>> look for these titles and bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> welcome to brooklyn, new york, for the annual festival. throughout the day authors discuss critical thinking lgbt issue of immigration, the

2020th election, and more. a full schedule is available on our website. now we're going to go inside for the first conversation. this is live coverage on tv on c-span2. .. >> good morning, everyone. i am michael cahill. it has been my pleasure and privilege to serve as dean here at brooklyn law school for just about three months now. it's going really well. [laughter] and, of course, i am happy to welcome all of you here and to welcome those of you watching at home on c-span. we are here, of course, as part of the 14th annual brooklyn book

festival which will draw tens of thousands of people to downtown brooklyn over the course of the day, several thousand of those people will be passing through here at brooklyn law school where we have been a proud partner of the book festival since 2012. and that has been a wonderful and natural collaboration since the law school and the festival are committed to the free exploration and exchange of ideas in an effort to better understand our world and, ultimately, hopefully to change our world based on that understanding. so pleased to have you, pleased to be part of the festival. and as part of that spirit of inquiry and discussion, i am very pleased to be moderating today's panel and to welcome our three panelists. so very briefly identifying them, each of whom has long and

impressive bios, but i will try to keep it brief. on my immediate right, rachel barko, regulatory play and policy at nyu school of law, former member for today's purposes relevantly are of the u.s. sentencing commission and, more relevantly for the book festival, the author of "prisoners of politics: breaking the cycle of mass incarceration," which is available for purchase and signing. to her right we have john fass, professor of law at fordham university school of law who is also sometimes known to teach criminal law here at brooklyn law school. he is the author of "locked in: the true causes of mass incarceration and how to achieve real reform." and last but certainly not least, my colleague, bennett capers, is the stanley a. august

professor of law here at brooklyn law school, and he is the author of the forthcoming book -- not yet available in physical form but soon to be available at all major outlet ares -- "the prosecutor's turn." so please join me in welcoming all three of our panelists. [applause] so that bought me time to get to the table here. so careful listeners will have noticed that the term "mass incarcerate" appears in the subtitles of both rachel's and ooh john's books, so i thought it might be a good place for us to start there. we can talk in a few moments about the causes of mass incarceration and what we can do about it, but i think first it might be helpful to get a sense of what mass incarceration is, because it's, it may seem obvious but, in fact, it isn't. it is true that we imprison a

lot of people, that we impress more people both in absolute -- imprison more people both in absolute terms and as a share of our population than anyone in the world. leaving those aside, we are the world leader in imprisonment. but that fact does not necessarily mean the same thing as the conclusion or assessment that we imprison too many people. so i'd like to get a handle on what exactly is the nature of the problem of mass incarceration so that we can get a sense of what it is. and, john, maybe we can start with you because your book begins by asking the question of what massen incarceration is. why do you take it to be a problem, what are the biggest signs that it is problematic, and how big a problem is it, and how much would we have to do to get a sense that we were meaningfully addressing the problem? >> yeah, that's a great question, and i start by saying

i don't actually know what the word means. i don't think anyone really does. when you go from small to medium, to large, to mass, i have no idea where those are. we have about 1.5 million people in prison, we have about 750,000 people in jail on any given day but about 10 million people get admitted to jails every year, and a study came out this year that probably about 5 million unique people every year cycling through our jails with about like, what, 4 million people on probation and parole, 10-12 the million arrests a year. in many ways,, that's punitive, that we don't pay as much attention to in the past, that giant part underneath. and i think the reason why i think of mass incarceration now is that whatever an optimal size is at least from a public safety perspective, we know this size is far too lang.

the data's increasingly clear, prison is an ineffective way to deter crime. to the extent that what deters crime is the criminal justice system, taking that as our first -- take that, and maybe we shouldn't, but accepting that within that silo are, right, detection is a far bigger role than punishment. several months ago tom cotton says -- [inaudible] the rate at which we make arrests is abysmally low. and he's 50% right. our clearance rate is awful a. for murder, only two-thirds of all murders result in arrest. of that's appalling. the collusion is not to lock more people up. that's the worst response to that. and so we know that more time in jail, prison increases the risk of reoffending. they're not committing crimes while in prison, but --

[inaudible] and i think we have a really growing understanding of violent crimes, there are better solutions that work more effectively and that an increasing number of victims would prefer that they're not prison. i don't know what the right number is. i know the number we're at right now is vastly too large, and we have alternatives that we could use and for various clinical and physical and budgetary reasons generally don't. >> i should point out now that although we all know each other, we have done no collaboration in preparing for this panel. [laughter] and i hope that it will seem spontaneous rather than unplanned. but i am happy to have either of the other panelists sort of share their own gloss, their take on what mass incarceration is or what they find to be the problem. >> i'll just add a little bit to what john said, give more ways of thinking about it and where we're at. one in three adults in america has a criminal record, and i

think it just kind of defies imagination, comprehension to try to imagine that we really need to treat one out of every three adults in the united states as criminal. given just thinking about human nature, that that is outrageously high. one in two people have a family member who has been incarcerated or is currently incarcerated. so it's just affecting that entire sweep of the population, but of course it disproportionately affects communities of color. so just thinking about all those numbers, you know, we have cities in america where one out of two black men are under criminal supervision. one out of every two. so the numbers are stagger thing. it's -- staggering. it's always hard to figure out how to bring home exactly what we're talking about in terms of how big this criminal justice enterprise is in america, but it, you know, it's touching almost everybody in very direct ways, and it's particularly touching communities of color. >> and the only thing i'll add, because i think one thing that

might have been left out is just how this has all changed over time. so to us, sort of a lot are incarceration is natural, seemed natural to me when i was a prosecutor. but if you actually look at graphs of how our cost ratios have increased over time, until we reached the '70s all of a sudden there's a steep the incline. and, you know, if you're a person who grew up in the '80s and '90s, it might look very natural to you. but if you go further back in time, you realize just how much we incarcerate and also how little it is connected to increased levels of crime. so it's partially connected to increased levels of crime but not entirely. >> if i could add one more thing, i think what that touches on is a really important aspect. rachel talked about policy failures, in the '50s and '40s and '30s, the policies didn't cause mass incarceration. and in many ways, you know, at

the end of the day mass incarceration's an ideology. choices we could or couldn't make. earlier this week a police officer in florida arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted and booked a 6-year-old girl for having a tantrum in school. and earlier in that day he had arrested, handcuffed and booked an 8-year-old boy because florida has no minimum age for criminal liability. you can arrest a newborn in florida if you wish, 13 states are that way. there's no policy compelling that arrest. and as bennett points out, we just kind of internalize this is okay. this is how it is done. and we could change it all tomorrow without a single legal change if we changed our entire political framework in our heads, right in. [laughter] >> that's all it takes. >> that's all it takes. [laughter] i think it's important how much of this is an ideological choice more than a set of policies. at the end it's really politics and ideology that drive it.

>> let's take a moment to explore where mass incarceration came from, but maybe at the outset of the conversation it's worth pointing out as both of you do in your books that it's a bit of a misnomer and misleading term to say there even is an american criminal justice system. so what we're really dealing with is at least 51 jurisdictions, 50 different states as well as the federal system, and perhaps in a more meaningful way, over 3,000 systems in that a lot of criminal law enforcement is county by county, and there are 3100 counties in the united states. having said that, each if you take a very -- even if you with take a very low incarceration state like maine or massachusetts, that state would be among the most incarcerative countries in the world if it stood alone. so the problem is pretty widespread. having acknowledged that it is a problem, i'd like to get all of your thoughts on where that problem came from, because its causes might give us a sense of

its possible solutions. and i think, ray cheryl and john -- rachel and john, in their books offer different senses of where the problem came from. to oversimplify a little bit, i think there's a fox and a hedgehog situation. rachel points to many, many different things each of which individually and all of which collectively contribute to the problem of mass incarceration. john is more focused on one big thing that he identifies as a significant cause. so maybe, rachel, you can start and john can offer his sense and bennett can break the tie. [laughter] >> i'm going to offer you -- [inaudible] so i think, you know, one way to start is just to ask when that shift happens in the 1970s that bennett talks about, it is important to note crime was up. we had an increase in violet crime in america, and it was the noticeable to people in their daily lives. it certainly would have been noticeable to people who lived in new york city and in other place. and, you know, it was a period

