see that child in the back seat, 100% chance your child will survive a crash unless the car completely collapses. 5% of people say, now that's crazy. they are just about as good. just throw the kid in the backseat and let them roll around. no one would do that; right? that's what we are doing on climate change. we are throwing a kid in the back seat and letting them roll around. >> you can watch the full discussion of the social conquest of earth on our website, book tv.org. book tv, television for serious readers. >> welcome to the 33rd annual chicago tribune printers row lit

fest. i went to give a special thank you to our sponsors. the program will be broadcast live on c-span2 book tv. if there is time at the end at-- of the q&a session with the author we ask you use the microphone located at the center of the room for home viewing audiences so they can hear your questions. before we begin, we ask that you silence your cell phones and turn off your camera flashes. please welcome our introducer, elizabeth taylor, literary editor at large at the chicago tribune. [applause]. >> can you hear me? is that all right? i'm elizabeth taylor and i'm so excited about this book. they will be here to talk about it. i got this book like-- seemed

like nine months ago and just read it so quickly and just found it-- it was the story of the 70s. it was this amazing the social history, so just in short, it's trying to-- "blood in the water" , read this book and said we have to book her for chicago tribune printers row lit fest and then how smart we looked, then she wins the pulitzer prize in history. [applause]. >> it's really wonderful. its extranet book. it's about the 1971 uprising, but it's so much more. is like extraordinary social history. heather is an investigative reporter. she just digs in there, gets the

documents and the 10 years of research are really shown very lightly. it's an engrossing read, just really want to know who was responsible, what the hell happened and then what the implications are for incarceration in this crazy country of ours, so i'm going to turn it over to heather and her wonderful colleague and friend who was at cornell. heather is at michigan and they are really going to get into it and then after that i really hope we will go to the back and buy and read this book. thank you so much. [applause]. >> hello. that's on. and so honored to be here today and be in conversation with someone whose incredible mentor

to me, personally and i think to summary young historians. i wanted to start off by saying that it's just been so amazing. i first met heather and she was just a few years into the research of this book and it's been incredible to watch this unfold and it's been so gratifying to watch the book about and get such incredibly well deserved praise, but also the way the book has become a vehicle to bring attention to issues that are unequivocally some of the most essential to our country and to our democracy right now. it's a real honor to be part of the conversation with you about this book. i thought we could start off by saying i want you to tell us a bit about attica, but i also if you want my first just saying how did you end up even-- you are labor historian. i don't know how you would

define your early training, but how did you end up doing this research and then let's talk about the actual story itself or let's start their. >> il-8 guess i am on also. thank you all for coming out to talk about this good-- book. the book itself was a real journey. some of you may know the book took 13 years to write and so the story of why i started to write it and what i think the book is now ours sort of two different stories. i started to write a book because at the time i really considered myself a labor historian, but civil rights historian and there was this event that happened behind, a civil rights event that happened behind bars, so i was really intrigued to write that history. with two caveats. number one, i had very little knowledge about prison in america as i think most

americans have very little knowledge of prison and had no idea the state of new york had sealed virtually all the records with regard to the story. this is a case of getting a book contract and realizing my gosh, i'm not sure i can write this book because i don't know how i will get access to the information. over the course of writing the book it was a real research journey, which we could talk about, but it was also a journey of understanding how important prisons are in this country and realizing and it was really sort out for me like a lightbulb that went off in the military mess. wow, after 1971, which is when attica happened all of a sudden we in this country start locking up everyone. in 40 years have become the worlds largest jailer with some of the worst conditions ever, so what is it about the most important prison rights protest that somehow someway we could've

ended up in this mess 40 years later, so that became part of the book, which is how did we become such a punitive nation, but it was also was a book about this particular protest in this particular place in new york. so, what are you take us to that story a little bit and start. i think many people have heard of attica, but maybe not a lot or had their understandings affected by sort of the press accounts that happened afterwards, so maybe * by setting the stage of what happened, of the conditions that led to adequate-- attica and what happened at attica in 71. >> so, attica, new york, is a tiny town of state and remains today a state prison where there were about 2400 men crammed in, severely overcrowded as much of

