previous outbreak was over 600 years before. it had circulated in the area that would be central asia now. it had not come to europe for all the time. when it did come, as you might imagine, for a disease that was killing a quarter of the townspeople, it was terrifying. there's a really classic example of the way that a coming of a disease outbreak galvanized fears that people had about

society at the time. one of the horrible things that happened -- the countries that we know of them now did not exist. it would be the western part of germany and parts of france in part of belgium and the netherlands. the massacre of jews. it was a very christian time. christianity itself was changing. people had their anxieties about that. when the plague can, townspeople in dozens of towns massacred jews. they said it was a way of warding off the plague. for that time, the massacres stopped. every law the fears and -- there were a lot of fears and unrest

about the way society was changing. the end of feudalism, the growth of towns, and the changes in the church came out of this very dark picture. host: lexington, ky on the democrats' line. your honor with philip alcabes. good morning. caller: good morning. i'll understand that fleas from rats cause black dust. what do we have to fear about fleas from domestic animals? guest: yes, the caller is correct that plague can be spread by fleas. it is normally a disease of small mammals. often prrodents.

nowadays, it can be found in a wild rodents. that is the most common reservoir in the western hemisphere. the radical, a flea that has been jumping from rodent to rodent that happens to land on the human could transmit the plague to a human. very few cases of plague in the u.s. every year. a handful. it is a bacterial infection. it is treatable with antibiotics. i do know that it is not a big public health worry. that is partly because it is treatable. we do not have the same ecological arrangements that erupted in the -- that europe

did in 1340's. rat species is different. the entire is logical system is different now. i am not sure if i have answered the question about fleas in particular. if you what can be in a place where there was wild rodents known to harbor the plague, your physician might advise you to come in for care if you have symptoms. it is rare. host: the next call is from mark on the independent line from california. caller: and was concerned about the origins of some of these diseases and whether or not a biological researcher may be involved in this. for instance, most people may

recall the panic that occurred when aids was right been the nation. two people initially came forward and said they knew what the disease was. the french person wrote a book about aids. in the book, he said that he believed that aids as it is in africa was likely brought to africa by u.s. homosexuals who contracted the disease here from research that was going on in new york and places like that, and then took the disease to africa. this is one of the discoverers of the disease who said this. this is not some sort of crackpot. when he said that jews were often executed when diseases started to spread. this was also true in germany.

most people might be surprised to learn that -- hitler talks quite a lot about disease. and makes the connection between jews and syphilis and homosexuals. guest: let me try to break this down. there have been a number of allegations that the aids virus may have come from a laboratory. that is almost certainly not the case for the main reason that the state of knowledge about molecular biology in the late 1970's when the aids virus started to produce the disease that we now call aids was not sufficiently advanced to create a virus that is at dispatthis

sophisticated. the allegation that americans brought aids to africa -- american and european scientists believe that the virus that causes aids originated in africa. africans believed it originated in the u.s. for quite some time. this is a fairly common phenomenon. everybody thinks the terrible epidemic came from someone else. it is so ancient a phenomenon that the ancient greek historian wrote that when the plague of athens cam around 430bc, the people said they came from africa bill that goes on today. -- came from africa. that goes on today. like an earlier caller said, people like to believe swine flu

came from mexicans. from a historical standpoint, it has to be looked at with the circumspect from. there's abundant evidence that the aids viruses -- there are several different related types -- evolved from pre-existing viruses of chimpanzees that had been living in africa. that seems to be the most overwhelming evidence. i'm not sure the georgian matters. -- i am not sure the origin matters. as for the aspect of homosexual lobby, it is important to remember that the aids virus has nothing to do with homosexuality. its job is to move from person to person so that it can keep on producing more jr. aids viruses. host: our guest is philip

alcabes, author of "dread." we are taking calls on u.s. policy for disease control, and also learning more about the history of disease control. when did disease control become a reality? what part of history? how did it work in the early days? guest: i imagine the horrord that occurred during the black death. at the same time, people were launching quite cogent disease control measures. quarantine, for instance, was essentially invented or at least begin policy very early on in the plague years, in the 14th century, and became institutionalized soon

thereafter. that was quite a long time ago. the idea of what is called the sanitary cordon, wally off your town, not allowing visitors in. but also began early on -- that also began early on. of course, disease control has evolved and changed with the advent of germ theory, modern technology, vaccination, antibiotics administration. but the basics of disease control, isolating the contagious, is quite old. host: there's a photo in "the washington times" of children getting hand sanitizer. the point of the whole story is that schools are preparing for swine flu. kids will be first in line for vaccinations.