of social unrest as well. so, you know, you had people protesting, rioting, use whatever terminology you want, and is so it looked like a time in america when there was too much disruption, too much violence, and the public was demanding that something be done about it. and both democrats and republicans responded to that and thought that the current, then-current approach to dealing with crime and disorder budget working, and they needed to do something different. and that really kicks off this kind of new way of thinking about how we're going to attack and think about problems of crime. and so a whole package of things start to happen. so one thing is instead of giving lots of discretion to judges and parole officers to decide kind of the ultimate release date of a person, that whole mold gets called into question -- model gets called into question because people start to lose faith in in rehabilitation and the idea of reforming people. unfortunately, it was based on one marley influential study, and it wasn't even a careful

read of the study can and a lot of programs were underfunded and weren't working right. but the conclusion that was drawn was nothing works. you know, none of these things work, so we need a new model that's really dealing with this problem. so there's a turn to mandatory sentencing, mandatory minimums, there's a term to longer sentences. there's a buildup of the number of people who do the jobs of criminal law enforcement in america, more police, more prosecutors, more prisons. and so that kicks off the kind of creation of what's going to then become an interest group for keeping things exactly as they are. so there's kind of the initial impulse which is crime is rising, kind of sensible til you want to respond to that, think about what to do. and the strategy is kind of an all hands on deck, let's really go all in on law enforcement. and i should just say that is a choice. as john says, that was a choice that was made. instead of saying, hey, why are people so upset, should we be thinking about urban development and investment, maybe we need to

do more with schools and job programming and health care and mental health care and the kinds of things these communities were also asking for, but instead of kind of thinking about preventing crime by offering more resources to communities that were really underfunded and really suffering, the response was we're going to deal with crime by getting just tougher in our response to it as it happens with law enforcement. so there's a big buildup of law enforcement. and what happens is, you know, crime was rising, there's this response. when crime starts to fall, you might have expected -- as bennett pointed out -- that we would say, oh, okay, now crime's falling, let's reduce that, or we don't need to do things quite the same way. but instead, the buildup continues and, in fact, we incarcerate more and more people. we build up more and more facilities to house people, more prisons, more jails. and i think kind of one thing to keep in mind is is how that then becomes it's kind of like closing military bases where it's very hard to do that once they exist, right? the politics of that is just really hard.

they become financially important to communities. that is true of this whole setup that we have in criminal justice. prisons can be really important employers in certain rural communities, and a lot of them are placed there. and even though there are studies that say they don't help the economy of these places, the perception is that they do, and they certainly employ a lot of people. so it's really hard to close them once they're there. how are you going to get rid of these thousands of prosecutors that you've hired around the country? they're going to find things to do to justify their existence, and that'll segway into some of the things that john will say. i think it's kind of -- it makes sense when you think of the initial buildup is about crime, but then it takes on a life of its own, and we have long since lost any connection to any of these things effectively working to tabling crime. and if anything, they're now really counterproductive and cause crime. now we have people who the immediate reflexive response is a punitive approach, longer and

longer sentences. we make it so much harder when people come out of their time, and 95% of all people who are incarcerated come back out again, they rejoin our communities. we should want them all to succeed. we should kind of want that as a matter of shared humanity, but even if you don't buy into the shared humanity, you should want it for your own public safety, right? so that they're on the right track. and the system that we have doesn't do a good job of that. and kind of a last footnote i'll add to that is when all this is created, you might have thought that's a big government buildup. big government in the most kind of prototypical way. like, we're going to get the state to come in and expand and solve your problems. like surely we would want accountability. we want to measure that it's working. we want to know, you know, this prison's doing a particularly good job of programming when people come out. we don't measure a single one of these actors for effectiveness to make sure they're actually reducing crime. no one is held accountable in this system, and i mean nobody.

and so it's able to kind of keep existing and growing in this kind of statistics factory universe because we actually don't hold any of those folks accountable for results. that's how you can have cities with clearance rates for homicide that are 20%. that show, how to get away with murder, i tell my students just commit one -- [laughter] because the clearance rate is so low, no one's going to catch you. there's no accountability. all those actors just use rhetoric, oh, we're going to get tougher. but no one holds them accountable. there's more to say, but i want to make sure -- >> so i guess my hedgehog take -- [laughter] burrows into one thing and digs into it, i spend most of my time blaming prosecutors. let's be clear, looking only at the '90s and 2000s because remarkably shoddy, staggeringly bad criminal justice. i don't think anyone can

understand just how profoundly horrific in quality our criminal justice data is. it's amazing. as we fight over whose data is worse, and for a really long time people are really depressed because mine's even worse than yours, and we're all right. [laughter] and so data from the '90s -- [inaudible] as crime goes down, prison goes up. crime goes down over the '930s, arrests -- '90s, arrests go down. prison admissions keep going up and up and up in a weird way that i'll talk about in a second. and what we see that's really driving that increase is not the risk of being sent to prison, it's the risk of a prosecutor filing felony charges against you. that goes up even as arrests go down. the chance of going to prison doesn't change that much, it's a all little noisy and crazy, and in the '90s and 2000 doesn't really change, and it's not that listening, right? the median time for release is one year.

violent crime is four years. and the only violent crime that's seen a dramatic increase in time served, and we should cut this back, is homicide. everything else is fairly short. longer than europe. in the netherlands, 90% of people are out in four years. we're still off the charts compared to the rest of the world but not nearly as long as we actually think, right? is so my question is what drives the prosecutor. and we don't really know. there's 2,200 offices, we don't track them at all. we have really nothing, there's no centralized data on d.a.s anywhere of any sort. but the sense is these really boring things that, from the policy side, these boring things. staffing, when crime went up in the '70s, we hired 3,000 more. in the '90s as crime went way down, we hired 10,000 more assistant district attorneys. and we don't have good measures

of productivity, but every proxy i can find tells the same story which is that the average assistant sitting at his or her desk today is no more punitive than in 1990, there's just 10,000 more of them. and when you arrest 12 million people a day, you're not playing mind sweep or anything. you can justify the position. and it's just that boring thing. or another thing, and rachel touches on this also in her book, there's these weird fiscal breaks. they're profoundly boring to talk about but matter so much. the d.a. is elected by the county, he's a county official. jail, pretrial detention and misdemeanors, county expenses paid for by the county, run by the county. probation, misdemeanor punishment, paid for, run by the county. but prison, felonies, the long-serving sentence paid for by the state, not some political science state -- new york, new jersey and alaska. they pay for the prison. and if you're a prosecutor, being tough on crime is actually cheaper than being smarter on

crime. if you send them to prison, it's onto the state books, and someone else pays for it. and it's not a national decline. half the decline nationwide is just the state of california alone. everybody else is just kind of following in california's wake. california made counties pay, and all of a sudden counties thought, hey, what? [laughter] like, no. this low-level crime doesn't need -- don't make us pay for it. california's messed it up a little bit, it's complicated, but these thing it is really matter. all that said, the prison trends over the '90s and 2000s built a fascinating picture that i think is at the true heart of mass incarceration. look, crime isn't dropping for years, yet 60, 70% of americans think that crime's going up every year. from 2000 onwards, that's true. there's a fascinating picture of 1974-2000. in is 1994 -- in 1994, 80% of

american think crime going up. they're right. [inaudible] in 2000 it hits 48% think crime is going up. we weren't. we'd caught on. americans get it n. 2001 it drops to 40% think crime is getting up, 60% get it and remarkably gets lost in the day taxer but state prison populations have been slowing down, and in 2001 state prison populations drop by 1,776 people. [laughter] fed prisons went up, the numbers inclined -- [inaudible] and we actually brought this giant, lumbering machine to a halt. we actually slunk state populations for the first time since 1974. and then in 2002 it goes from 40% to 75%, and state the prison populations jump up dramatically 2011, 9/11, it has nothing to do

with crime. americans are traumatized by outside attack. and we respond to that politics of fear by being terrified by everything. what's remarkable is that gallup runs a second question alongside that first one, is there anywhere within a mile of your home that you're afraid to walk at night, and that drops in the '90s as well. we understood that our own neighborhoods were safe, and that doesn't change after the attacks, but the country as a whole, that's terrifying. now it's rational policy just to lock everyone up in sight, right? and when do we finally get it to drop back down? in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. we're spending more on prisons than in 2009. that's all a lie. it's a useful lie but it's a lie. it's an ideological lie. it takes one trauma to knock us out of another trauma. and much of what happened in the 2000s is not a response in crime at all, but acting out in fear about sort of what had happened and our general sense