prisons are today these were men who were suffering pretty inhumane conditions. being given one square of toilet paper today, not a book to see their children if they weren't married to the mother of their children. and having to deal with really capricious rules. for example, to the storyline because it symbolizes the degradation of it all over that you could get: current parole but then the administration would hand you this outdated phone book and say you can't leave until you have written to an employer and that employer agrees to hire you. well, i can assure you not to many employers were thrilled to hire someone with the postmark about a cup correctional facility and also you had to pay for the stamp and you had to pay for the paper and no one had any money, so these were just the sort of degradation degrading conditions and what ultimately happens is a protest that is

asking for again, very basic improvements of conditions and this is a really extranet or protest because it happens over for long days and nights. could bring them observers to watch over these negotiations, people like tom wicker of the "new york times" or famous civil rights lawyer, but also some quite conservative state legislators, a real mixed bag. they all agreed these guys had legitimate claims that the state needed to deal with them, negotiate without and the negotiations seemed to be going well, but after the fourth night the state decides to take this prison with brutal force, sends in 500 state troopers-- i'm sorry, the masses about 500 state troopers and sends it

about 200 and also corrections officers are armed to that teeth after dropping gas across the present, so everyone is immobilized and then the shooting begins and for 15 minutes all you can hear is gunfire and they kill 39 men, prisoners and guards alike and then there is a total of 128 man shot, some six, seven bullets wounds. then they torture these men for days and weeks and the torture is really so brutal that i have to say was the hardest part of the book to write. probably most extraordinarily, they then step out and tell the entire world that something different happened i'm a witch is that the prisoners killed the hostages and that the story i think is a profoundly important to shaping what the nation makes about prisoner rights and so the story, which i thought was going to be about this rebellion turned out to be about the cover-up of the crimes they go on for the next really 40 years, so the book is about a third about this rebellion about two

thirds about both the cover-up and the prisoner and hostage fight for justice that takes them for decades before they are finally heard. >> so, talk about-- i'm always struck by how much of the conversation about your book ends up being about that first third, so talk a bit about what the resolution was. you say there was this long fight for justice, but what happened i think that's the last known sort of-- the story of course continues, but what happened? i know there were hostages involved in efforts to get justice from the state and people incarcerated were also involved, so like what is the struggle bed? like talk a bit about what happened in the aftermath. >> part of the extraordinary thing about this story is that it starts in 1971, ends in five

days and then for the next probably 20 years the nation doesn't hear a lot about what goes on, but what's going on is the state of new york is filing cases, not against the troopers who killed the people and tortured people, but against the prisoners for rebelling. the first thing that happens is a series of criminal trials against the prisoners and their attempts to then in turn themselves sue the state or be heard are put on hold and they can't do anything while these criminal trials proceed. the hostages are swindled by the state. and they are handed these meager checks and told that they-- go ahead just get a little groceries, take care of yourself and we will take your of you in these 120-dollar checks, $40 checks meant they quote unquote elected a remedy, which met when they cash them they cannot sue the state, so for many years the

prisoners were fighting for their lives in the courts. of the guards had been swindled and were kind of a left in poverty and on their own. so, it wasn't until the criminal trials were resolved that the prisoners could in fact launch this massive civil suit, a federal civil rights case which takes 30 years to wind its way through the courts and in 2000, they finally get a jury verdict which is quite extraordinary showing that there was-- the state was liable, but that there damages to be had and then they were overturned on appeal, so ultimately they had to settle with the state. it sounds like a really powerful settlement. it was about $8 million for the prisoners, but when all is said and done divided over how many of them there was it was barely anything, but that settlement really brings the hostages together to fight for themselves

and so very recently the hostages had their own settlement with the state of new york, but all of that is an extraordinaire story of resistance and also not over because the state still has admitted responsibility, still hasn't apologized and frankly it still is not open to the records , so we are still demanding that these records the open. there are family members that want to know what happened and those are still not open to. >> so maybe that's a good segue to talk about the process of researching this book, which heather came and gave a talk where i work at cornell and i remember joking with my colleagues to same a talk on the history of attica is fascinating, but i would honestly also say she could do three talks on the talk of writing the books about the history of attica because it's also incredibly riveting and telling in its own, you know, it also has revealed a lot in itself, so if you would, could

you bit about sort of what challenges you face when you are doing this research and the sort of process of the different kind of records you used, different sources you used and yeah, what challenges you faced. >> for those of you who are not historians, you might not know how historians usually write books and that is that our first stop is at the archives, you know the various institutions that have saved those records, maybe in a box, folder, file and then we go through them meticulously and then reconstruct the story and tell it to readers of the page. the problem in this case was that the enormous paper trail of attica, so you can imagine there was all of the paperwork attendant to the rebellion, then there was the criminal trial, then there was all the investigative files that go on for years and then there was the

