targeted members of the osage indian nation. wrapping up, shattered by jonathan allen and amy barnes. the book takes a behind-the-scenes look at hillary clinton's 2016 presidential run. many of these authors have or will appear on book tv. you can watch them on our website, book tv.org. .. and if you do take pictures please tag the liber on social media. up until the last few decades america's incarceration rate was

on par with that of other liberal democracies. however, in the last 40 years we've seen a 7% increase in incarceration here in the land of the free. we now have by far the highest incarceration rate per capita of anywhere in the world other than maybe north korea but there's not enough data coming out to know for sure. so what is to blame for america being number one at locking up its own citizens? many theories exist and that we'll be hearing about them from expert in the field, john pfaff has seen, it's been 15 your studying data on imprisonment and if you to discuss his book which seeks to debunk some of the more popular theories while providing his own take on this national catastrophe. he is professor of law at fordham university with a focus in criminal law, since the law and law of economics. he has been published in the journal of criminal law and criminology, american law and

economics review, and federal sentencing reporter among others. he was richly written up in rolling stone fleet and the new yorker. please welcome john pfaff. [applause] >> thank you so much. i want to talk about sort of how we got here and how we can get away from here. with the basic focus on things that are not wrong but much less important than we think they are. they lead us to overtake things really matter. incarceration in a nutshell. from the 1920s to the 1970s are rate was stable. so stable that in the single worst on academic article ever written published in 1979, one of america's most prominent criminologists said we will never go about 100 per 100,000. if it has real change the laws change a lost to push it back down to 100 per 100,000. no. in 2010 all prison rates reached over 500,000, adding jails.

we're technically speaking out number two in the world, not number one. the seychelles population 99,000, prison population 650. technically slightly above us. if they released 45 people from prison we go back to the bone. in all fairness we are number one. the only countries become close to us are places like russia, kazakhstan and cuba. places like england which is the highest rate in western europe is about 200 per 100,000 french in germany, 100 or so per 100,000. nothing close. since. since 2010 with seeing a slight decline. reformers are looking at this as signs may be we have turned a corner. they are putting this remarkable reliance on incarceration behind us. when you look closer it's a little less optimistic. that itself is not optimistic. if you look at it by state with states seeing a decline in

prison, when you seen increases 2010 can we see is the united states is -- california, top line. what else not so much. basic numbers come in 2101.49 people in prison. between 22-2015 that declined by 77,000. a drop of 5.5%. not a lot but not nothing. we turned red this giant numbering machine and i think it's a present use prison growth exploded. it didn't explode. it rose relentlessly steadily for 40 years. a slow steady rise. at least we stop that. if you take california alone out of the equation, the decline falls to more than half to 35,000. if you take the top five decliners out of the picture, 11,000, basically nothing. the united states is not

decarcerated. if you ask him he states that shown prison, probation and parole, it's seven, not 25. jails are completely harder and much different headlines. it's not nothing but it's not a lot. that's a tally because prison reform is one of the few truly bipartisan issues at a time with the democratic and republicans debate whether or not the sun came up today. you will see the aclu and the koch brothers sitting side-by-side sincerely working to fix this. for all this bipartisan effort there's very little to show for it. the question is white. the argument is we ignore three critical factors of a huge role and get very little attention. the first is prosecutors who are ignored by everyone. they make it into reform bill, wrote discussed. there's almost single-handedly the foreskin prison especially since crime started following but we rarely talk about.

people are convicted of violence as those in nonviolence crime. almost all of our reformers focus on that, low-level nonviolent drug offenders and they should not be in prison but the fact of matter is in state prisons they held 88% of all present, over half of all people have been convicted of a violent crime. if we don't change and we punish people, there's only so far we can go. the third person we ignore is the public sector. we complain all the time about the private prison. the private prisons are bit players in the story. what matters are the public prisons that old 92% of all people. their unions are profoundly powerful. almost completely unacknowledged. they hav had the ability and capacity and willingness. the prosecutor, the public-sector unions, we will be consistently disappointed in what reforms are accomplished.

start with the prosecutor. the study i did, the years 94 94-2008, there's almost no date on prosecutors. you take what you can get but that's a time in which crime steadily declined the prison population still kept rising. what happened during the crime rise in prison growth is a complicated story but why do they keep going up even as crime when steadily downward? here's what happened. crime goes down. during the same time arrests go down. over all of us fall by 5% but arrest for serious violent crimes drop by 25%. search property construct 20% and rest for drug trafficking dropped by 50%. those are the crimes you go to prison for and we are arresting you and fewer people for those crimes during that time. we are fewer and fewer people entering the criminal justice system altogether. yet during the time of you and your people entering the system, the number of felony cases in state court skyrocketed.

fewer and fewer arrests, more and more felony cases. once they filled the cases filed against you the probability you get admitted to prison doesn't change. about one in four felony cases goes to prison. about one to four felony cases goes to prison in 2008. once you go to prison and this is a great myth, the amount of time you spend in prison does not change. there has been no systemic increase in time served in prison. sentencing loss of content for. time spent in prison hasn't changed. it's not that long. i asked undergrads what do you think the meeting time spent in prison if for some convicted of violence? ten years, 12 years, 20 years. the actual answer is for. four years if your convicted of violent crime. one year if you're convicted of a drug crime. prison growth et cetera but people spend long periods in prison although we spent less time but the change was admitting people to prison in the first place here this

decision to file the felony arrest charges to start with. that's what drives are prison growth. it's not longer sentences. it's lots and lots of people serving relatively short sentences. the reason prison population is getting great, all these people growing old in prison, that's a small part of it. the much bigger part is very large cohort of baby boomers are committing offenses much later in life and they keep being admitted to prisons. very, very few people spend a long time in prison. it's driven by mission. the question is what his mate is prosecutors more aggressive. why the charging more people even as arrests go down even as crime goes down, widely getting tougher? really hard to say. you have no data on prosecutors. none. we have decent data on crimes, good data on arrest. a lot of data on prison population but where it really matters with prosecutors we literally have nothing. just scraps you pick up here and there.

