any system that incarcerates people at the rate that we do in our country and our state -- the implications that this has had in minority communities, 70 people -- 70% of the people that we incarcerate -- this is a system based on punitive measures. this indicates that we have to fix the system and that is why i am here today. we have to fix this. >> john ray is a direct question. if you are presented with evidence that the police officers have committed perjury, or if you have this attorney in your office who has hidden evidence in the pursuit of a conviction, will you take action against this? >> we are aware that we're looking at many cases --

any system that incarcerates people at the rate that we do in our country and our state -- the implications that this has had in minority communities, 70 people -- 70% of the people that we incarcerate -- this is a system based on punitive measures. this indicates that we have to fix the system and that is why i am here today. we have to fix this.

so i'll tell the incarcerated people, if you get out of here and never come back to a place like this and don't tell the young people how to never go to a place like this, you're still a thief. i owe people. that's why i go to talk to people. but my disease is first off wrong, theirs guaranteed wrong. made that way was i. first thought wrong, inappropriate, impolite, incorrect, cruel, criminal, abusive, petty, angry, poor, first thought wrong, absolutely. first thought wrong. 12 minutes, that's what i get? 12? second thought was i'll take two and make a difference. first thought wrong, sometimes second thought wrong grr! sometimes it takes me 15 minutes to get to a healthy thought. sometimes longer. sometimes four days of long, wrong, and strong. i went through t.s.a. recently in san jose where i live. i was born and raised in oakland, i went to jail in livermore. here is the part. normal people don't laugh at jail there. i worked there. god bless you if you worked there. i couldn't do that job for two days in a row. i can do it for an hour. an ex-felon who is an extraordinary father.

people now in the u.s. and probably here in the u.k. soon too are going to be incarceratedfor private profit and this this creates an incentive to make poor people criminalize them you know just briefly you mentioned that grilling in westminster this is going to have in the next week or so do you think the british parliament could intervene and they could terminate this contract . well it's a difficult thing to do to the olympics that this final stage will soar towards one when the olympics actually happen yes that's a very difficult thing for them to do but i'd like to see a bit of spine from our parliament to say that these are not appropriate people to be doing that a lot of people involved in the olympics as you probably know who aren't really appropriate such as the dow chemical company who when they bought union carbide really took on the responsibility for the deaths of four thousand people in a gas cloud in india and the maiming of countless more who were poisoned by the by the dow chemical company i think there's been a real complete kind of mismatch in this olympi

public policy, working with state governments and justice and lower in corp. -- incarceration and working with other people. a variety of settings. i do not believe that incarceration has taken us where we need to be. i believe the war on drugs has been a failure. when we institutionalize people over extended periods of time, we take low-level offenders in the early stages and harden them and we send them to the university of crime. by the time they get out of prison, they become a bigger social problem. where i come from, whether it is the [unintelligible] i am on the side of saying we need to reform our system and reduce the number of people we send to jail or prison. we need to reserve that space for people that are truly dangerous and have no way of fixing themselves. we have to realize there will be some people that will go to prison because the rest of us need to have some people in prison in order for us to be safe but that is a small minority. there are many other solutions out there whether it is someone who has engaged in drugs or has a drug addiction. or engaging in some other low- level crime.

a lot of formerly incarcerated people have made a decent living legally. he can do it too.made that determination, and maybe if you're apart, he can focus on that. what i know for sure is if you remain in this situation, you will grow to resent him. he'll probably grow to resent you as well. it cannot survive like this when you're this young for that long. you want to get married. no reason to break up, if you know his heart is in the right place but financial issues can be stressful and can be deal breakers in marriages. so you need to deal with it now in a realistic manner. love is beautiful, but maintaining a home and raising a family on love alone is hard. a price tag cannot be put on that feeling you have. would you rather have a good man not making money, or a wealthy one who doesn't treat you well? i hope i brought up questions maybe you haven't thought of before. at the end of the day, why not live apart and let him focus on getting his life together. >> it's very complicated question, obviously you're not in the middle of their relationship. you only know what she