that we're afraid, just punish, and that will make us feel safer. >> so if i'm supposed to break the tie -- [laughter] there's no tie to be broken. i think in a way, i mean, we're sort of all in agreement there's so many causes to mass incars ration. incarceration. you know, like john i strongly believe the prosecutors played a major role with the state of affairs that we have right now. that's part of what my book is about. but beyond that, i want to go to something that he and rachel mentioned. in the end it's sort of us, like society. wewe in a sense have been bamboozled. the whole idea that i just want to return to that mass incarceration happened without us noticing. literally it's been, what, five, ten years that people have been talking about mass incarceration. it was happening for decades before that, and we were oblivious to it. we were, in fact, participating in it, you know? crying out for more incarceration. sure, you know, numbers might have gone down in terms of

whether people thought crime was going up, but people were still wrong, you know? their estimation was still highly inaccurate about whether crime was going up or down. but that's part of the problem. part of the problem is we're now a society and have been for decades where our initial reaction to almost anything call the police in a by we wouldn't have done, you know, 50 years ago or 60 years ago. we expect the criminal justice system to be the remedy for everything. foolishness. call the police. the opioid crisis, call the police. and the other part of us being bamboozled is we just wanted the problem to go away. so when we saw problems, we just wanted it to disappear. we weren't willing to ask the tough questions, what's causing the rise in crime to begin with, or what's causing homelessness? how do we address those issues? so when we started using, you know, prisons sort as the

panacea for the world, of course this is what we end up. but luckily, as i think all of us are pointing out, there does seem to be this real interest in changing things. so so the question for all of us now is how do we harness that energy to affect real change and get the numbers back to something that makes sense, something that we could all live with. the other thing i would just add, can and i hate to say this because part of the argument in my book is that we're really not as punitive as people think we are, but a lot of us are. and it's is sort of absurd we've gotten to a point where it's quite common now, you know, like oh, somebody shooted a hundred people, let's send them to prison for 185 years. it's absurd in certain respects. in other respects, i think as john pointed out, more and more victims are beginning to realize, wait a minute, you're

not really solving the problem. especially going back to rachel's point where we as a society start to wake up to the fact that, you know, one out of three homicides is going unsolved? property crimes i think is like 64%, if i remember, of all property crimes go unsolved. how many people in this room have been burgled, burglarized? i see one of my former students, robin, raise her hand. but numbers are very few. and i mean, we're not indifferent, but we sort of have become society where we're like, oh, arrest more people instead of becoming a society saying, wait a minute, why aren't we solving the crimes we care about? so hopefully we can start to make that change. >> so i think think it's fair tl three of you point to, among other things, two big factors in the rise of mass incarceration, one of them being prosecutorial

practices. i think that's a through line in all of your remarks. the other being some combination of popular will and politics. turning to the first one first, and i'd like to start with bennett, to the extent that prosecutors are the problem, how do we deal with prosecutors, and what can we change about that? and i'm starting with you, bennett, because i know you have the most provocative -- [laughter] idea to throw out this, the idea of eliminating the public prosecutor. so maybe all three of you can suggest some of the changes or reforms that you think we might engage in to try to rein in this prosecutorial trend. >> so the thrust of my book which will be published by metropolitan books but which isn't out yet, it is really an argument i came to after my experience as being a federal prosecutor for ten years and being a law professor and thinking about lots of reforms and realizing after probably a

decade of writing and coming up with ideas, i was really just tinkering at the margins. i was tinkering with the machinery of criminal justice but not really suggesting something that could affect real change. and i really took to heart michelle aler's sort of -- alexander's sort of suggestion in her book "the new jim crow" that we need bold, new ideas if we really want to change mass incarceration and overcriminallization and racial disparities and all these other issues with the criminal justice system. so thinking along those lines, i started thinking, well, wait a minute, why to we need prosecutors? prosecutors are part of the problem, public prosecutors. maybe sort of changing our ideas about prosecution and radical race or might be part of the solution. so most of the people in this room probably know there's a nascent movement to abolish prisons. part of what i'm sort of suggesting is maybe we need a movement to abolish or at least

curtail public prosecutors or at least the role they currently play. so this, as dean hale said, might seem like a radical idea. i'm going to make it less radical in, like, one minute -- [laughter] it's radical, but it's also part of our collective dna. one thing we don't really talk about is, sure, prosecutors have all this power. this power didn't just happen. this power was 300 years in the making. in fact, the very existence of prosecutors was 300 years in the making. we tend to take prosecutors for granted. in fact, it's not part of our common law history. if you went back in time to the 1600s in england or went back in time to the 1600 in colonial america and look at the criminal justice system, one thing you would notice is there were no prosecutors handling day-to-day crime. basically, our system, our collective dna is somebody stole your cow, you would go to

justice of the peace, you would ask for an arrest warrant, you would prosecute the case. the turn to or creation really of public -- and just to be more accurate, there were attorney generals at the time, but they only handled matters that directly affected the crown. day-to-day criminal matters people took into their own hands. the people had the power. so gradually what happened over time, over 300 years starting first in connecticut in 1704 is we taliban to say, oh, private -- we began to say, oh, private prosecution is a bad idea, we're going to let public prosecutors take over, and with that came prosecutors gradually taking more power and more power and more power until they had a monopoly on criminal justice. and victims, losing power because i'm sure the people in this room have been victims of a crime probably notice that the prosecutor wasn't really representing you. the prosecutor is representing the state. and the prosecutor might have

been curious about your interests but really wasn't that curious about your interest. so what i'm advocating for in my book is sort of a return to a system where at least the victims, actual victim of crime actually have more decision making authority. and believe it or not, i could talk more about this later, but believe it or not, i think if we actually gave victims of crime more authority about when to prosecute, how to prosecute, what kind of remedy that would restore them, it might actually contribute to a lot of other things that could benefit us all, might actually contribute to reducing mass incarceration. it would certainly give power back to the people, and it would do something else that i think might be really interesting. once we start focusing on victims again and the power the victims should have in the criminal justice system, we might start to recognize that there are all these crimes out there that the state has been prosecuting that never had any

victims to begin with. i mean, we should all sort of be outraged that the state is wrong in prosecuting for drugs if they're not harming anybody. we prosecute so many crimes where there are no victims, and maybe if we started to focus on victims again, we'd actually start to realize, wait a minute, maybe those shouldn't be crimes at all. so just a few of the ideas that will be in my forthcoming book. [laughter] >> john? you dislike prosecutors. you want to get rid of them? >> so i think for -- if i had not become a law professor, i would have become a prosecutor. i'm not anti-prosecutor, i've just come to realize they play e this end credibly huge role in the system. i had a student drop my class after saying that once. [laughter] the look of shock on her face was striking. >> you want to think that's the reason. [laughter] >> fair point. so i think one thing to stress

is that we are the only country in the world, literally the only one that elects a prosecutor. we're also the only country that elects judges, and the only country where parole responds directly to a publicly elected governor -- [inaudible] so in many ways we have a certified democracy in criminal justice, and those two things do not go well together. and before you think i'm so some anti-democrat, the fed is designed to make -- [inaudible] and we're okay saying some things shouldn't -- [inaudible] i think it's important to realize that's a a weird pressure we have, that -- we keep talking about we, and we is not a term that applies here, right? there is no one we, there is no one us. and frankly, too, you can see -- prosecutors are elected by the county, and counties are really weird, strange things to elect prosecutors for, right? because crime, at least street

crime, tends to be a very urban phenomenon, and most of these larger counties, what you end up is people least affected by crime, more suburban, white, wealthy, conservative voters have an i don't want sized -- i don't want sized voice in -- outsized voice in voting for the prosecutor. they don't know them, they don't see them. even before you get to the dehumanizing aspects of racism, which are huge, they just don't know these people. you know, it's a huge disconnect. and so we want to be aware of that challenge. i think it's not surprising. when you think about this move towards the progressive prosecutors, radical changes from the -- [inaudible] philadelphia has no suburbs. the county, prosecutor didn't have to win over the suburbs. brooklyn has a very progressive --

