>> i am hearing to questions from you. for the cases of people who were not diagnosed early on, and are still decades later exhibiting posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, acute symptoms that are interfering with their daily life, is it something new that you all are trying or recommending, or is it those three courses of treatment? >> in the army, we would not be necessarily treating a veteran, first of all. >> of course. >> so the three that i mentioned are what is shown by the evidence to be the most theytive, but obviously are not going to be effective for everyone, and there could be something else that is more effective for your wife. or it could be that she is always going to carry this with her. and we have many people still in but theyyou have ptsd,

are able to function with it and they are able to get through, weather with their colleagues or because they know how to manage it, they continue with it, but they still have some of the symptoms. that is another thing that goes along with what you were saying, you have ptsde does not mean you are addled with all kinds of disabilities, but it could be that it is something it affects your sleep-- >> light might narrow -- like nightmares. and traumaticsd brain injury overlap, a lot of times has to do with the way that somebody that's a traumatic brain injury could be through a that theyevent, so might have ptsd associated with the dramatic brain injury. if traumatic brain injury toelops later on in

dimension, which we are seeing more and more evidence that that is a possibility, i am optimistic and i would be surprised if it were not the case that the v.a. is going to look at that and take that into consideration. >> [indiscernible] i think that is another panel. we could answer your questions afterwards. >> this concludes our panel discussion for this evening. these join me in thanking our panelists. thank you all for coming. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> president obama is in chicago to talk about immigration in the recent executive order. live coverage of his remarks scheduled for after 5:30 eastern today on c-span. this week we're interviewing members of congress who are retiring at the end of the session. at 8:00 eastern tonight, tom harkin is leaving after more than 35 years in congress. that will be followed by a conversation with howard coble. here is some of what you will see tonight. we will begin with senator harkin and then congressman coble. --get rid of the filibuster on legislation as well as nominations, but on the other hand, i have often said

the republicans do have a legitimate argument here, by the way, in that they are not being allowed to offer administrate their not be allowed to offer a minutes because they filibuster bills and they are filibustering bills because they are not allowed to offer administrate the best way is to get rid of the filibuster, but alt the same time guarantee to the minority in new rules of the senate that the minority will be a lot offered germane amendments to any bill on the floor. maintenance g commitments, -- germane amendments. the minority does in hot have the right to prevail, because they can stop things, so the minority prevails. for the not the right minority to prevail, but it should be the right of the

minority to amend or offer amendments, half full and vigorous debate, and have votes on this amendment. if we did that can i think the senate would begin to operate very well. afterember one time just we did the contract with america had us working until 11:00 and 12:00 at night, and i had pretty good rapport with linkage. at 10:00 one night, he said, howard, why don't you go to the speaker and say if you cannot make this hundred days 100 legislative days. so i went to newt. i said, mr. speaker, the troops are restless. there wondering if we can extend the hundred-day timeframe to legislative days. he thought for a few seconds. he said, get back to work.

sir.d, aye-aye, >> you can see those interviews tonight at 8:00 eastern. it is part of our weeklong conversations with retiring members of congress. we are for your comments on race relations in america after last night's decision by federal grand jury. 1400ve gotten over comments on our facebook page, including this from susan who said i would be afraid to have a black baby boy in the usa. just look how the black president is disrespected here in the united states. what ism neal, happening now and for missing has nothing to do with michael brown. it is a group of thugs who found lawlesse to be barbarians. >> if you comments we've recently received -- >> i have to tell you to see

these people in person, to hear them have the panel discussion or congressional hearing, it is so important to understand the context and to listen to the tardy. -- n its and entirety. " is thenk "book tv greatest program on tv. i like these authors taking the -- but the moderator always does a great job of stimulating the conversation. it is what i look forward to on the weekends for me, to watch it as much as i can. all the timespan

when i am home. it is the only station i have on most of the time. i think it is absolutely excellent. i watch all of the debates around the country. thank you for the book talks for the history. i like all of it. i'm thankful it is there and i use it in my classrooms. i teach at a community college in connecticut. thank you very much. >> continue to let us know what you think about the programs you are watching. or you canmail us, send us a tweet. join the c-span conversation, like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. jones says crime in the u.s. has gone down in the last 40 years, while the u.s. in car streets 25% of the world's prisoners. it was part of the discussion at new york university law

school. the brennan center for justice released a report. reducing incarceration in the u.s. good morning, everyone. thank you for joining us today. i'm going to start with some brief introductions of my fellow panelists then make a few remarks. we will engage in a conversation about the role of the federal prosecutors in the 21st century and then open up at the end of the presentation for questions. i want to start in the middle, introduce lanny brewer, who is with is today. lanny is the vice-chairman at covington and burling, served years as the says attorney general for the criminal justice

at the department of justice in washington. one of the longest serving attorney generals for the criminal division in history. closer to me is paul fishman, the united states attorney in new jersey. paul served at least one term as the chair of the attorney advisory, an executive committee of u.s. attorneys who meet regularfully washington and provide leadership in that role. next to paul is ken fleet. ken is the united states attorney in the eastern district of louisiana, which is new orleans. ken has been u.s. attorney for about a year. i was just remarking to him that he has accomplished more in his first year as u.s. attorney than many of us hope to accomplish in our entire term. just really done some great programs down there, going to talk about this morning, and so ken, it's great to be here with you. next to lanny, with the striking white hair is my elder colleague, barry griffin. the united states attorney in

kansas. people say what is wrong with kansas, i said, not barry grissom. we came in together in the same orientation group or pledge class, as we call it, at the department of justice. and barry has had a great run as u.s. attorney, engaging in unprecedented level of outreach with local law enforcement in kansas and one of the real leaders in the u.s. attorney community in terms of civil rights as well. and finally, at the far end of the podium is doug jones, doug is one of the co-chairs of the panel whose work led to the report. doug is the former united states attorney in the northern district of alabama. i had a chance to hear doug speak. he spoke to large group of u.s. attorneys about his work when he was the united states attorney, specifically his prosecution of a cold case in his district that stemmed from the 1963 bombing of the birmingham baptist church and the murder of four young girls in that tragic incident. he personally handled the prosecution of ku klux klansmen that were involved in

that bombing. it was an inspiring search when i heard it. inspiring to think about it, and gifting to know doug has been great thing for me. so that's our panel here this morning. [applause] that's an introduction, and let me just kick this off. i'm the united states attorney in north dakota, served just over four years. and i was delighted when the brennan center asked me to participate in the blue ribbon panel whose work led to the report today. this report and the brennan center is a very important voice at a very important time in reformation of the federal criminal justice system. as you heard michael say earlier there are a lot of factors that are coming into confluence here that have created an opportunity and a space for substantive change in the federal criminal justice system, and this report at this moment in time is a very important voice in that effort. so i want to thank the brennan

center, we all want to thank the brennanster for inviting to us be part of this. the panel this morning is intended to discuss this question -- what it is to be a prosecutor in the 21st century? what is it to be a federal prosecutor as we enter the 21st century? for a long time, i think the model of being a prosecutor -- maybe for decades, maybe for hundreds of years -- the model was the prosecutor sat in his or her office for a long time -- mostly his office. times have changed in that regard as well. sat in their office, and waited for agents, for law enforcement officers, be they county deputies or fbi agents, to bring an investigation to the prosecutor, the prosecutor would look at it, would charge the case, would move forward with the goal oftentimes of trying to get as much prison time as possible for the crime in question. a very sort of reactive model. that model is one that is

changing within the department of justice and has been changing for the better part of the last four or five years. shortly after he was confirmed , attorney general holder gave a speech in which he had a remarkable line, i think, one that has guided me and other prosecutors here, that a united states attorney general and an assistant united states attorney must be more than a case processor. a united states attorney and an assistant united states attorney needs to be a community problem solver. and with that vision in mind, the agac, under paul's leadership for part of this time, set about creating an antiviolence strategy for communities in the united states that really rested upon an expansion on the prosecutor's role. certainly as a prosecutor, we

are responsible for the enforcement and prosecution of federal laws, violations of federal laws. that's our bedrock principle and something we take very seriously every day. that's one leg of the three-legged stool. the other legs are -- 95% of people our offices send to prison think come home to their home communities at some point if and if we don't figure out a way to reduce recidivism rates we won't make communities safer. a shift away from convictions and length of sentence to is the community you're serving more safe today because it's your turn on the watch? in north dakota, i worked with my colleagues to develop an antiviolence program for

american indian reservations in our state. i looked at my role as improving public safety, way struck at the time at the daunting crime problems that face american indians who live in reservation communities. when you think of the fact that a native american female baby in her mother's arms has a one in three statistical chance of being sexually assaulted sometime in her lifetime, that's public safety problem that the u.s. attorney should care about. so, with the help of my colleagues and the u.s. attorney's office and much input from the communities themselves, many, many days spent on the reservation, talking to the consumers of public safety, that we were attempting to supply, we put together an antiviolence strategy that really has two -- has at its bedrock a community prosecution strategy. i wanted to make the ausa's living in bismarck and fargo, who are serving the communities, make them part of those communities. it's hundreds of miles in some