my data set come from the court system. when you file a felony case in court the court system. craddick ms. shaheen lumbers into play and these are gathering numbers you can use. a couple theories. some easy to fix, some harder to fix. one is weak public to finish the 80% of defenders qualify for state, qualify for state provide a lawyer. yet we suspended underfund public. the budget is much smaller. prosecutors have a tremendous host of free services public defenders don't. if the prosecuting something to be investigated, they don't pay for. it's called the police department. the public defendant pays for it out-of-pocket. the dna labs, the sheriffs, police, a huge array of resources. north carolina, if you look at the budget, public defenders and prosecutors should have the same

budget in that state, north carolina. if you account for all the free services that the egg gets that the public defender doesn't, once i can't fight it has had the money and no people. he's a solution, just find indigent defense better but it's her. new york state is a blue state. they disagreed aclu to defund because the underfund big yet when that bill hit the governor says, he vetoed it in terms of waste. he didn't loose dates, democratic governors are afraid to add budget to defense. that is something we could do and would be huge step to take. tougher sentencing laws. sentencing laws have gotten tougher and maybe it matters because it changes the bargaining. look along order, in in a beautiful gilded courtroom with lawyers yelling at each other across room. the law in law and order is spot

on. the original, no idea about the spinoff. remember what jack said to the judge and the judge said to jack mccoy, that's my second best in law school. the law in law and order is great but the cases never end and a quarter. 95% of all guilty verdict a result of the plea bargain. we have no idea how the process works. it's a complete black box. it could be the back 15 years ago you said anatol definitively don't take this three-year deal i'm going to get you five years at trial. now if you don't take this three-year deal i'm going to get you ten years, 15, 20 to 12. you still getting the three-year sentence, time served which are plenty of faster because the threat is much more severe. we can fix that. we can cut time served but when they cut the official sanction imposed it works in a complicated unknown plea bargain process. no one is certain that maximum sentence. much less being hammered out and plea bargain and we don't have the plea bargain process works.

in many ways the most boring after i have, and that's the rest of my work is what matters tends to be the most boring. staffing. here's to interesting facts. between 1974-2008 the number of counties that had a full-time prosecutor went from 45% to 85%. that's in the suburban counties. it's not 1996 they got a full-time dh, one part timer. rural and suburban counties did. it would for a part-time country full-time or justified budget and it's not a lawyer who prospers on site. he is a prosecuted. in the urban areas, something remarkably perverse. as crime is going up from 1974-1990 we hire 3000 more trial prosecutors. from 17,00 17,000 to 20,000. from 1991-2008 as crime drops

steadily we hire 10,000 more prosecutors, three times as many, from 20,000 to 30,000. they have to do something. they can't just play minesweeper all day. if you look at what weird measures of productivity, the evidence is consistent. individual das are no harsher today than they were 20 years ago. they'rthey are equally harsh ane 10,000 more of them than we did. a significant portion of this that this is we arrest so many people and drops of may cases to start with that you hire 10,000 more das, there's plenty of cases to justify their position. they can do that because who wants to take a job and not do their job? one solution is not hire as many das. that these positions expired but the prosecutors are going to fight that to the nail, how they show the status, their staffing size. some things really defy

solution. i've seen the enemy and he is us. prosecutors are tough because way which we vote for them. americans say we want sort of less punitive approaches a crie but yet we can punish prosecutors for failing. they know we are interested in voters and don't take the stancs to maximize the chance of reelection. we have to take on risk and that's a big thing to ask for. when i say the prosecutors drive, there's good news and bad news. the baggies is is no federal law, no state law will solve this. it's being driven by county elected prosecutors who respond to county level incentives and basically don't do was happen in the state or in the federal system. to solve this county by county by county, to see this next graph shows prison growth or prison shrinkage not by state but by county. orange counties have fewer

people in prison in 2014 than they did in 2010. blue counties have more people in prison by 2014 than 2010. when you see this map, except for california, mississippi, vermont and kansas, you won't be able to get by states on this map. some of these dates are grew, somma shrink but the amount of variation is pretty big. it's a county by county process. you have to go county by county by county using da after da at the da not to be harsh impunity. that's exhausted. there's about 2500 different offices nationwide. safety% of all cases are filed in counties that we live in very densely packed counties. there's not a lot of prisoners into either. you saw this added more local level budget of the thing to keep in mind about this is the das don't care. they ignore trans.

with the rhetoric shifting in d.c. from prison reform to american carnage, i felt optimistic prison growth will continue on however if what you for good or for bad independent of rhetoric coming out of d.c. this is about the local da. a lot of pleasure to go but federalism is a shield. no law in d.c. will change what local das do. it's very hard to make a local da pay attention to think outside the county. those who want to reform would be allowed to continue to reform and it will continue to reform regards of what rhetoric of crime and punishment is coming at a d.c. there is a fair amount of good news though have to pay attention to the prosecutor and we don't. when hillary clinton rolled out her reform proposal she talked about policing as you talk about parole. that was end to end. it's not end to end. she missed the middle. she never talked about das and she died alone. no one does that they're the ones we have to start focusing on and change their incentive

and behavior to get them to stop being less punitive. we have fewer people in prison for longer senses are driving growth. that means prosecutors are driving. the second and most common approach is the war on drugs. it was funny at first and now it's also funny that usually go, i stead study prison go and tryo understand. they look to me like you pour mr. scott academic throwing her life away. it's just the war on drugs like i never heard of this war on drug. i should write this down. war on -- how do you spell that? no. i get it. people talk about it but its impact is far less than people think. it's true between 1980-1990 the number of people in prison for drug rose sharply. from a 6% to 22%. from 1990 onward state prison system shrank and shrank and

shrank to about 50% today. the fed to 50%. the witness of federal jurisdiction. the fed is like 12% in the state 80%, drug people make only about 15%. 85% of all people in prison are not there for drugs. what are they therefore? violence. between 1980-2009 we added 1.1 thousand nine we added 1.1 million people in prison, state prison. that number is staggering. but who were those 1.1 million additional people are sent to prison? 223,000 or 21% seven convicted of a drug offense. 5,501,000 or 51% were victim of violence offense. violence drove the growth. about 53% of all people in state prison had a primary offense a crime of violence. almost anyone serving a long sentence is there for violence. the data looked at have all the

people admitted to prison in 2003, how many still in prison 11 years later, 75%, 3% of those admitted in 2003 were still in prison 11 years later. of the 3% three-quarters had been convicted over index on a crime, murder, manslaughter, rate, i could assault or robbery. 83% some violent crime or separate kind of less a crime like assault. long serving people are there for violence but most people who are there for violence are still serving short terms based on a majority prisoners. if we don't change and we punish people convicted of violence will not cut our prison population. there are rebuttals that come up one for the left one for the right completely valid questions are raised both are not nearly as devastated by the pills for argument is people raising often. the first is maybe i'm undercutting what the war on drugs is. i'm counting people do for drug

crimes. what about the person councilmae in a drug deal gone bad? that's a not a final time, drug crime. as they go to the war on drugs? maybe. what about the person who stole from a store to fund the drug habit? that's a property crime not a drug crime. should captain as well? yes, but. so first violence. a lot of evidence not so much of the war on drugs that prohibition cause of violence but prohibition causes drugs to go where the violent already is. she points out the fact there's this anthropological evidence showing him in the world and income in the world if you take young men and deny them upward mobility and the state that affords logic and violence they will kill each other, fight each other in death rates will be high. just as true in 19 century czarist russia as it is where

she doesn't work as an "l.a. times" reporter in south-central los angeles in 2010. it's true in 2010, the 90s and 80, place like south-central get a large group of young men who are denied upward mobility, underfunded schools, all the other no racist berries that deny employment to young black men, and the state is not renounce its control of violence. the murder rate for ellie can as well is 60%. 60% of all murders in l.a. county result in arrest. that alone is shockingly low. almost one-third of all murders in l.a. don't result in arrest. two-thirds of all black members result in no arrest. the state is not enforcing the laws of murder. when the state doesn't enforce the laws against murder, young

