in different in. minnesota in our newscycle. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy you can foundation let it be an arms race is often very dramatic development only personally i'm going to exist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and talk. become a battleground in the us in vermont people have demanding the shutdown of a local plant from my yankee is right now my focus because it's a very dangerous. power plant the owner is attempting to run the reactor beyond its

operational limit this case just sort of puts a magnifying glass on where's the power in this country where's it going is it moving more towards corporate interests or is it more in the idea of a traditional participatory democracy as are powerline with the people this case demonstrates that struggle in the very real ways our struggle. you. belong to sherman didn't is guilty no ma'am. would we see on t.v. shows is not reality our justice system isn't what you think it is rolling stone magazine considers wayne kramer of the m c 51 of the top 100 greatest guitarists of all time he battled drug addiction in 1975 went to prison for 2 years for selling

cocaine he's since provided guitars and taught music 10 mates at over 50 correctional institutions throughout the united states people think that you know you have a right to a trial and everybody goes to trial and there's the good prosecutor and the defense attorney and they battle it out that is the way it works the way it works is the prosecutors stack up the charges on you and force you to plead guilty to a lesser charge to keep from doing life or double life or triple life people don't get trials what they get is a deal people suggest that anywhere between you know 3 years 10 and 15 percent of people behind bars could be innocent of the crimes for which they were charged michelle alexander is a civil rights lawyer stanford law professor and the author of the new jim crow one of the most highly acclaimed studies america's criminal justice system the reality

is that thousands of people. every year and the united states wind up pleading guilty to crimes they may not have committed because they're the they're railroaded by police officers who give them false information or horrors confessions or because they're afraid of facing you know harsh mandatory minimum sentences and believe that you know the best chance is to just take a plea using. every general you don't know anything about you know the president the politics in county jail you don't know anything so they put you there with these people in this is how they force you to take deals the u.s. justice system just like any justice system in the world a system where 95 percent of the cases are resolved by plea bargain it's no longer trial system it's a plea bargain system the whole purpose of plea bargains from the perspective of a prosecutor raises his conviction rate so prosecutors typically have in the high

90 percentile conviction rates including those plea bargains. because of course from a legal standpoint we know that nobody would ever plead guilty to something they didn't do and so we agree that i would plead guilty in exchange for a youth already sounds we went back into trial we entered the plea and i went down for a 90 day observation at the youth authority in norwalk the challenge is if you're innocent and you clean guilty you better be a good liar you go down there you talk to psychologists and they ask you to just do it but you have to say yes because it has to be consistent with everything well how do you do it i mean i didn't have adequate answers for these questions so they didn't they didn't buy it in a sense you know rightly so and they sent a report that was positive and negative report back to the judge. he said i didn't realize that you thought he would be able to help you and so allow you to take back your guilty plea and go have a trial oral sends you to state prison right now so that began another period of

waiting. it would be well over a year before bruce would get another trial day 23 hours a day in a cell in isolation no contact with other juveniles only counselors one hour out for recreation and while they might not be able to introduce an alternate suspect demanded his lawyer knock down every argument the prosecution could make. the pass a kid i said this could not. i've seen his mother's body through the back window of the house the sun's reflection in the glass and the furniture would have blocked his view his defense was the crime scene pictures were taken on a much sunnier day the prosecution claimed all the bloody footprints in the house matched bruce's shoes defense says his fingerprints were not found anywhere in the crime scene there was no evidence that he wiped anything down or made any attempt to cover his tracks because bruce had nothing to hide the prosecution called robert

hughes who claimed confessed in the 7000 model of county jail and the defense compared robert hughes to a used car salesman who wasn't to be trusted. then one day they wrap their keys on the door and they say listen here it's a verdict and my dad was there he was there just every court day and he was right there in the front row and we were just you know. i contact but you can't really talk because you're not allowed to it's not a visit you know you're not allowed to visit with your. but he was he was there and the jury comes in. one by one you know excruciating the slow sets down. and the judge speaks we reached a verdict yes we have in the matter of people versus bruce willis here. with the jury find the defendant. and they said guilty. and it was just.