cases from my office to the reservations, and we're not in a position with a budget to place a prosecutor permanently on the reservations, but i set forth a requirement we were be on the reservations monthly, every six weeks, meeting with communities, leading multidisciplinary teams, training law enforcement, meeting with the community, and starting a dialogue so that we could work together to make the community safer. and in the spirit of what gets measured gets done, i put that requirement into the performance work plans for my ausa's. if they wanted to continue to advance and get raises raises and be successful, they would have to hit the benchmarks of engaging with communities. we have seen some results over the last four years. the number of cases that we have brought, we have assigned additional prosecutors to those communities and we're bringing more cases. we're removing more of the most dangerous folks from those communities. we're not stopping there because we're not going to arrest and

incarcerate our way out of those problems. we're also working hard to support viable crime prevention programs. i have an ausa who is an enrolled member of one of the tribes in north dakota himself who for the last three years has routinely, six, seven, times a year, gone to the high school in middle school at the standing rock indian reservation in north dakota and met with middle schoolers and high schoolers to talk about the challenges they face, and to talk about with them -- state away from drugs. this is what domestic violence is. this is the challenges of sexual assault in your community. you need to wear your seatbelt. things as a simple as that. and this ausa tells me, when he now sees in our juvenile system one of those kids that he has interacted with in that other setting, those kids are embarrassed. they don't want to see gary in the courtroom.

they want to take to heart the lessons he has given them when he comes to speak to their schools. so that's an example of a crime prevention program that i think has the potential for success moving forward. again, that's an experience in north dakota, a small office, small district, with substantial crime problems of our own, but in a way that we have shifted the way we do business. we'll hear more from the rest 0 our torches about what they've done. i want to start with doug. doug, as i said, is the lone former united states attorney on our panel, and doug, we're talking bat new generation of prosecutors, but your lens here is broader. you have been involved in these issues for longer than some of the rest of us on this panel. how did we get to this point? we were interested in hearing your views on that. >> all right, i appreciate. let me initially say thanks to the brennan center, for the panel and the work on the program but for the work they do in general. it's just amazing the way the brennan center can have a voice of progress. for particularly in the area of

criminal justice. i also want to thank my colleague, jim johnson, and the brennan center for asking me to co-chair this. it's an real honor. there were two things that michael said that i think we ought to take particular note of. number one, crime over the last 40 years has reduced. we are seeing a continuing drop in crime. and the second aspect -- which is all good. everything about that is great. but the second aspect, which is connected, is that we incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners in this country, and those are connected. and as this panel is not naive enough to think that aggressive prosecutions over the last 30 and 40 years have not contributed to the drop in crime. they certainly have. it's important for prosecutors to show the flag and that they are being aggressive. but now when we see the budgets being busted, if you look in your program you see this

country spendings $260 billion annually, to incarcerate individuals. overwhelmingly, the majority -- not majority but for some 40% of the prison population in this country is african-american. there's something skewed with all those numbers. and so now, as tim and michael alluded to, folks have started to look a little smother on what smarter on what we can do to maintain that level of security and even reduce crime, but at the same time not send entire generations of people to prison. you go back -- i first began my career as an assistant u.s. attorney in birmingham in 1980. it was in a day when just as the war on drugs -- you all remember the war on drugs. a term that i hate, by the way, because war implies somebody is going to win and somebody is going to lose. well, we're still fighting a war on drugs, and we will always fight a war on drugs.

the fact is, during that time, both politically and with the department of justice, things began to change and the term that we have heard for generations, called "prosecutorial discretion," became a smaller part of the prosecutor's role. we had mandatory minimums that congress decided that they needed to show their constituents how tough they were going to be. i'm not criticizing that. it had its place. department of justice also became very aggressive, not only on the crimes, drug crimes, but on others. as the decades wore on, congress continued to act. one of the byproducts of that was that in the federal system, almost every crime that you had seen has now all of a sudden found its way into the federal code of criminal conduct.

now, used to be we all heard the saying, don't make a federal case out of it. that used to be a big deal. you make a federal case out of something. now you can make just a federal case out of just about anything. former attorney generall ed meese has been very vocal about the federal criminalization of our nation's laws, but as the criminal code expanded, so did the role of federal prosecutors. they had more crimes to deal with. in 1984, congress passed the federal sentencing guidelines that went into effect in 1987. the sentencing guidelines were mandatory, and so now you not only had prosecutors who lacked the discretion on sentencing, so did judges, and for a couple of decades before the supreme court made those guidelines advisory, it was a very difficult time getting assistant u.s. attorneys to learn how to exercise prosecutorial direction.

they just didn't have any. the department of justice sent in guidelines that required and mandated their offices to seek the highest sentence possible, even on plea agreements. that has helped reduce crime, but the budgets of the government have been busted and so many people have gone to prison because of it. i think it dates back a little bit longer, back -- i know at least during -- for the last 15 or 20 years you have seen the department begin to do programs where u.s. attorneys would not just supervise their assistants and make sure that they were aggressive in prosecution, they would reach out into the communities. one of the most famous programs has been the weed and seed program, where money went into communities to try to help neighborhoods, with after-school care, things that would keep

people off the streets. and so the prosecutors have slowly, especially united states attorneys, who have now seen their role more as -- not just the lead prosecutor, not just the chief law enforcement officer -- when i was u.s. attorney, that's how i was always introduced, as the chief law enforcement -- federal law enforcement officer of the district. well, u.s. attorneys' roles are now much bigger than just simply enforcing the laws. we have got to figure out ways in which we can reorient it, the guidelines as well as the priorities of u.s. attorneys office. that will take a lot of doing. we talk about climate change. across the way at the u.n., the clinton global initiative. they're talking about climate change. so are we. it's just a different climate within the criminal justice system. and it's going to take some

courage for both our political leaders as well as the prosecutors, regardless of the administration, in a bipartisan effort to come up with new solutions that don't require prosecutions and incarceration. it's going to take congress in the way they look at the budgets -- one of the things i know that all u.s. attorneys the last 20 years have faced in the department of justice is that congress has in their budgeting of the department of justice, had focused on specific areas that they want to see more prosecutions of. and so your budget was geared toward those, and you had to spend money for new prosecutors in the areas of drugs, firearms, terrorism, whatever the case may be. congress is going to have to kind of loosen up. we have already seen the supreme court make the sentencing guidelines discretionary, but prosecutors are having, i think, with all due respect to my

colleagues here, i think they're still having a difficult time understanding their role that now they have this new sense of discretion, that they don't have to just look at a case and say, well, this fits within this guideline, so that's what i will recommend, that they'll look at a much broader picture, look at the defendant, look at the same factors that a judge might look at that sentencing under the code. and at that point, i think we're beginning to see a lot of training. i absolutely think the attorney general and his smart on crime initiative is a huge step, a huge step, in the right direction for federal prosecutors. but we -- make no mistake we have climate change culture change we have to address, not just within the department but within our political system and our communities to make sure that we're doing things smart, and efficient, because every budget in the country is being busted by all of the law

enforcement and incarceration and prison system issues that we face in this country today. >> so, doug, thank you. the point you make about the budgets is an interesting one. in terms of the attorney general's smart on crime initiative, i've heard this discussed this way ask this resonated with me as a u.s. attorney in a district trying to do business in a tough budget time. the choice that -- when you know that the federal prison budget third of the one entire department of justice budget, and that is projected to go to 40% in the near future, that money is going to come from very much it's coming from our offices. so, it is -- the choice here is not between mandatory minimums or shorter sentences, between the status quo and shorter sentences. the debate here is between the status quo, mandatory minimums, and less cases being done on the

front end, and to me that starts to bring in into question the risk of safety to communities. and so we have to develop strategies to address that moving forward. now, barry, in kansas, you have taken some steps over the last few months, some new programs, to take a look at this idea of what can a u.s. attorney's office do to sort of impact the federal bop budget? i mean, is we're prosecutors, right? our folks deal with in many cases very dangerous criminals that need to be incarcerated-but in kansas, how are you taking up this challenge? >> well, one of the things that i first became aware of when i became a u.s. attorney, came in from outside the department ofity. i did not have experience of working with the doj.

