president trump refuses to rule out recognizing crimea as part of russia ahead of a summit with a lot of input. the leaders reach a non-binding agreement on the migrant crisis but warns there's still a long way to go to solve the problem. and the u.s. and child abuse campaigner and nobel peace prize nominee is arrested by the f.b.i. over allegations of pedophilia. the latest on the stories you can find are to dot com stay with us now for the big picture. who are you just mail in some saliva or should you this week we'll talk

about those d.n.a. testing services but first why are there more people in american prisons and jails then russia and china come bind about d. cars aeration i'm holland cook in washington this is the big picture on our team america. as robert muller's investigation applies pressure to michael cohen and paul mann a fourth president trump seems to be sending them a message these people these things get cleaned up. for did it. reagan did it carter did it. clinton did it and bush did in political investors so you're saying after the probe is over it may be cleaned up with any people run fairly prosecuted. the president recently pardoned controversial filmmaker dinesh

d'souza and hinted that he's considering pardons for martha stewart and rod blagojevich both former contestants on the apprentice mass incarceration in the usa remains an issue we have more people in jail or prison than any other country more than russia and china come binds why let's ask dr nas gould. senior research analyst at the sentencing project which advocates for policy reform through research and media welcome thank you very much great to be here the u.s. a prison and jail population has grown five hundred percent in the last forty years although your organization is a nonprofit some children prisons are now for profit does that figure and it definitely figures in but i think a lot of people overestimate just how much because it's roughly one in ten people that are incarcerated in the united states and prisons are in privately held

facilities most people are in publically run institutions so while private private prisons and private jails have a big role to play in immigration detention and in some federal detentions more broadly the problem that we have is a political problem where elected officials want to appear tough on crime we heard donald trump talking about being a law and order president. but those kinds of policies are not necessarily smart on crime and they're not necessarily they are not effective policies smart does not equal tough exactly smart doesn't equal tough we know that we have dramatically increased the number of people that we sent to prison we've increased sentence lengths other countries haven't done the same thing and yet they've managed to reduce their crime rate significantly during the same period that our crime rates have fallen since the one nine hundred ninety s. well here at home the numbers are what the numbers are and people of color are lots more likely to be arrested for a low level crimes why is that happening there too. main reason is that that

happens it has to do first with discretion of individual police officers in terms of who they pull over whether they search them and whether they arrest them so we know that police officers in many jurisdictions now they're not far more likely to pull over people of color but when they do pull them over there are much more likely to search them and when they search them they search so many people that they actually have a lower contraband hit rate so they have a lower likelihood of finding drugs or illegal weapons when they search people of color than whites but because they search so many people they end up arresting a lot more people of color than whites so that's one factor the other factor has to do with departmental white policies so where what neighborhoods is the war on drugs being fought in it's not being fought in university campuses it's not being fought in affluent communities it's primarily being fought in low income communities of color and so that doesn't have to do with the discretion of individual officers but

has to do with departmental wide policies that are driven by city decisions and then that continues as you go up the up the ladder to sentencing policies that apply to everybody across the board well here in the district of columbia as in a growing number of states marijuana is now legal in new york city the police are no longer making possession busts do you see that and. other minor crimes as helping or are you aware are you that the trump era tough talk about crime is going to reverse the d cars aeration gains made during recent practical reforms there's definitely still a lot of room for reforming even marijuana arrest and sentencing policies but also when we get into other drugs as well to scale back the war on drugs there's a lot of concern that the trumpet ministrations rhetoric is going to harm the progress that's been made and undo it so we know that it. well sessions has backed

out of consent decrees where the federal government would have a role to play in making sure that police departments weren't over overly violent and were not racially disparate in their in force made decisions so that's one issue they've also reason did exactly order is an executive orders that occurred during the obama administration to reduce reliance on for profit prisons for example to not charge everyone with the most serious possible penalty one for a drug drug crime the president has talked about using the death penalty for people selling drugs so these are all things that suggest we're not just going to halt the progress that's been made but potentially reverse it judges using their discretion . to keep from clogging the prison system you know in the era of mandatory minimum sentencing the amount of discretion available to judges has been really narrowed especially in the federal system so it has a lot to do with prosecutors prosecutors have