how does it work today? how well does disease control work, beginning here in the united states? guest: disease control can be extremely effective, especially in the developed world where there's money to put into it. and the u.s. response to swine flu seems to me to be both circumspect, but evidence based, straightforward. i think there was a little bit of panic at times. schools will probably kohl'wered that did not need to be closed. i really have to credit the cdc for keeping people informed in the wake that seemed to be designed to naught fomenting hysteria.

in developing countries, disease control can be very carefully administered. again, in developed countries, we put a fair amount of funding into disease control. some people will say not enough, but much more than poor countries. there's a big problem there. you are probably aware that with the likelihood that there will be a vaccine available against swine flu sometime this fall, the question arises -- what countries should have access? should the united states and europe be able to buy up the vaccine because we can't afford it? what about the poor countries? host: in the financial times -- more calls for our guests.

republican line, john. gcaller: i am really happy that you have this man on here. it is so nice to see somebody intelligent on c-span talking about something intelligent. i have a couple questions. my favorite book of all times is a book called "a short history of nearly everything." it has so much interest in step about science. people should just educate themselves and read more. when i was in elementary school, which was about 35 years ago, i remember people came around and gave us some kind of vaccine. i do not know if anybody does that anymore. i wonder why. why don't we quarantine groups

of people when we think that they have something that can spre áo4d%@@ "l -- locked down a chinese university for 3 weeks. people have to bring food to the students. they cordoned off a village in the western part of the country

where there have been a small outbreak. that is still a possibility. it does not really seem to work very well except if you note exactly who needs to be quarantined and you can be a really good at it. to our credit, we try to develop disease control systems in this country that recognize individual freedom. mostly, there are alternatives. for something like swine flu, quarantine would not be very effective. can be transmitted before people get sick. it is too hard to know who has been infected. would be hard to know who should be quarantined. the question about vaccination in schools -- i am not sure that the vaccine was actually given out in schools.

that is not the practice now in most parts of the country. you have to show that you have been vaccinatioed in order to register for school to the decision has to do with policy. i am not a policymaker. i believe that has to do with policies about the relationship between the disease control authorities and the education authorities. it would be a question better put to the education people themselves. host: a message via twitter. guest: that is the $64,000 question these days. everybody should have access to health care. can it fuel an epidemic?

could be considered not to? as i said, an epidemic is a story. i guess you could tell the story that way. i try not to say that this is an epidemic and that is not. if obesity and crystal meth addiction can be epidemics, maybe a lack of health care could be called an epidemic. is a little the semantic. does lack of health care fuel epidemics? i think it is fair to say that in historical experience, when people are unhealthy, they are more susceptible to disease. it is certainly true that the spread of disease is often faster among the poor because of crowding and the inability to afford preventive measures.

in that sense, it is related. host: chuck is on the line in chattanooga, tenn. on the democrats' line. caller: i want to ask a question about what you believe is the most expensive and the most overblown epidemic of the 21st century. you talked about obesity and other kinds of the epidemics. what has caused america more than anything else so far this century? guest: it sounds like she has an answer in mind. i do not have a good answer to the question. i cannot tell you exactly in dollar amounts where we have put

the most money. certainly, lots of fundy was tracked into aids -- lots of funding was put into aids. we spent a lot of money on diseases that do not often register as epidemics. i think we probably should. as you know, heart disease is the leading cause of death in america. we spend money on that. most people probably believe we should. i would not want to say we are wasting money on a and b, and not spending enough on c and d. i am more interested in the way we talk about epidemics. the question of expense is not one that i have dealt with. the question of what we talk about most, i think, until swine flu came a few months ago, we probably would have said bird flu, obesity, drugs, alcohol,

and cigarette smoking. it could take your pick depending on how you listen to the public dialogue. should we? that is the problem. that is a policy problem. how do we decide what is the most important thing? how do we decide what is the real threat? host: the role of the media in all of this. good job? bad job? what do you think? guest: i am often asked this question. i will tell you. there is the paradox of getting past about the role of the media as i am talking to the media. without pulling punches, i think the media, in general, do what the media are supposed to do. that is, delivers information in a way that tells a story. sometimes the media highlights stories that are inflammatory.

