welcome to your voice a new jersey public policy program at the unitarian universalist legislative ministry of new jersey u u element j is dedicated to providing a voice of justice equality and compassion series of educational programs walks floor important social as issues facing new jersey including economic justice mass incarceration environmental sustainability immigration and other important issues today we're exploring mass incarceration which is commonly know as the new jim crow this term was coined by michelle alexander who authored the book the new jim crow mass incarceration in an age of color blindness our guest today include alexander shalom a senior staff attorney of the american civil liberties union in new jersey and in that role alex litigates cases on issues that disproportionately affect people of color he advocates both in and out of the court room throughout new jersey on issues such as accountable accountable police practices just criminal systems and living conditions for those incarcerated our second guest is attorney rosanne scotty rosanne is the new jersey state director of the drug policy alliance she founded the prevention point philadelphia harm reduction walk project providing free legal assistance for drug users and sex workers in philadelphia in two thousand and fourteen she received an award for outstanding achievement in hiv prevention long time racial and social justice activist he has recently been involved in advocacy addressing discriminatory racial and economic practices in the criminal court system alex facing our society today that call for urgent action these include immigration economic inequality and poverty voting rights gun violence to mention just a few what makes criminal justice reform an issue why is it important and what may its relation be to other issues well i would say what makes it important is its relation to all these other issues criminal justice reform and in particular drug policy reform impacts so many areas in terms of economic a quote in quality in terms of racial justice in terms of the criminalization of pregnant women that we're seeing increasingly across the country and you know in terms of voting rights you know when you look today at so many here in new jersey between fourteen and sixteen percent of african american men can at any given time can't vote because they are on parole or probation and you know this is one of the things that leads people to call the drug war in our current mass incarceration the new jim crow so i think it is the intersection with all that that makes it so important i think it's also the absolute magnitude of it right the united states has five percent of the world's population a quarter of the world's incarcerated population and you know that's two point three million people but that's not just two point three million people lives disrupted that's two point three million families lives thrown into turmoil two point three million communities destroyed and so it's the absolute scope of it it's also the fact that it doesn't impact all americans on the same level right you have people of color making up about thirty percent of the united states population but sixty percent of the prison population so there are all those reasons it matters but also to reinforce resins point you know everything famously talked about when he was condemning the war in vietnam he said the bombs dropped in vietnam exploded all and what that meant was money spent on the war in vietnam is money not being spent on programs of social of up to every dollar we spend on mass incarceration is d this and to what extent has this been this has has been one of the interesting things is that if you look at the low rates of incarceration in this country for the over the last twenty years from the early one nine hundred they were up until the one nine hundred seventy s flat our rates of incarceration are flat we got to the mid one nine hundred seventy s and all of a sudden the rates of incarceration went off the charts and i don't think it's a coincidence that this happened right at the time at the height of the civil rights movement when so many whites had been one voting rights and access to economic opportunities and all these types of things and then you saw this phenomenon of mass incarceration and the new jim crow come in and were a lot of those gains particularly in poor communities of color and so there is absolutely a connection to this and you know it's gotten to the point where it's we have become infamous in terms of this around the world when people look at our rates of incarceration and the disproportionate impact it has on communities of color this is something that in order to hold our heads prison where is one in every eighteen african americans is in prison right now that's an astonishing fact the fact that an african american male has a one in three chance of being in prison at some point is life is a mark of national respond that is you know on its face i would say laughable you know we know from government study after government study that african americans and latinos and whites use drugs for instance at exactly the same rates but the rate at which african americans and latinos are arrested incarcerated the war so the percentage of whites that are arrested incarcerated and so the disproportionate impact is not a result of more crime report drug use it's a result of our policing and our incarceration policies i actually take a position that i don't think we can ignore the fact that poverty and despair contribute to crime sometimes but i think roseanne hits the nail on the head by talking about drug use marijuana that's like the easiest place to start we know when you start a drug policy alliance or a c l u figures this government study figures indicate that drug use marijuana use among african americans and white people is virtually identical and has been for decades now but we know that if you're an african american in the united states you're three almost four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use you know the new jersey your two point eight times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use so what we see are these policing policies things like stop and frisk things like broken windows policing that call for the the people are a force and of low level crimes like marijuana possession and like other crimes and those aren't happening in princeton or in montclair or another affluent is you've spoken about the numbers of americans in the prison system who have been incarcerated and how that's grown usually since the victories of the civil rights movement why exactly has this happened and what is the role of the war on drugs during this period and what made the short among term affects be on