a lot of discretion in how they charge people and they are able to charge people for crimes that carry mandatory sentences or not and so we've seen around the country a number of progressive prosecutors saying that they want to play an active role in ending mass incarceration so for example larry krasner in philadelphia is one of these prosecutors but we also see at the federal level guidance is from the attorney general telling prosecutors to not use their discretion in a way that would help to reduce the number of people going into federal prisons and how much time they serve there what sort of minor crimes what sort of petty crimes are by the numbers clogging the prison system the most. well people most people in fact in state prisons in the united states are not there for minor offenses most people are there for a violent offense about half the federal prison population is serving time for

a violent offense and that includes crimes like assault and robbery so the trouble is that in the past we used to not send so many people to prison for these offenses we might have given them probation instead or just giving them a second chance and we also keep them there for much longer now when we do send them out for community supervision if they get they have a police encounter for a marijuana possession that can send them back to prison because of their original offense so that's a major way that a low level in forstmann especially in communities of color sends people back to prison. when you look at the los level crimes that people are getting into trouble for that could be if they're if they're driving police officers will pull people over for a whole variety of reasons what we know is that they're more likely to pull over people of color for investigatory reasons rather than traffic safety violations so just because someone didn't signal or because they were driving too slowly and they want to check out what's happening those kinds of police encounters because they

happen in such a high volume they risk putting people in danger and so it's these kinds of putting people in danger of experiencing police violence it's these kinds of policies these kinds of practices that. professional football players have been protesting by kneeling during the national anthem at their games and it's that kind of protest that's being missed characterized by the president and and that we should really pay a lot more attention to to realize that a lot of people of color in the united states are experiencing unnecessary police contact that exposes them to the possibility of deadly violence which profiling. profiling yes it's partly profiling which suggests an intentionality and it's also just implicit bias we're all have some level of bias in our decisions and the evaluations that we make of the level of risk we face from the people around us so it's not as if police officers are alone in this but what we need is guidance and

training and policies to make sure that we can mitigate the impact of that bias that everybody has in american society we're only human yes that's right we're only human. even after someone who has been convicted has done their time life is for ever changed explain how. well life is forever changed in that it's very difficult for example when you're released from a period of jail or prison sentence to then be able to find housing a lot of apartment landlords and other housing providers will do a criminal background check and they're reluctant to rent to somebody who has a criminal conviction so that's one issue another issue is it's very difficult to find employment a lot of employers will ask about criminal histories at the beginning of an application and they will discriminate against people who have criminal records

they don't hear them out they don't listen to why crude that record how they've what they've been doing since then and then another factor is that when people have a hard time finding employment lining housing we make it very difficult for them to receive federal assistance so cash assistance food stamps so we really are closing a lot of doors for people to be able to land on their feet after their criminal section sanctions and it really does not make intuitive sense if you were to design a policy from scratch you would want to make it possible for people to work and to live in have secure shelter so that they can live a law abiding life to get back on the grid to play the game voting rights moves in the senate you know lead them back into the game correct exactly so six million people in the united states are excluded from voting because of a felony conviction most of these people are not in prison or in jail they're done

with their sentence and yet they cannot participate in our electoral system and that's really problematic because if this happens in swing states like virginia and florida and in this and given that people are disproportionately african-american or latino that really changes the composition of our electorate and it really affects the who ends up being elected to represent our country the president's recent and. hinted pardons are really outside the box in terms of the normal procedure what message does this send the system. well the pardons that and the commutations that he's made so far really seem to be politically oriented most of them alice johnson's commutation though is very much a move in the right direction because she is emblematic of the problems in our federal prisons people that are there overwhelmingly in the federal prison system are they're serving time for a drug offense so more than half about half are serving time for a drug offense and they're typically serving eleven eleven year sentence for that

