>> remarkable year for book that have been tackling the uses and especially the abuses of this country's criminal justice system. and we at politics and prose have been honored to host authors and poets behind them. the first event we hosted this year at this location was for the investigation of the misdemeanor punishment without crime and we're closing with an equally essential look at the way the legal world unfairly treats this country's disenfranchised and the author target is his own former profession as a public testify. the become called "usual

crueltity" comes from alec karakatsanis. the founder of the civil rising corps, advocating for racial justice. especially known for come batting the unconstitutionality of money bail, karakatsanis was name the 2016 trial lawyer of the year by public yates and the steven b.b. b wright aired for -- and as an introduction to his talk tonight i'm very excited to be welcoming his guest nor program, the poet, based indog, raised in columbus, ohio and every serving an eight year sentence within the virginia department of corrections he began using poetry as a method of healing. among his work he taught various work shop, after school programs and panel discussions dealing with topics like mass incarceration, prison reform, social justice, disenfranchisement and education and join me in welcome pain the

poet to kick off the program. [applause] >> can you hear me? >> i'm pain the poet. as you heard from what he said about me, one of the thing its like to do is i like to artistically be able to articulate experience, so we may come from different backgrounds but i like to find the way to bridge the gap between understanding. from where i have stood to where i stand now, to where you sit to where you have stood in the past. i use my art as a way to kind of like introduce you to a world that maybe some of you haven't seen and the effects of said world. so we're going to -- for so long i had been searching for purpose. i remember searching for a reason to be believed and with the ability to grab the

attention of millions in the way to be word is remember working ways to be certain, certain there was a ron i exist and the search and i found this. you may not understand. this was supposed to hefner. i was supposed to believe rap base only means of expression, pour my heart into poetry the world would not accept if or my real would come into question and everybody in any background would be unable to establish connection within thundershower heart. supposed to he scared at the high class poets would consider a convict inkea capable of creating art. whole pages covered in dried tear and using a pen over opposition what came out is this right here. i'm pain the poet, the polar opposite of environmentality product, pure example of years in the making. never left my past define me, nor let my history claim in the and i've been charged and convicted but never let them sentence and break mow so now i've been paged persistently.

this is all i've ever had for a childhood of craziness, mother on two or have to-dave party binges. no need to find me a baby sirte we were tough kid and we struggled to make enough. whatever enough is. now as a man there irno limits to the lies i haven't created yet but before you make it, give doubters room to suggest you need a backup plan or safety net or gas station grocery store job would butow safest bet those who have never been can tell you'll never make it and those who don't have know all the reason to be comp miss sent and accept everything and i you've take away me breath, then how can you expect me to ever live. so now all i do is give. my every joy, my every pain, my every hope, my every fear, put my spire life on then line for his. i'm only real the way i'm real also the moans to openly expose our the inmer deal with being me

own opposition mitchell enemyes real and i spill the way i spill as a men others of release, trying to make the inner me. so every poem i put forth as a promise of pure love i am no dirt of -- different from now. the only difference is my emotiones fill my mind and allow my penmanship like gears which drive mets to believe my purpose upon the earth, this right here. peace. [applause] >> we talk about a lot of the effects of incarceration and what it can do to a person. recidivism. there's a big issue in this and that's when you leave an institution only to within a certain amount of time return pack to incarceration. a lot has to do with the mental effect of what incarceration does to you so the poem if wrote

was me within he throw weeks is a way reese lead after doing eight near the virginia penitentiary system. called go there. >> i remember struggling, really struggling, you see dealing with the return to sew vote from incarceration is complicated ill it i remember having difficulty engaging in casual conversation. used to hard i had reluctance in my eyes eyes and give off a funy vibe of -- i institutionalization, the enemy, to fight against is exhausting and i was gone before twit fer instagram, when mike was alive and bush was in office. coming home is like it's hard to relate. hard to keep pace and even harder to find place where simple this wills guess difficult. imagine trying to date, especially if they feel like you're vulnerable in and your position allows you to easily mold and shaped or the they feel some obligation to replace it. one of them too have been

through it and the feel you have an obligation to be and-it's crazy when you consider that ouch the kind hearted find victim to alwayses they create. i never won any bomb bailed over no charity case some never try to force love and i can't promise to provide the are in a relationship requires if feel like i can't and i have so many demons have to face it and wouldn't be fair. i have so many demons i got to face. i don't think you want to go there. i don't think you want to go there because if we go there we have to go where i was projects and predicted be. he they would els of have to kid, one sister, minute brother, the son of two felons and my father and mother raises by one parent, leaving a woman to her kid off east 22nd, columbus, ohio, one bedroom apartment. a couple of sheaths and a blanket on the mattress and hear. they never say home where is the hart bus but don't say when hose