civil litigation file. this is thousands of boxes of information and i couldn't get any of it and some of it was officially sealed and some of the frankly is not. it's just that when you file a freedom of information request it would come back heavily redacted. i did learn that you just need to keep asking the question of different people because it's funny about bureaucracy, they don't always redact the same thing in each copy of the file so you can kind up with them next to each other and extrapolates what just happened to. but, i was really forced to rethink how we write this period , how we write about the 1960s and 70s and frankly, i was really humbled to understand that there is so much about this period that we don't have a clue about. we don't have any idea how history actually happen. we know the results.

we know, for example that the black panther party was largely decimated by the end of the 70s, but we don't have a clue about what the mechanisms were behind that destruction or similarly with this i was able to get quite a bit, but i suspect even i don't know the half of what was going on behind the scenes, so i had to figure out who had a copy, who had the original of what the state might have and that was really interesting. there were the survivors. they never stopped talking. they never stopped insisting on telling their story, so that was critically important and it was also a matter of thinking, for example if the state had the autopsy reports, well then did the local medical examiner still have them and ways in which: back to the original source, but ultimately i still could not answer, what i was coming to

feel was the most important question, which was how could it be that 39 people are shot to death, 120 age are shot total and then they are tortured and not one member of law enforcement ever is held responsible, so what is that story and that was the story locked in these investigative files and i was very very lucky. i just happened upon this whole stash of records in a county courthouse that i don't think anyone knew were there and that allowed me, finally to piece it together with the state new, what it didn't act on that it knew and then match became-- >> did they not know those records were available to you? >> they didn't end in fact, once i found them, which was its own

crazy crazy moment where i'm looking around like do they know, are there cameras in here, do they know what i just saw, i mean, this was a huge wall of thousands of pages about a cup related documents and it was in a dingy dusty dark room. i mean, there were no tables to take notes on. i tell my students, this was in 2006 in my students today say why didn't you just take pictures, scan, scan, scan i was like there were no smart phones. we don't get smartphones until 2010 and we do now the technology, so it was this kind of crazy story of trying to take as many notes as i could, asking could i please do some xeroxing, which by the way i gave them a 200-dollar check to do that xeroxing thank god because now i have that check. >> why is that check important? >> will, because before the book came out a reporter tried to

find those same records and they all disappeared and are not there anymore, so yeah, and that was my deepest fear. from 2006 until the book came out last year i didn't want to tell anyone what was there because what i hope was that the book would come out and then the footnote would make clear where those records we're in everyone would descend on the courthouse and demand to see them and there would not have been time to get rid of them, but there clearly was and they are not there anymore. >> and check, how-- >> well, it's for the copies of those attica records and i wrote on that check copies of attica records. >> it proves they were there. >> at least that what i said was true was that i went there on that day and i took copies and paid for those copies. >> what was in those records particularly that you think was not necessarily first to be released to a historian writing a book on it-- attica? >> the investigative files, so

right after this retaking on the scene are members of the attorney general's office who are charged with figuring out what had gone wrong at attica and they quickly set their sights on investigating prisoners, not law enforcement. by looking at those records i could see in fact they had a 10 of evidence against law enforcement despite the fact that-- by the way you should know the new york state police that retook that prison where the same-- was the same body that governor nelson rockefeller put in charge of investigating the scene, so needless to say key evidence was disappeared, photographs were doctored, film was spliced, statements were change and went missing and what i came across some of the two important things i found number one was an internal document that's showed that the

rockefeller administration had had a series of secret meetings and rockefeller's pool house. you can't make this stuff up. it was over a course of three weekends with the head of the state police, the people who had retaken attica, the attorney general's office and basically i think to get their stories straight, so i found that document and that document revealed they knew they would kill cost-- kill hostages when winning, which they denied for 40 years and reveals they deliberately did not give an ultimatum to men before they went in and i found the whistleblowing document. there was a prosecutor, and incredibly important hero of this story, malcolm bell who could see that he was trying to prosecute police and he was being blocked every turn and he finally pieces together the reason why he's being shut down