crime alice johnson was serving a life sentence for a drug offense there are two thousand other people in the federal system serving a life sentence for a drug offense and so what we would love to see is for him to continue to move in that direction and to address the systematic problems that we have with over sentencing people in the federal system for drug offenses dr non-school khan from the sentencing project thank you for joining us thank you very much it's been a pleasure. brags that it was all about the british might to bring back five hundred factories we're going to export our way back into a g.t.t. rocket ship and take on the world cool britannia. well it turns out they're all

going to be picking fruit out there in canada very shy. current american administration is raising terrorists and drew phony gold trade agreements when america sneezes the rest of the world of value to contribute to protectionist fever. as the who sang who are you just melon some saliva you may be surprised growing up we would german we dance in a german dance group i would lay the hose and when i first got on ancestry i was really surprised that i wasn't finding all of these germans in my tree i decided to

have my d.n.a. tested through ancestry d.n.a. the big surprise was where when i'm german at all fifty two percent of my d.n.a. comes from scotland and ireland so i traded in my later hosen for it kills beyond this recreational research mapping the human genome is a remarkable breakthrough what's at stake let's ask dr marcus feldman professor of biological sciences and director of the morrison institute for population and resource studies at stanford university professor welcome. twenty three and me is among the prominent consumer d.n.a. testing services and they claim their words we are extremely confident in the accuracy of the detailed results we provide to our customers our standard for accuracy is unmatched in the market since twenty three and me is the only consumer company to forgo or undergo i should say f.d.a.

authorization for health related tests showing these test to be over ninety nine point nine percent accurate professor how accurate is this testing and what can the consumer find out from these kits. there are two kinds of information that come under the rubric of what twenty three may was talking about one is the three d.n.a. . markers which are effectively like patients that tell you about the risk for breast cancer they have permission to do those they're called the. genes. and the other class of information that they provide is an estimate of risk for a certain number of rights that can be related to

things like hypercholesterolemia or diabetes and they tell you whether you are about average risk or about normal risk or below average risk for these kinds of. chronic illnesses. their accuracy therefore they're not telling you a number when you ask about that kind of thing you know they telling you whether you're above the law or about average. and the other kinds of information that they provide you with which is the fraction of your ancestry that might be coming from different places just like your introduction had the person coming from the british isles that kind of information has become the rigor in the

field of population genetics and ancestry studies and they different companies are getting better and better at that telling you what fraction comes from where. this is what we call an ancestry estimation. and it comes from vast amounts of d.n.a. data which shows different patterns of variation in different parts of the world so for instance there are samples that have been taken from different parts of europe from the british isles from eastern europe from southern europe from north africa and those samples all differ slightly from one another. actually if the truth be told the variation that is actually there with in each population is much greater than the variation between even europe and africa but

leaving that aside the statistical procedures that are being used by ancestry twenty three in may and other companies. are pretty good at telling you on the basis of the vast amounts of d.n.a. data that have been collected since the. advent the human genome. production. data is pretty good at being able to be classified into different ancestry components i'm impressed by the first part of your answer because the second part is what draws people to these services who are my ancestors but in terms of your susceptibility to various health woes if they come back with the test results that say you are above average is that a trigger to go see your doctor. yes it can be and if you look at

their website they say that any such information should be. used in consultation with two kinds of paypal one would be a genetic counselor and the other one would be your physician right that in fact a very interesting study was made public today from finland which showed that those tejpal who had a higher than average. test results for things like. diabetes and other diseases actually changed their own environments as a result of getting this information so those people who were smokers cut down their smoking those people started to do more exercise actually