[inaudible] again, no -- there to do it. boston, not really much of one, chicago not much of one anymore. where the urban voters have the largest voice is where you get the most progressive d.a.s. from a reformer spective, at least in the short term, that might actually not be such a bad thing. we have 2,200 prosecutor's offices, but the top 1% of counties by population handle 25% of all felony cases. the top 10% of all d.a. offices handle 65% of all felony cases nation wild, because that's where all the people are. a couple blue dots in illinois and texas, that's a map of voting but also a map of people, right? blue is where the people are, and red is where the people are not, right? and that's also true, evidence showing more liberally inclined tend to live on top of each other, and this is how our maps

play out. that's also where crime tends to be. you can elect progressive d.a.s who have a radically different view, you could have a huge impact in the short term because they would tend to be hechted where the crime is. the question is -- elected where the crime is. the question is whether that can work, and we just don't know. [inaudible] there's not a lot of data there, you know? the there's already people complaining in both boston and philadelphia that the reality doesn't match the rhetoric. larry -- [inaudible] runs an office of 600 lawyers. you don't change that overnight. i understand all sorts of things -- his office and not the metaphorical sense. room 704 with name plate, cases coming through because it's hard to trust that senior management has been there. it's hard to turn these things around. you saw that during the brooklyn campaign. gonzalez would get up in the debate can and say i don't

demand -- [inaudible] and tweet out 30 seconds later then why did my client get hit with $5,000 bail last night for x? one, gonzalez is lying, or two, he's got some 23-year-old ada being told by their manager you will demand bail, that's not going to make it all the way up to eric gonzalez's office. you don't turn bureaucracies around overnight. there'ses also a big question -- there's also a big question, the office changes the person. is that because they never were progressive, or is it because when you become a prosecutor, the office inevitably changes you and that it's just hard, you're fighting against history and the establishment and seeing people at their worst day after day and not seeing the humanizing public defender side of it. [inaudible] the justice system rather than

adversarial things. the jag corps, you never know where you're going to be at -- [inaudible] there are more radical ways of thinking about it. i'm stop talking and let rachel talk. [laughter] >> okay. i'll put one category, could we just have a whole rethinking, could we stop electing them, could we stop having them category. but i don't know what the box is also like, just tries to stay really super practical. so here are the things that i think are more immediately feasible that i think are critical, because prosecutors don't just get their power from nowhere, they get their power from laws. they get their power from the things we give them to do. so one thing we could go do to take some of those powers away, we need to eliminate cash bail. when we think about the number of people who are ine cars rated, as john points out, the statistic hovers around more than 600, 700,000 people are in jail, and most of those people are there pretrial. they haven't been convicted of anything.

they're not guilty of anything, right? yet. some of them will be. but they're pretrial, and most of those people could not afford to make bail. and a prosecutor went into a courtroom anded is for a certain -- and asked for a certain dollar amount, and that person couldn't afford it because they are living on the margins. if we eliminate cash bail as a tool of detention, prosecutors no longer have that tool. one, it increases the pretrial population, but people who are in jail will plead to just about anything to get out of jail, right? and even if they're not guilty of the thing they're being charged with, if they're told, hey, if you plea, you'll get time served, and you'll go home to your family now, you know, ask yourself what you might do in that situation. it's an enormous if tool that prosecutors use, and we know it from the data, to get people to plead guilty. if you eliminate it, you both help the pretrial population, and you take away some of their power to get those guilty pleas. second huge power they get is they have the power to bring charges that have mandatory

minimum sentences attached to them. and in those instances, that means the judge is going to have no discretion. it's a huge bargaining chip for prosecutors. you do away with mandatory minimums, you take away some of their bargaining leverage and their ability to, again -- the system that we have, and i'm not sure if we've even sized this -- ensized this strongly enough. the system that we have, and it's not really a system, it's many systems, but the operation of criminal law in america is all done through pleas, it's all done with people pleading guilty. and is so you might ask yourself, wow, why aren't these people exercising their trial right? we have this constitutional right to a jury, and the reason is because prosecutors make it too costly to do so. they say you want to go to trial? let me tell you what i'm going to charge you versus what i'll do if you plead guilty right now. we need to think about how you change that dynamic, and how you do that is, one, you get rid of mandatory minimums. two, you might say how's it even

constitutional that the prosecutor can say if you want to exercise your jury trial right, that's going to cost you risking a sentence that's, you know, three times higher than the sentence you'll get if you plead guilty. that's because the supreme court decided in a divided vote that i think is wrong that that's okay, that somehow that's not an unconstitutional condition on the exercise of your jury right. so the other thing -- so this one might fall in the pie in the sky category, but i will just tell you the composition of the supreme court changes, and one thing that i really hope that the people who care about criminal justice is will pay attention to is who is on that court and on federal courts around the country. those seats really matter because a they decide these kinds of things that then give prosecutors enormous power, and most of those people are former prosecutors, i would say. so we need to change those kinds of things. we also need to impose fiscal discipline. the point that john made about it's a correctional free lunch for a district attorney to use state prisons needs to stop.

there's ways you can do it, make prosecutors have to focus on the costs of the things they're doing. and lo and behold, when people have to pay for things, they use them less. they spend a little time thinking about it. there's different models that we could use to think about doing so, but we can. and that's thing i'll say about prosecutors who are critically important is it's not enough to elect somebody who is a progressive prosecutor. it's important, it's a huge thing to do, i encourage everybody the pay attention who they vote for for prosecutor. i totally agree with john that they are -- if we had a pick in rank and importance, the actors in the system, they're number one, but it's not sufficient. it'll never be sufficient. and if you want to see a case study for that, philadelphia's a good one because larry has tried to do a lot of things there, and he's getting pushback from the police, he's getting pushback from the judges. so he has actually really tried hard to have his prosecutors stop asking for people to get detained pretrial, you know, with bail. and the judges are saying no. and so, you know, now reformers

are like, wow, we might need to elect new judges. and you do. you will need to elect a different slate of judges, get different judges in place. you'll need to rethink who your elected sheriff is and put pressure on your mayors. it's like my favorite show in the entire world, the wire, says it's all connected. you're going to need to target all those focus. but i do think in the kind of prosecutor triage there's things we could do that would help a lot, and if i had to pick my top two, it would be ending cash bail and mandatory sentences. >> michael, can i just add one thing? even though this whole panel is about prosecutors, i just want add something. the other thing we need to do is sort of ask why aren't we providing more funding to the defense. >> yeah. >> you know? because it's that major a problem. we're all willing to, you know, pay taxes to help the prosecution, but what about the defense in. >> i agree.

>> every presidential candidate says we needs to abolish cash bail. i think the issue really gets to heart at why this is not a policy issue. we're going to do something california has where we can detain you -- [inaudible] it's not about risk assessment tools. judges do the same kind of risk assessment. yesterday i saw l.a. county proposing legislation that it's a crime for -- [inaudible] causes a reasonable person to fear physical violence or property loss. and given our general view of the homeless, they're threatening me, and that's enough to get a conviction. so we want to decriminalize poverty by getting rid of cash bail. great. i mean, great. and so now the system shifts, it adapts, it moves. if we still want to criminalize poverty, we will. because now we're going to make asking for money a crime, we're going to build up their prior record, and then when that next serious, oh, we don't have cash bail. your 17th conviction, charges

for street-level aggression. they're calling it aggressive by stopping. we use that. but that's, of course, only something we hit the poor people with. and unless we attack this underlying ideological desire to punish the poor and marginalized, it's like whack-a-mole. we'll crush cash bail, and then we'll criminalize being on the street, use a prior record as a non-poverty base -- [inaudible] core laided with -- correlated with poverty to still get at poverty itself. my book is all pure policy recommendations, still buy it -- [laughter] in the past two or three years -- i realize as i'm saying this, my editors are crying. stop saying your -- >> locked in. [laughter] >> buy the next one too. they're great together. [laughter] the policies matter. they stop things in the short run, but we don't adjust at the same time the ideology, and in the longer run the systems will

adapt to get to where they want to, that piece of it. >> so time is running short already, but given that we are on c-span and given that we are about to enter a primary election campaign, as a lightning round i wanted to give each of you an opportunity, should you wish, to call attention to some candidates' criminal justice platforms that you think are interesting or candidates, perhaps, that are or are not attending to the problem in a way that you think is good or bad. >> i'll do this quickly, because it's lightning round. there are things that presidents just cannot solve. most of these are like my platform is to give everyone candy, riches and to make them younger. like, it won't happen because the president doesn't have control of really almost most of the things in a lot of these plans. so my litmus test for candidates is tell me what you're going to do with the powers that you have as president. and the key things i look for a,

one, the president has basically unlimited power to use clemency to reduce federal sentences. and that's, it's a big -- the federal system's only 10% of our overall system of incarceration, but it's one of the biggest jurisdictions incarcerating where there's almost 200,000 people there, and that is actually uniquely a population of people there for drug offenses. not crimes of violence. they're serving ridiculously long sentences. it's kind of an outlier in john's overall portrayal. so a president can use the clemency power and reduce those, and someone who's serious about mass incarceration, to me, is someone who says on day one i'm going to do with the clemency power, and tell me who you're going to appoint as your united states attorneys, your judges and your sentencing commissioners because those will also be things as a president you get to do. you've got senate confirmation, but you appoint those people. and if you're not looking for