and he's ultimately just shut down is because rockefeller is sitting in nomination hearings for the vice presidency and that's when the whole thing shuts down and so he wrote in 167 page document that outlines all of the evidence that the state had that it did not act on and i found that document. there was only three copies ever made and i found one of them. it will never happen again. whatever book i choose to write, that will never happen again. >> so, talk-- well, taught all of us, i mean, sometimes we have jumped that we wish we wrote on the 13th century. there is something about writing history when there are a lot of people still alive and so talk about the process-- i guess to take a really interested a lotta people that that, you know, imprisoned at the time that were part of that uprising and that

are still around. talk about their involvement like in the process of writing and maybe even after the book has come out, i mean, i know you to talk to some people and, i mean, i imagine that's hard. it's a traumatic event. where people interested in having met story told? what was your experience with the survivors? >> i think as historians we are not equipped as i have said and other public forums, we are not equipped to deal with contemporary trauma. it's one thing to try to read counted and rescue it and it's a different thing to every single person i had a conversation with about this at some point just broke down and it's clear to me early on that this was still traumatic that people were still suffering guesting from what

they had experience, you know the guys in that yard whether they were prisoners or hostages many of them cannot hear helicopters to this day without just kind of having to basically shut down, i mean, it was so dramatic and i was not prepared for that. it made me feel a much greater responsibility for how the story would be told, but that said i hope-- what i did was try to tell it from multiple vantage points him in one minute you are in the yard with the prisoners at the negotiating table and really trying to understand what they were trying to do and then you are also in the hostage circle or in the house of one of the hostage families as they await word or you are in nixon's white house when he is asking rockefeller the only question that matters to him when this is over, which was basically did the blacks lead to this, was this all about the blacks and rockefeller said indeed mr. president, it was. he's basically okay with the

carnage as long as it was led by the plaques are about the blacks and so people remained i mean i know that some of the survivors have not been able to read the full book. it's just too much. >> so, i will ask one or two questions and have people come down if they're interested in asking questions, so the first question i have is you said this book in some way started out as part of a civil rights history and i'm wondering if you can talk a bit about, i mean, i think we will talk more about how we think about this story in terms of the trajectory of mass incarceration, but i like you to talk about it as part of the history of struggles against white supremacy and racial inequality and civil rights history. do you still think of it as a civil rights story? >> i do because there's a question that everyone inside

america both black and white and brown understood that this was not just about incarcerating people. this is about racial subjugation. you cannot understand the brutality of this retaking without understanding in racialized terms not to mention the fact they were made to do the white power salute and a stripped and to crawl and the black prisoners who were leaders had big x is marked on their back in shock, i mean, the racial element of this in one of the guys who is tortured most severely, every beat of the baton, every cigarette burn, everything that happened to him, people sodomized, this is all punctuated with racial epithets, so on the one hand yes, it's fundamentally to remind us prisons are sites of racial subjugation, not just about

somehow public safety or containing crime. on the other hand i didn't know until i did this book that this really was a human rights story. if you look at some of the photographs in my book one thing that might strike you must is the pictures of the men who have been stripped and lined up to run these garments of troopers because you quickly notice they are not all black and brown men. there were a lot of white men in there and they all stood together, 1300 men. they negotiated this. they elected leaders to speak for them out of each of the cellblocks. they democratically elected leaders or can a major every speech speech was translated into spanish so the spanish-speaking prisoners could understand as well, so it was a human rights story and at the end of the day there is so much repression in this book, so much -- you will read it and just

sort of shake your head at the revelation that everyone with power who could have done something could have done the right thing from the lowest level clerk to the supreme court of the united states, quite literally in the justice department. they are all called upon to weigh in and every one of them fails. on the other hand, it's an incredibly human rights story because these people never go away and i will end by saying you should know in the book came out, which was last september-- four last august in preparation for the anniversary, the 45th which was september 9, prisons across this country erupted again and it was very importantly on september 9 because they were reminding us in the last 40 years, 45 years because we got atticus so wrong because we allow the state to tell the story instead of the people inside, prisons are worse

today. they are more overcrowded. people serve more solitary and one of those prisons in michigan where i'm from these guys as we speak here on the stage, these guys are held in solitary for daring to protest and we don't really know what's happening to them because again, these institutions are public. we pay for them. they are ours and we don't have a clue what happens inside of them. >> the walls keep us out and then in, so if there are any people interested in asking a question, please step over to the microphone over here and while people are going over i will just ask one more question and i might not be able to resist as a jump in, so historians in this-- it's receded a bit, but there's this real charge against timing if you call a historian work president, that sort of a knife in the gut that you are too involved in the current moment

and you are being too roped into the contemporary world and i wonder how do you think about the role of authors of books and maybe historians are academics specifically in struggles for our own independent and varying visions for social change, social justice, i mean, do you think it is something that needs put in a box? how do you think about that and that charge-- of course, your work is being used and i think it's blissett impreza conversations about this crisis of mass incarceration. >> we have set up a false dichotomy when we say somehow if you investigate something and then you tell people what you think the conclusion of that investigation is that somehow it's being biased or somehow you are putting aside your scholar g objectivity in becoming a bias activists in the moment. i think these things are intimately related.