men turn to violence. that brings the drugs. there is already despair and a lack of hopeful upward as. that's what drugs will come to. take drugs out of the picture but don't result in underlying structural problem, that deny these young men belief in the future in the state doesn't prevent them from the able to kill each other, the cause of violence and death will shift from drugs to something else. you don't want to oversell this point. there was a distinct spike in murders tied to the crack but a very real level the causal link flits around. think about people stealing stuff. why are people in reason for drugs? is for trafficking, in opposition. it's a distribution to why people selling drugs? same reason. creating violence because they are denied other legal opportunities to do so and with allies. it's a below minimum wage job. if you legalize drugs but on address underlying economic

desperation what happens? will stop selling drugs. they were consulted in the legal private sector. they will turn to something else illegal. they don't have other options. you are seeing this in new york. the gangs are shifting away from drug selling and turning to identity theft. still denied other options. so, yes, i am thinking, if you just take drug enforcement out and told salt in other underlying defects, that brought drugs to those areas where there so opel unit solve the underlying social status and it will shift from drugs to property. violent people should be in prison. exactly why, in the article saying maybe not i guarantee the first comment on every single thing, it doesn't matter if it's the conservative "wall street journal" or the liberal "boston globe" it would be this is great as long as it is not in your house, professor.

you hear the score in the way they write the word professor. two things. one, you talk about people as violent offenders. that is the exact one were to use. never use the word violent offender. you say some as a violent offender that defies who they are. you are a violent person of violence is not a state. violence is a stage you ate in and out of violence. we've not knowledge kids are crazy and so we should treat them less because it's just to keep it in your which is put into 18, moved to 24. this is how long it takes before you start stopping a lunatic child. we have acknowledged the other side of that curve. you age out of crime. people systematically stop being violence in the '30s, late 20s, early 30s. some will find on but very small number. most what a joke. laws are not built to handle that. you'ryour violent, will throw ty

way. there's hormonal reasons, testosterone level shifts. social reason. you get can have a job. you are not around your friends doing stupid stuff. i paid example is an amazing to be showing what a terrible horror movie comes out, that body violent crime plummets. as violent young men go to the theater instead of the bar. then they go home instead of being drunk and doing stupid young man stuff. as much as a find the saw movies horrible, they are probably the cheapest and most efficient frontline of oregon's violence. they should release a saw every friday night. it would be great for our overall nation violent rate. you age out of that. you get married and get a job and you don't hang out with your friends and do stuff at bars on a friday night. if you describe -- it keeps you away from doing dumb stuff. we can let people at present earlier with no losses.

these long sentences don't deter. deter. there's no evidence of long sentence deters. the over incapacitate. california saw this. they led up 2000-3 strikers or do. the recidivism rate is one-tenth the state average. 5% versus 50%. a big part of that, their old, 40550. you don't do this stupid stuff in your 50s. i'm 41, like i know i i would lose fight i might've one when i was 20 something. we ignore that in our policy. there's a deeper point. it was people out of prison, and crime goes up because people come less people are in prison, that might be okay. there are huge cost that we completelcomplete the door. going to prison is a huge vector for tuberculosis, std and other

diseases. equallequated earlier death. one year will cut your lifespan by two years. the risk to die from and truck over reduce skyrockets. -- drug overdose. there's a stigma and shame that holy spirit, our cost for phone calls that practically bankrupt prisoners. half of all the people in the prisons come from the city. the financial cost. it cuts into income of the people who are left behind. it reduces overall tax base and increase our healthcare costs. it imposes misery. if those dating markets off. dating functioned with the neighbors is a 50% no, the gipper's fino. and so highlights neighbors it's very hard for families to form because it throws off the dynamics of dating.

it alters this fundamental interaction in way she don't begin to tap into when you do a cost-benefit analysis. talk about $50 billion we spend every year, when you don't you put a price tag on the cost and their staggeringly huge. they might justify something, just offset these costs. it comes to the profoundly racial geography. who elects a prosecutor? the county. outside new york city and baltimore in st. louis and san francisco and that's about it. the county can sense of the and the suburbs. though suburbs are richer and wider and far more politically powerful than the city. they play huge role in choosing who the prosecutor is. the prosecutor elected by the rich white suburbs is in charge of enforcing law and disproportionally poor minority areas. those suburbanites feel the benefit of safety. the county of safety. they feel safer. they feel the benefits of the

don't feel the cost. it's not their brother, not her uncle or some other nephew with her daughter or sister or the mother or the father who will be sent to prison for too long. prosecutors are inclined because the way we segregate our population so sharply to pay attention to benefits that they get to do most of the cost because it don't pay for prison. their elected prisons are paid for by the state to its free. they get all applicable outside and the collateral costs are borne by community that is about politically less powerful. of course there be tough on crime and ignore all these cost because the electorate doesn't rebut the cost. i amaze our talk what hobbies cost of incarceration, people look at me like i'm what cost? they don't think about this, almost like nightly defendant. these costs are on the radar by the actual human misery these

$50 billion we spend every year. a recent poll that came out after book was published, they asked two questions, one troubling, one profoundly troubling. the problematic but solvable one was what percent you think the half of all people use prisons are there for drugs? the blueline people say yes. the first part of overall, liberals, moderates can consider. yes, half are in prison for drugs, conservatives suggest, the real, real answer is 15%. we think half of all people are there for drugs and they're not. keep a focus on people convicted of drug, that's for the bodies are. maybe we can educate our way around that somehow. educate the public but you can

fix misperception. the next question is so heartbreaking. the next question was would you be willing to punish less someone convicted of violence and poses little to no risk of recidivism? are you willing to address the easiest example of a hard question we face? dark blue is no. 55% of liberals, 60% of moderate said no. that we are not willing yet. even if it does little to no risk of recidivism. we have told the american people that we need to solve the problem of low level nonviolent drug offenders who should probably not in prison but they are not the ones driving growth. people who commit violence and because with emphasized the low-level nonviolent drug offenders so much, we have convinced we not ask the hard question to ask her are starting to. louisiana is entertaining reforms. louisiana is both.

to state is at least talking a have a punish you. based on this fact you age out. if you've been imprisoned for 303 years you become parole eligible. that still staggering. in european countries the maxim is 15. 15. in louisiana once you get 30 years in prison they are at least willing to contemplate parole. we are getting there. we are pushing the conversation slowly but it is slow. what can we do? prop 36 shows you can parole people and they will not repent because they're older. give more local to mention marseille. go with the county dictates. let this it have its lda. leave some the costs and benefits that a closer fell, get rid of the systematic divide opposing the role of those with the cost. depoliticize prosecutors and especially judges. perhaps even stop electing

prosecutors. we have ways to show prosecuto prosecutors. there's a lot of interventions that can work come on on things we do to stop crime for happens. we are being smart about this and we came to adore it all. local commuters are getting better but there's a vast array of interventions that can break violence, respond to before it happens instead of reacting harshly afterwards. ex- post harsh reactions are nowhere near effective as these strikes before and. you can expand those and funding. illinois defunded want and i'll talk about in passing new minimums to do with a followed. stop using present a start funding things that stop it four stars. there are political reasons we might do it that way but we need to change the way we approach that. the last part, private prisons.