the first thing that i soon realize that was i was a resource manager. in i have a slice of a pie that is a certain size and i can have so many prosecutors and do i want my prosecutors or the prosecutors in our office, to merely focus on getting the longest sentences they possibly can for a smaller group of individuals, or could they broaden their effort and get reasonable sentences for avalancher group of individuals to keep -- for larger group of individuals to keep our communes safety. oning the look at is michigan that has been on the books a long time but had not been fully utilizedded, which is diversion programs. the classic diversion might be a young woman who works for a bank and worked as a bank teller in a drive-through window and calls in the police and says, i've been robbed. two black men came in and stuck a gun in my face and took $5,000." well, five minutes after she is being interviewed by the police, she breaks down and cries and says, "i took it."

she has no prior criminal history. she is certainly not a violent person. the money recovered their victim made whole. is that person someone we should saddle with a felony for the rest of her life? is that someone who we should put into the system so that the resource of the folks in probation department, which has to be there to monitor those folks that tim just described, who are more violent in nature and who are now under some kind of supervised release, do you want to burn these resources for that person? i do not think so. we drafted our diversion program in kansas and did it after we did an extensive amount of outreach. one thing that i did not want to have for my fellow folks in law enforcement throughout the state is that the feds on high are making another edict we have to follow, or they are going to tell us what we should do. so i've been engaged in my tenure as u.s. attorney to be very active in outreach.

well, as i told the attorney general when i first got my job, two-thirds of the folks in my state live in one third of the eastern portion of the state. and the phrase i heard most often -- i don't mean to denigrate my predecessors but , when i would be in western kansas, communities of 8,000 people, 5,000 people, 12,000 people, that's an entire county. the refrain i always heard was this is the first time i ever met a united states attorney. so to get buy-in from all the folks out there in local law enforcement, was important. after we did that, and it's part of the move towards the smart on crime initiative. we sat down with the folks in probation and we put together and retooled, retweaked our diversion program. it hadn't been addressed since 1995. and we set out some guidelines, and it is something that -- out -- now that we have changed the tool, will the tool be used? you heard what doug and tim said. one issue we have as prosecutors in this environment is breaking an institutional mindset. we have always done it this way.

and particularly if you're a , prosecutor who agree up or came to the department an assistant united states attorney who came to the department during the time of mandatory , guidelines it really was, drop , your finger down two points for this, going to work with us, get something for this, do between this many months and this many months. the issue of prosecutorial discretion went out the window. and a lot of folks, that's how they matured as prosecutors. so one of the challenges we have is to now institutionalize the notion that you have great leeway. you can look to the guidelines as guidelines, not something that is mandatory and that, again, has been a real challenge for us, but i know with the attorney general's leadership, we had a number of our lead prosecutors in all of our offices go down to the national academy of -- in south carolina,

to meet with the attorney general to meet with the dag, to meet with various folks in management to impress upon our line prosecutors this change is coming. i had the great fortune, along with tim and my colleagues here, to go to the white house at the last u.s. attorney conference. we were at the conference, the president came in and we all had our picture with him. typically the president says a few things and leaves. well he stuck around this time , and focused and spoke about the smart on crime initiative, and how this was a unique moment in time that we needed to seize, and when i went back to my office, i conveyed that my prosecutors, that this isn't a gray area. there's not a lot of ifs or ands, this is what our boss wants us to do. doesn't get any higher than that. so we have -- i think, moved in that direction. there's still challenges to be made. to get people away from doing 851 sentencing enhandments.

as many of you may know, that is when someone has a prior adjudication as a felon and in the past, you'd file a motion for 851 to enhance the sentence, to maximize the time. now we have a process where we say, okay, if you want to use an 851, justify it to us, us being the management attempt. -- team. and we have dialogue. it is not just something that is out there, and i think that is also helped us keep down the unnecessary incarceration of someone. one of our federal judges said know, i don't know the difference between if you do ten years and 15 years. i don't know if the extra five makes you that much of a better thoughtr not," and i that's just good kansas common sense. so we have tried to approach our prosecution with good kansas common sense.

>> thank you, barry. we haven't had -- have had a lot of discussion about the change in what it is to be a prosecutor in the 21st century in terms of enforcement, prosecution and things of that nature, but i want to turn to ken from new orleans to talk at bit about his office's efforts at building other two legs of the three leg three-legged stool the terms of crime prevention and re-entry. you have remarkable programs you have been working on over the last year and we would love to have you share those with the group. the 322 initiatives. >> sure, thank you, tim. as tim mentioned, michael also ilighted, the united states leads the world in incarceration. well, my state happens to lead this country in incarceration and indeed the city of new orleans leads the state of louisiana in incarceration rates. what we have been doing, focusing exclusively on enforcement, is our only tool as prosecutors, simply is not

working, and i see it every day in the state of louisiana and specifically in southeast louisiana. so we have tried to engage some additional tools, specifically on the re-entry level. we have tried to engage with our business community. i think we all can agree that a major part of this issue of reducing recidivism, trying to close that resolving door -- revolving door recidivism, rests on providing long-term stable employment to these individuals as they return to our communities. new orleans leads the state of louisiana in incarceration, and we'd lead the state in terms of people returning to our communities. and so what we have tried to do is engage the business community, talk to them about the perceived and actual risk of employment in this community, and some of the incentives out there to encourage employment in this particular area, things like the work force tax credit that is out there. things like the federal bonding

system that is in place through the department of labor. but our office is not stopping therement we have an initiative called 32 plus 2, 302 plus 2, which is really a reentry collaboration between some of our nonprofit organizations in the community as well as our businesses, where we're trying to encourage 30 local businesses to hire two returning citizens for a two-year period. we're looking for businesses that represent a diversity of our industries in the state of louisiana. but we're also looking for businesses that are committed to providing long-term employment opportunities for these individuals, not simply for a two-month, three-month, six-month period. and then what we're doing is we're partnering with a re-entry initiative that is out of the state penitentiary, out of angola.

interestingly enough, the types of resources available at the state sim surface what we see at the federal system, but also at our local jails. in that program, that angola program, what we're seeing are inmates getting training in a hard skill, things like welding, 19 different areas of hard skills. they're getting over 100 hours of cognitive and life skills, things like parenting, financial management, drug treatment, drug education. and then, ultimately they're , getting out of that. getting out of that system. also get thing ged's or their high school equivalencies. once they return from that, what we're hoping to dod provides this initiative as pipeline where they walk out of prison from day one with a long-term, stable job, before they return back to our communities, and we're hoping that becomes part of the answer, where every aspect of our community, including our business community, is really engaged in the fight of trying to reduce

crime in the city of new orleans. that it is one pillar of our work in the office. the second pillar, of course, is trying to prevent crime in the very first place. i'm born and raised in new orleans. i'm the second-youngest u.s. attorney right now in our country. and i also happen to have lost a brother to street violence in new orleans. so this issue of trying to intervene in the lives of young people is near and dear to my heart. right now what we are doing is using or one hand an initiative called the student pledge against gun violence, where we're going out into all 450 schools throughout southeast louisiana, on one day, october 15th of this year, and the pledge is quite simple. we're simply asking our young people to pledge not to bring a gun to school. they promise not to use a weapon to resolve a fight or dispute. and lastly, they promise to use their influence with their family and friends to ensure

that those individuals don't use a weapon to resolve a fight or dispute. very simple pledge. it has been around since 1996. over ten million young people across the country have used this and taken this pledge. this is the first time we'll do it in new orleans, and i think ultimately on that day we'll be sending a very powerful message that our young people individually and collectively are taking a stand against violence in our community and in their our schools. the second piece of our work in terms of prevention and intervention really is an outshoot. we have a gang violence reduction strategy that is built off of professor david kennedy's work that is in partnership with the city of new orleans. it's a fantastic initiative. the gang violence reduction strategy. it has been implemented in various cities across at the country. we have got analysts that have been financed through that work, and what we're trying to do through the work, of course, is trying identify how people were connected, how people are connected, who is involved in

some of the narcotics trafficking and the use of violence to enforce narcotics trafficking organizations. what that analyst has also done is taken some research by a yale professor, andrew papakristos, who focused own social networks in terms of identifying which individuals in the community are most likely to die from gun violence. and we have applied that research to the streets of new orleans. and what we have found -- we have been able to identify many of those individuals at this point. we have the ability, the data that shows that these individuals are at the greater -- at the greatest risk of losing their life to gun violence on the streets of new orleans, and by high risk i mean they have a nearly 60% greater chance of dying from gun violence than the average new orleans resident. >> that's frightening.