you are a historian. you have looked at this in every possible way it could be looked at, every scrap of paper available to see, talk to anyone you could talk to and if the conclusion of that has bearing on where we are as human beings today or bearing on where we might go i actually think we have an obligation to share it and speak about it and keep these things isolated in zero, actually think that is where the criticism should go. if we have something that helps us understand where we have been or shed light on where we might go we need to share that. you know, you should all know julie's book that just came out is incredibly important on the same question, how did we get to this punitive moments and how do we get these tough politics that we have just embraced, but let us down this terrible path and you can't read your book, julie,

as well without saying i kind of get what we did wrong and even better how i might do differently, but the book is beautifully researched, deeply, you know, the highest level of research integrity, so i don't think they are dichotomous. >> thank you. on going to go over here and we will just start right up. >> as you were speaking i was thinking about what's going on currently on a national level. you are talking about a state-level suppression of evidence basically and more currently, contemporarily we have the torture report from the u.s. senate and we have never seen the actual report. we've only seen the summary from dianne feinstein and right now the head of the intelligence committee, the one who was just interviewing james comey has called on those reports back from all copies of the report

back from the various agencies and basically they are trying to suppress it, so that we will never know what are the basic issues in their report is that torture doesn't work and yet if you interview most americans, most will say yes, it's bad, but it works. well, that is not true and i wonder if you are basically so wiped out from having done this number of years of research, is this kind of it for you or is there some other brave reporter who will go out there and get the real story? i certainly hope so. >> thank you for calling attention to the current lack of transparency in our federal government right now, but i think that's, that probably won't be me, but there's no question it will be someone because the fact of the matter is that whether you are

republican or democrat or left or right, if you are part of the bali-- politics and you are taxpaying citizen or resident of this country you have a responsibility and right to know what's going on and people will continue to demand it and prod them poke until you know, but we do need to start thinking much more clearly especially about prisons or torture of having more access. more access would hate the-- make the secrets harder to keep. >> part of your story was suppression. last week we have james comey coming out and explaining how he was fired, so my question knowing the system and people would you believe that the

investigation-- >> not to the level we will never know anything because again i have this incredible faith that between reporters and investigators and citizens demanding answers i don't believe any secret stays safe forever which is the fear they have, but is it a cover-up? of course. i mean, of course the ideas to make sure that people who have benefited themselves financially or benefited themselves politically aren't held accountable and this question about accountability and transparency that transcends whether we are talking about prisons or local government or federal government, i mean, we have a right to know those things. >> thank you. >> i would like to preface my

questions by telling you that i spent eight years as a rehab counselor at three different prisons in wisconsin. my experience then was that the older officers basically and probably many of the other ones, also, they felt if you did the crime you do the time and now is it and some of them were not very happy to see us coming in and providing things like services while they are there and then rehab plans when they get out like halfway house placement and purchase of work clothing and evaluation workshops and training and so forth, so they thought we were bleeding heart liberals, but at any rate we never had obstruction. we had a pretty accepting overall environments and i don't think there were things going on there at the maximum-security prison in wisconsin, for instance that were going on

other places like collusion between officers and inmates in terms of drugs or anything like that, so i'm wondering now with the outlook is because-- i stopped working there 40 years ago, so i don't know what's going on there now, but was this the outlook in general across the country? we hear about all the things in prisons in california and arizona places like that, what is the outlook for actual rehab services taking place, and should-- educational training and the kinds of things we did then connect that's a great question. there is many people who could speak to this besides me who are working on it very very directly, lawyers trying to improve prison conditions and prisoners trying to improve prison conditions and people trying to make them more debilitating than people trying to improve the conditions within them, but the fundamental