imheartless. the final of this is a kid on then edge who didn't care. a kid in the position where both robber and victim were scared. we not going there. i don't think i can go there. i don't even know if i know how. society brought harm to my heart and realitien and as a poet i may seem calm and come postal serviced about inside i'm hollering out. never known love and now i travel about, bitter and beaten, marked and scarred, sufficient skatinger in the without of me own short coming and now i'm struggling for air. you see i'm a victim of a pain but out of love i don't care and been here my whole life and i just pray noneoff y'all have to good there they always tell me to look at the bigger picture. doesn't seem wrong but at the problem with the big are picture it's not physically developed and the frame it wasn't built too strong so it couldn't hold and collapsed and folded now that image is fallen. so as far as the future holds, can't call it. i just know i write what i write

and i say what i share. i know what files like to wear your heart on you've sleeve and if the whole world doesn't care. be grateful you don't got to go there peace. [applause] >> big incarcerated, you talk to a lot of people sometimes, some are better than others, [inaudible] >> sometimes there's people in places that go beyond what you see people go, and i talked about my childhood, talked about details didn't even think were actual things that may have faked me growing up so this poem

please don't jump is speak -- please don't judge us. >> please don't judge us. no, you see a lot of us were the victims of the ones that loved us. some of us had wayward fathers s and unededucated fathers and dudes wrote husband ill with cousin -- hustle with cousins and please don't judge. the he only wanted accept appearance so as adolescents we fell to the familiar faults. we used to think drugs would pay us and we knew no other life so we ran the circus for any feeling of fortune and being moved by minor materials because as kideswood use to think it's important. i remember feeling the drug dealer supportive. drove me to school, bought me the jordans, taught me money over everything, that dollars are poor and the older guys got checked for unemployment and no matter what, never trust any

member of law enforcement. never had anything for us. only watched them take family from us. just a victim of the wins that love him no matter how many times we try to tell them please don't judge them. they don't understand this all started as babies. and bottles and pamper the sonses of fatherless and some followed examples. she's a daughter of a promiscuous mother. she that little girl might not know what love is. so manies will have kids that kirstined to suffer. and hurts looking into the eyes of the kids death any touches. watching our youth at the back of a squad car when they're arrest it fresh out of prying pan into an oven, heat on 400, raid net world where it's all of us or nothing. used be raised by mothers who always wanted marriage but never could trust it. they were always victims of the ones that love them. but plea don't judge them. don't call our women products of

the projects. i swear we try. just that the reality of the world fed us a lie and the only way we can live is to fight for our lives in this cold cruel word. we sing rap songs, jury springer and morrie -- maury fathered our girls. the court system is picking a person that picks out a point the finger at people as if they're was. they patted. the as perfect whip judges and prosecutors are put in place to hurt us. i know they feel we're irrelevant. you see one color get a slap on the wrist and a black kid hit with the time they hit mandela with. the to say we're treated equally you inassault my intelligence. i spent eight years gone, eight years long and i was wrong. i tried to explain that i succumb to circumstances beyond

my knowledge. back against the wall, suffocating under circumstances and needed money to eat but thinking but now leaves a sour taste any mouth because manging it out may have been more problems than previously perceived but in moments of stress, reflection over contemplation. hindsight opportunity express what i had momentarily believed. it was back against the wall, suffocating under circumstances, i needed money to breathe. i'm just grateful my family still loves me. i'm even more grateful they had faith in lord in which is world so ugly and i say, please don't judge me. thank you, i'm pain. peace. [applause]

>> pain has some business cards here, youert hire him for events and pour him. where can they find you? >> i have a website, poet pain.com, and [inaudible] >> and please come take a photo of one of his business cards before you leave. thank you to politics and process for hosting us today and for pain for coming up from norfolk to be with us and i always just so inspired when i hear what pains to and one of the themes of the book, if you actually get it and read it, is how are we going to change this narrative that is produced a legal culture and society more generally that has allowed for

the massive caging of human beings, and all of the cruelty entailed not bureaucratic process that leads us to inflect so much pain. so i want to talk for a little bit about my spiff perspective oninging ins. is room here if people in the pack want to filter. in i think the have a couple more chairs for anyone who would be more comfortable in a chair. is that right, jonathan? we have a couple more chairs for some -- >> there's another empty chair right here. i was going to talk for a few minute but my perspective, the background and how we got into the work we're doing. i mostly then like to have questions and comments from the audience. i find that these events are much better with someone not talking at people but for a real discussion. the only thing i ask if you ask a question, maybe you can say your name or make a comment and say your name so i or other people can refer back to your

comment and your awesome thoughts as we build a discussion together. so, i first started doing this kind of work when itself quit being a public defender in 201. had get an grant from any law school to dish think i pitch the grand to something to the effect of give me some money so i can take down and dismantle the criminal legal system, and the people i pitched this to, this is a wild idea. there's no way we'll give you've this money. they have no hope of accomplishing something to broad and sounds ridiculous. luckily for me nobody else applied for the money, and so they had to give it to me and the first thing i did was i put applane ticket to alabamay i used to be a public defender. the plan was to go from court to court and city to city and jail to jail and see what i found. some that trip changed the course of my life and my career. i remember toward the end of the trip i was going to symptom in