in past iterations of the department of justice i would dare say we would simply wait until these young people simply showed up in a coroner's report or in a police report. as i said, that's not enough for me and so it's not enough for my office, and so what we're doing is that we are focusing on the 14- to 16-year-olds, very few of whom actually have any criminal history at all but are connected. they're connected to individuals who have been engaged in violence in our streets. they're connected to individuals who have already lost their lives on the streets of new orleans, and we're trying to engage them and prevent the same result for them. we're asking our faith-based and other community organizations to adopt one individual youth off of this list. it's an institutional mentoring initiative. one institution adopting one youth. we're asking that institution to provide three mentors from their membership or from their

congregation, to ensure daily contact with the young person. and by young people, i mean that this is a purely data-driven analysis, bit the way. -- by the way. we have an overwhelming number of them are african-american males but we also have a significant number of african-american women and we also have several caucasian males in the group of 14- to 16-year-olds. we're asking those congregations, memberships, to provide three mentors from their group. we are providing a mentor curriculum through some already standing mentor programs that exist in new orleans area. but then we're also asking that membership or congregation to then embrace that young person and their family, wrap their arm reasons the group and help provide any additional resources that the family may need , academic enrichment, housing, food, transportation, which we all know are significant

, significant concerns for many of these young people, as i've said before, these are the individuals that will show up on the front page of our newspaper, unless we take urgent action and intervene in their lives and that's what we're trying to do through this program. it's called, crescent city keepers. thank you. >> ken, thank you. and, and -- that is right. [applause] so, what we just heard is a long way away from the model of a prosecutor sitting at their desk and waiting for an agent to bring them a case file. i think that ken's story is amazing, but it's not unique amongst our 93 colleagues. there's a new generation of united states attorneys that are committed to expanding these roles in the 21st century, beyond the historical perspective. i'm going to turn to paul next.

now, i want you to note -- >> thank you for saying i'm a new generation. i appreciate that. [laughter] >> we had some prep calls for this. was able to get everybody but pull on one prepare call that lasted ten minutes. then i had paul on his own prep call which lasted a half hour. so i have no idea what he will talk about today. i would suggest to him insuring light of what we just hear from ken, about the great work going on -- i know paul has a great re-entry program in new jersey called renew, mentioned in the report, but paul, i know that what you -- i know one of the things that frustrates you is the idea that there's great work being done but is it being funded? is the funding going to be there to support programs like the ones that ken was talking about? to support the work that barry is doing, outreaching to local law enforcement, to support the additional u.s.

attorneys, needed in north dakota to make sure we have that strategy on the american indian reservations. you have been the department longer than some of the rest of us. i would just merely suggest to you that might be a nice topic to talk about. >> let me make one observation before i start. what makes ken's description of what he is doing in new orleans so remarkable, it's not just the energy and the park and dedication that ken brings to this job, which is really awesome, he is doing it with bubblegum and sticks. there's no money. right? and i'd like to believe that if we save a lot of money on the back end, on the prison population, that some of the money would be refunneled back in into the justice department, u.s. attorney offices.

didn't get the increase in staff to do that. he took existing resources -- >> in fact he lost resources as a result of sequestration and the hiring freeze and is doing more with less. >> exactly. there's no office in the country up to full strength or has the budget it had ten years ago, none of that is happening. so what he has had to do, with what we want to do these programs, is to say, we're going to take an assistant attorney general, or two, who would otherwise be prosecuting cases, and cases that borrow doug's phrase are cases that should be made federal cases out of. people who are -- they're not the typical case we do. it's not the bank teller with the $5,000 embezzlement. even if she did it. or even the $5,000 bank robbery. those aren't the federal cases we're doing now. it is the ponzi scheme, the $100 million corrupt public officials, people hacking into tower our commuter systems and stealing 100 million identities or 100 million credit cards. if we take prosecutors off the line to handle these kinds of incredibly powerful, worldwhile projects something else is not , happening. that resource choice of the kind

that doug was talking about. i are talk about my my re-entry court. one this this attorney general has done and it's important to note that eric holder is the first attorney general distance dick thornberg to have been a united states attorney and have been in the field, handling cases and make though kind of choices in the field. i don't mean that other people's experience isn't valuable. a fall lob -- having been out in the field and been a u.s. attorney in a place like d.c. where there is no district attorney, the attorney general had a vision in his head, and in his experience, of what we should do and how we should behave. that was fortunately consistent with how most of us wanted to approach the job anyway, but that was a big difference in the way the depth has thought about its mission. our mission is to protect the public, to increase public safety. that is our mission. the way we do it is because we're the department ofity, supposed to do it fairly. and with appropriate procedures

and making sure the system treats people they way they should be treated. but once you get past those two core concepts, to the way we do our priority choosing is very different. i don't have indian reservations in new jersey. right? i don't have counties in new jersey with 8,000 people in them. we are a very different place. i have the city of newark, the highest carjacking rate in the world. 400 carjackings last year in a city of 300,000 people. i have camden, which in 201, -- which in 2011, 2012 this highest homocide rate per capita in the western hemisphere. think about that. we have the largest part assume cat companies in the world. we have a huge cyber network in new jersey. we have with all due respect to my friend ken, a reputation for political corruption in new jersey, that new orleans may claim the mantle for. [laughter]

>> no offense taken. >> so the problems that we have to deal with in each of the 94 districts are very, very different, even though we all have the same job title, and even though we have the same types of people who work for, and what the attorney general has been very good about, is telling us that we should not only be community problem solvers but we should be the people who decide in our districts, notwithstanding some of the constraints doug was talking about where there are some ausas who are paid to do a's who are paid to do particular things, that overall we have a lot of discretion and a lot of freedom put people in the kinds of place wes need to put them to address the problem inside our districts. that's important. the second thing this attorney general did, a confluence of his arrival and at the demise of the mandatory sentencing guidelines. the attorney general said i want you to think about this differently, the way barry was talking built with his kansas common sense, what's the right outcome in a case like this? not what do the rules say.

but when you're looking at a case, what do you think as a prosecutor, as a line prosecutor, as the united states attorney, what is the fair and just result. and i will talk about why that works a lot of the time and why that doesn't work later if we have time because that has constraints. >> right. >> but i do want to actually tim's question, because i'm afraid of him. >> he said before i start and now he's going to start. >> but i'm going to be brief on those. first, on outreach, the requirement for the attorney general in any office to do some outreach to get an outstanding rating. they do as much as they want, go talk to parents in a school about enter sunset safety. they can judge a moot court competition at a high school. they can go out and spend a lot of time talking to people in the arab and muslim communities or other minority communities about their civil rights concerns and about the way we can address those in the federal government. whatever they want to do as long as it's related to the mission of the office is great.

and we have done a lot of that. and i've done a lot of it personally. but again, we have hired an , outreach coordinator, and that's all we have to sort of make this happen. second thing we have done is, like some of my colleague around the country, we started a reentry court, and the reentry court focuses on higher risk returning federal prisoners to number. why high risk? because the high risk ones are the ones who are most likely to come back though loyce runs don't need the same attention so we do higher risk, and we invite them into the program. we tell them that if they come into our program, run by a fabulous magistrate judge, that what we wellwill do is give them intensive supervision through to the probation department. they will be in court every two weeks at 5:00 on tuesday to meet with the judge personally. we'll pay attention to how they're do what they're doing, and always asking them the question, what do you need? ,nd our goal is to take this

people who have paid their dues, went to prison for crimes they committed that were serious, for which they should have gone to prison -- make no mistake -- but are now out and we think they need a second chance. and fabulously inspiring program. we graduated our first six folks in july. i see my friend, former governor jim mcgreevey, doing a huge opt of re-entry work on his own. he was there. it was an inspiring day to watch these six folks, one woman and five guys, get up and thank the judge. last time i worked in a federal judge, they didn't thank the judge. thank the judge and thank the prosecutors from my office and the public defenders for helping them get their lives back on track, and i'll just tell you one quick this will. each of them got up to speak, and the first one spoke, one guy who has a double eye bloods tattoo on the side of his neck, and you know what that means. what his life was like before that. he said -- and the turned to a whom who was a federal public

defender and he said to her, you changed my life more than anybody else did because one night after court, at 7:00 in the winter when it was dark you offered to me a ride home, and he said and that showed that you trusted me to be in your car. and that was -- it was a chilling moment. i talked about it it the other day. it was a chilling moment for everyone in the courtroom to realize what it meant and what it could have been if he hadn't decided that he wanted to change house life, and so that is the kind of stuff we're working on. i guess my plea is, as you talk about these issues, think about how we're other going to fund them. >> yes. >> because it's not cheap. it's cheaper than jail, but if we save the money on the back end, are we going to spend it on the front end? >> and with all due respect to paul, we have saved the best for last, lanny, we're going to turn to you. we have a group of u.s. attorneys who i always , bristle when i'm in meet meetings, and they refer to

the 93 of us as the field, as if we're a sales force for a photo copier company. but that's okay. put that being said there's a lot of wisdom -- within the department ofity, written main justice, within the building are -- there is a tremendous amount of power to pull the levers and move initiatives like this into the field. give us the perspective from the former head of the criminal division, from mainity, what is it that goes on in washington that can support, that is part of this effort? a part of this effort for the past four or five years? >> a real honor to be here, and i think you're seeing what this department of justice is doing with these remarkable u.s. attorneys. i just want to be clear for a moment. in a room like this, these decisions seem extraordinarily obvious. which is that of course we need to identify and reduce mass incarceration. and it's really been the