problem this book underscored to me is that we have to completely rethink how we deal with this question of so-called wrongdoing or cry make in this country. for starters, there has to be a greater attention to equal justice under the law and that's to say if we have a justice system it needs to be just and secondarily, we have to rethink this idea that we make our society safer better by putting human beings in cages. there's no evidence that it works. there is abundant evidence it doesn't work and is so while we might tinker around those edges and improve the conditions inside for people and i'm all for that, ultimately i think what at a car shows and what any trip inside a prison shows is that there are better ways of dealing with social problems and putting people in cages makes

guards left safe, prisoners laissez, communities less safe, destroys families, so i hope that what we are headed for is not a discussion of how do we improve prisons more, although, that is part of it, i hope we discussed how do we imagine dealing with social problems differently other than putting people in cages. thank you. >> heather, i knew one of the survivors have added from detroit. they and the attica uprising inspired a whole generation of revolutionaries like me and people of the world, so first off thank you for this book. thank you. and it today we are under a regime in a more brutal and

vicious than john d rockefeller's new york state, so what would you say to today's resistors here and all around the world? for example, there is a strike going on right now at full some prison and i urge everyone to support that, but thank you. >> thank you for that. i think what that period of the 60s and 70s show is that ordinary human beings when they stand together can change policies and culture and ideas, but it has to have extraordinary faith and imagination that change can happen. i think sometimes some people have no faith anymore that change can happen, so it probably starts with having that faith that this is not permanent. nothing is permanent anyway. everything changes, so let's make sure it changes anymore the

main erection, but what attica shows us is that tell our history straight because if you allow people to tell the media, the press what happened and it is incorrect, if it is it true then will have a generation turn gets this generation, so it's about hope and i don't mean that in some flippant way. i mean, about imagining we can do this differently. >> did the guards union assist the injured hostages in overturning those agreements they signed and isn't the modern union, which is progressive and represents thousands of cor@union, which is progressived represents thousands of correction officers facing a dilemma because if there is significant reform that means layoffs and closing some prisons and losing jobs? >> great question and i get this a lot because i do labor history of prisons as well and my

position on this is that we create a really sort of false problem when we hit corrections officers against prisoners in this configuration of reform. the fact of the matter is that some of the guard unions have been incredibly repressive in this discussion. i think most of those have acted more like employer associations and unions. if you look at some of the worst states in terms of prison build up they don't even have guard unions, so to put this all on the guard unit i think is a bit of a red herring. that said, my experience talking to guards in unions is that they don't necessarily want to work in a prison per day just want to work as so if you see this as a working-class issue, but the working-class issue for the guards that is to say everyone deserves say 14 conditions and deserves to come home at the end of their shift in one piece and you see it as working-class issue that everyone on the inside is now rendered permanently employed him having a criminal record, then this--

there is common ground here, so i was gratified, actually at the convention i think two years ago when i was there used the term mass incarceration numerous times in a condominium way just to condemn and say this is not good for any of us and we have to figure out jobs that do not depend on harming other people and locking them up and i think a lot of guards agree with that, but we have got to have these discussions across these lines. doesn't serve our purposes to have them against us, i think. >> i see this as a pendulum sometimes. i have a couple of funds that have been incarcerated in one recently lost his eyesight. i think the pendulum is that rodney king that made cameras on police vests that we have kind

of disclosure on what goes on in the field. had we get that in penal institutions so that the guards feel safe, i guess the editorial here is that we want the balance for the policeman to feel they can go into a neighborhood and eradicate a bad guy, but we don't want people to have-- people with serious crimes to be persecuted to reconcile you hear about your son because your story unfortunately is the story of countless, countless, callous american families and so the answer to how we get transparency is that all is fleet-- countless families are supported to speak up. .. if i'm going to pay for institution and you're going to put my children in this institution or my mother or my brother or my sister, we, the public have a responsibility and

a right to know what goes on inside of them, full stop. and i think that at the local legislative level, the state level, the federal level, that should be a demand. that should be, access should be a demand so that when someone is inside and they're at the utter mercy of their captors, that we have some -- some sense of assurance that they're getting health care when they need it, that they're not being abused and that we know that they're not going to come out worse off than when they went in and right now we have none of that. so thank you for speaking up on [applause] >> so, thank you to all of the people who asked questions and all of you who are here and thank you, heather, for talk about the book. i'm just so excited this is going to continue to advance these conversations which are so important. so thank you.

>> thank you. [applause] >> thank you for attending today, and books and book signing will be just outside the stage here. thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to portland, oregon, on booktv. located in the northwestern parted of the state, at the meeting of the willamette and columbia rivers it's oregon's large e city