we talk about shark attacks probably much more than we need to since not the medieval diane shark attacks -- seen as how not that many people die in shark attacks. people like them. society tells stories to ourselves. it does not seem to me that by and large media creates a mysteriouhysteria. host: joann on the republican line. caller: good morning. i was watching the science channel years ago. they have a program on about how they collected all these health

records that went back generations. they were discussing obesity of the time in the families. they traced it back to a famine that have occurred generations before. are you familiar with this study? guest: it rings a bell, but i could not cite you chapter and verse. caller: i was 1wondering. we have all these fake sugars today. and they have this outbreak of diabetes. i was just wondering if any of this could be tied into our genes and illevolution. guest: she brings up the

question of obesity and genetics and evolution. other than swine flu, obesity seems to be on our public health mind the most. i talk about this in the book. there is a lot of inquiry about obesity and a lot of rhetoric about obesity. it seems that everybody has a different take about what is causing this problem. it is worth pointing out that it seems to me that the problem of obesity, based on current data, is overblown. the mortality associated with obesity is normally that rate. the safe levels of weight are often missestimated. from the data, it is the

extremely obese who have been increased risk of mortality. if you just go by the day the, it is not clear that this is such a big public health problem. and yet it is a big public health problem because we talk about it in that way. a lot of money and programs and research goes into obesity. as to the genetic hypothesis, there seems to be genetic components to obesity. they're sometimes seems to be dietary components. it is very hard to say this is the cause of obesity. it is very hard to say that obesity is a problem. it seems to be a problem for some people. some people who are obese develop diabetes or heart disease.

many do not. many experienced a long and relatively healthy life. it is hard to say. you cannot say that if you become obese, you will die from it. it is a complex problem. there are lots of pieces to this. it all has to do with the way we live our lives today. the public health conversation about obesity and besides conversation -- and the science conversation, it is over layered with all sorts of questions about what is wrong with the way we live today? host: another passage from the book. host: here's another look at the

book. our guest is philip alcabes, author of "dread" in new york. sheila on the democrats' line. caller: every day we hear about so many people losing their jobs. a lot of people cannot afford cobra and they lose health insurance. now we have the swine flu fall season coming up. what would happen if many, many people came down with the swine flu and they could not afford to get health care? guest: it sounds like there are two parts to her question. there is one part about health care, which is on everybody's mind these days. the other part is positively about swine flu.

let me answer the swine flu part. i do not have a crystal ball. i do not know if swine flu is coming back. nobody knows that. some people think it will. others think there's good reason to believe that it will not. there's a very persuasive paper by some people who are very good scientists and historians of influenza. it appeared in the journal of the ama this week. it is about the history of the h1n1 flu. it says it is likely there will not be what some people have called a second wave of small inflow. -- second wave of swine flu. we do not know if it will come back. preparations are being made in case there is more swine flu this fall. what would happen to people who do not have health insurance?

that seems to be a central policy question. that is part of why the health care debate seem so pressing right now. for many years, we have had a health care system that is content to leave tens of millions of americans without health insurance. what happens to people like that if there is some really bad 7 health problem. maybe it will be flu. maybe it will be something else in the future. i do not have a good answer. i think it is a policy answer that remains to be developed. host: another question from twitter. guest: as the immune status of adults in the u.s. declined? i do not know if that is true.

it is very common for people to think that modern times has done something bad to us. @@@@@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ something right because it is easy to see what we're doing wrong in our society, but we are doing better than our grandparents did. empirically, it does not seem like we have made ourselves more susceptible to disease.

host: orlando, fla. on the independent line. you are on with philip alcabes. caller: good morning. you made a comment a few minutes ago that prompts me to ask you two questions. why is it so difficult? they are talking about not having enough vaccines. i have heard because it is not enough profit and the pharmaceutical companies do not want to make it. why is it so difficult to make the vaccines? you said that you did not know if there was going to be another wave of h1n1. it has not gone away. in orlando, just last week, we had another person died from the

flu. it is just continuing. host: two questions. why don't you take the first one first. vaccines and profit and making an offer everyone who needs it. guest: you want to the vaccine production to go slowly. we have a very good example of what happens when flu vaccine production went too fast. that was in 1976 in what is sometimes called the swine flu fiasco. there had been a small outbreak in new jersey. a few recruits died. i think the number was 13. there were about 300 cases altogether. because of alarm that this was the beginning of a reprises of the terrible 1918 flu, u.s. authorities launched a nationwide vaccination program.

vaccine production was hurried so the vaccine would be ready in the fall. i think about 40 million doses were administered. then it turned out that people were getting a syndrome, a bad neurological syndrome. some people died from it. that was a lesson about hurrying vaccine production. i hope we have learned it. there are questions on whether there will be vaccines available soon enough. with a vaccine production, you what to make sure it is safe before you offer it to anybody. let me say that vaccine production is done by forms of new companies. it is not by thdone by the govet in this country. it is a profit making enterprise. in some cases, it is a cutthroat one.