montgomery and visit colleagues and with went to their office monday morning, i stopped into the local courthouse, and that morning there were 67 people in jail garb and chains around their ankles and waists and wrists, all of them were black. i as i watched the court hearing it became clear to me that not a single one of them was charged with a crime. there was a property but no public defender. and -- there was a prosecutor but no public defender and there was a man arguing this person should be jailed and they didn't pay enough money and they should be jailed, and one by one the people whose lives are being discusswood wheat up in front of the judge beg for mercy. have four children. two only their disabled. please depth lock me up. i don't know what to too. don't take my from my kids. another man need on the floor of the courtroom and begged for mercy. i've done bad things ump addicted to drugs, hive stolen things i can't afford these

tickets, lope don't put me in jail' for each one the judge said unless you pay any a thousand dollars i'm throwing you in jail. i later learn -- i'm a presented sophisticated court observe even the person if thought was the prosecutor was actually the public defender and turned out that the city of montgomery's contract for public defense told this man that he wouldn't be paid unless enough money was collected through fees and fines. explains used i was watching. when i found that out i did what seemed natural to me and i started making objections. in alabama you're not permitted to make objections while you're sitting in the courtroom audience, and especially if you're not barred in alabama. so, i was asked to leave the courtroom, and i had seen five cases by that point and i i'd written down their names, and i walked up into the local jail,

which in montgomery, alabama, is both physically and met metaphorically as it is in so many countries the jail is connect ted he courthouse and i walked in and i called the five names and they product me the five people. again, after five people they figured out what it was was doing and asked to leave the jail as well. the five people were my first clients as a civil rights lawyer. very bravely talk about two of them. i think it bears on why i wrote the book the first person i opened the first essay in the book about, share knell mitchell had been sitting on her couch od four-year-old and police raid her home and they arrested her and ripped her away from her kids because she owed traffic tickets from 2010, four years prior. been in jail for two weeks at the time i met her and had no idea where her babies were. she does spread to get back to them. a jail guard was nice enough to give her a pencil. court document says paid if a $2,810 or do 5 days in jail.

0 'back have at the court document she had been writing numbers, 2870 now she od on the top right. on the left-hand come shul writment the days one through 58. she what writing, 50, 75, and then own's she was subdistracting the numbers from 2800 seven. she said in montgomery you get $50 a day toward your debt just for being in jail. but if you agree to be a janitor for the city and to clean the feces and blood and he music discuss and mold off of the jail house floors where you sleep and the walls and if you agree clean the judge's trash canles you get an extra $25 a day. so all of the women war competing who would get the $75 that day, and so some of the days she was able to do the extra work and some some she wasn't and it cass clear that montgomery was running a debtor's prison system and by the time she was done describing this to me the pencil on the back of the page was smeared with her tears, and i took a

photograph of that document. next person if meant, lorenzo brown, the man note down on his knees in court. he had to pay $2,000 or do 40 days in jail. he wouldn't speak to me. didn't trust in. was wag an inside out hooded sweatshirt. told him i was a lawyer and the last person who told him was his lawyer was the person who told the jump to lock him up. he said i'll speak to you've if my pastor gives you permission. i had my phone and we call this pastor and the pastor said, luckily my grant had chest been posted online so the pastor could goggle i was actually a lawyer and said this lawyer is an angel from god sent to help you through this and i actually know that's not true at all. i'm not barred here put i would thereof talk to you and see what he welcome do to help. i built a wonderful relationship with lorenzo, relationship of

trust and he told me his story and subsequently -- and lorenzo and three other people became my first clients and within a few weeks we were in a beautiful federal courtroom, full ol' marble and wood and lorenzo and share knell told their stories beautifully and the federal judge was so outraged he order all of the city officials to appear in front of him in person to explain hough this could be happening. instead over appearing in court they just released everybody from the jail in a single day. and i think two things are notable but that hearing. first, we as a culture and legal system have been so desensitized to the brew adult of putting a human being in a cage that entire cities have been people in jail for no reason so little reason on a single day without any care they can release everybody. the second thing was, something that happened that i didn't actually even see myself. way going up to talk to a judge

after the judge issued the recalling recalling and lorenzo was caulk with his cane toward the back of the courtroom and there was a lawyer who came to watch the hearing from the southern poverty law center and she held the door hope for him and as he exited the courtroom, he whispered to himself, under the breath with his head down, he said, wow. i never enough i had this much power. and so the second thing i learned that day, i think what the power of these narratives. particularly when they're developed by people who have been directly impacted by the system if think a lot of people who in whose name our seal system functions every day don't have enough idea the kind of pain and cruelty it is inflicting only people residents bodies and minds and families and communes. after the montgomery case, i went to ferguson, and michael brown had just been murdered. i -- we i made judge shapiro and we spend time together and the same thing was going on in ferguson.