leadership of these u.s. attorneys and the attorney general that is making progress and the brennan center and the like that is moving that forward. you got to take a step back. like ken, i grew up maybe a few decades before him, but i grew up in new york city, the son of refugees, and then at a time when crime was at its height. i was a manhattan d.a. when people in this city felt incredibly at risk and people wanted those who they felt responsible in jail, and in jail for long periods of time. and ladies and gentlemen, if the crime rate goes up in the united states, very quickly, i believe, people will again very quickly say, we need to have sentences higher and people have to be incarcerated. and, of course, during the crack wars in manhattan and the like, we saw an enormous push for that. governor rockefeller, and the sentencing -- federal sentencing

reflected that. so, what you saw for the next couple of decades was -- the attorney general was extraordinary here -- you saw an enormous disparity in the federal government between the way that we were prosecuting those who were incarcerated for selling crack cocaine and those who were incarcerated for selling powder cocaine. and that was because when these laws first came into effect, people thought crack was different. but the result was the disparity that became more and more and more evident which is young , african-american men were going to jail because they tended for the most part to be involved with crack, and white men and others were going to jail for far less because they were doing the exact same thing, some with powder and some with crack. and so you saw a horrific phenomenon in this country of african-american men going to jail far langer -- far longer than other men -- typically men -- for the same crime.

and that became more obvious, and what you needed, frankly was , leadership, and many administrations that did lobby for it. frankly, families of the people in jail had lobbied for it. there was a recognition that's needed to be changedded and no one did it. and then i was fortunate enough to become aag, but frankly, i was fortunate to be aag under this attorney general and this president, and they said we were going to change it. so i had the privilege in '09 to go before the congress and argue for the first time in history the administration was saying you have to change this, you have to have parity, one-on-one. the reason i tell this story is that ultimately, the law was changed, but the disparity decreased dramatically. when i testified literally in the senate there was an extraordinary scene of mainly african-american women, mothers and grandmothers, lining up-wanted to hug me and congratulate me.

but, frankly, i did nothing. it was the attorney general. it was the president. so that's the kind of leadership, that the kind of courage you have to have. and frankly, the person who testified next to me was reggie walton, one of our great judges in d.c. an african-american judge, who , had been the deputy czar for narcotics. back when this law was created. he was the one who said the timing was great, but we revisited it, and, of course, the changes were to be made, so i applaud this administration for that, and i was lucky to be in washington to do it. the next thing that the attorney general did was he created early on something called the attorney general's sentencing and corrections working group. and he began to visit my -- being the vice chair but the attorney general was saying to the men to my left and right, and the men and women of the department of justice, and frankly for people not in the

department of justice, let's rethink some of our assumptions here. so we rethought how the depth of justice is going to deal with the death penalty. how we are going to deal with incarceration. deal with re-entry programs and i think that was very successful and some of the programs you're hearing before the today are a result of the attorney general giving that guidance. and then the attorney general in washington decided after much discussion to change what had been a fundamental precept for quite a while with the department. ausas a all over the country, whether in new jersey, louisiana, kansas, north dakota, or georgia 0, anywhere else, were told that you had to each time, each time, you had to charge the most serious provable offense, and the attorney general said after all this, no. i want an individual assessment. and that's what you heard about. now, the challenge is going to be, because of individual ace

assessments people will say, now again we have too much of a disparity. the people who essentially have committed the same crimes in essentially the same situation, with essentially the same background, are they getting a essentially the same sentences? and if there becomes studies in the next few years, ladies and gentlemen, that say no, there is going to be an enormous pressure again to take away that discretion, so we have to guard against that cycle. the one last client i want to make is absolutely essential. the criminal division when i was proud of it was to support the u.s. attorneys, and any of these folks here, my friends, and we used to say, how can we help. it was to go after gangs which was an enormous initiative.

there was an alternative, and you have to take the worst of the worst ofy, and the worst don't take a 14-year-old who can't talk to them and force him to become a gang member for the rest of his life. but in doing that the other issue in the criminal division is that the budget is going down. the only part of the department of justice that goes up as the bureau of prisons. it has as the population increases, so the challenge here is to be smart, to have these -- but frankly to do with the center does because the american people don't support this. i testified in front of congress more than my colleagues and so really how our elected officials feel. on one level they want to be supported but the minute the

crime rate goes up the minute there's a terrific example of someone who is in a re-entry program who committed some horrific crime there will be enormous pressure so we need to create it for everyone. the department in the attorney general shared a lot of leadership and i think you have heard the results of that from the people on this panel. >> right, all right so i want to , open it up to questions. we have folks with microphones in the audience for questions. we have a question over here. we're going to start -- you know what? we are going to start with the judge. i just think that's a smart move by anybody might position to start with a federal judge. >> are you going to practice in his court? >> that is something you never know, right? >> it's an incredibly inspiring talk but what i wanted to know to ask you though, how much thought you were giving to the institutionalization of the practices and programs? so often we see these types of programs are led by people like

you, very smart, very charismatic, what we would like to think that then the next u.s. attorney comes or the next administration comes, the next attorney general comes and some of those programs or the perspective of those programs are important gets washed away. are important gets lodged away. -- some of it is money because money and having people specifically designated to do those types of things becomes important. but i wonder as you are sitting there and some of you have done this in the past i don't think you have focused on that and quite the same way. when i was attorney of connecticut for example did a lot of what you're talking about and did a lot of those things and i wished i were smart as you are to do some of things you're doing but never thought about institutionalizing it in a way that another smart good thinking person doesn't take it away because from their perspective that's no longer as important

and we need to focus more on incarceration for longer periods of time because crime rates have gone up or there's political pressure so do you talk to politicians about figuring out ways to institutionalize this beyond your specific term? >> i just want to say this, the word institutionalization for these programs is not one we have started talking about is a community in the last six months. under the leadership of the attorney general's advisory advisory, aur first former u.s. attorney in the late 1990s and came back as a recidivist and came back starting in 2008. todd reaches the solicitation and paul did as well. lanny wanted to respond though. >> i was going to give one

example in my colleagues can talk about what they are doing in their districts but didn't attorney general was mindful of it. one of the privileges when you are the head of the criminal division is you work with the u.s. sentencing commission and we did do that. we also are able to work with the attorney general and with your colleagues in the u.s. attorneys office in dealing with the u.s. attorneys manual, and an example of institutionalization, an example is we dealt early on with the notion of the sentencing guidelines and the sentencing commission even a nonviolent person who had an addiction could not be in a diversion program. so we change that and that was much discussion and working with the sentencing commission so they changed the guidelines and the commission recommendations and the united states attorney's manual has changed that as well. obviously someone can change it again but obviously that's a big effort too.

that would be a small example of something you could do. >> does anyone else want to talk about institutionalization? barry? >> paul talks about taking a prosecutor way from being a prosecutor in putting that person on another task such as outreach or something of that nature. making sure that you have responsibility for the task and the simple as this sounds give it a title and given individual that responsibility to be the point person because otherwise it becomes the flavor of the month and it just kind of fades away. so you have to weather going back to our sample on-campus diversion we have a person who is our diversion court nader and that diversion coordinators a prosecutor. it's doing more with less but

when you institutionalize it like that someone looks at your chart there's that person. it's not just somebody who's floating out there but has that responsibility. as lanny said someone cannot come in and change it but once you get some on that responsibility folks are reluctant to give up that responsibility. >> before we move on i will say this in the narrow area where he spent a lot of my time which is public safety on the reservation. this attorney general said if you are one of the 30 u.s. attorneys with responsibility for reservations, you -- audio]\ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> thank you. let me tell you who is here with us. the chief from the st. louis county police department, the tkins, andchief al a

we are also joined by a major general of the international brigadierwell as general with the national guard. ont night, terminals intent lawlessness and instruction terrorized this community. burning buildings, firing gunshots, vandalizing storefronts, and limiting family businesses. many for the second time. i am deeply saddened for the people of ferguson who woke up this morning to see parts of their community in ruins. i just came from west fl ourissant. is a heartbreaking sight. seniors scared to go out, school go outd, kids afraid to and play. this is unacceptable. no one should live like this. no one deserves this. we must do better, and we will.