individuals families communities and societies a home you've already spoken to some extent this is there anything more we can say about that and its impact on society as a whole i don't think you can talk about mass incarceration in the united states with any credibility without starting and ending with the war on drugs the war on crime has by and large  war on drugs and so to to dismantle mass incarceration you need to start by ending the war on drugs i think all reasonable people who look at the system would agree with that but that's not enough we in addition to this proliferation of incarceration based on this hyper policing of drug use what we've also seen is cynical politicians being elected on these tough on crime platforms and these tough on crime platforms simply aren't compatible with my world view and i think the world view of most unitarian universalist which is to believe these things this kind of lock them up and throw away the key philosophy you have to believe that people are beyond redemption you have to believe that people are defined by the worst thing that they've ever done and  that's not how i look at the world and i don't think that's how a lot of people look at the world and i think we need to start rolling back some of those are sentencing practices policing practices and so on i think that's something that really goes when you look at families and you talk about the effect on fan you know children who have a parent incarcerated are many times more likely to end up being incarcerated themselves than children who don't have a pair and carson rated people who have been incarcerated make over their lifetimes about forty percent less in a lifetime wages than people who haven't been incarcerated and in poor communities where there is mass incarceration in places like newark where there's such a high rate of people being arrested and put through the criminal justice system you know that's one thing that's lost money for that would be supporting those families supporting communities you know paying taxes to the city all the things that we need to have to have strong families and communities so it directly impacts our families and communities in very real  this is before they've been convicted and what you would think that the most dangerous people the people most likely to flee those are the people who own the other people would be out but that's not true the drug policy alliance commissioned a study and we learn that when be about fifteen thousand people in jail in new jersey almost three quarters of them are pretrial the tv's meaning they've been convicted of nothing and about half of them haven't been charged with a violent crime haven't been charged with a weapons offense and haven't been charged with a sex offense they're simply could there are not not the dangerous people they're the poor people we know that there are more than a thousand people in jail because they couldn't come up with twenty five hundred dollars to get out and so the recognition a but also some strange bedfellows governor christie the attorney general the county prosecutors the office of the public defender what everyone agreed is we need transition from a system that makes determinations of release or incarceration opportunity to reduce part of the our problems and that's incarceration it's not enough i'm it's going to take some some real hard work to implement it the right way but that's certainly a step in the right direction and that's actually a something that's going to come to the voters in november there's constitutional amendment that is its passage is required in order to effectuate this bill and that will come to the voters in november can you explain why it's it's necessary and well so new jersey's constitution hundred eighty nine to forty nine has provided that all people charged with crimes have a right to bail in the hole but capital cases in capital cases used to be a kind of broad category and fortunately we whittle that down and then we would all it down to nothing  and so that meant that everyone has a constitutional right to al and you think that's a great thing constitutional rights are good like those and we like ben o b l is a good thing also the problem is it was a right in name only so a judge could look at someone a poor person charged with a crime and say you have a constitutional right to bail your bail will be set at one million dollars and this person has no chance of making a million dollar bill i used to be a public defender and i represented lots and lots of clients the of the truly most risk and that's what we are supposed to chill and this is also something when we talk about you know what folks can do to help make the system better this was a two year fight to get this  passed and i know robert hertzberg you were at the state house and many many community groups faith leaders faith communities came to tell their legislators that they wanted this to pass they wanted the opportunity to vote on it and you know time after time it was incredibly inspiring to see the rooms at the state house filled with people from all walks of life making their voices heard and that's so so important we realize not everybody can get to the state house but picking up the phone and calling your local assembly person or senator and telling them how you feel about a particular issue if it's veil reform or mass incarceration and generally saying you know if any bills come before you that increase penalties we don't need any more increased penalties that is huge legislators really pay attention when their constituents reach out to them and i think people need to make their voices heard more on these  statistics here in new jersey over the last twenty five years our prison population went from about eight thousand to about twenty four thousand that means it tripled the percentage of people who are incarcerated for mandatory minimums went from about eleven percent to seventy one percent and that's another piece of the not just the number of people we put in but how long we keep people and spending on corrections that is incarceration has grown  over our spending on say education and when alex talks about every dollar we're spending on mass incarceration is money we could be spending on education and other things in our communities to support our families and communities that really goes to the heart of that when you're spending you know we went from spending about two hundred and eighty million dollars a year to spending about over a one point three billion a year on incarceration that's that's money that comes out of taxpayers pockets and could be going to programs that they care more about the thirty seven thousand people in prison or jail with new jersey if you know that you were two point eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession the fact that alabama is worse x what are some of the what is it going to take to make this go away completely what is it going to solve this problem what is it going to take in new jersey to make mass incarceration the new jim as a health issue and not a criminal justice issue and you know i have some hope when you look at things right now our approach to the overdose crisis that we have here in new jersey has been mostly a public health approach and again supported by a lot of on likely allies governor christie signed a good samaritan bill so people aren't arrested when they call for help in an overdose situation he said signed the same bill which allowed for increased access to laaksonen which is the antidote  overdoses and has done a lot of work and get into the hands of police and first responders and there's community groups that are now providing the locks so on and so that was a public health response we didn't say hey we have a situation where people are being harmed by opioids and what do we do about it let's have some more penalties let's have some more mandatory minimum is what at least so far we've done is to take much more of a public health approach to it and that's what we really need to shift this from a criminal justice perspective to a public health perspective on these issues completely but there are also things out there that are legitimate criminal justice issues and the question is how do we treat them and are we treating them with a kind of a humane heart or with a cold heart and i think part of it is just recognizing the fundamental humanity ever comes for the criminal justice system and that's going to be true in our sentencing laws and everything in between but i want to get back to this idea of the strange bedfellows because it's not just what we've seen in new jersey it's happening nationally where you and some of the people who used to beat the drum loudest about locking people up for whatever reason have come and said we need to start talking about x a shift in mindset that i think is very important and i think gives me some hope in this kind of work filled with the spare that we are at least moving in the right direction with some people finally starting to recognize and whether it's because their heart calls them to do the right thing were there philosophy on spending cause them to do the right thing the problem with locking up lots of people for a really long time at other than the moral problem is that it starts to become expensive and that's why police are you would expect to see this you see some of the reforms some of the most progressive criminal justice reforms have come from the strangest places we do a lot of work on solitary confinement and maybe even which has the lowest incarceration rate in the united states has done great work on solitary confinement but so is mississippi mississippi has done really progressive things on solitary confinement not enough let's be clear in the united states at any given day fifty thousand people wake up in solitary confinement that feels yankee stadium that's a horrifying thought put in juveniles in solitary confinement at rikers island which is which is really you don't have to travel to you know have to travel to new york for that that's something we've been working on there was a nine organizations that filed a petition with the juvenile justice commission last july july two thousand and thirteen trying to get them to end the practice of punishing children i walk in now in small rooms you would think it's kind of an elementary position but we haven't gotten there yet in new jersey i think we're making some progress but we're certainly not there yet and i understand that psychological studies have indicated that this is mentally very harmful and psychologically very harmful and can have long lasting effect to keep somebody in solitary confinement so form of torture  brain science on it is totally clear for everyone but particularly for vulnerable populations like juveniles or the mentally ill right yes so i think we can conclude that something can be done because something has been done already but there's a lot more work to do what would you advise individuals and organizations i know the new solutions campaign has a coalition put together of many organizations in information on our website go and look get involved to your faith community one of the very inspiring things that has come out of michelle alexander's book is that faith communities across the country have taken up reading the book and doing days of action around the book and getting involved in various criminal justice reform activities so you know those folks are out there and you can ask you know at whatever your community group is or your faith community you know in your city look for groups that are working on this and get involved and they will know whether it's at the city level or at the state level had to get involved and what the opportunities are depending on what your particular issue if you're particularly passionate about solitary confinement that is something that the done fabulous work on if you're particularly interested in drug policy we both work on that issue but you know everyone will have something that really grabs them because there are so many aspects to this horrible war on drugs that  get involved make your voice heard joined with some other people because inside it well there's no shortage of things to be done what we need to do is convince policymakers that even though people who are incarcerated don't have a actual voice they don't lose their right to being passed a reality it's a lot of your work and time and sweat i know that when and that's what i want to thank you so much for that thank you i think we've run out of time unfortunately mike i thank you for now for your wonderful moderation of really some insightful questions and helping the viewers get a better understanding of what this is all about because they will be asked to be voting in november it and a half hour a segment but we hope one of the things that you said was very important is that we help our listeners will continue to educate themselves to become involved in the book get involved in communities create coalitions of like minded people who are concerned about these issues and work together and talk to your congressman and your legislators and let them know that the present system is not ok and it's very detrimental to the lives of many many people especially people  i'd like to just again say that these programs are a service of unitarian universalism legislative ministry of new jersey it is a nonprofit faith based organization supported by our unitarian universalist congregation throughout new