people who are committed to criminal justice reform and committed to enforcing constitutional guarantees, then you're not really serious. >> what rachel said is spot on. i would just add two other details. centen city's great -- clemency's great, if they empty the system, all of them, we still have the highest populations in the world. we're still number one. the other thing i look for is the feds really can't do much, it gets even harder because, to her credit, harris says i can't do much, i'll use these incentive brands to do it. that's really hard for the feds to do, and they overstate what they can do, all of them do. local governments spend $200 million a year on criminal justice. the doj has a budget of $25 billion, so they turn the doj into nothing but a granted organization -- [inaudible] doj does a lot. and usually feds come to about 1% of what we spend on criminal

justice, and there's plenty of evidence including the anticrime act that everyone talks about that had no impact, the feds can't offer enough money to get states to change their mind. no one took $94 million asking states to do things they wanted to do, now we're trying do them to do things they don't want to do. so i think in general, rachel's right, there's nothing much they can do at the state level. where they can use their bully pulpit, that's their power, shaping conversation. my problem is with these 6,000-word plans take 30 minutes to read -- we don't have law review articles that long. it takes three hours to read all the plans correctively, no one's going to read them. [laughter] outside of here, no one's going to read them. they lay out this vision of it's a policy fix, and our job -- legislative policy agenda. no, the president's job is to tell us a moral story that we're doing this morally wrong, and we

need the change it, think about it. they just don't even give you a fix, they just say you are thinking about this wrong and they don't even think about it. >> bennett, quick last word? >> everything they said. i'll just add what i care about is figuring out what the nominees care about. to me, that's more important than anything in their platforms, do they care about mass incarceration, do they care about letting out people who have committed violent crimes, not just nonviolent crimes. what do they care about. the bully pulpit, i think what they care about sends a message. and i hate to use the term trickle down, but sort of has a trickle-down effect even for state jurisdictions. >> please join me in thanking our panelists. thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> now, while we wait for the next author event to begin -- it's a conversation about critical thinking and the future of the planet -- we're going to show you a portion of tonight's "after words" program. our guest this week is michelle malkin, and she's discussing u.s. immigration policy. >> and, you know, it would be one thing, again, if we could just point fingers at beto or julian castro and say, whoa, they're really out there, they want to decriminalize border trespassing, and they're talking about this seriously. they want -- they really do want to abolish i.c.e. and not replace it with anything else. but working behind them, of course, are these larger corporate interests that how the crazies and the radicals to give voice to the ultimate working

agenda of their own organizations. i mean, they will be very happy if every last willing worker in the world is headed across the border for dollar an hour wages. >> host: let me ask you this on a related point, and we're talking about business community and free trade, right, is really important in texas. and nasa and having a free flow of goods and services across the border to mexico. my observation is you've got a burgeoning and growing middle class in mexico because of nafta and getting free trade, and our goal as a society ought to be to encourage economic growth throughout the hemisphere. we want that to occur, we want to decrease the pressure valve for people to come here. but isn't part of that is the economic situation and making sure we stand up for free trade? i would note that nancy pelosi is blocking the president's goal of giving usmca done because she doesn't want to give them a

victory, but also why don't we recognize that enforcement in order to stop the magnet for people come across is part of that? in other words, it's better for mexico, guatemala, honduras, el salvador, vens whale and south of america for us to have a secure border where everybody knows what the rules are, they're welcome to come here through the open doors, and they would actually -- that would actually result in better lives for people from other countries. >> guest: i agree with you. the formulation is basically that interior enforcement and enforcement of our own borders is empowering to, you know, the people in these home countries to create more wealth in their own countries and to convince them to take more accountability for their own homes. but, no, we're just racist for believing that the best way for people to improve their lives and prosperity does not have to risk, you know, their own kids' lives and enrich drug cartels and all of these ngos. and here again the financial

imperative comes into play. i have a section in chapter one called banking on illegals where i talk specific about all the financial institutions, bank of america, wells fargo, now there are all these apps, and paypal is in on it and a lot of the silicon valley to be able to more seamlessly send remittances back home. we have president trump who has vowed and promised and signaled and telegraphed that he's going to start taxing the billions of remittances that are sent back to mexico and the rest of the world. hasn't done it yet, and shockingly i think for most people,al although i know you know this, the federal reserve itself runs a remittance program called directo mexico where it recruits illegal alien customers in america by throwing festivals and having carnival games for the children to sign them up so that they can get a cut too. >> host: well, one of the things

that i think grabbed my attention in your book is a little bit about talking about the media, and i think you referred to what some of the media personalities have done to create a climate of hate. so kind of what we've already been talking about a little bit there, you know, can you talk a little bit about that and how that's impacting the whole conversation right now with respect to how we actually solve the problem in a rational and sane way, believing in sovereignty, believing in free trade, believing as people of faith wanting to help people who need help, but believing the best way to do that is to have a system that works, where the law's enforced and where it isn't this open borders, wink-wink, can you talk about the media's fomenting that wrongly? >> guest: yes. so it is incredibly difficult to talk rationally about policy consequences when you have open borders, pop began da -- propagandists in the media constantly smearing patriots as

haters. and seizing control of the absolute moral authority card, you know, to confer essentially the immoral authority only on illegal aliens and their families at the the expense of american families who have been separated. you know, that never, ever comes up. actually, i wrote a column this week about questions that i know the open borders media are not going to ask the democrat presidential candidates. i mean, the debate is in houston, right? houston, which is a sanctuary space where jocelyn johnson lost her husband. both of them members of the houston police department -- >> host: right. >> guest: and she does not have standing in american courts to be able to sue to hold the sanctuary anarchists accountable. where are the bleeding hearts on the left for families like this? she and her husband are both african-american. there are so many stories like that, is and yet you have an open borders media that when

president trump finally embraced many of these angel families and told their stories during the state of the union, these media types on twitter were proactively smearing them, sneering at them while they were being applauded in the chamber. they have absolute contempt for american citizens while they exalt every last supposed victim of the illegal immigration racket. and in many cases lie. i talk about the straight-out narrative deception. we talked about sanchez, many cases like that, and it certainly doesn't help that you have outright illegal aliens in the media like jose antonio vargas who's calling himself a real american, obliterating the very fundamental difference between people who came here legally like my parents did from the philippines and people like

his who came here illegally. >> and that was michelle malkin, our "after words" guest this weekend. watch the entire program tonight at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific times. [inaudible conversations] .. [inaudible conversations] >> hi, everyone. thank you for coming to this session on thinking about thinking. in the editor-in-chief of public works, which is a magazine

devoted to cutting edge ideas and can be found online at public books.org. i will be moderating today for a conversation with these three authors, all of these books talked on this question, how should we think? how can we think forward, how week can remember and what kind of attention should be paid in the present? we will talk about thinking across time and hopefully we will also understand more about our own processes of thought. the first speaker will talk about his book about five minutes before we go to conversation, lewis. lewis has written an interesting and experimental book called a primer for forgetting.

he's a poet, essayist and translate and poet, i'm very happy to say he's written book that are connected to my field. his new novel but it was not a novel, it's not a poem, hopefully he will give you the tools to think about what is in this book that it represents. next to lewis is dena's written a book called me telescope that looks at the long range and thinks about future implications and the problem of foresight. in addition to being writer and journalist, teaches the science of technology into society program at mit.

i just learned it will take up on leadership role very soon. next to dena's james, rights, freedom and resistance and attention to the economy. speaks of carving out our own forms of attention around our values and the challenges to doing that today under social media and technological diffusion. james is a writer on technology in general. this book he has written has been described by techcrunch as an instant classic in the field of test epics. i'd like to have everybody introduce that book about five minutes and then will move to conversation and questions.