when i got there the city of ferguson averaged 3.6 arrest warns per household. almost all of them for unpaid debt. so it's 2.2 arrestsways for every adult in the city of ferguson. we brought the same kind of case in ferguson their same kind of case in mississippi and in louisiana and new orleans, and as we're doing that work it became clear that this problem, this everyday inflix of brutality. the use of courts as mechanisms for revenue generation was all over the country. another thing was clear was we kept winning cases. jumps kept saying, it's unsuspensional to put a human being in a cage because she can't make a monetary payment, but i realized at the time that was the very foundation of the american money bail system. so, at the time we were bringing and winning okays for people who had been convicted and kind fortunate to pay fines and fees they were 500,000 human beings in jail cells every single night, prior to being convicted of notwithstanding at all

because thaw couldn't make a monetary payment and i know a lot of you know but the issue. judge morrison in the back who has worked on the issue for how many years, judge? 40? you're not that old. 20 years. and so we began a series of caveses designed to challenge the american money bail system and the first ten months in 2015 we found 12 cases 12 different cities. he goal was to show it could be done and debate this their rid that no human being should be caged because you can't make a payment and a and to create a sense of-under gentlemen general si that was lacking in the way the legal system confronted the issue of. the other goal was to work, not just as lawyers to come up with some theory and then are difficult late in the court and then have the court solve the problem but to work with communes and tell certain stories in a different way to build power so if we did win a

case, the people who dvd what would rye place this illegal system weren't the same people that create it and that's one of the main reason i wrote the book. five, six years later that's lore more attention on this horrible injustice that is our criminal punish. bureaucracy but i'm very scared about the state of what is called the criminal just reform movement. i guess i think it's out there in the ether. has anyone heard the afraid the criminal justice system is broken? yep. it's kind of popular thing to say now and one thing i realizes around the country is that your theory for what is wrong with the system informs the kind of strategy and tactics you might use to fix it. if you think that the criminal justice system is trying to create a society where all human beings can nourish and everything is equal it's prone but if you think the person is to control and cage and surveil and preserve certain hire akis

of power and -- hierarchies it's functionings quite well and if you see it in that perspective, it's incredibly efficient bureaucracy, bureaucracy that somehow manages to take 12 million people every year from their schools and churches and homes and families and jobs andse them into this entire system of government run cages of concrete and metal, and where i come down after 1 11 years of being a lawyer is the system is functioning quite well and the stated purpose, the is not it's up function in our society. if you think that, you're going to have a different philosophy for the kinds of intervention we need to make. if you think the people running the bureaucracy are in good faith trying to make us all have flourishes lives you've might think the solution tonight give them more information and data and show them we spent trillions of dollars on this, cabled tens of millions of people and let's

just take the war on drugs. drug usage rates are higher than before. we captured everybody's electronic communication and end privacy, caged people, ruined their families, separated hundreds of thousands of children from their family and every single american state and yet we have nothing to show for it. maple people are that dumb and you can show the statistics and they would be, how can bev -- what can we do to fix this late get rid of police and courts and jail. if you think that the criminal punish. bureaucracy is a locus where power us contesting power and at the ruling class uses the criminal pin issue. bureaucracy to control the population and deserve hierarchy of wealth and power your solutions are much more likely to be organizing people directly impacted by the system. building powerful forces at the level of real pour. this is the philosophy ofsive rights corps and the argue. itself you're working in the

criminal justice reform space, and anything you do that grows the bureaucracy rather than dismantled it, that doesn't actually focus on building power among people who are impacted is not in the end going to macany bit of of difference and let me just give -- before i sum it up, the example of bail reform is maybe one of the most powerful examples of this phenomenon and one of the main reason its wrote the book to explain why i think this is so dangerous. the bail reform movement was left by fancy lawyers most live white men, called themselves liberal, 1960s, it was a cause taken up by a robert f kennedy jr. they led the first behavioral reform movement and said, it's unsuspensional and wrong and immoral to cage people because they can't make a payment and after years of advocacy within the bureaucracy they were successful and passed the federal bail act. and the day before the act went

into effect, 24% of automatic people were detain because the cooperate make a monetary payment.... we actually are aging three times more people and more discriminatory from a socioeconomic class perspective than before. i think the answer to this potential paradox lies in the fact that those reforms are led by elites, people who control

the punishment of geography. it wasn't any kind of change in underlying power dynamics that created the bureaucracy that the rule and class uses to control certain populations. i think back over the history of the american judiciary, what made us think that institutions like the courts and congress were ever going to be the source of radical social justice. he looked back at the supreme court's history it's never been a source of radical social change. that's not what judges are, judges don't see themselves as radical agents of social change they see them slip aging present ãbthat's why every term rather issues the supreme court lagged behind social movements. the same is true when you look at the criminal legal punishment or bureaucracy. even the case that perhaps is considered the most significant and positive case in the history of the american soup ã ãsupreme court you have a beautiful decree that is unconstitutional to segregate schools yet five years after brown, 20 years after brown, 60