that great great distraction. bernie sanders one to show he cared about prisons was a person you did come here's a bill to abolish private present at the federal and state level. put aside the fact it was completely unconstitutional. the impact would've been close to zero. 8% of all prisoners are in private prisons overall. at the state level is closer to 6%. almost all the private appraisers are in just five states and the note evidence of faster growth. the problem, so that's part of it. the bigger problem, what makes itself pressing for me is the problem with private prisons isn't the profit, is the insidious. here's your classic private prison or story. you paid you pay per person per day. they cut back on holocaust to make up for prison per day rate profitable. they country, cut, cut staff become cut program, pet food. it's bare-bones as possible. they take all the extra money at per day out the prison and used

to fund on resources and a fight any sort of reform because of the body in the print is more money for them. they can't see the prison shank. that cuts off profit and that's horrible. what i described to you, not a private prison. what i just described is the state of louisiana did facing overcrowding problem, entered into contracts to pay local county sheriffs, public officials, per prisoner per day to house the prisoners in local counties public chill. it wasn't a private actor inside. the private schemas later -- came in later. it's not about the profit. if you incentivize public actors to maximize body count, it will maximize body count. instead of dashing what is instead we wrote contract that incentivize the private actors to focus on recidivism.

people leave the prison and we will track it. we'll see how many come back in five years. if enough don't come back that's when you get paid. you don't get paid per prisoner per day, you get paid if they don't come back. not a pipe dream. pennsylvania does this with halfway house with australia did this with their entire prison. it's not the private, the insidious. the the fact that matt is public prisons had exact same terrible incentives private prisons to. we ignored altogether. we spent $50 billion a year on prisons. half to three-quarters of that is wages. public prison guard unions are hugely powerful. private prison profit last year was $400 million. public sector guard wages were $25 billion. who do you think will be the biggest political actor? i get a lot of resistance. private prison profit on the left, it's in their, right

there. there's public prison guard salaries right there. that's what guard unions maximize, salaries. their job is to maximize payroll. that's what they get paid to do. they make so much more of it at that's really where the power happened but we never talk about the guard unions as a force that derails reform. here's a great example of how effective they are. new york state has shipped 25,000 appraisers since 1999. the amount we spend on prisons has gone up because the guard union will not close prisons. people complain about private prisons and contracts it if capacity although said fibers and get to pay us as if it's filled until 75%. phantom prisoner contracts. that's terrible. new york state is littered. the guards are getting their full-page watch over practically no one. how is it different that a private prison being paid for prisoners who are not there?

its exact same problem. people rant and rave about these private prison contract terms that are bad and they never talk about public sector guard unions. guard unions play huge role. politicians play huge role. public politician. jobs, a lot of places the prison is only job. the job impact is overstated, they think they're getting an economic benefit but they believe it is the economic dynamo for the area and their constituents believe that so they'll fight tooth enough to keep the prisons open. outside of four states, you live in one before, california, new york, delaware and maryland, everywhere else wears a prisoner live for the purpose of the sensing which bradford districting for representatives? they live in the prison, not where they came from. all across the country we're littered with these rural prisons that take black and brown men from the city and knew

them at to the where they can't vote, rural areas, they can't vote outside of maine and vermont. they are physically there, cannot vote and they count as five fifths of a person. i'm using that fraction as a purpose. there are dishes all across the country where is the prison shrinks that legislator will lose his seat at the next election because they depend upon those bodies in the presence i can't vote to maintain their power. there's a distinct political bias. they're taking people out who tend to vote democrat, at democrat exceeded and moving to much more conservative areas where they bolster republican representation. we new york state get rid of the proposal republican senate slipped in a district because he knew they would lose a senate seat at least one of the next count and added an extra seat to try to exert some degree of senate power. the bias is clear and the four

states are states that this is a democratic governors, democrat of sims and house of state passed the law during that brief to your window when the senate was controlled by the democrats the same time december and the governors mansion with an assailant time they force this lawsuit. republican so it will cost them power. nationwide they have cleaned this is because after the prisoners. they will fight reform tooth and nail. boring and dry, enumeration policy that hugely important. also it's not just urban suburban split when it comes to race. the people in power don't feel the cost they are imposing. it'll feel this cost b of people don't look like them. the same empathy for, broad systemic difference in views. the politics are screwy. as much as we want one thing to work the politics are pointed towards misery and was against mercy. no matter how will a program works if it fails once, the

politicians believe it will be done. willie horton in a sentence '80s, massachusetts has his department serving long prisons since ago hopefully we can. no one ever violated but one guy did. willie horton ran away, ran out to marilyn, rape, broken i credit us all, gets a visit when the governor of massachusetts who did need to pass lava supported ran for president there were all these attack ads that link willie horton to michael dukakis. the impact was grossly overstated. 1% of all americans saw it. but the psychological impact become a recent update is darrell dennis, a parolee in arkansas about three years ago, two years ago, one parolee to mix one murder while on parole and like a five-10% publish decline turns into population increase. the entire parole system in arkansas shuts down. this is how we operate.

until we depoliticize the system, respond to only one bedt crime, will never get fixed. constant loops, it will happen before, a lap and he can pick is an example. in 1970 congress abolished a mandatory minimums for drug sentencing. as state policy rep member from texas got up in the low thousands of this is an important law. we need to abolish mandatory minimum for drug senses because they're morally wrong, bad policy, that across the board. that representative was george h. w. bush. was vice president and president, brought them all back. now we're trying to take them all away again. we abolish all these things that don't change ongoing politics but we would write back your kindred when crime is down we cut penalties. when crime goes up we them all back up. systematically predictably decide to do that. or not design but that's it is been built.

no reform has attempted to change the ongoing politics. there are things we can do. we can use sensing commissions and other devices to make immediate response to the shocking crime to date less immediate where ran into it we can do the same broken system. as crime goes up enough, we will be in trouble. so that's a big take away, my final side and then i will take questions here the dramatic and shocking is often distracting. they guy who gets 80 years for an low-level drug offenses horrible. that should not happen and we should be opposed to that. that's not what is driving things. what's driving things much more mundane, the burglar who gets four years. it's these low-level stuff that is turning to the system. the big shocking things are big and shocking because they are rare. what matters is more vocal. something much more basic, much more mundane. the da who is often signing plea

bargains. the final is the most important fix to be the hardest because why they are still a problem. it's big and important we are probably fixed it. if it's big and not a is probably lingering. if it matters is kind of like it matters because we don't have to pay attention to. because it's boring. i was doing this one death row case, down to 100 center st. has been been getting fighting off 1000 misdemeanor cases. that's how i spend my pro bono time s discussing get records ad wrote wrote their offense on the is two years down the line. it does get the climate but that's what things matter. pay attention to boring and unimportant, with expensive that, not things that drive the process. i'm optimistic we can. we need to shift attention away from the shocking and high-profile to sort of almost more horrifying but less dramatic.