this morning and this afternoon, i met with law enforcement leaders, and all agree that the violence we saw in the areas of ferguson last night cannot be repeated, and that is why to protect lives and property, we are bringing more resources to prevent repetition of the lawlessness experienced over not. the national guard presence will be ramped up significantly in ferguson, and assuring that they are ready to act quickly to prevent violence. first, we are deploying hundreds of additional guardsmen to ferguson who will be stationed throughout the community to protect homes and businesses. the missouri national guard will also continue to find security at critical locations, including the ferguson police department, this isn't both the city and the county, and i thank them for

their work. it is a testament to the professionalism of local law enforcement, the missouri , and third, the guard rapid response teams will be positioned so that they are noticeo act at a moments if challenges arise. altogether, there will be more than 2200 national guardsmen in the region. lives and property must be protected. deserves to have peace. we will provide safety and security in the region. i know this morning that there is pain in the hearts of the community, and they also know it is vital for us to understand how we got to this place and how to make it better. byontinue to be heartened the steadfast work that so many people in this region are doing, with peace and understanding to overt violence, and to move forward together. will say something,

and i will be glad to take something. be joined by gregory mason. mr. mason? >> thank you, governor. the national guard will deploy a trained and ready professional force with soldiers who are quick to do the job and you have returned to ferguson and this region, and we will continue to to protect life and property. we are here as trained and ready soldiers to do what we have always done for the state of missouri. >> thank you, general. >> i just want to say that we have worked with the national guard many times throughout the past years with disasters around the state. and night was a disaster, as the governor said, we cannot have a repeat of what we saw last night.

and this is over the last 100 plus days. more, and we will and thank you. >> thank you, colonel, and now, the chief. thanklso would like to general mason for the assistance he is going to give us. we had about 400 plus police officer is down there before we called about 60 officers from st. louis city and about another hundred officers from physicality is, so it just goes to show you the value that the and ourings to us community not only needs to be safe, they need to feel safe, and i appreciate the governor's that regard.

thank you. >> thanks, chief. the director of public safety for the state of missouri. clear that last night was a disappointment, a disappointment in so many ways. so much work has been done by the command over the last 100 days, and we deployed many , anders out in the area unfortunately, there was a group of people who were intent on causing violence and mayhem, and we will do better tonight. there will be a significant , andnce in the community we hope that we will protect the property, protect the businesses for those people of ferguson and also throughout the city of st. louis and our community. >> thank you, director. >> we will be happy to take any questions.

as we had before, we had about 700 guardsmen in the city and county last night, and late last night, these were exactly the times, and we deployed the guardsmen to the ferguson police department as an additional strength there, and as was indicated either folks there, we will continue that mission all long with the other two missions that we talked about, expand the role of the guard. we will work to make sure there is public safety and that the guard, that that force is used in a way that tonight is a safer night.

deployed directly to the ferguson police department. and we will have a significant number out tonight. line, we want to make sure we keep things calm and safe. yes, jason, go ahead. >> if not, why were they there? >> the national guard was part of the uniformed command so that officials would be freed up to be part of that command. as we said, we had 700 guardsmen

in the region, doing a lot of static work out there. we certainly had guarded the command post. as i said, we had more at the ferguson police department, but we will have more out there tonight, and we will continue to provide resources. yes? as i said before, we had some. i am not sure. at the command center at various times, and at the police department. >> you may have been pressured --the obama administration -- canng the guardsmen you respond to that charge? >> that is false, and politics as nothing to do with what the

folks up your are doing. we are doing our duty. behind me, you have sworn officers, and we have hundreds of people out there putting their life on the line every night, and politics has nothing to do with the tasks at hand and the seriousness of this mission. yes, sir? --e again, i am not i am not going to go through operational things other than we have been working these plans for a period of time. obviously, we will have folks out there tonight. workottom line is as we towards the missions, we are putting out 700 guardsmen that were dispersed in the area. most of those were in a situation such that they could free up certified officers that tonight,freed up, and we will put additional guardsmen out to make sure things are safer. yes, sir?

we will have full strength as appropriate for the tasks that are in play. like i said, we will have more strength as is necessary to deal with it. we are confident our folks are trained and ready. well, i mean, there are going to be a lot of folks there. we are certainly looking at options, but i think what people want is peace. what they want is safety. we have to get through to that point, where the people in this region are confident to walk up and down their streets, and the best way to deal with that is to do with the issues that are facing us right now. this is to make sure that the people of this region on the streets, not that we have to have guardsmen or police officers or things of that nature, we are trying to get to a place, back to a place where the people of ferguson and the

region feel comfortable walking around with their families, walking around with their kids. that is our goal, not to shut the place down. thank you. [no audio] the news conference wraps up in st. louis with governor jay nixon and other state public safety officials. just a reminder also, we are interested in your input on the grand jury decision. log onto facebook.com/c-span and post your comments and read what other viewers have to say. thanksgiving week, c-span is featuring interviews from retiring members of congress. watch the interview tonight through thursday at 8:00 p.m. eastern. >> i have often said republicans do have a legitimate argument

here by the way, in that they are not being allowed to offer amendments. well, they were not being allowed to offer amendments because they were filibustering bills. is best way to get rid of it just to get rid of the filibuster, but at the same time, guaranteed to the minority and new rules in the senate that the minority will be about to offer germane amendments to any bill that is on the floor, germane amendments to that legislation, with reasonable time limits for debate. >> i will not even qualify this. the most eloquent orator in the hope is once said, and i remember this correctly, he said but for wild about it, those who have committed perjury. , in heyou justify that

said, i cannot do it. henry sayingmber that. >> and also on thursday, thanksgiving day, we will take an american history tour of various native american tribes at 10 :00 a.m. eastern following washington journal. then at 1:30, attend a groundbreaking ceremony at the new diplomacy center in washington with former secretaries of state, and supreme court justices at 8:30 pm eastern. that is this thanksgiving week on c-span. for our complete schedule, go to c-span.org. another discussion on state solutions to reducing incarceration. the center for justice at the new york university law school has a forum featuring law enforcement officials from around the country, and also from this panel, a former president of the national rifle association.

panel proceeds from the premise that we really do not have one criminal justice system, and the response to the issues of overuse of incarceration go beyond federal ownerns, but each has its system, and then subsidiary systems within each state. what we are going to talk about responses at the state level and local level to the issues of the overuse of incarceration to solve criminal justice problems and to deal with violence within the communities. the panel that we have is missing one member who is advertised, catherine lanier. we have really worked hard to make sure we have people that are actively engaged in law enforcement and chief lanier was cela thison the x

morning and was pulled off to deal with issues in d.c., and we have with us moving from the left to the right geographically that is and perhaps otherwise. [laughter] doug gansler who is the attorney general of maryland a former state's attorney in montgomery county, and a former president of the national association of attorneys general. next to him is jeff slymack who is the special assistant attorney general in the office of attorney general kamala harris of california. jeff oversees criminal law policy is a special assistant to the attorney general from california. next to jeff is cyrus vance who is the district attorney from manhattan, and many know him well here in manhattan and moving next we have the commissioner of the baltimore

police department and he has joined us today. and finally to my immediate left we have david keene who is a founding member right on crime. he is the former president of the national rifle association and the former chair of the american conservative union and a board member of the constitution project. the way this morning's next will proceed is as follows. each of the members of the panel will have a few minutes to discuss issues of key importance to them and then we will move through some significant claims and when i say a few minutes i have one personal attribute that is relevant and it's not the fact that i was an assistant u.s. attorney are serving long -- or served in law enforcement. i the grandson of a pentecostal am preacher and i have a very good sense of when people start to warm to their text which

means they can go a little bit longer than they need to. so i will exercise those instincts as they move forward. but each panelist will have a few moments to talk and then we will talk about community engagement. we will discuss issues related to return and re-entry. we will discuss issues of fairness through the operation of the criminal justice system and how many of the panelists have employed strategies to root out bias and put in systems to ensure that justice is clearly administered firmly but also fairly. with that i will start with mr. keene. >> thank you very like the idea -- thank you. i like the idea that after he talked about having a panel with experience in law enforcement that he calls on

panel has no background whatsoever. [laughter] found the first panel to be a really relevant introduction to this panel because it hit upon the kinds of problems that we all face to deal with criminal justice issues in the public sphere. as jim indicated i'm on the board of the constitution project which is a bipartisan cross ideological organization that works on issues of this sort as well as a founding member of right on crime. before we put together right on crime and number of conservatives for meeting regularly for several years in our offices to discuss the problems that we have been dealing with the criminal justice system and the question of reform. it was our feeling that in the 60's and 70's in particular the public discussion of criminal justice issues was skewed by the fact that you had misrepresentative strawman arguing with each other.

you have politicians who claimed that since crime is a problem we had to lock them all up, throw away the key and punish the more severely. then you had others who tended to speak only for the criminals and that was the debate that appeared in that's the wrong question. the question as you approach criminal justice issues was stated as well as anyone has by paul fishman on the earlier panel much he said the mission of u.s. attorneys inundate the mission of the system is to provide for safe civil society. the question is not whether there are too many people in prison are not enough people in prison or whether the laws are too harsh or the laws are too lean. the real question is what works. we got into a situation certainly rhetorically and politically where the question of what works and the mission that paul discuss this morning became subsidiary to the smaller missions of the various groups and politicians and constituencies involved.