years after brown, you can have more school segregation and many parts of the country than before brown. a corollary maybe we can draw from is the same-sex marriage movement. some very smart lawyers brought cases into late 70s and early 80s about the right for same-sex marriage. they were basically lost in every court they were in including u.s. supreme court. 20 to 2530 years later some of the same lawyers but other various lawyers using the same six or seven words in the 15th amendment brought the same cases. this time they won in virtually every court. it wasn't the lawyers were smarter or the 14th amendment became better, i think there was a social movement in this country that changed the way people think about same-sex marriage. i know there's a lot of disagreement about how that social movement was organized and potentially co-opted by certain moderate interest the point is that there was a social movement that that's

what the court responded to. i think what we need in this context is a radical social movement that changes the way we think about human engagement changes the way we think about the criminal punishment bureaucracy as a tool of oppression.and that changes the way all of us understand that this systems purpose is to be the locus for power exerting, it's the reason that if my ancestors stole certain land from other people that today i can call the cops if someone tries to trespass on that land and exert the force and violence of the state to remove them from my property. at its core that took criminal punishment is all about. it's all about reserving certain hierarchies in power. that's the argument i make in the book. i think what's so scary as many people parading around the country as criminal justice reformers some of them quite famous people who are running for president, some former attorney general's they are making a claim that all we need to do is make a few tweaks

slightly shorter mandatory minimum sentences may be some more diversion programs and you know it would be great if we could spend several hundred million dollars in every major american city and put body cameras on the police to watch them oppress the same people in the same neighborhoods doing the same things. those are the kinds of things that typically pass reform in our current criminal punishment bureaucracy reform movement which is austin often called the justice reform movement. he wrote the book in a way to try to and tell scrutinize some claims and offer a set of rules so that people could tell what is a good reform versus bad reform, what is likely to help dismantle and build power what is likely to reify it reinforce the aspects of criminal bureaucracy that are causing the problems. we don't confront those questions, he worried this movement will be co-opted and

that people who have profited off of and created criminal punishment a bureaucracy of going to shave off some most gore-tex flourishes but leave in place architecture and bureaucracy of the apparatus we've created. i'm going to stop there for a second because i've been talking for a long time. several people have heard this book talk a couple times. they learn virtually nothing from what i've said but thank you for coming. i want to make sure this is most useful and relevant for the people here. if there are questions or comments i think jonathan has a microphone. we can pass it around someone hopefully will be brave enough to ask the first question and then it usually gets going. >>. >> for the cash sale systems the way the prison system has. what other roles of the private sectors in that? >> sarah asked old family friend here, thank you for asking the first question. the cash bail system has it been privatized the same way some prison system has been privatized. the answer is yes.

throughout the long history of the use of money bail since the magna carta for profit bail bonding had been illegal in england, it's still illegal in england.about 1898 the u.s. saw its first for-profit commercial charity company started working in san francisco. to this day, for-profit money bail is only legal in the united states and philippines. that industry has really corrupted the basic delivery of what's called pretrial justice. i don't use these term like department of justice or pretrial justice or criminal justice system or propaganda that gives you the impression of what they're trying to do what they're actually doing is some justice. the term law enforcement is meant to imply there is objectivity in the enforcement of the law and not just enforcing some laws against some people. but we call this system the pretrial justice system it's been privatized almost every american state to 46 states have private for-profit money

deals. what's fascinating we been able to have significant victories in many of these states including after we won constitutional case tracking down the money bail system in california the democratic california legislature passed a bill eradicating the for-profit money bail industry in california. what is so scary about that is that those industries aren't stupid. the punishment bureaucrats who supported matt repeal of cash bail industry aren't stupid. they carefully fashioned the system that would replace it. we are seeing this all of the country.imagine the federal bail reform act we are seeing in all these places like california when they passed the cash bail reform act they included provisions that expand their abilities dramatically to

increase. they passed a bill that's going to get rid of the cash bail industry and its forecast by all the counties in california to end dramatically increase their jail populations. as we have it built in a power because we were striking at the core we ended up with ãbthey see the writing on the wall basic public zeitgeist against cash bail right now so they are reallocating their capital and their business model instead of being the person that sold you the bail bond, now you're released without cash bond but ordered supervision. they will be the person that charges you for gfs monitor and charges for test. in for-profit officer you have to report to every week. they make the same amount of money off the same populations

with a different label. this is i think a fantastic example of if you don't confront these mechanisms of oppression at the real level of power they will reproduce themselves to different levels. i think the fact that we are taking head on the privatization of the cash bail industry they have given up i don't want to make it seem like they're fighting is very hard but they all understand some of the larger aggregations asked them from an investment perspective and a large insurance companies that control them they understand very well they have another ready-made business model right there because there's 2.3 million human beings in cages right now this country but there's another 5 million people on some kind of government run supervision. those people ãb another question. >> my question is, do you think, you are a former public defender in the new left and no

longer public defender, do you think it's possible to be a public defender and also not be a cog in this system of the bureaucratization of the criminal justice system? >> let me preface my answer by saying, i don't know the answer to that. i don't know if it's possible to be a lawyer in our society without being complicit in this justice. before i talk about public defenders and say many negative things because i know there are so many public defenders in the room, let me say that it's not clear at all that the work that we are engaged in know where we are going to federal court and asking those courts to vindicate certain constitutional rights, it's not clear that work is it also just legitimating the system and may be lending at the credibility it needs to keep functioning. it's something i struggle with every night as i go to sleep. what is the line between using the system and the cases that we are able to bring in the system as a way of helping