>> my book is an experiment in thought and form. seek out places where forgetfulness is more useful than we are remembering. formal experiment is, it's not set up as an argument it's a collection of many short pieces which are ranked as a collage. rose done after some years of collecting things for my collage, i tried to put them into category so the book now has more notebooks. one of which firsters mythology, there are many old myths about how we think about memory and forgetting. one example, all over the world, you find the beliefs that the unborn soul knows many things. i find it in judaism, greece, china and the promise when you

born, you forget everything you know. it seems like a tragedy. you can flip it over and say that it's a good thing that forgetfulness is the precondition of birth and new life does not appear unless you can forget. the first picture in the book has mythological information of this sort. i believe that they give us a pattern of thought to look at whatever is going on. the second notebook is concerned with individual psychology, forgetting, like we all do. and meditation practice, you study the self, forget the self. if you forget yourself, the

world get real again. it has a sequence, it's not about repression or amnesia but a kind of practice in which you look at how you thought about the world, or habits of mind and become familiar and less controlling. it's a benefit, certain kind of self forgetfulness. the greek word for forget, it has to do with hiding, something forgotten has been hidden in the mind. you know your students names but they've been hidden in your mind and you can't remember. the opposite, has been the course of things you cannot hide in your mind, the unforgettable, things that haunt you or harass

you day and night. unforgettable is an example of where might want to do some work to put those things to rest. not that you don't know they happened but you're not in control of your own mind. the third section, i call it nation. it's around an old remark from the 19th century, talked about the natures of place where people have many things in common but they have also forgotten many things. he thinks of the french becoming french, had to forget the middle ages were when they slaughtered protestants. it's hard to build a nation around those differences.

so the book is about collective memory and forgetting. it's harder to do, it doesn't work as well because nations have many minds. in that section, it fails several times. look at how we remember the american civil war, we haven't forgotten it and we shouldn't. the final section is called creator about spiritual practice and logistics prospect. in terms of art, what you want in art is kind of self forgetfulness. i don't drifting of the mind. many artists for whom the work has to begin with forgetting our history, they school they brought up with.

john cage once said you go to the studio and work and everybody is there with you, parents and teachers and if you're lucky, they slowly leave the room. if you're very lucky, and you leave the room. >> thank you. >> the guy wrote is called the optimist, thinking ahead. i believe people alive today, we are part of a generation of humanity who has never faced a greater need for higher stakes of thinking ahead. i think it's true whether you look at our life span, we are looking so much longer than our grandparents. so the sense of what our future is as much longer than what has been historically for generations of humanity. it's also true when we look at

the biggest challenges we face in as somebody who is to look at climate change directly in the obama white house, i've been motivated by trying to understand how we individually and collectively can grapple with changes on this planet and the way in which we are today changing the atmosphere and climate the people want have 50, 100 years from now and beyond. we have power and knowledge to shape the future and we also have aspiration and values to look across world religions, the founding documents of democracy, these doctrines and ideas and values around future generatio generations, subregional and human experience to want to care about, to care about future generations. here we are in a culture of instant gratification where we

are focused on what's immediately next into the many factors at play that encourage that. i went off on a journey of studying this idea of thinking ahead because i believe that we need to deal with it better and that change will experience in our own minds requires greater imagination than we have right now about what's to come. we have to imagine and be able to imagine what we will do in our lives and communities to address that. it let me fire away from crime change, to claims of thinking in ways we can think and aid our imaginations to think about the future and get out of the trap of short-term thinking. what i discovered is studying a number of science, social science, economic and biology

but traveling around the world and collecting stories and looking at examples of people communities have struggled or succeeded at thinking ahead and planning ahead. that's a dangerous misconception but permeates our culture and thinking which is that this short-term is a course of human nature. we might as well give up on problems like climate change and prepare for the apocalypse and i disagree. i strongly disagree. i found was evidence and stories that show this is not a trait of human nature. it has to do with the environment, conditions, it's a choice we face. we have to acknowledge that as a choice. if we choose to be shortsighted, it's a conscious decision we are making. it's constructed through stori

stories, it brings in intuition and art and science. in order to be to some degree, it's something of a roadmap, for the first time at the degree to which we need it. another consent, it's a collection of insights that can be used both on a personal level but also throughout the organization and society. i think there's a responsibility we all hold for thinking ahead but also institutional and cultural factors we need to hold accountable are leaders in deal with the change in society and build from the individual up. in this exploration, i'm looking forward to being in conversation around memory because there's a

special role they play in inhibiting or aiding our ability to imagine the future if there are examples of that in the bo book. a japanese engineer who insisted on building it at a higher elevation with a high wall on the coast. he did that based on his knowledge of a flood in the shrine of the year 869 and that decision to build this nuclear power station led to sparing that nuclear power station from 2011 tsunami arduino destroyed fukushima so there are all these ways in which history and memo memory, individual memory are at contention.

one of the other things we might talk about here, anchors for the imagination. ways we can protect ourselves into the future so i write about the church in germany where john cage is being played over a time 670 years and every few years, there will be no change in spring assembled and reassembled for this music to be played. it's one of the more artistic processes but there are many but come from the concrete to help us to be able to be thinking across generations. >> thank you. >> thank you for having me today. my book, i was working at google

many years ago, in addition to external environmental crisis that our planet faces, is an internal environment so crisis, are technologies were playing a major defining role in our crisis. i've got to begin the book with observation in the 1970s. it creates a scarcity of attention. we describe our technology and information, we assume the changes of information data but when i saw in the industry was essentially most of the products we use becoming our primary goal to capture and monetize and explore our attention. it's an ecosystem of unbounded

persuasion of a new kind of power and problems we are seeing. so the title of the book is stand out of our light. this comes from the story of the closest thing i think he's ever produced. an agent grease, he was exiled from his hometown for evasion of currency, lived in the markets and would do all sorts of things to draw the people. he would loudly disturb them. he is admired by one of the most powerful person in the world. alexander the great comes to visit and he's flanked by his soldiers and he says, i respect

you and advise you. he was lying in the sun at the time and said stay out of my light. [laughter] i use as a parallel to say the people who make our technology are well meaning, they want to improve your lives. but they are standing at a light that they didn't realize was the light of our attention. i wanted to elaborate this problem, information abundance has effects on our thinking and habits and lives but then the way this industry, which came to maturity in the 20th century and has been supercharged by knowledge of psychology in the infrastructure, global

communications. the way in which this might of our attention and doing the things you want to do. i think a lot of the time we think our attention is hijacked and distracted. somebody just asked me and that i go back to what i was doing. as a tradition across the world, when we give attention, it's what we are. i wanted to deepen what's at stake and by coming up with deeper senses of attention that relate not just to moment to moment, we are all giving each other right now attention years of this. questions of habits, identity of pursuit of longer-term goals,

not just task goals and even the capacities like metacognition, it enables us for values in the first place. i embark on a project of interrogating this problem, deepening what's at stake and getting heading for at least simple solutions because this problem is a multilevel problem. it will take structural change of a fairly in this economy around. i started in the book by saying to do what matters, we have to give attention to what matters. i think all of the problems in the world, anything, unless we can get the right kind of attention to them, we can't if

we tackle them in the right way. it seems like the dynamics are producing or taking us down a very straight path. i do think there's hope in writing the book. in the dark time, i think there's a lot of fronts right now but i'm hopeful our eyes are beginning to see respect to many others. >> each of you have questions of continuity, we need to think in one way that in order to get to something like foresight or attention, we have to change to get that. that raises the question of identity and the continuities in

the sense of self or cultural focus back and oftentimes lead to doing things in the same way. so how do we pick about identity when there's also this imperative for a change? >> one of the discoveries of my research is that cultural identity can have a high influence on our ability to value the future. you take a marshmallow test which people know about, test of whether they would indulge in the first. it led to this when i think to be a misconception which was

that there are just certain kids who wait for the second marshmallow into they are better and will do better in school and on achievement tests and end up earning more in their careers, which was the correlation which is what they found. but that actually, as you look at the literature and all that is been done since the initial test, it's a much more complicated picture. you find that toddlers who are the kids of farmers are passing this test in poverty and scarcity, they sacrifice the future. having the inability to think past the moment. they pass that test at 70% in american toddlers pass about 30%. there are studies that show that the norm is that the kids in the

group all wait for the second treat. they will adhere to the cultural norms. i think these ideas about identity are culturally and socially dependent. we can change the environment and norms around us. that's just one example of how that can happen. i do think the abundance of information in the immediate can interfere with the ability to see ourselves as having consequences in the future, having the future that exists around, beyond our media. in our immediate surroundings, we have the input of everything we want right in front of us whether it's a donut or marshmallow or what we are doing in the moment. information we get in the present, the abundance, and

might understanding, that can be a way of reinforcing the present over the future and inhibiting that ability to imagine future consequences or desires or aspirations. i think part of what we have to do is limit some of that input of the information when our norms are not reinforcing the identity. that reinforcing the take, take, take to get us in that. >> that reminds me of the media, the distinction between media that can access or space and over time, etchings in the stone tablet and carry ed across the ocean. maybe not so much over time, identity is our self

representations in some form of media, it would make sense that media that is over space but not time, would have a hard time keeping that stability of identity in these forms of media. i think we are one way to think about it, where in our ecosystem can we lead into these prime elements? i think there's also the question about the extent that this ecosystem that's designed to get us to want certain things to care about certain things. i think this question of, is it are true or authentic expression