we formed right on crime because we thought it was time for people regardless of their political orientation or their ideological correction or stance to start looking at these problems realistically because the system clearly is not working when the united states becomes the premier jailer of the entire world where one and 100 adults are serving time or have served time in a penal institution. where there are more people in every prison, in every state in this country today suffering from severe mental illnesses that are all the private public treatment facilities in each of where the mission the prison and jail system is supposed to fulfill can be fulfilled because it's dysfunctional. more people are being locked up for things that they shouldn't be locked up for that they needn't be locked up for that is necessary.

pat nolan who was in a fellowship former president of the prison fellowship when he was there he liked to talk about the fact that today we lock people up because we are mad at them when we should be reserving prison and jail space for people who we are afraid of. there are obviously people who have committed crimes and who are dangerous enough that they need to be kept away from rest of society. they built the prisons and the prosecutors filled them up. i have to say one thing in trying to get real prison reform through and we have done most of our work at the state level as

i'm sure doug knows, we have had great success working with democrats, republicans conservatives and liberals than with governors who are concerned about two things. one, the way their systems are working or not working in the cost of the systems in many states across the prison system is greater than the cost of a public education system and they both work just about as well but maybe a reallocation of resources might be in order. i have to say that historic constituencies still exist. it's incredible to me that this is a great group of u.s. attorneys that you have an prosecutors on the first panel but i hesitate to thank they are representative. in every state and dealing with federal reform the prosecutorial committee is one of the greatest resistance to doing anything for

a variety of reasons. one they believe in their mission but secondly they are managing to try to force people through a system that doesn't work, so they want all of these sentences so they can force people not to go to trial. as you know most people don't go to trial and lord knows how many of those people have accepted deals because of the consequences would be an adequate defense available to them because of the sentencing rules that we have or that they can be subjected to. so we got involved because we wanted to make sure that the question of what works and what doesn't work and was humane and wise and humane had to be discussed in terms of that rather than in terms of where one stands on the political spectrum or what one can do to advance his or her career as a prosecutor or politician or whatever. i'm going to quit because he can see me getting warm on the subject and is dangerous. somebody referred this morning to ed meese former attorney general and he's been very concerned about over

criminalization as we call it in the federal system. there are thousands of ways you can have it up in a federal prison if someone wants to play there. i remember our first meeting and there was a former congressman there and i said you know everything has become a federal crime. i used to say the poster child for that is carjacking. carjacking is illegal anyway and i said why did that need to be a separate federal crime? the poor guy lowered his head and shook and he said -- and that's why they make great press releases for congressman and senators and something happens. so we need to look, everybody from all sides of the spectrum, those involved in law enforcement and those in the prosecutorial community and those interested in the issue need to look not at punishing

people or freeing people or this or that but need to look at what works and the fact is that over incarceration does not work. >> thank you. commissioner keene you can actually pick up that theme. >> actually i'm a gun guy. >> this is what we would call a battlefield promotion. if you could pick up the same about what works in the field. >> that's very interesting to think -- i'd like to thank bill my good friend for allowing me to come into his territory without a visa so i appreciate that on his part and my good friend left me as the only police officials answer questions so i'm going to reach out to both of them. very quickly i think the theme is extremely correct is what works? when i was thinking about coming on this panel i wonder what i could offer. i've been doing this job and policing was almost 35 years and i started in the 1980s and early 1980s and saw a lot of different things happen. i always ask the question why and how does that why project is into the future?

what i can guarantee you is when crime increases right now we are seeing a decrease overall in cities throughout the united states. when crime increases much like we have terrorism that took place in this great and wonderful city the public says respond. i'm going to talk about that and how those two things are going to play together because as we walk forward as a civilized nation we have these conversations i'm going to get pressure one day when the crime rate goes up and someone will say do something about it, do something about it now. if you don't i will replace you and somebody else will step in the position to find out how to resolve that issue and to address that issue. and when things calm down we become civil and we have deep-rooted intelligent academic conversations. in the city of baltimore we continue to focus and i'm pushing, i've been in baltimore for two years and this is the third city had been in charge of. i come from the west coast and i was born in d.c. but family moved at an early age to the west coast. the only reason i'm sharing that

with you is because i grew up in south-central los angeles. a very poor kid, came from a neighborhood where traditional gangs started in my neighborhoods. gangs like the crips and the bloods and all these types of thing started in the neighborhood where i grew up. i share with people to see if they can connect with me because i share with the communities many times what we ate was fried bologna sandwiches. anybody a fried bologna sandwiches in this room? so that was my time that i grew up. i ask people and i asked my mother at that young age of eight years old does anybody give a damn whether i lived or died. did anybody care if i survived is a little black kid growing up in south-central los angeles and did anybody understand my hopes are my dreams or aspirations?

with that and i take from that what we are doing in baltimore in the cities i have been and as i try to push organizations to be progressive. i try to push organizations towards having academic information comment and focusing on what works. not the flavor of the day. not what mythology is that based on empirical data based on the best practices in those things that work for police agencies. as i say that with some baltimore today we have programs like cease-fire. i had dinner with david kennedy and we were talking about the progress of cease-fire within the city of baltimore. if you are not familiar with cease-fire oversimplify. what we do is focus on groups. we focus on group gangs and individuals that make those crews, we make them up. we called him into a room and bring them from behind a curtain and we say we know who you are. in our room we have all my federal partners and we have basically, the hammer angle of

approach. we tell them we know who you are. if anyone in this game group crew becomes violence we are going to crush the entire group. what we really wanted to do was step over to a site where we have wrap around services to get your life and help you move on have a fruitful environment. that's oversimplified with what cease-fire is. it's working in 65 cities and locations from new orleans to chicago to camden to newark so it's in different places. we brought it to baltimore and have had it in oakland also. we are also focusing on violent repeat offenders. we are not arresting neighborhoods and the good thing about cease-fire but also the people who are exacerbating problems with violence out there in our community. our repeat offender program focuses on eventual spot the community not the mass of

minority kids out there but focusing on those people we know for a fact or killing other human beings and trying to take them out of our communities. we also focus on groups, we focus on gangs and refocus on cruise. those are a lot of different things. gangs can be the bloods and the crips etc. and that you have groups that come together from neighborhoods to come together to do criminal acts and then you have crews. those can be drug crews who are coming together to sell drugs as a whole so we focus on all these pieces and not on stopping young people as a whole. however baltimore has had a history of mass incarceration and i withdrawn the table that probably most police departments in the united states have histories, recent histories of mass incarceration and i'm going to that next. we are also focusing on legitimacy which is how i describe it for city is that we jump up and down by the fact that we have had some the lowest homicide rates in the history of

the city and recent times, 197 because baltimore used to be closer to 400. it is a significant drop and i applaud and that was before i walked in. not that i had an impact on that but i just say that. i applaud that i applaud the way of a down to 197 but if that community is no better than what it was before the 197 what do you have to cheer about? if you still have the poverty levels, if you still have the same vacant homes, if you still have the same impact that 18-year-old kid their life is no better than what it was before the 197 what do you have to celebrate when you pat yourself on the back? we are shifting and what we are doing and what i want to move our team from is away from enforcement because people tell me tony stay in your lane. your job is doing policing which is enforcement.

i'm trying to teach the city and not only the city but also my police officers that her job is to prevent harm and harm comes in a lot of different forms. it's not just enforcement because if you focus on just enforcement your only told to address the problem is arresting people, mass incarceration. when you are looking at addressing an issue by prevention of harm you are dealing with a lot of different things and it crosses the line so you don't stay in your lane. you cross a line of economic development, you cross a line of poverty. you have a responsibility because many of these areas you are the only kind of government that these residents ever get to see. we also address re-entry and we have a re-entry program. we are also internal but the police police department addressing behavioral issues with their police officers. then i want to jump back and i want to finish because i get that body language so i want to be very short. so we have all these progressive issues that we are taking on and

i have drafted a number of papers out of harvard. the last one deals with double-blind sequential lineups with a project innocence in new york and carol stephens and addressing how politics pushes sometimes and that's just one phase of the paper that we wrote. the politicians -- which pushes prosecutors to push through and we end up arresting the wrong people in 30 years later we find out we are arresting the wrong person. if you have a chance to pull that up is out of harvard. i'm not doing that is marketing but we are trying to answer and push difficult questions. the point i raise with this is when i was a straight police officer in the 1980s rock cocaine hit southern california and it hit hard. we had african-american young men dying left and right every single day brutal shootings taking place. people like me killing ourselves