communities and local organizing campaigns helping people create a moment and vehicle for telling a certain story. i definitely believe the story we are telling a lot of our cases is subversive or has the potential to be subversive in that everyone understands very differently it's ridiculous to keep a human being in a cage because you can't make a payment. and cruel and senseless, it makes no sense. i think a lot of people are saying, if the criminal justice system is doing that and doing that to 500,000 human beings every day and separating families, what else is it doing? if i can't trust that, how do i trust all the other things it telling me about what it's doing? >> i think there's something subversive in a local and national narratives we are able to tell around it. nonetheless, you are still left

every night with the feeling you are participating in this unjust system and that it's very difficult to ever find progressive radical social movement that's done real damage to our country's ruling class that's been led by lawyers. i think lawyers just like other people can participate in social movements and be part of building power but i think it's hard to think of an example where that's actually led to radical social change. i've been avoiding this part of your question for a long time. i ended up leaving being a public defender because i concluded that i was complicit in the system and wasn't able to push and prod and challenge and expose it as effectively as i might be able to do if i was a little more free. another thing that had to do with his and very bad with bosses. maybe it's possible for a different person to done the things i wanted to do but i was either going to get fired or leave so i had to leave first.

all kidding aside, i want to say two things about public defenders. there is no question that we been complicit in the system. i know there are all kinds of constraints placed on public defenders, incredible crushing caseloads. horrific judiciary.judges are really the problem. they are the biggest obstacle to change in every jurisdiction we go to, prosecutors, and other constraints. i worked for two of the most prestigious public defender organizations in the country the federal the public office ã ãin my 4.5 years in those offices neither i, something you have to live with every day, nor anyone else for my office to my knowledge filed a single bail appeal. a single appeal. i know for a fact that we didn't file a single request for bond pending appeal my entire time of the defender's office and i'm not sure if we got one at the public defender

service offer either. think about what that means, when i got the pds our division was winning about 33 percent of its cases. however, because of the backlog of cases in the time it took to process those, it took about 2.5 years for a case on average to get done. if your sentence was less than 3.5 years you already serve your sentence by the time you won your case. it was in that context that we were asking for clients to be released pending appeal. i don't want to be too harsh on the lawyers that work there because i and other people work there often had good reasons for not filing certain motions but to never file any. what is it say to a legal system when i was in the federal defender's office i was told when i wanted to file bail appeal i was told not to do that. was it say to other actors in the courtroom that the person who supposed to tell this client story and who supposed to take her human caging as a matter of the most extreme

urgency that any wealthy person would have a lawyer filing appeal immediately, what is it say to everyone involved that we are not doing it? they must be thinking, the most terrible readers they have good reason for. must not be that bad in jail may be the is a different reason. it leaves all this thinking in the aggregate of that thinking if you judge or public defender over the course of hundreds of thousands of cases is to lose sense and stop asking clients what does it mean when you are incarcerated? what is it mean for you if you're detained for the next two months until trial. what will it mean if you're detained until your appeal and are not even asking those questions of your client of course you're not telling the story in court and a whole set of narratives that would be so important to change the way our legal system thinks are just being ignored. i think the second thing i want to say about public defenders and i think that's changing. i spend a lot of time now with

public defenders all of the country working with them, training them, collaborating, i just did a conference in new york about this exact issue and the question public defenders are struggling with is how can public defenders be a part of the social movement? how can public defenders be in a position to act collectively to organize around certain issues to refuse to participate in certain aspects of the system. where possible one barrier has been the rule of ethics which are written by corporate lawyers typically for the benefit of corporate clients and enforced by an apparatus that's mostly prosecutorial and judicial but it's long been told public defenders you can do anything collectively with your client because it's against the interests of individual clients.it's fascinating to watch public defenders push and prod at the margins and maybe untangle some threads. they are also doing really creative things like keeping track of prosecutorial misconduct and databases.

how can we actually take back the narrative in our society with what the criminal punishment bureaucracy is. it's kind of an exciting time to be in public defender world, their starting in many communities to work with community organizers. there is a totally different moment in many of these jurisdictions and i think it's possible to do some of the things that were possible five years ago six years ago, seven years ago. it's an incredibly noble job on a daily basis. standing there next to someone who our society wants to put in a cage and telling their story head standing between that person add the cage and never tell people not to be public defender but i think we need to understand the ways in which even public defenders have become desensitized to the brutality of the system they are in every single day. i hope that's enough, we can talk afterwards. >>.