some people have said blood thirsty. the pharmaceutical companies want to be able to make their profit when they are producing a vaccine or other products. that is what for-profit companies do. the caller also mentioned h1n1 has not gone away. that is true. when people talk about a second wave, they're talking about the possibility that there will be a lot of new cases in the fall. that remains a possibility. host: 1 other viewer via tw itter. what can we look forward in terms of organization, money, that kind of thing? guest: because i do not have a crystal ball, i will not attempt to read the future. i will tell you what i copal

happens and hope that will be a sufficient response to the streetweet. -- i will tell you what i hope happens. i hope that we do it in a smarter way. to use an old-fashioned term, more holistic, more and related to the complex relationships between the environment, environmental change, commerce, transportation, human migration, the food supply, and human susceptibilities. i think we're trying to do that now. i am impressed with the movement that is called one world one health. it wants to redirect our attention in a more complex and

holistic way. if you really want to control viruses, and others that come from animals, we have to stop thinking about locking the doors to the human population, which is what we attempt to do with the flu vaccine. and really think in a much more complex way about the entire ecosystem that we live in. hope that is the future. host: this is in open called the baltimore sun -- this is in "the baltimore sun" this morning.

host: do you ever see something like that happening? guest: alas, i am sure the research will go on. this is the elusive but beguiling silver bullet. everybody wants the one shot that will fix everything. i am old enough to remember the space program of the 1960's and the food that the astronauts had to eat.

you want to put everything into one box and injected into people and they will be magically immune. that would be great. that would be a terrific efficiency. i. -- that would be a terrific efficiency i suppose. that gets into germ theory. it goes away from my vision of what really sound public health in the future has to look like, which is we stop thinking about viruses as a problem of humans and start realizing that the march froy emerge from complex interactions that we share with animals and all of the determinants of the way that animals live in the way we interact with them. host: here is what viewers question via e-mail.

is cancer an epidemic? if not, why not? guest: i will stay away from stating if this is an epidemic and that is not treated cancer kills a lot of people in america. i think there are 600,000 cancer deaths every year. that is much bigger of the problem than one century ago. that is partly because we live longer because we are good at controlling the killers of a century ago like tuberculosis or pneumonia. do we want to call an epidemic? that is in the eyes of the beholder. host: william is on the line for republicans. good morning. caller: good morning. first-time caller. thank you for the opportunity,

c-span. first, by to talk about my experiences and then i will ask a question. i dread vaccines. the reason is that in the first grade and the second grade, i was given a vaccine. by the time i got to the third grade, 10% of our class suffers from the disease. it was a scary experience. what is an acceptable rate of instance of a disease caused by the vaccine itself? guest: william debts at a terrible problem. it is one of the reasons why vaccines cannot be the whole public health answer. in the 1950's, early in the

polio vaccine era, in the first vaccine, it was contaminated with what is called wild type of virus. kids who got the vaccine came down with polio because of the vaccine. many of them would not have had polio had they not been vaccinated. it is a terrible thing. it qualifies as tragedy. vaccines are by and large safer now. it is a reminder. but along with the experience in 1976 -- it is a reminder about the problem with vaccination. there is likely to be some adverse consequences of vaccination. it may be an answer, but it can also harm some people. william house to what is the

acceptable level of harm. -- william ask what is the acceptable level of harm. i would not be able to say that. of course you want to minimize harm. the decision about a vaccination strategy means you have to decide whether you are really to take the chance that some people will be harmed by the vaccine. host: tell us more about why you wrote about autism. here's what you wrote. guest: yes, autism is not nothing itself, of course true that is a real way of behaving in the world. a lot of people have the way of behaving in the world. if we say that we are ready to accommodate people who have autistic styles, than in what

sense is this an abnormality? the rhetoric about the autism epidemic seems to be about a certain set of fears about modern life. in particular, there have been concerns about vaccination and concerns that vaccinations causes autism. and also about environmental influences. perhaps changes in diet and so forth. in a way, talking about autism as if it was an epidemic is a way of talking about the things about our modern life that makes us uneasy. as we learn increasingly that we can deal with kids to have autistic styles, if we think about good ways to do it.

host: one last call on the democrats' line. good morning. caller: good morning. i get up at all different hours. i am retired. in a tv switcher. in may, there were talking about the swine flu. it had dna from swine, flu, and humans. there was a scientist on the re that said that this flu was man-made or it was an accident. i did not see it again. i called congressmaen.

nobody knew what i was talking about. it was never on the news again. why? guest: that turned out to not be true. early on in the swine flu outbreak, because the h1n1 strain was unusual -- tan lee, is -- technically is rna not dna. it is from pig viruses. some people speculated it was made in a laboratory that turned out to not be the case. host: our guest has been philip alcabes, author of "dread." ank y