is also a big question in the environment where they interact with having goals. >> in my book, the assumption is that memory and identity are connected. they know who we are by what we have identified with. that means that if you wanted to change identity, you need some form of forgetfulness. one example is the 19th century, they were trying to create an american literature into they were clear about the need to forget european literature so there beginning of europe at the project in 19th century america, the authentic ocean is in the crossing should

have helped us forget europe. the pacific is three times as wide and we could keep going west. one of the things you say about identity that comes up in my book is that a lot of identity is made by opposition, i know who i am because i'm not this other thing. it's gets put into play politically. as a moment in my book where -- backup. the politics is the systematic organization so what we do politically, to get a political movement going is to figure out who your enemy is and get people to rally around this. i quote ronald reagan who goes to philadelphia, mississippi, a famous set of murders in the 60s and announces he's in favor of states rights. what he's doing is invoking the

category of identity by difference. you know who you are because you're not black or you are not, or you do believe in states rights. so again, the project here is if you want to transcend the politics of identity by difference, you need to forget your differences then there's a project cause. >> i was going to be my next question. i think you are all pointing to environments that are there which reinforce our assumptions and oftentimes assumptions we would like to move beyond so it's hard to build new norms or identities when we are all operating under the consumer and corporate environment that gives us structure that reinforces a

present oriented focus and focus on scarcity which then reinforces a sense of necessity in the present which drives action but will sacrifice long term. ... or other strategies which might get us to think about the future more. >> let me say one quick thing, it links to what james does. and i think links to capitalism. i was struck in your book by him, he describes the way all

our computer systems now lay down cookies, which keeps track of what you've done in the past and so forth. also these third-party cookies, which operate across different platforms. when we one way of thinking about this as it's creating your identity in cyberspace. through these linked information systems the world knows who you are in a certain way. this is the creation of identity and i began to wonder, is there some way to erase these cookies? to take control of the identity that's been created for you by capitalism, or by a system where market triumphalism is the goal. your autonomy is not the goal. cookies, capitalism, how about you james? [laughter] >> one thing i point out about cookies as they originally started as a way to essentially

enable task successful on website to be able to say this is the same person across different stages of a shopping cart process, websites. it was extended beyond websites and then extend initially beyond devices. i think this gets at the questions of perceptions of identity. the identity i have for myself which is then i express and see reflected back in different ways, then the identity that other people other entities, companies, that assume that i have, the profile me in certain ways. giving attention to certain aspects of my life that happened to be relevant to the goals they have. then you see this reflected back, it feeds in on our own sense of who we are. i think, certainly i think it's this sort of colonization, monetization of identity in the

form of profiling in the form of cookie, in the form of i think it's absolutely an important piece of a lot of this problem. >> we are living in a period of on saturday, highly on regular and capitalism which i think is important to talk about and point out. is capitalism inherently incompatible with long-term thinking?i think it's an interesting question but i think what's clearer and more easy answer at the moment is, is this period of unregulated capitalism incompatible to a large extent or discouraging us from valuing the future whether the future of our natural resources or the future of our societies and their communities, i think clearly that's the case but i also think we have to recognize the choices that we have within that system as well.

i looked very closely at capital markets and the way that investors are driving companies to focus on the quarter in the way that corporate leaders are pointing the fingers elsewhere saying, i have to manage for the quarter and not managing for long-term value and how that really, people get all upset when they hear about corporate fraud like wells fargo and the fraudulent accounts that were set up, or enron and the accounting scandal but more value, more pension holders and 401(k) holders investments are lost by the routine and very legal practice of ceos managing for the quarter and taking resources on a research and development for growing their companies in a way that would be good for workers. these are very clear choices that both are proud policy regulars and corporate leaders and investors are making. in some instances they are making them differently. what i think is important to point out those examples is to show that there are indeed ways to orient, even in the system

toward more long-term thinking and to not have that reinforcement. that said, it's very hard for us as consumers on the subway platform in boston there's a sign from uber, good things come to those who refused to wait. you're being advertised to not wait, to indulge in the immediate. at a constant rate. as james rightly points out there's a whole profit-making machine around focusing our attention on fulfilling that next immediate desire and not focusing our attention on what we might ultimately want for ourselves.i think it's also, is there another system of an economy that could better encourage us to think ahead, possibly, but i don't see a clear example of that except the extent i've seen traditional what i would call heirloom economies working in fisheries around the world and

documented where the resources being passed to the next generation and divide alternate modes but they are not yet or they are no longer the dominant economic system that we operate under. i'm interested in both what do the examples show is about where we could go and the directions and what we need to preserve of heirloom economies but also if our economy is to remain in this format what can we do within that because we can't give up. >> i love the idea of the heirloom in your book. i gave a different way of thinking about what an economy could look like that wasn't about this precedented oriental capitalism we got today. it always raises a question about the family in the work and the family inspirations that i read both in ãand your

work. i was wondering how you think about that. where does the transition between generations come into your thinking? i think i noticed it first because you dedicate the book to your parents. for my parents across oceans for the sake of the future and your mother comes up very early in the book as well. >> traumatic memory is the easy case to think about why one might want to forget something that happened to you. but one thing i do in the book is to widen the sense of what trauma is. the greek word actually means wound. there are all kinds of wounds. i began with odysseus in the odyssey as wounded by a bore when he was out hunting with his father. it's a tribal or group wound is

the kind of think you get when you're greek in the situation. in terms of my own family i was not exactly wounded but my parents thankfully forced me to do certain things as a young man. they forced me to learn to read. [laughter] they forced me to learn to spell. they forced me to learn to be handy with my hands. my family was very important to be smart not dumb. i've been anxious about this my whole life. my point is a simple one, trauma might be the easy case but all of us have come into the world shaped in a certain way the more you can come be conscious about ã >> i think that's interesting

because i think we are leaving heirlooms all the time and whether we do it consciously or not, sometimes trauma is a form and even heirloom and sometimes the heirlooms are much more positive or expensive for us. i write in the book about an heirloom i got from my great-grandfather who, as far as i know, the only other writer in any of my extended family has existed and he was a music and art critic in the early 20th century had musicians and artists who would give him objects but his wife, my great-grandmother squandered them, she sold most of them off because she wanted to travel the world after he died but this one instrument survived and was given to my grandmother who gave it to me and it's called a bill robot and it's played with the bow and has more than 20 sympathetic streams for mainstream is made out of mahogany. very beautiful. this heirloom to me change my thinking and gave me an anchor to get myself as a stitch and a

fabric of generations to think of myself as an ancestor and descendent and also to understand what an heirloom truly is i think it's very different than a legacy and that it heirloom is an object that is it's replaceable with any amount of money. someone stole this instrument from me i could never really replace it because its meaning is carried from the past from someone i didn't know to me. when i pass it on it will be passed and shepherded into the future. for me that's a metaphor and why i wrote about all the way up from heirloom economy to heirlooms for the planet but there are certain irreplaceable resources we have that you can't just leave a building with its name on it or bench or trust fund or account and replace an aquifer that has completely dried up or a fishery that has completely been destroyed.

that we as communities can come together and do what we do as families which is protect something that is that kind of value for the future it doesn't require us to perfectly perfect the future.it doesn't require us to know what people five generations from now are like, it just requires us to pass it to the next generation allow them to use it and adapt it and value it and share with them what it is we value about that object. for me thinking about my family and having this connection put my sister and i very much forward and first in our future that that became a way of thinking about what we actually need to do more broadly as a society. understanding there is a connection a continuity between the two. >> we have a few minutes for

questions if anyone would like to ask. [inaudible speaking] [inaudible speaking] [inaudible speaking] [inaudible speaking] seem to be the corporations and recently in this room tim wu was talking about his book the attention merchants. in order for us personally to manage our process of consciousness, how much time do we have to spend thinking about the fact that it's other people who are thinking more about

managing our consciousness then we do and controlling it. i don't think it's inherently better people are thinking more about than we are about managing our own lives as long as they are on our side. i think how much time do we need to allocate to this in our own lives, i think throughout various religious traditions you mention the sabbath, one day a week, you are not working, you are being, getting back to that essential thing. but i think that's one way of describing the situation we are in is there's a lot of people thinking about what our lives ought to be, how we ought to think, etc. the goals we ought to have. but they are not necessarily on our side. trying to optimize the certain short-term petty metric circles.