>> my name is ben phillips, in the kind of mainstream criminal justice reform movement we hear a lot about this unlikely coalitions of social justice progressives, conservatives who want small government, and effective use of resources. do think there is any merit to these kinds of coalitions? and in the more grassroots and radical work you are doing, are there similar coalitions unlikely or otherwise? >> great question. i think there is a real and very difficult to know what the effect of some of the bipartisan criminal justice reform efforts are. some of them seem real in the sense that there actually meaningful getting people out of jail.

it actually is exploiting things like libertarian philosophy and religious philosophy to actually change the way people think about punishment and undermine the punishment bureaucracy. seeing mostly ploys to reinforce the punishment bureaucracy c. at the end of the day we have to be very careful with the kinds of coalitions you're talking about. make no mistake, most of the conservative criminal justice reformers may have been persuaded somewhere along the way that especially if there libertarian that the criminal legal system is out of control. and completely ineffective and something to be reckoned with. at the end of the day most democrats and republicans supplies to mainstream democrats and more standard libertarians and republicans used to those people are fairly

happy with our society it looks. if there was a choice between radically dismantling and abolishing the system and keeping our society mostly the way it looks they will choose the latter every time. if you are theory as we need a radically more just society that looks really different from its in terms of who owns things and then i worry that those people will jump off the bandwagon. you have to think if you conclude the best thing you can do to fix the criminal punishment bureaucracy is universal healthcare and housing for all. ãbwant to think of criminal justice reform in a silo they say we can make tweaks to the rules on bail and the rules on

sentencing and yes as we attack those things that are real level and organize people and build relationships and communities we have no hope of actually fundamentally dismantling that system. i worry some of the bipartisan work is being done doesn't have a theory for grappling with that. a lot of that work is getting people out of cages. there's a lot of work in the movement and i think there's a lot of people doing the collection work that are banking on being smarter than the people they are in coalition was. understanding that the system can be ratcheted up and it was ratcheted up but if we slowly ratcheted down it can be losing

power at each step.what separates by no means i'm against her mental change. everything i ever worked in my career is incremental. the thing you have to keep your eye on is does the person working on that have a theory and turn into more radical change or is that person just going to be satisfied with incremental change? that i think is the real tension not the bipartisan nature but the real tension between people whose vision is basically abolishing all the systems. slightly less cruel versions in our omaha to answer your question in terms of local coalitions other than to say the same dynamic is been playing out. you have time for two more questions. >> and joe schapiro, thanks for the shout out. i'm a journalist at mpr. i want to hear more about how you envision this radical social movement that is going

to create this change. he talked about marriage equality and the change over 20 years as soon as that happens because gay people started coming out. 20 years before, people didn't know a lot people who were gay and then suddenly people knew, they were in your family, people you work with so how do we get that kind of understanding? how do you see that radical social movement spreading?>> let me just preface the answer by saying i don't know that that question is ultimately one for me to answer. i certainly have a view which i will be happy to tell you.

that is a question i think for the people organizing the movement and it shouldn't be like a fancy lawyer and a pink sweater. in dc. by and large. i certainly have done a lot of work with people who have theories about this i think that's what's really informed a lot of my perspective but i think one of the mistakes is that we are always looking to people like me like what is this gonna look like what is our strategy to be? i think that's a real error that should be repeated. my own view is something like we need to be hearing from the people that are directly impacted. i think there's been really a couple of intellectual failures at the heart of mass human caging and moral failures. intellectually we failed and as i argue in the book we fail to appreciate the cost of the system of mass human caging because we haven't been listening to the voices of

people who are directly impacted by it. there's a lot of attention paid to the family separation crisis at the border over the last year and and a half but there are 3160 local jails that are essentially places of family separation every single city and town in this country. we haven't understood those costs because we haven't made space in our cultural discourse for the voice of the people whose bodies and minds and families and communities are on the line. so we need to dramatically change whose being heard in media, in the arts, that's one reason why civil rights for has ãbwere trying to change the way our lawyers think internally trying to think change the way we think and work and talk about all these issues and the kinds of voices that are given privilege in these conversations. the second intellectual failure as we have it scrutinized the reported benefits of mass incarceration. there is a role for journalists and scientists and maybe lawyers and other people to

actually demonstrate that for the public in a really persuasive way that what's actually going on is the use of a giant metastasize bureaucracy to control certain populations has zero, significantly negative effect on the things that tells you that a function public safety, well-being, there is part of the intellectual failure is failure to understand and scrutinize the purported benefits.then i think there's a moral failure. all of us have allowed ourselves to be really complicit and failed to approach the situation with the requisite level of urgency. i was invited to the white house once and only once for reasons i think you can probably imagine. we were at this event, the purpose was after like seven years of the obama administration we are getting together to have a panel where we talked about the problems in the criminal legal system a wonderful panel morrison was

speaking. however other luminaries i was not speaking i was just sitting there. i did ask a couple questions which is the reason i'm not invited back. one of the things struck me after seven or eight years of essentially doing nothing but mostly bad things in the criminal bureaucracy the administration decided they would bring together all these experts and talk about how horrible it is that hundreds of thousands of people are detained every day because they can't make money bail and that tens of millions of people are crushed under the weight of fines and fees. 13 million people can't drive, can't take the kids to the hospital can go to work because ãbwe were talking about these issues and in the middle of it the attorney general comes in and interrupts everything. it says oh my goodness, i'm so sorry, i know you all must be freaking out, i know all of you are very worried about what's going on in san bernardino, i want to assure you got tactical team a and tactical team d and