so thank you and i look forward to any questions you have. [applause] >> if you have a question that is a microphone right here in the front. please stand up, lineup in front of the mic. [inaudible] >> the fact is one size does not fit all. there was a difference between the culture of attica, woodburn and sing sing and 195 the dark side. you spoke of california, not incarceration for people. in new york state that is still self-defense law. you cannot be off doing self-defense or you have a larger percentage of white people in jail. self-defense in new york than

you probably have in california that includes a 15% of the population in jails that are white. the fact of the matter is you spoke about the crime rates going down in some areas. that may have something to do with the fact that women in prison are now 600% more than they were ten years ago. they are 32% of those, of those in jail are therefore psychiatric reasons. >> is there a question? >> children of parents at second, third, fourth generation crack and cocaine addicts may not do drugs but they would do violence to get there sexuality and then their children -- [shouting] >> i will just add nuk new statf a self-defense law. i teach it to my lost its every year. but anyway, please. >> i was going to ask you, first i want to thank you for the presentation. i like that you were orange to

this meeting. on palm sunday in your city going to rikers, on the way there i was o on the bus, talkig and i said have you been to prison? he said no, i'm too old for that. prison is for young people. right? so is my question. the question is, a lot of people in prison have been in trouble with the law. prisons are the boarding schools for america today. i'm an immigrant who came to this country. i feel like when i arrived so what else went to prison, i got an opportunity to do whatever i could in the united states. my question is, what kind of a social reform contract do you offer for people who are the first conflict with the law? could be anything but the first time, seems like you did a great job with like traffic violations but your two tickets, so what you suggest the social contract for people get in trouble the first time? >> i guess the first thing to realize is that lots of us do

things that could trigger the law and a lot of us have the launch of it against us. it's true people go to jail or prison and those are two very different institutions typically. my focus is on present not jails. jails are mostly pretrial detainees, very different creatures. mainly relies on jail more horrifying. we lock people up for public safety. it's completely sent to me if true, it strikes as plausible is that 89% of all people not on rikers make it to the trial date. if you are on record the person jamaica to trial date is a 4%. if you're locked up in rikers you're less likely to make to trial and if you're free on bond or your own recognizance. rikers can one job. keep them there until trial. they can't get you to trial as well she is laying people off. rikers is its own sort of

separate thing from a look at. a social contract, it's hard idea with deep problems. think of it this way. when i was in high school i punched a kid. not very well. i'm not even sure he really realized it but i did punch him in the church. i was not exactly a bruiser but i punched a kid. it was a soul. there was no cop. if there was a cop there, dude, stop punching people ended up blackett, don't do that, drop precipitously. you broken the law, one thing comes young people do stupid things all the time. some young people do the stupid thing until stopping a stupid idiot. others who do the same stupid thing are hauled off to jail. maybe stop doing that as a starting point. realizing that there's a systematic difference in how we respond to bad behavior by young

people and young men in particular and that is the need to impose higher laws, direct over to one group over the other. other. thus tieback to an important point, a theory called the condemnation of blackness which is a three that has his idea that offending by white people is a pathology to get done something wrong. look at dylann roof. this is a most amazing thing, he self radicalized himself. somehow he just became a racist murder. there was a literature, no group. the new times looked at this, self radicalized. people of color, social pathology. it is for the proof of the systematic failure of that community. this undocumented disparity in that approach through today. there's this compulsion we fail to respond more aggressively to minority offending because that's not just this guy doing something wrong. not just john punching someone. is this guy punching because that community is flawed?

we have to flood it and react to. deeto. deep psychological factors american culture has embedded in it, there's no easy solution to it. at least acknowledging it i think is an important first step. >> my question is you said there's no easy solution to it but you said it is slowly going in the right direction. can you speculate on how you think it could move faster or better? a scenario, three scenarios of positive being addressed and if it's not, the implication for positive, negative and neutral. >> things cascade in weird ways in our culture. when gay marriage was proposed, crazy, focus on the best policies, that's habitual advocate and now is the cost social right. admit with the politics of gay marriage and politics of crime are different but look at marijuana. support for marijuana legalization is moving in an incredibly sharp kind of way. i'm very wary of people say we

can do that now, let's just do it. attitudes have a habit of shifting in surprising fluid kind of voice. i think i'm optimistic, in that and 26 election. it was run on a very crime on attitude. trump has been this very carnage in america kind person. that's what his campaign built record the same time he managed to win millions of votes, coming within a hairs breadth of the possible, in about 16% of the major cities reformist das one elections against tough on crime. i'm going to be more moderate. at the same time in states that trump one, or oklahoma, the state that went the strongest fort drum, 65-35. at the same time they passed to statewide references, decriminalizing large swaths of drugs and shifting that money that would be used for punishment into treatment. you see the same time things are terrible, but they're willing to

vote for reformers. there's this growing shift that's taking place. also this ongoing, the great sword, cities are increasingly liberal and the rural areas are conservative. plays out fairly well in this concept because most producers tend to come to cities. cities are getting more blue and they tend to be more tolerant reform minded das or police chiefs. you have the right are part of the country become tougher and tougher and more conservative and harsher. they are impacting the prison population which would be slight less. there are these broader shift taking place that pose, some of it is generational. look at the senate can use senate. it also strictly generational lines. the baby boomers hate reform and younger senators favor reform. if you're a boomer you look to the spike in crime and gradually cut and that spike will always linger in your psyche and be there. my age, and 41, crime decline

started when intercoastal most of my life things are pretty much safer. my attitude is much less unity. my age of political awareness was pretty much the decline. i think that plays a huge role in what you've experienced over the course of your life. >> i want to thank you for all the things you brought up. i think you did an excellent job. for some ever heard anything like this brought out. i think america runs on the type of thing she just brought out. the prison system is a market basically. you talked about drugs, but alcohol is th a biggest drug of them all. it is a more socially acceptable drug. most deaths from october the this than heroin, cocaine, crack, crystal meth and everyone else put together. the only thing bigger is tobacco and firearms. they have atf, the live off of peoples pain and suffering. when you did a survey about the people locked up in prisons, it

seems to me that america is nothing but an elimination ground. correct me if i'm wrong. it's a big money. >> it's a big money. there's a lot of money here. i think what to board realizes most of that money contra terrific is a much more country in public sector than private sector. as politicians and unions and cards and that's a much different story than these remote companies that are trying to rake in the own private profit. it's not fighting some far removed one companies headquartered in tennessee, the other is a florida. in new york state with no -- we're fighting them at all. it's us against us. we have to take jobs away from the state of new york and it makes it a trickier issue. when cuomo has tried to push present form these are cited to jobs program. will shrink the prison but bring something else in because these prisons operate as a rural jobs program is this like new york. texas had the opposite from