off left and right. in the communities that do something about it. we don't want to hear talk and we don't want to hear rhetoric, do something about it. the only thing we knew how to do because there wasn't a lot of theories out there to do community policing with starting the people said this is not a time for community policing. do something about so it so we did. we arrested everyone that we could because we knew a silly thing we could do at the time. there was no empirical data for us to do anything differently. what drives us today whether talking about legitimacy cease-fire hotspot policing and on and on are based on theories coming out of academia. in the 1980s we didn't have the body of knowledge. in the 1980s we did what we could do to solve a problem which led to mass incarceration. that has tripled in communities that i came from. as i close what we are going to do in the future needs to be based on peer for beta. we need to research that is done that we know works and works

well that we focus on the right thing to do. [applause] >> there's nothing to control a moderator better than up police commissioner saying i'm watching your body language. [laughter] when i grew up that was a matter of concern. seide. >> thanks, jim. good morning, everyone and good morning, panel members. it's a pleasure to sit here and to listen to you. this panel is speaking directly to the group that deals with the largest number of people in our criminal justice system. my office alone handles 100,000 cases a year. not all of those are large financial fraud cases although

many are. we handle more criminal cases in a year than the department of justice handles nationwide. when we are talking about where the fourth, fifth and sixth amendment meets the road it's in our state courthouses with the help of our police department and attorneys general. this attorney general has a unique perspective on how to deal with criminal justice in the broadest sense and how our country is adapting to it. we are going to get back with jim i hope to some more pointed issues about racial bias which i look forward to but let me share in a few minutes i have about how her philosophy and think my philosophy addresses the question of who goes to jail and how we handle that. first and foremost i think every prosecutor and every law enforcement official has come to understand that a crime prevented is better than one

prosecuted. crime prevented is better than arrests made. as the roles of das today have evolved and you become smarter i think our office i look at for our success and how many convictions we have although obviously i want our office to win its cases. i really look at the role of the d.a. to partner with the police and over the long-term driving crime down. that's how i measure our office of success. in an effort to achieve success as it's no longer just in the courtroom that we are going to be making an impact on driving crime down. increasingly that the tools of the das office in mind in particular enable us to affect crime prevention in ways that i think are absolutely consistent with crime-fighting. they're really one in the same. so i could talk at length about our enforcement actions whether it's in the white-collar area gangs domestic violence and the like that for this purpose i'm

going to leave the hardcharging persecutor discussion turned to strategies who uses the das office and crime prevention. first and foremost i think we realize manhattan and a lot of new york communities has a youth gang and violence issue. part of that is going to be investigating break-in at gangs but i believe and we have come to believe that it's equally important for us to take our resources and our tools as a district attorney's office and invest them in the neighborhoods where we do our job. for example when i started months after starting we realize some of our gyms not in some of the most high crime areas of manhattan were closed on friday and saturday nights because there was no funding for it. that was the case with the police athletic case in one of our blue ribbon organizations that deals with help tickets. what we did was we simply took

money that we got from drug forfeitures and we started to hire world-class trainers in basketball to begin with and a high training operation and build teamwork and leadership among kids to provide boys and girls 12 to 18 years old, five to 9:00 p.m. friday and saturday nights the days our zen group that is most at risk and to provide for them there are office through hoops we hired world-class sports programs. we started with one gym in central harlem and now three weeks later we have nine sites in manhattan. we have service 3800 kids who have signed up for this. my point, my question is why is district attorney doing this kind of work? the reason we do it and i think the recent das do it all over the country in the recent police commissioners do it is because we know this is a crime-fighting

strategy. supporting the communities and parents with what they want. they want their kids to be able to be somewhere safe and to do something productive in ways that city government sometimes can afford to do. our office is fortunate because we handle a large number of white-collar crimes and give substantial dollars for most cases that we could invest in our communities but that is where we are making our investment and that is how raw our office approaches this. similarly we have one of the few immigrants affairs programs in the country for a das office. our systems and our community affairs people are constantly out and at various communities talking about how immigrants can protect themselves from immigration fraud and colleges in school about how kids can keep themselves from getting in trouble with texting and on the internet, how seniors can protect themselves from being

victims of elder abuse. again this is not what makes the headline. the d.a. convicts rapists who goes to jail for 40 years but what it is doing is when we start to work and mass and the five counties amend them start to work together with the police department and working with the police department up and down the coast what we are doing is crime-fighting. we are preventing crimes and a briton i think that's the direction we are going to keep going. the news in new york and closing on this is not that bad although there is always room for improvement. new york has dropped its state prison population from 71,000 to about 55,000 over the past 10 to 15 years. that's still a lot of people in jail and absolutely i think we can do more as prosecutors, as judges and police officers and being far more intelligent about who we sentenced to jail and then have a responsibility while they are in their to give them opportunities so when they come

out they can be successful in their community as they re-enter. it makes no sense to send someone to jail and not provide some pathway for them to succeed when they get out. that 15,000 person drop in population indicates we have been more selective and new york state of the top 10 states by population sites is actually tenth in terms of number of people ascends to school -- to jail out of 100,000. the highest maybe california or texas and in new york 257. so i leave you with this. i think the game is changing and the strategies are becoming more broad and i think that's fantastic. i think it's giving the communities where it needs than i want. i think we are doing a lot of things right but quite clearly

lay in state government are actually the people who are having to deal with this issue of over incarceration or incarceration my personal opinion. next week, next month we are bringing together 23 prosecutors for major cities in a coalition called prosecutors against gun violence because we want our voice is das to be heard in the debate about what's working to fight gun violence and what's not. what's happening is strategies are being shared office to office and crime prevention and how to make sure the strategies deal with preventing crime are being shared. i think it's making a difference and i look forward to what we can do together over the next couple of years. >> cy, before you move over to just one quick question. the number that you cited that dropped from 71,000 to 51,000 is tremendous and hardening. it is as surprising or noteworthy to me is the numbers that michael gave in terms of the nation's ranking in the world in terms of the number of people that are incarcerated.

could you talk just a little bit more about what you think are the factors in that decline before we go to jeff? >> this is a decline that started 15 years ago so i believe in that 15-year period new york has been innovative in the area of providing alternatives to incarceration, and creation of drug courts, creation of a number of specialized courts which focus on an offender who is given a to succeed in a resolution of a case and avoid significant prison. so i think that we are being smarter with our support of people who have been offending. we are smarter with who is going to jail. i think the rockefeller drug law reforms which are overdue in a good idea provide more discretion to judges and prosecutors and a wide array of charges and decisions.

by the way new york state has among the broadest discretion given to judges in sentencing ranges than any state i know. i prosecuted on the west -- a practice on the west coast for a number of years and despite popular belief new york state judges actually compared to other states have a huge range of options to use in many of the cases. all those factors being smarter feeling we need to be smarter feeling way to be more judicious about to eating up resources that relate to incarceration, community engagement helping us do our job in terms of community sanctions i think those are some factors. >> thank you. that 15 year trend is important because of the opposite of what's been happening nationwide. jeff. >> thank you, jim and thank you to the panels here today. it's a real pleasure to be with you all today. the brennan center really is doing some of the country's most amazing work on criminal justice

reform issues and it's a testament to the brennan center that they were able to get us out of the bubble that is a state of california to come out and talk today so we are very happy to be here on behalf of attorney general harris. when you talk about issues related to criminal justice reform and problems and solutions in the criminal justice system california in many ways is the alpha and omega of these issues. we have been confronting these problems and these issues for years, actually decades now. they are our solutions we have been implementing that i was going to talk to about today because i think it really symbolizes both where we have been but where we can go and in

many ways is emblematic of where the country has been and where it's going. as i mentioned a moment ago california in many ways is distinctive for many of its -- the great things it produces for the country with its innovation and agriculture. but we lead another distinctive ways as well in criminal justice and issues related to incarceration and that's unfortunately definitely the case. to give you some perspective on what is happening in the country and in california one statistic for us is particularly telling. one in 10 people who are incarcerated, he resides in the state of california. that should tell you something about the scope of the problem on a national level but also as it exists in the countries largest state which is california. we have the second highest prison population and i was listening to cy talk about the state of new york's prison population which i'm gratified to hear is continuing to get lowered and in the state of california we are doing the same that arched number still hover around 116,000.

that i will tell you it's just the state prison population as i will talk to you all about in a minute. many of the state prisoners are now shifting to our county jail population. the problem is in one sense good and better shows us what the solutions are but also tells us how much more work we have to do. one other dimension to this and the commissioner or cy mentioned this, there also are other issues more than just as it relates to who, how many people we have in our prison system today. again another telling statistic we have in california is in a state of california 6.5% of the population is african-american but 29% of the state's prison population is african-american. there are statistics like that now and that is just one example but it tells us again what more we have to do. we know from the 1970s leading up to 2006 by way of example a