swat team f and they are all flying out there right now they can interview people getting to the bottom of it, make people safe and what is clapping. and i thought to myself, that is what it looks like when somebody treats something with urgency. that's what it looks like when someone responds to suffering in a way that has moral urgency. not seven years later having a discussion about if the problem is bad. it was almost like you go home turn on the local news it turns out while he was here talking to the dc police had rated my house. in my house they had a dungeon in the dungeon i was keeping people who i have been plucking them off the street mostly black and brown people almost all impoverished people and i was torturing them. i was exposing them to sexual assault, physical abuse, stick

squalor, starving them, putting them in solitary confinement. i think many of you would support the police rating my home. some of you might even support prosecuting me for that crime. i think a lot of you would support, nonetheless, some kind of emergency medical action to rescue all those people. but that is a situation we have in over 3000 local jails in this country we were allowed jails to become grotesque torture chambers. forgot here is working on a case on the way here about a woman whose 8.5 months pregnant she can afford money bail the judge jailed her because he wanted her to have her baby in the jail because the jail was 10 minutes closer to the hospital in the treatment facility she wanted to live in with her unborn baby bed we can't get her out of jail. she's going to have her baby just like the woman we could get out two weeks ago in san jose she can have her baby and as soon as she has her baby it can be ripped from her.i just found out today that woman is in solitary confinement and not jail. that's what we are dealing

with. that's in santa clara county which is supposedly the most progressive pretrial county in the state of california one of those progressive states in the country. i say all of this not to be a downer but to acknowledge that we have it treated these issues with the moral urgency they deserve. what will the movement require? it will require leadership by the people whose bodies and minds are online. to force our society in ways i can't do just talking at you about things. to force you to confront and look at what we are doing anyway that actually moves people to action.

there is that work being done but i think one telling thing is that the work of more radical organizing has been divested from by philanthropy in our society. people are willing to give money to me because may be how i look and talk and doing fancy legal cases. i think may be more insidiously it's because the work we are doing is not that much of a threat to the underlying order. i think what's really telling is the actual organizing communities has been divested

from. what i hope is there is a new generation of people working on these issues and actually understand the differences between those and that's why wrote the book to try to move people to action on these sets of principles. >> we can do one more question or move to signing. >> i have a short question. you mentioned at the end these grassroots efforts have been divested.to what extent is money helpful in this movement and where as someone who's dealt a lot with the movement does money help? if you have money to give, where would you put it? >> great question john.

there are lots of organizations locally all over the country that need money like lots of organizations, i will take one, we work with a lot, so covelli debunking ellie. debug was doing incredible organizing work they invented this model called participatory defense essentially using the terminal defense process as an on-ramp to families who have loved ones going to the criminal process to organize them and get them involved and engaged in the criminal system and those families become the debug community and help the next family and it politicized and engages people. much of that work was being done by volunteers. there are so many organizations doing some of the most incredible work here elsewhere around the country and other re- major city and smaller town that are doing it essentially with no resource. they can't produce materials they can't pay the people working for them and that's a real problem because you need

to be able to pay people to do this work to have it be consistent and enduring. one of the reasons why the proceeds the royalties from this book are being donated to a group called se justice group in california organizing women is incarcerated loved ones. we could talk afterward there's lots of organizations i encourage you to actually do your own research wherever you live one of the organizations actually organizing and building power in your community and which of those organizations are led by people that have been directly impacted by the criminal punishment bureaucracy in which have actual theory of change and involved at the end of the day like abolishing the systems. those are the organizations i would donate to there's a lot of great ones. we would working with a number of organizations like that around the country i'd be happy to offer you some thoughts about specific places but there's also great ones in dc and like i get some rules of

thumb at the end of the first essay about the kinds of changes that are good are the organizations advocating for those kinds of changes. enter they lead by directly ãb they have radical politics that involve abolishing the systems. if an organization doesn't have radical ãbyou can be assured it probably won't make much of the impact and someone else's probably with much more money than he is probably already giving the money. [laughter] ed and jonathan, we are done. i want to say one more time paying the poet is an amazing artist and i've done a number of events with him and he moves me to tears every single time. but he needs you to support him. he's got a patriotic you can donate to he loves to do events. find him if he hasn't already gone back on the bus but i don't see him.

i don't think he had to leave. i can't stress enough how incredible and earnest he is and how difficult it is to make a living doing this work. please consider supporting his work and as i mentioned, please also take a moment to look up the se justice group and organization all the royalties are going to. it's really amazing and inspiring work and i couldn't be more proud to be associated with them and i also wanted to take politics and prose and jonathan were putting on this event. i will be here to sign books for the next 30 minutes or so. [applause] novelist, jonathan safran. his new book is we are the weather. saving the planet begins at breakfast. in the meantime, we are joined on the set in miami byformer professional quarterback , syracuse quarterback, on mcpherson