because one of the they can't keep enough cops on the job. it's a jobs program. >> all these people locked up, what is a, 500,000 were present were present in america than china? or has not gone up? >> that -- >> federal offenses. it's not enough jobs because there's no balance. you have too much money, more than others, there's no financial balance. it creates desperation. >> i think the extent we are removing people from civic life. the impact is much good outside prisons that altogether. that's the setting site, why is the american -- 13 is unlike european countries we don't want many because it i've dated but it could be as many as 60 million men had a criminal record. in a country of 315 million, perhaps 60 million men have a a criminal record and, therefore,

made 60 minute are to access to jobs is our job growth, there's a massive, prior criminal record. it seemed much more subtle ways. 1.5 main prisoners shocked but is not a staggering elimination. as far as prolonged post-release, even without any prison time at all, just a felony conviction, acts as a marker that never leaves your site is much more i think the way has this durable impact that's hard untangle because it keeps such bad records about that. >> i have a question. [inaudible] it's important, it reminds me of the song of the pet shop boys, but have a question because you are very intelligent attorney. working in soho -- advertisement

about israel is our protector in the middle east against terrorists. you know, we started criminal justice as criminal lawyer, just to protect herself against any acts of violence. how would you describe, who is really terrorist here? who are we standing against in the middle east? >> the middle east? that is a question that is far beyond my specific area of expertise. that's not my area at all, unfortunately. >> thank you. your book, in addition to your book, is it feasible for you, for example, to run for some sort of political office or to try to pass somehow some type of

law that would rest some of these issues? >> i am assuming i like the temperament to run for office successfully, but yes, certainly i think you see a growing number of academics who are trying to work with policymakers to do this, to try to change things that are not working. you are seeing a growing amount of philanthropic money coming into this area. ..

>> i'm much more comfortable in front of peter than my own child, some random baby. but i think you're seeing more people mobilized to push on this. >> is there an organization that you recommend anyone contribute money to, to try to change some of these issues you bring up? >> i mean, i don't know which ones i'd necessarily say contribute money to. a lot of groups are doing aggressive work in this area, the aclu, the koch foundation works very closely with the aclu, and then after that -- those are the two biggest players, and after that there's a, you know, pew foundation has a lot of work in this area. this is, like, the one. there's so much wrong with our system that every aspect is

important, but there's no sort of one group that's spearheading the charge for reform. it's too big of an issue for one group to do it. >> [inaudible] effects of this system in certain communities, you know, from -- [inaudible] to the economic system to the health care of the community. and i'm wondering, does prison culture or sending so many young men at a young age to prison, does it i tend to increase also criminality in communities, or does that stay static? like, to what extent does the actual prison system itself increase or not -- >> right. >> -- criminal activity. >> so it's a very hard thing to study. and most studies of it don't do a very good job. just the stats of it is incredibly complicated. but the best studies tend to say, to serve two takeaways that sort of to seem contradictory.

one is that prison was a fairly effective device during rising crimes in the '80s. by this point today when crime is low and the prison population is high, that marginal prisoner is not zero, but it's close to that. even taking that as true though, at any given point however effective prison was, there's something else that's more effective still, right? so a dollar spent on policing goes further than prison, because police actually deter crime. again, crime is a young person's game. either someone is not going to be deterred by a 50-year sentence, it's an 18-year-old, because he's never going to get caught. i'm an idiot, right? but if i saw the cop on the corner, right, maybe not, right? so that's where deterrence really works. and then there might be non-policing options that are even more effective than you have than the cop on the corner.

so prison never worked as well. but now there's an interesting study that shows the gains in prison might be short run. the less crime yo commit, but the -- you commit, but the more crimes that individual commits upon release from prison. those crimes later might be less severe, and it might be okay, but the math gets a lot harder to say it is actually work, right? and there's evidence that the younger the person is, the worse the impact of prison on their behavior. doing it younger is by far the worse thing you can do. just the exposure to more harmful events. getting jobs, getting married, those rah pathways -- those are pathways out of crime. and so, you know, it's probably a net loss in general, and the younger they get, the worse it's going to be. >> you started out pointing out that most of the incarceration took place in california.

so i'm curious what, like, reform took place in california that you thought were particularly effective or ineffective. >> yeah. what california did is very unique. california basically is very, very hard to sue a prison for bad conditions. there's a federal law that no one -- [inaudible] the 1984 crime act during the whole 2016 campaign, it doesn't really matter anymore. it makes it really hard to fight against bad prison conditions. california says, yeah, people are dying, but we've got systems in place, stop complaining about it. but they lost on that ground. so the ninth circuit basically took over running california's prison system and said you've got to cut capacity from 200%, scale back to 135% capacity. that was the good world, was 135%. only one-third over capacity. with the democrats controlling the house and the senate in the governor's manx and with jerry -- and with jerry brown as

governor, they took a whole bunch of state prison offenses and told the counties you can still convict them of these crimes, but you have to house them in county jails. they also made it much harder to send people back to prison for parole violations. in most states, about 30% of people going to prison are coming off of parole, in california it was 70-75%. had a unique arrangement of politicians in power adopt this incredibly sweeping policy that no one else can begin to think about adopting that seems to do an amazingly double-head things of cutting prisons and at the same time cutting jails because they stop sending you back for parole violations. what california's done is kind of remarkable, but i'm not sure how much other states can try to do it both because i'm not sure they have sort of the underlying sort of causal mechanisms that

reeye linement -- realignment seems to be good at targeting, but also the political will to push this all back on the counties. and doing that, they solved one of these big moral hazard problems which were county prosecutors sending people to state prisons. the county said, look, you can't do this, and california's initial reaction was that's the point, right? you've been free riding off us for years, start picking up the tab. unfortunately, sacramento passed all these subsidies, and it's really hard to tell counties don't do this. they fight back really aggressively even in california. >> hi. i happen to live in an over-policed area that is three blocks away from -- [inaudible] and when my son who reached that age where they say rites of passage and his friends being stopped and frisked, i often thought that maybe blacks should have been maybe getting, they

can get social security or disability because they've been arrested so many times and unable to get a job, housing. if someone is arrested and has a record, housing is very difficult to come by as well as a job. >> i think people don't appreciate the magnitude of the consequences that come from, certainly, being convicted. arrests have some, convictions have more. the web site has changed. if you just google aba collateral consequences map, it'll take you to the right site, you can go state by state and look at when you get convicted how many potential restrictions can be placed on you. and for new york state, it's about 1300, right? now, that doesn't mean you're going to get 1300 upon conviction, but they have up to 1300 they can do. and there's a great example of how perverse these incentives can be. new york fixed this by law, i think in 2008, but it took a long time to get there. the single biggest training