there's more than 2.3 million people who are incarcerated. over 7 million under the supervision of the criminal justice system. of those people incarcerated, more than 60% are minority ethnicity. two-thirds in for drug offenses are people of color. those statistics not just the one that captures the nation's attention, it's the mass statistics that we'll be talking about. how we want to think about it. we call this new frontiers to address racial imbalance in the united states. our hope is we will talk to you about the best research that's out there. the best of what we know and what question be doing. we're going to start with the first panel on policing and then we'll have panel on prosecution and then mass incarceration and sentencing. our keynote comes at the end. she's wonderful to make time for us. she's going to close out our events at the end of the day. she says the book is intended to stimulate a much needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating a racial hierarchy in the united states

with and we can create jobs for people who have been historically underemployee or formerly incarcerated people and immigrants. we can think about job creation strategies that really do held to address the leveling of the playing field that has been historically embedded over our history and over time and there's a tremendous unity and coming together. more than ever that we share as americans in this country today. from that place of shared experience and understanding one another's stories as part of the 99% we can build a 99% movement in this country that helps us do a fundamental reset and helps us to reshape the economy and all our visions. there is room enough and resources enough and talent enough and solutions enough that all of us can see our hopes and dreams realized in the american democracy but it is up to us to build that type of movement and build those types of solutions that actually address all of these things. [applause] >> all right, everyone. we have just a few short months to make a very strong statement about the country that we are, the degree to which we won't turn back

our deficit, we are going to continue to keep providing unemployment insurance and continue incarcerating peoplel be within our budget and continue providing food stamps and continue with detention centers. we are already continuing with this stuff. let's take that money and put it to a program that can get people trained and so they can transition from the public sector to the non-profit sector or private sector and grow the economy. it is such shortsighted thinking. we we don't to increase deficit for a year but instead we are going to increase it for 50 years because we have young people that never learned skills. >> this is a show where occasionally people can lose their tempers. >> i'm losing it. >> as well you should. jonathan, go ahead. >> every time you said -- everything you said makes sense is right and true. but the other half of the equation is to get folks to re -- folks here in washington to reprioritize are going to have to convince them that it makes more sense to spend the money now on these worthwhile efforts than to spend money later and as we know in this city, no one wants t

engage the city and county in supporting us and looking at ways to move away from the over incarceration of people and look at ways to reform their behavior. the efforts we have undertaken when george was appointed to the position -- jeff asked him to come to the public defender's office to have a question and answer session, which he did, and i attended with him. we are told that was the first time that had ever happened, and we reciprocated by asking jeff to meet with the district attorneys in our office. we have begun a dialogue that both sides think is very healthy. we have identified a number of issues that we think require further exploration, so we are creating working group's staff by the people from the d.a.'s office and the public defender's office to look at improving things like discovery, which is an important issue, making sure that we have reciprocal discovery and that it is transparent and complete. looking at workers from collaborative courts, looking at solutions besides incarceration, dealing with mental health and behavioral health issues, rather than using the jails as a solut

so there's more than 2.3 million people who are incarcerated. over 7 million under the supervision of the criminal justice system. of those people who are incarcerated more than 60% of them are racial or ethnic minorities. one in every ten black men in their 30s is in prison or jail every day. two 30s of the people who are in prison for drug offenses are people of color. and those statistics, not just the incident one antidote that captures the nation's attention, it's mass statistics that we'll be talking about today and how the different institutions of government lead to those statistics, what they can do about it, how we want to think about it. we call this new frontiers to discuss racial imbalance in the united states because the hope is we'll talk to you today about the best research that's out there and best of what we know and what we can be doing about these problems. and we're going to start that with this first panel on policing and then after lunch we're going to have panels on prosecution and then mass incarceration and sentencing. a

are there certain people who would be better subject to medical treatment instead of incarceration. are there certainly people who we actually think would be better off in prison than not being in prison? those types of decisions, i think, are going to be much more useful coming out of the neuroscience in the near term. in the long term, maybe we can get to the point where we make individualized decision-making, but so far it hasn't actually panned out. >> to all of you, do you think that it would be appropriate to keep this out of the courtroom, for instance, until there is a lot more certainty, or should we be using it now and run the risk that we're reaching potentially wrong conclusions? >> i'll jump in first on that and say it's already here. so the idea that we should wait for the science to get better, i think, is just, it's too late for that. so the cat is already out of the bag. the question is what do you do now that it's in the courtroom. well, we have dualing experts. we have judges sitting in a gate keeping role who have to decide whether or not the evidence should be ad