read the bottom literally fell out of my world and said it's over and. it's my life. when you've been falsely accused your only hope is for your attorney to directly challenge the veracity of the police my attorney seemed unwilling to go that far you never out right said isn't it true that you're just lying about all of this here's the investigatory work that i did that proves that you're just a liar and he never did that. and this is part of a larger problem that david sirota calls the authority bias authority bias meaning for the government an institution says somebody did something and they must have done it what's strange about it is that this is a country that in one way or the american side goes this i don't trust the government can do anything right on down trust anything the government says and yet at another level at the very same time that that's the dominant rhetorical paradigm

in our politics there is this authority bias where when the government accuses somebody of a crime or says somebody is a a wrongdoer we're flexibly millions and millions of americans thing. it must be true for you to go you're not you're not or thank you very much you're not beholding would you like to be placed under arrest you're not allowed to arrest me . and so if you're and you find yourself in prison it's hard to have any hope at all . a year later my client then another woman in knifepoint and less sentenced to 6 years for armed robbery but other than those his father nobody had connected my client to the murder of other inmates like jeff deskovic another wrongfully convicted man trying to prove his innocence. remember reading about. in the magazine just the same night they all allow people who allege

they've been wrongfully convicted who have a plausible story to write about the hope that more public attention will come when i read about bruce's case it was reaffirming to me that i was on the right path because even though he hadn't been exonerated he was still looking for help he had given up you can't give up no matter how long it takes. and it could take a long time one of the biggest factors in why the us has the largest prison population in the world is the length of our prison sentences. that average sentence for burglary in canada and in england is around 6 months in the us it's around a year and a half. in other developed countries drug offense might land you a year a year and a half in jail in the us it's 5 to 10 years or more if you're

a black man in america your sentence will be 20 percent longer and if you're a white man for the exact same crime i met a woman that had a 1st offense nothing more than filed. worth of crack cocaine and was sentenced to jail in 1979 and didn't come until 2014 she said. i don't know how to send a text. people particularly black people were defined as the enemy in the war on drugs they were defined that way politically but also through media imagery crack cocaine epidemic is taking a new and dangerous turn white people brown people people all use drugs and sell

drugs at the same rate but if we look at who's serving time in america's prisons the law enforcement apparatus is deployed disproportionately against people of color look at them in the war on drugs also bears a major responsibility for racial bias in our prison system is african-americans are rested for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites and serve longest sentences although people of color make up only 30 percent of the laces the make up 60 percent of the prison by the most conservative estimates if we keep going the way we're one in 4 a black man born today will go to jail at some point in their lifetime. 5.3000000 americans of the right vote based on a felony conviction and that impacts man of color more than anyone else just has to change. you know with any. damage and although white people may not have

been the original target they may not have been the inspiration for the war. many people particularly poor working class white folks have found themselves. as a u.s. army veteran who served in the gulf war. 3 weeks. what he paid for it so that he wasn't giving it to me for free if you want to call that trafficking trafficker. personally use we would just fry and play frisbee english and rock and roll drug affairs are never major reason for america's overflowing prison population the u.s. locks up more people for drugs than any other country on the planet there are over half

a 1000000 americans locked up for drugs on any given day and paul was one of them he was facing a lot of time facing 10 year mandatory minimum but they offered him a deal for not forcing the government to go through the time expense of a trial all he had to do was plead guilty and after some painful consideration. and after all those years in prison one thing bothered paul the most you know here we are in this modern society where we're melting pot and nobody's getting along for the most part and then in prison you know it's completely opposite you know who's going there if you were a racist or you win and they require you to be one soon as you get in every single jail or prison in america everyone i've ever been to it's all divided by race and everything segregated and there you have the white phone you have my skin phone you have the black phone you have the asian phone.

everybody's reaching for that you have described as a president soucie and i mean it's a russia and i think the resolution of this is there's going to be a gnostic war that's going to go on for maybe months as john in an already rejected it's. almost as off to mediate as the fighting is too early on that people are now battling to see what territory they can get and i think when the fighting settles down in the lines drawn and people realize that the not going to move forward or backwards then they're going to send to the other players to. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to us on the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

it seems the racism that helped spark the explosion of america's prison system still burns like a raging fire with walls shamefully him from the public eye. it was a very strict code of pentagon erase this is what we do. even to prison guards promote this. some people theorize that it's a way for the guards to keep control over us because if we all got along then who would really be running the prison. us or the guards one guard for every 100 guys prison society is further divided from race into gangs so it helps to either be in one or be from the right neighborhood to prison the guy that was next to me was just a regular dove lone beach he played basketball at padi high school he was a regular dooley on a flat top you know me you know he was going to prison for he had took