program in new york state prisons is barber school. until 2008 one of the things that disqualified you from getting a barber's license was a prior record. we would train thousands of men to be barbers, and immediately upon release tell them one thing you can never be is a barber, right? and then they reoffend because they're facing stress and pressure and no job, and we look at this and there's two things you can think when someone reoffends under conditions like this. one, maybe we're make reentry really hard for them. or, two, guess we didn't make reentry hard enough, let's scare them straight even more, right? and traditional policy's been the second. and it's not working now, maybe that tougher law will work, because if you scream at someone a little bit louder, that's when they tend to respond best. yell at them louder. i think we're starting to get smarter about that, i think

we're starting to realize that reentry is an issue. we need a lot more first chances too. why respond after, why make conditions where they don't offend in the first place, acknowledge that a lot of these policies were misguided. new york state finally lifted the blanket ban on prior people with felony records getting jobs as barbers, right? but it took years to get there, and we're slow in acknowledging how much pressure we put on people. at least during your parole period you can have a driver's license, but you have to have a job, right? now, in new york city you can manage that. in rural ohio, you cannot. you hear stories people spending four and five hours getting to and from work each day, paying for transportation to the job that they have because they didn't get a driver's license because they went to prison. we just make lives miserable for people and then act shocked and appalled that they end up reoffending today. >> on that question, three quick questions. what is our reincarceration rate for people, and do we have any data that compares median

income, people with convictions versus not? second question was a few months ago there was talk about education for the population incarcerated, but i think that got shot down because people didn't want to pay for it from public funds, even basic ged degrees. what ever became of that. and third question is what successful models do we have of in the world for these violent offenders that we can adapt and say, yes, guns notwithstanding and -- [inaudible] that this may be successful for us? thank you. >> sure. so long talk after a long day. the first question, reoffending rates. so the stat you normally here is about half of all people who get released from prison end up back in prison. it's not entirely true. it's sort of true. if you look at everyone who leafs in one given -- leaves in one given year, about half of them go back. the difference is the fact that

certain people are very, keep going back and back and back. in any given one year, across time there's a lot of people who keep being that same person coming out and going back, so the overall risk looks to to be about one-third. so higher than it really should be but less than the number you normally hear. as for median income, the numbers suggest those who have been to pretty tend to have substantially lower incomes. going to prison has a huge impact on your income, but it's fairly slight because you already have a low income before you go to prison in the first place. i don't know what happened with the various education bill, but they are politically difficult to get through. obama did note the '94 crime act abolished pell grants, obama tried to bring them back. i'm not sure what the status is right now. as for programs that work, you know, i wouldn't say

notwithstanding guns, the programs we see rolling out now are trying to focus very much on guns. that's something we need to understand about gun violence, we need to view it as an epidemic. 400 student -- 400 machine guns could all be traced back to one. a shoots b, and you sort of roll these shootings back, if that first shooting didn't happen -- a shoots b. so b's uncle shoots at a's brother, and a's brother fires back at this person, his friend shoots over there, and this thing just spreads. if you can cut it off before it spreads, if you can see that first tryst of disease, the bullet gets sent and break that transmission, maybe you can stop that whole spread of it, right? in chicago there's a firm called cure violence, it has worked very well in chicago, it hasn't worked well elsewhere, but in chicago there's this very interesting evidence showing

that the rise in shootings in chicago is almost perfectly timed to when the governor cut funding for this program. more than any other sort of factor. now, the thing to realize about this is one person says it looks like this program works really well in communities that have well-established gangs, creating sort of a cohesion amongst the gangs. what works in chicago might not work in binghamton, right? you've got to be very on the ground, not sort of, hey, this program works, let's roll it out nationwide. we're going to put gun violence behind us. what works in chicago and l.a. and new york will not work in binghamton and sandusky, right? so we've got to be smart about how we approach it and focus on small and big and urban, these are different social contexts. violence is a very social thing. new york city murders of the 400 people who were murder, something like 40 didn't know the person who killed them.

tv makes us terrified that the guy in the dark alley is going to kill us. that rarely happens. all these angie's list ares -- that's where you go to find a plumber. megan's law, amber alert -- like i said, long day. sorry, angie's list, you have no connection to what comes next at all. [laughter] we're always afraid of the stranger in the van kidnapping your kid. that's never going to happen. the killed napper is the other parent -- kidnapper is the other parent, right? it's probably the person you're married to. not yet but at some point. you know, divorce goes bad, the kidnapping happens. these are not -- violence and these horrible crimes, they're not like random shots in the dark. they're very contextual and social, and it requires social and contextual response and not swinging a big stick, kind of one-size-fits-all solution. yeah. >> [inaudible]

some states that were banning -- [inaudible conversations] >> a couple months ago i read an article that said certain states were banning inmates from reading, certain books were bad and they couldn't read "mein kampf", they couldn't read the kaballah or the bible because the books were considered -- >> right. >> -- i guess, propaganda. they just, these prisons decided that the inmates can't read -- >> right. so prisons have banned books -- sorry. >> i remember reading in the article, you know, what type of crimes these people committed, so i apologize for that.

so my question to you is do you think more literacy should be advocated, and do you think then reading dostoyevsky, you know, "crime and punishment," would help? >> should literacy be advanced? absolutely. supreme court precedent saying if the prison officials say safety dictates this policy, it's almost impossible to overturn the policy. so prisons have banned books, all sorts of things all the time. they say, well, we think it's an issue of safety, to the court was obliged to take hands-off approach unless it's incredibly egregious. once they say public safety, the ability for the courts to intervene to let those books back in plummets. so, yes, i absolutely think we should focus on literacy and better training and allowing books in, but the law as it stands gives wardens incredible discretion to not do that if they don't want to.

>> i feel it's very hard to follow you. i don't know if you talk too much or you talk so many things at the same time or you talk too fast. [laughter] anyway, i guess the main theme is you think that incarceration rate too high in america. almost all the people, all the countries from the whole world want to immigrate to usa. the number one reason is safety. it's not richness. china is so rich right now. although people have money, they want to come to u.s. so i think i don't quite agree with your point if you, some people did some -- you think it's not violent crimes? the drugs can destroy a person's life in many, many ways even though when it started, it's not violet. but the -- violent. but the person, at young age, they start to take drugs, their

whole life is doing them. they cannot make good marriage -- [inaudible] so i think, i want to ask you you think the people can age out of crime? i mean, are they just being robbed of their life? >> no, i mean, i don't -- it's not a question of what i think, it's a question of what the data show. and the data consistently show people age into and out of crime. it's not an opinion. it's a fairly well-established sociological fact. i mean, there are persistent offenders who persist, but they're a very small fraction of that population. and, yes, we are a fairly safe country, although to be fair, we're about the middle of the pack for europe except for lethal violence where we're off the charts. if you want to avoid being killed, go to france, germany, spain, portugal or england. but that doesn't change the fact that we could do better and that prison is not the way to keep our crime rates low. there are better and smarter and