a very interesting study that the information that you get which tells you something about the genetic components that contribute to these. traits actually prompts you to make an environmental and just meant to yourself sure and that's very important that's really important well what else could we inherit from our ancestors in terms of personality traits if your great grandfather had a great sense of humor is that something that can get passed down. not really that that's a very complicated kind of trite and is subject to. several different parts of a reddit t. heredity is not only genetic heredity consist of the kind of environment that you live in the cultural aspects of your parents and their parents that are being

passed down by a process of cultural inheritance so it's not only the genetic inheritance that we are receiving from our parents we're receiving a lot more stuff that is rather more difficult to quantify and just as important i guess we are all just shipped off the old block professor thank you for joining us tonight on the big picture. the commercials make it look like fun we're going to explore who we were as carl sagan once said the reason that we're out in space is to find out who we are but who knows who we are and when all of these companies collect what we've swapped out of our mouth and turn it into d.n.a. and it all goes into a database what could possibly go wrong let's ask attorney an analyst alliance how bout it. great subject i love this let me throw into the mix

hippo laws let's talk about health information let's talk about the trans middle of evidence because you see holland when i have your d.n.a. it's not your blood or your blood type it's you and we'll get into the notion of cloning but with that i can maybe one day find out oh all holland cook apparently be always a conservative republican. he's ahead of us our or maybe not or he likes it or who knows he has a propensity for early onset diabetes who very very on insurable gee i'd hate to think this would get a. how's that life insurance policy or they're going to and you know if they want to see this you know because and so so then it goes up now take two that what we're doing here on my phone i'm giving it my biometrics all the time sure i thumbprint my eyes my voice where this goes imagine this huge conglomeration of

every human being blood type voice fingerprint d.n.a. how and i can plant evidence on you better yet i can play you at crime scenes while i have you this is you it's something that people forget because they say hey look at this other part scandinavian you any at what it is you do use you you gave who your d.n.a. you know what i'm scandinavian enough what the scandinavian how did they fall for this and recently with the gold estate rapist in killer who was found let's talk about that one i know but nobody wants to rein in the parade of catching a serial killer that we haven't found for years but is that kosher i mean is this is this what people in thought they were getting into when they sent swabs and

bugle sellers are like very scary stuff once they've cracked your code they know more about you than you do correct. absolutely wait until they find out the genome is mapped in where every little part is your taste in music your taste in your shortcomings think health problems tendencies of let's say depression insanity genius not so genius it could be the worst the worst mark think about the worst credit score that never goes away that people have but again hala it's you d.n.a. is you it is you're not a time right ok so indeed clearly there is some potential for upside but given all of the above and i want to one word answer have you or would you do the swab and do the d.n.a. test yourself absolutely not well let that be you know warning to our viewers who

are on the fence thank you attorney and analysts lionel thank you sir. and that is the big picture if you missed any part of this week's show or if you want to share it you can where you'll find all our shows at youtube dot com slash the big picture r.t. i'm holland cook in washington back next week and tweeting in the meantime at holland cook so let's hear what you would like to see in the big picture question and more.

i am back strasser this is the kaiser report the show massages your mind like find time assist or better bangkok look at the best mrs ever feet all day will bring a fetus of let's talk to stacy herbert stacy and i just called. and max is doing a live periscope as we do this which is a basically a form of russian roulette for a t.v. presenter. except you know talking heads instead of other things whenever you want to put that down then we will commence and begin oh no resume our kaiser and i

forget i don't think i'm around so i'm really blind at this point so i have a headline here i thought with give you great joy in fact i think it might give you go leave air bus prepares to take flights aerospace giant i'm brink of a panda named british investment tens of thousands of manufacturing roles at risk over banks but for the ordinary brit do not worry about the loss of thousands of jobs tens of thousands of jobs at airbus no no no picking fruit is more fun than you think out of the job seeker's told job seekers picking fruit is more fun than you thought this is the times of london of course picking fruit as well remember pre brags that it was all about the british might to bring back five hundred factories we're going to export our way back into a g.d.p. rocketship and take on the world cool britannia go britannia or turns out they're all going to be picking fruit out.