a deal for i believe it was like a spousal abuse images grow it was a terrorist threat in the united states a terrorist threat covers any statement it contains the threat of violence against another person in this case reggie is talking about an argument a man was having with his girlfriend where he threatened her until he was going beat or whatever it was it was a terrorist threat it was no physical violence or anything but he took a deal for 18 months and he was only supposed to like take a deal for 18 months you're going to do it 5 or 10 or whatever so he failed. the 1st night we got the ax who from south central from south central where you from explains when one of your homeboys over here said they're going to direct you where you're supposed to go this guy he didn't have anybody he was just from like the snowy just was a regular do no end that night. and i'm listening to was going on and on if they were playing because that's what it started off was this is the whole gamut everything is that is is. way to lead to something knows just what i'd say you

don't let anybody touch you in geo and he didn't know it is easy to understand it you're not supposed to rouse was somebody in the sale because this is what they're doing they're trying to see if they can get you're going to position in this it right there moment both and i'm listening to him they give them a somebody will come help does do. i mean they did in that night in the say oh they were a team. according to the department of justice nearly one in 10 prisoners suffer sexual abuse while in american jails and prisons. so let's keep that in mind the next time a talk show host a government official or anybody makes a joke about prison rape the fact that we find these jokes acceptable shows just how far we've gone in normalizing rape as a just punishment for any offense as long as we keep imagining that people in prison are subhuman that they're predatory and cordial and nothing like you and me why would we lose any sleep about what their lives are like what's happening to them there are now over 5000 jails and prisons in the united states more than we

have colleges and universities in many parts of america are simply this out there are more people who are living in prisons there on college campuses and a multibillion dollar business has occurred. brace yourself this is going to sound too barbaric to be real like medieval times a science fiction horror film or a french historical musical the 13th amendment of the constitution outlawed slavery but it still allows for forced labor if you are and president today there are roughly $1000000.00 american prisoners working for corporations and government industries there is no minimum wage so you could make as little as a few cents an hour bruce worked in the kitchen for years then in clerical jobs making a maximum of $0.32 an hour. it sounds like another time work on brothers movie but

it's happening right now there are no benefits no organizing and no strikes this is big business for state and for profit prisons to sell inmate labor to fortune 500 slike chevron bank of america 18 n.t. and the us military nearly half the population in prison make military uniforms body armor helmets and provide labor as subcontractors for fortune $500.00. they make office furniture command call centers take otel reservations work can slaughter houses for manufacture textiles shoes and clothing for pennies prison labor is part of why some state and private prisons old a multi-billion dollar profit. not only are prisoners used to make products prisoners themselves are sold as products since the 1980 s.

the prison population is boom now 150 private prisons are paid billions by state governments to house prisoners private prisons do so well some of their biggest investors are banks like wells fargo bank of america many private prisons demand 90 or even 100 percent occupancy meaning the taxpayer foots the bill for every bed even the empty. for profit prisons are incentivized to incarcerate more people and for longer periods of time to shoulder quotas and to make sure that happens they spend. tough on crime. today nearly 10 percent of america's prisoners are held in private prisons they also spend millions influencing immigration detained immigrants are held in private prisons for indefinite periods of time often years exposed to brutal conditions because they're not americans the government gives. no right to even the most basic legal representation or medical care 3 housing

facilities were set on fire and apparently all started over inmate frustration over the quality of medical care perhaps needless to say being treated like cattle and used as forced labor for pennies an hour is not that popular on the inside but that's not the worst of it the socks if you're using the underwear that is you is used you got to buy things like shaving and food and sweats and socks underwear t. shirts the canteen or commissary is more expensive than any convenience store on the outside it's definitely advisable to have money so that you can get started if you don't have $50.00 to $100.00 coming into your books or your account every month then you're going to need to hustle. this is philip he was convicted of robbery is crook it is is we are out here course crooked inside there too whether it's drugs whether it's alcohol you've got people that they don't drink but they manufacture

prune a wall d. is saying quit in the in the in the boiler room they found a still friends that i knew had actually gotten so far as to likes the cover to bring tremendous trees over and so we had copper tubing they were making motion and saying quit. mainly they drag it to the hostel. so drove through our business recreation officer is like a networking college for criminals of the month or any of the guys in prison are there trying to learn how to do crime better and this is just a school for criminals to learn more criminals and that's not an exaggeration 2011 study from ohio university showed that after spending time in prison continuing to engage in crime scene their criminal earns increase on an average by a $1000.00 a year jodie lewin is the executive director of the prison. diversity project there are thousands and thousands of people in the system all they want is the