far less socially destructive ways to accomplish that. and we need to adopt better and smarter approaches. the costs of prison are not uniformly borne, but we've imposed these costs because those poor, more minority committees because those who have the political power in wealthier white areas don't feel these costs. and so we could still always do better. >> another thing, people commit some minor crime, they don't got punished. you think that will make the whole -- [inaudible] i think if you don't punish, i do not say we should punish them so harshly, but if you don't punish, i think -- that doesn't make the nation a better country, that only makes -- and everybody wants to live in the safe neighborhood, safe country,

safe neighborhood. even the criminals. they want to live in a safe neighborhood. i don't think anybody want to live in an unsafe neighborhood or unsafe country. so i think what we should focus on is raise children better. [inaudible conversations] >> i guess i would just say this, pay attention to how the parents in those safer places want their kids punished or what they tolerate for how the kids are punished. they clearly don't think their kids have to go to prison, they do everything they can to keep their kids out of prison. but they're okay -- [inaudible] for things they do wrong. so it's not what they think we have to do to stay safe, don't do that to my child, and that's a terrible idea. right in that lie right there, you see that's not exactly always about safety. >> -- for keeping people in prison, the same things i taught

in the bronx in schools, we see them in the foster care system, keeping those -- [inaudible] and getting paid. how do you suggest de-incentivizing things for people who should be serving the public all around? >> yeah. so that's the question that would give me minow bell prize, i think. -- my nobel prize. this is dealing with the medicine, that instead of paying doctors per procedure, how we pay them per outcome so if you do one procedure and fix the guy perfectly the first time, you get more. as it stands right now, if you botch the first surgery, you don't do a great job, you've got to go back in the second time, that's two payments. and the guy is less worse off, and you're better off. oh, i'm going to do a subpar job to get paid more. what if we could pay them based on this guy's so much healthier than this guy, so the good doctor gets paid more for the good work that he's doing, right? medicine doesn't have an answer to that yet.

they're working on that. and that's a case where incentives are perfectly aligned. the doctor and the patient actually want the same thing, but you got to figure out the right way how to measure it, how to want fite, how to structure a system that pays for that. and that's the structure that private prisons actually kind of work for. at least as a starting point, what the if we paid the prison not based on prisoner per day, but literally recidivism? you relieve 5,000 -- released 600 people last year, we're going to track them for one year, five years, ten years, twenty years. there's a lot of questions, but based on how often they recidivate or don't, that's how you get paid. you get paid more than the prison that released 600 and got 30 to come back -- 300 to come back. before you paid us the same, so why should we work harder, and now they're getting more money than i am. so i want to focus better. i think the focus on private prison profit gets it completely wrong.

the profit motive might be an amazing thing, right, if you can harness it correctly and pay them based on doing the right thing, they will do the right -- they will be at least encouraged to do the right thing or at least be better or be a pilot site for what does and doesn't work. a couple that are getting paid can experiment more, and we can translate those ideas to public prisons. it is this really hard question that we wrestle with in lots of areas. medicine, they're still struggling with it, so it's not, it's not easy. but i think i agree that if we can change that, that changes everything. >> one last question. >> yes. i'd like to know what prevention -- do you think is there a big part of the school education system, early grades or civics? what do you think, is there any examples in the u.s. or around in the states or in europe where education prevention really works? and what do you recommend? what do you think would do that? >> i mean, this is not my primary area, so i don't have a

good sense of what the answers are, and i'm sure it's an incredibly nuanced and complex field. but you hear about things like head start appearing to have, you know, long-lasting protectionings, right, that as long as you maintain that kind of initial early childhood investment later on, it can have a durable impact. i also think we want to be very, very careful about framing programs like head start in that way, right? there's labeling issues. hey, you're less likely to be a criminal, that kind of puts that idea in their head and can be very toxic down the line. i would argue as a moral point of view, we don't want to frame providing assistance to the poor is only justifiable if it reduces crime. that's a horrible thing to say from, like, a moral perspective. either has that impact. so i think there are education programs that have proven impacts or long-lasting impacts on the likelihood of going to prison. i saw some study today, i just saw the headline for it, so that's always a hugely risky thing, but it said something

like for young black men having one -- having one black teacher in, like, grades k-5 increases -- reduces the risk of high school dropout by 38%. small things showing that like, you know, having a black teacher, a role model, a mentoring role mold that you can relate to much more directly can reduce high school dropouts, and that surely has an impact on job, employment, all the other things that can shape pathways in and out of crime. or at least arrest. so those things can work, but i think you've got to be very careful not to frame them that way or sell them that way, even though that might be politically expedient, because it sells a broader message that these communities are only worth our investment if it makes me safer. that's an easy but i think incredibly toxic thing to say. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some authors recently featured on booktv's "after words," our weekly author interview program. chris hayes discussed racial inequality in the united states. stuart taylor examined college campus sexual assault policies. and dr. elizabeth rosenthal, editor-in-chief of kaiser health news, reported on the current state of health care. in the coming weeks on "after words," new america president and ceo anne marine slaughter will examine how technology is impacting foreign affairs, and minnesota senator al franken will discuss his senate cap pain. campaign.

rachel schneider will report on how low and moderate income families manage money. and this weekend on "after words," nebraska senator ben sass argues that america's youth are not prepared for adulthood. >> when i got here, i wanted to spend my time getting to know these people and trying to figure out why doesn't the senate work, because it doesn't. we're not focused on the long-term issues. so i interviewed a majority of the senators in private to get to know them well. and i'm one of the three or four most conservative people in the senate by voting record, but i'm not very partisan. i don't think either of these parties are very impressive. so i was indifferent to spending time with republicans and democrats. i want to know the people, what do they worry about, why are we not tackling the challenges of how cyber will remake warfare, why are we not talking about the portability of benefits in an era where millennials are going to change jobs faster and faster? and i realize that there are some very, very substantial collective action problems which

i would sort of summarize as saying as we move into this post-industrial moment, local communities and immediateuating institutions are being -- mediating institutions are being hollowed out. most americans are not politically polarized, they're mostly disengaged. they're worried about neighborliness, but most people are not consuming cable tv nudes talk shows -- news talk shows. of the small subset that are hyperpolitical, there's polarization, but most of the public is checking out from this conversation altogether. and i think that one of the effects of polarization is that people in these two political parties think that the main way they would lose their job and, frankly, one of the things that's scary here is the biggest long-term thought a lot of politicians have in d.c. is simply their own incumbency. there's not a lot of long-term thinking. most people are more afraid of losing a primary in their own party than trying to persuade anybody of the other party. it turns out at exactly that same moment, we're fractionalizing media, again,

because of the digital revolution where it's possible for people to speak more and more to and only hear from echo chambers of people that already agree with them. then narrow casting becomes a smart strategy if your main goal is re-election, but i think we have big generational projects, and we need to do right by the next generation. >> "after words" airs on booktv every saturday at 10 p.m. and sunday at 9 p.m. eastern. you can watch all previous "after words" programs on our web site, booktv.org. >> eugene is the largest metropolitan center between sacramento or san francisco and portland and going east all the way to denver. so it's a main center for education and health. you have hospitals, you've got the schools. it's kind of a transportation center a little too. but because of the beautiful