>> the problem is large groups want you to think a certain way. it's a wonderful line from james's book the freedom of the mind is the first freedom. there is a trade-off between trying to make sure somehow your own mind is sequestered for sufficiently it's free to think.and then what is this relationship to the larger imperatives to think that come to you from your group. >> just two quick answers to that. one is that we shouldn't assume we have to do this alone. one of the stories i tell actually researching having interviewed professional poker players who live in las vegas and the way that they developed a subculture around thinking ahead and patience and nonreactive, non-impulsive

gambling. and the way in which they reinforce each other through language and norms and increasingly in our society we do need to do this in community, to be reinforcing each other to put our attention and consciousness where we want it to be and reinforce our values because of this larger set of forces and the second is to really hold accountable our leaders. we need to be voting in leaders and thinking about using our political power or community or social power in any way we have that in order to not have this be so unfettered at the level of the way we are being marketed to you. or the way fossil fuel companies are destroying our environment. >> i want to ask a question, this is a fascinating panel by the way. i wanted to ask a question about distraction. how would you explain, yesterday there was that huge climate marks, mostly of young people. if anybody is accused of this distracted generation, it's young people. how do you explain that these

young people are thinking about the future and even though there are these distractions, how do you explain the thousands of books that are sitting outside that people manage to read, write, even with all these distractions. it just reminds me when i was a kid it was the boot tube. it was going to ruin all of us, it was a distraction, now we have a golden age in television. how do you explain this distraction combined with not being able to look into the future with what happened yesterday. >> i think it's a great question. i agree with you, with your sentiment about the idea that generational thinking is not usually helpful. technology is destroying millennial's. i think a lot of this is

because we see certain things in others or rejected on others because we don't want to see them in ourselves especially distraction which i think we moralize as a failure of self-regulation a lot of time. it seems to me that the climate forecast yesterday was precisely at the response to a distractive oral. we haven't got as far as we need to that this push had to happen. the weight in which they did it they had to do it is in the intention economy to have this in it enormous show people around the world getting attention. i think it's in line with the narrative of us being distracted. for the problems of books i think the prevalence of books and the prevalence of existence of book festivals is evidence that the book is not the primary for room media in our culture. the fact that we have to encourage people to read books, there is no internet festivals

up the same. [laughter] once something else comes after the internet if it does maybe we'll have those. i don't think it's initially exclusive i think these things are intention constantly. >> i want to tie the income you mentioned memory at the beginning, i think the first two and then you are ãb maybe just talk a little bit about memory and how mythology works and the extent to which maybe we lost that or it's been transformed in the history which is its own mythology but we don't think of it that way. how can we learn from the past? how can we keep the mythologies while we are moving away from

organized religion which kept a lot of those lessons in certain ways. >> the memory palace, this comes out of greek and roman rhetoric. these are devices by which the rhetorician somebody's going to give a speech can remember his speech or her speech. the idea is that you imagine a palace or house and you move from room to room and in each room you have mentally placed an image so striking you won't forget it. the images are connected to the topic you want it next to your talk. this particularly i think worked in an oral culture as in cultures where only the elite are readers what you do is design your church with a whole set of images around the edges of the church which explain the stories of the bible or whatever your story is. people come see it and they are in the memory palace of the story that culture story.

because my book is about forgetting, actually attacked the memory palace. i'm trying to think about forgetfulness but have to be in the book to find out what to say about that. >> thank you so much for coming, it's been a terrific panel. thank you authors. [applause] i'd like to remind you that the authors will not be signing their books at the signing table outside the building where barnes and noble also will be selling their books. thank you. >> thank you kate for putting together such ãb [inaudible background conversations]

there will be more live coverage of the book festival in just a few minutes. next up is a discussion on nonfiction writing. [inaudible background conversations] in the meantime, we want to show you a bit of a program he will see tonight at 7:15 pm eastern time. here is former utah republican congressman jason chase it's on president trump. >> the oversight committee was founded in 1814. it was there to oversee any and all government expenditures. it's had gyrations different committee names, abraham lincoln when he came on the

committee, this was his committee assignment when he was in the united states congress, it's interesting, he became known as spotty because he was challenging the president, where were the origins of the mexican-american war and he didn't believe, there's a great history there of this committee and what it's been able to do. what's interesting is what changed when i left. the oversight and government reform committee changed and now nancy pelosi elijah cummings changed the name of the committee, it's called "the committee on oversight and reform". democrats don't believe that government is a problem. they think it's a solution to everything. they don't need to go look at what government is doing because of government is all good. what you see now are hearings and oppress to go after individuals and individual corporations. that is not necessarily the purview of the united states congress. the committee is this wide,

probably the widest birth of any jurisdiction. there is two supreme court cases we lay out here where oversight was wings were clipped back to try to get it on the straight and narrow, which is look after government. we had a hearing smile in pharmaceutical and the epipen situation, farm boy. where we did call it into individual corporations. but what we also did was called in the fda and health and human services to say, how does this happen? when elijah cummings is doing is now demanding and sending out subpoenas and directives to go and letters and record amounts, to look under the books without any evidence of wrongdoing by the way. presupposing the outcome on fishing expeditions to go look

into the lives of individuals. if you have proximity to donald trump, look out. because that is a prime time target. this operating agreement, which nobody has seen the light of day between elijah cummings, jerry nadler, maxine waters, adam schiff, and i want to say there's a fifth one, about how they are going to do investigations and how they were going to do impeachment. these people lay this all out before the 116th congress even started. but it's all premised on the idea that they were going to be essentially i believe the campaign research arm for the democrats. i think that's what they are doing right here right now there is no justification or evidence to justify a lot of this. there just literally want to find out, let's go figure it out then we will go figure out what the crime is. it all starts with the idea and the promise that we don't need

to look at government, we need to look at people and individuals. it's kind of scary that the congressional, the branch of government that they would engage in this kind of witchhunt. this kind of power grab. this sort of diving deep. it is scary the abuse of the power that is going on there. >> one of the most high-profile examples of the confirmation process of justice kavanaugh. he talked about how choreographed it was from the opening scene maybe you can give us a little sneak peek. >> we go through, whole books you could write on just the kavanaugh situation. the pre-work what we try to focus on is the work that they were doing and he outlines that they had, no matter who it was, this was going to be a narrative about a frat boy who was out of control and gone awry. the clearest example, and it's been out there, it's not brand spanking new and my book but we remind people about the press

release that was already written with ãbthey just needed to fill in the name. when you see that in some total in retrospect put together in the way we did it in this chapter, it reminds you of how evil and how bad it was and i think it's almost humorous that these democratic senators, every single one of them had pledged to vote no and then complained about the lack of openness and transparency. you still have senator schumer and the others say, this is a trick they always do, they always do this, they ask for things that they know cannot be given to them. you cannot reveal, by law, grand jury material. there is executive privilege that a president has with his seniormost advisors. with jerry nadler does time and time again, dated it part in the kavanaugh situation, they

asked for information that the president has executive privilege on. it's the same claim that barack obama claimed, believe me, i wanted to get ben rhodes before a committee to talk about that iran deal. i invited ben rhodes to come testify before the oversight committee. he was in a new yorker, he was doing public speeches. certainly he has time to do all the media and public speeches. he can come talk to congress about this. they claimed executive privilege. they said there is a separation of powers issue and i dropped it. i didn't issue a subpoena. the difference now is cummings and nadler will issue subpoenas and say, see! they don't comply. they know that if it goes to court they will never win. they don't care because that court date is going to come after the next election. they want to create a narrative, i guarantee you, you will hear nadler and cummings, we issued a 250 subpoenas and they never responded! most of them are wholly bogus.

and the court would laugh them out. the reason jerry nadler became the chairman of the judiciary committee as he went before his colleagues on the democratic side of the aisle and said, i better suited to pursue impeachment.come with me, i'm going to do impeachment. that's how he beat out ãand became the chairman of the committee. this is what he's doing, abusing his power. >> one last question for me then we will shift ãwe will end on a positive note like you do in your book. what should conservatives be looking toward to rain this in? >> and tried to do this in the deep state, i did this in paragraph on purpose, i don't want to just lay out all the bad. you come and listen and you are like, bummed out. it's not the feel-good meeting of the year. try to end on a positive note that this is the greatest country on the face of the planet. somehow someway the american

people for liquor these things out. they sniff out authenticity. they understand these issues but we have to be aware of them. the very fact i write that you are reading the book is good news. the fact that people want to dive deeper on these issues but i also think it's incumbent that we engage in federalism that we push back on ãbwe push these the federal government does too many things to too many people. so much of this shouldn't be done at all or should be the purview of the states. somehow we got to neuter the power of the federal government and just get them out of so much of this business. i think a lot of those answers will be pushing for states rights and doing those types of things. >> the entire program with jason schaefer's will air tonight, check your program guide for more information. [inaudible background conversations]