opportunity to get a good education and to be hired by somebody where they can have a job where they have a meaningful work and a livable wage in the late eighty's early ninety's there were python 315 programs in the prison system nationwide took my dad's advice been saying for a long time look for some computer training is there any computer training in there because he knows you know i finally when i got to san quentin i said do you have any any computer training so it was great because i mean those who know the least obey the best you know and there's this rebellious kind of spirit in their stand still a big quantified self want to right now so there's this rebellious is you know i could actually size my brain they can stop you from doing that so we really got this cried about our education particularly in that particular program in class and it was an honor to be able to fight the system as you might say by educating each other and then see me graduate that 8 years later and i was really

proud of me and our relationship just blossomed just became so deep and so so meaningful and dad was everything to me. and it was just 2 weeks after i graduated that he died. moved to this. day and sure. they will miss. and he says. you. know. room. when i sign this crime bill we together are taking a big step toward bringing the laws of our land back into line with the values of our people in 1904. congress passed the violent crime control and law enforcement

act which among many other things barred people in prison from receiving. most of those programs folded almost overnight to be realistic everyone should have a college education or it's already been open too much. but if they have skills such as welding walton on the shore students from all the moment seeing guys go through the wall and programming or making $3040.00 on their own streets and are writing letters back to the instructor over here those are. these guys new jobs so there will be probably still going to turn into the go you know during the drugs and that type of thing so. what are the true critical reason number one why people are ending up in prison is for a lack of really quality educational opportunity the american public in general has been so profoundly brainwashed into thinking that what we're doing with our prison system is somehow normal or rational or. just.

i find that overwhelming and exhausting i mean because i'm the more you spend time in. inside and the more content you have of people who've been directly affected the more deprived the. appearance. out of every inmates are physically attacked every 6. lot of the violence you see in prison is not an expression of the character of the people in prison it's people reacting to the situation and this is something so few people understand if you took a 1000 people off the street and put them. he. would end up committing violence because of the situation that they've been placed in 5 years into as an older inmate whose nickname was the devil want to be ready to take the blame for a knife that guards at the yard but reggie refused later would say. that the devil was going to kill him or he had to kill the double. one about the situation any

other way and no matter how many. this was the only thing that could have happened it don't sit right with me because i never been in the 1st place. you turned me into. this whole time and you turned me into a murderer because i had to after that they put terry confinement and he went from a life sentence without possibility of parole to facing the death penalty. so he gets put on trial for the death penalty case and his lawyer starts looking into his original case and gives me a call and says you know i think this guy is innocent of what he went to prison for the 1st books and the 2nd reason besides the prison was this miracle to happen to be a book. about the homicide division of the book documented

right along with the detective. this homicide investigators 1st night that she was on the job that they. every night she investigated the murder she would ultimately arrest reggie for and we're flipping through the book and reading it and all the stuff in it those never disclosed the defense that's all documented that all indicates pretty clearly that reggie's innocent but it would still take the innocence project 10 years to get bad she out of prison. as the u.s. economy was booming growing numbers of people were made homeless. you can work 40 hours in a week and still not have enough to get housing everybody believes america still has the lead up to the reality of we're not financially equality and the lack of affordable housing for a living minimum wage gave many people no choice. that's been a problem with the city always turn around and told me stay away i don't miss. the

food if there is no answer because yes the reports we sourced the most vulnerable were abandoned on the streets to become invisible comes. was a pandemic no certainly no borders just blind to nationalities. as a muddled up with the we don't have the facts in world to. judge a. commentary crisis with this system to. we can do better we should. everyone is contributing your own way but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever the challenges create the response has been much so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we are in it

together. a week of hostilities between armenia and azerbaijan brings devastation to going to go on a kind of region and beyond t.v. reports from the front line. massive explosions in the very center of the city 250 millimeter caliber it is a massive rocket. russia and france a syrian militants are pouring into that complex. straight accusations of a former nurse and. i'm not here to call out his lies everybody knows he's a liar and there's nothing smart about you joe what do you. know your number 2 you know. the 1st presidential debate.