so i'm here to talk my talk about my book locking up our own and i thought i'd start by talking about what brought me to to want to write this book and there's two reasons really the first one has nothing to do with the criminal system at all and that's i don't know if any of you are like this but i'm the kind of person who when i go to a movie and if there have been no african american characters in the movie at the end of the movie when somebody says to me you know what did you think of that movie my answer before i can get into details of the movie my first question is always well where were the black characters and i feel that way about about film i feel that way about literature i feel that way about art i feel that way about history i feel that way about workplaces i feel that way about law so i knew that i wanted to write a book that had african american characters front and central in the narrative and then the other reason is really very much has to do with the criminal justice system so this is a book that has a lot of history and has a lot of stories and one of those stories involves a young man by the name of brandon brandon was fifteen years old he was my client in juvenile court in washington d c mid one nine and i had taken the job because i viewed this work as the civil rights work of my generation my parents had met in snick the student nonviolent coordinating committee tony orange you out here yeah he's here so he was he he met my dad and worked with my dad in los angeles and snake and as anybody else here who's who's involved in snake involved in the movement in the one nine hundred sixty s in any way ok well my parents met in that organization and in that movement and i felt like now a generation later i had opportunities that were impossible to imagine from my father's generation you heard by i was clerking on the supreme court i had the chance to be this public defender but at the same time it was apparent to me that not everybody had prospered in that way we didn't have the term mass incarceration then hadn't come up with it yet but we are ready knew that the united states had passed russia and south africa to become the world's largest jailer we already knew that the united states was five percent of the world's population had twenty five percent of its prisoners we already knew because the sentencing project had reported it that by them in one nine hundred ninety s one in three young african american men was under criminal justice supervision so that's why i had taken the job and i was in court asking brandon asking that brandon be put on probation he had pled guilty to possession of a gun possession of a small amount of marijuana and now he was facing sent letters from a football coach and from teachers attesting to his character his mother and grandmother were there in court they had been there for every court hearing they were ready to take him home brandon like almost all of my clients was african american the prosecutor in the case was asking that he be locked up she said that he needed to be set a lesson for possession of that gun he could hurt somebody she wanted him to go to oak hill the prosecutor was also african american ok ill the place she wanted him sent was a dungeon this city didn't admit that but we all knew it the washington post had written story after story about what a hell hole that was no functioning school no job training programs no drug treatment some things on paper but nothing for real the judge who had to make the decision judge curtis walker also african american so he looks out of the courtroom he's got this young black man facing sentencing these two african american lawyers arguing for opposite sides of the case and he leans back and he looks in the brain and he says son mr foreman has been telling me that you've had a hard life and that you deserve a second chance well let me tell you about heart let me tell you about jim crow let me tell you about segregation see the judge had grown up in that era he knew what it was like and he proceeded to tell brain and as he was wrapping up he said so here's the thing people march fought and died for you to be free dr king die for you to be free and i tell you this he didn't die for you to be runnin in gun in  carrying on and embarrassing your community and your family so i hope mr foreman is right i hope you turn it around but right now son actions have consequences and your consequences ok they locked him up i went back and visited brand in that the cell block three young african american men in there with him and ever since that day i thought about the fact that to put it mildly not everybody in this community green agreed with me and my colleagues that fighting over incarceration was the civil rights issue of our generation the judge had taken the same history that had motivated me to become a public defender and he had flipped it and used it as a reason to justify not only this a lecture but a juvenile prison sentence and the judge wasn't alone the city council that passed the laws under which brennan was sentenced i was a majority african american city council eleven of thirteen members in the original one in seventy five the police chief was black the police department was majority black and so it occurred to me then that somebody needed to write a history a story hopefully with nuance with empathy with compassion recognizing the pressure that people were under but somebody really needed to write a story about how it was that this first generation of african american elected officials police officers prosecutors judges had ended up in many cases following the same choices the same path that the nation had fallen what had we been doing in our community to end up locking up so many of our own and so that's the question for me the question of the book now i could stop here and say ok th is in the book let's you know go by was ya came out here and they told me also saw it for about thirty thirty five minutes so i can't and here let me give you kind of the highlights of of the argument the first thing that we have to s because heroin was the crack before there was crack in washington d c in one nine hundred sixty three they tested everybody that was entering the d c jail for heroin three percent tested positive hundred sixty nine it was forty five percent and it wasn't just d c cleveland memphis chicago ople in los angeles new york similar numbers the homicide rate in c tripled in the one nine hundred sixty s nationally double and it's not just the numbers it's not it's the statistics one of the things i did in my research is i went and i found i looked at letters from after american elected officials who had retired and it given their papers over to to various libraries around the d c area and when you look through that material what you see is this pain and suffering from citizens who are writing to their elected officials i came across a letter after letter of people saying i feel like a prisoner in my own home i feel like a stranger on my streets i can't go outside because they're selling drugs on the corner i can't leave my kid in the playground after school because they're shooting you have to do something you have to protect us what has happened to our community now who's receiving these letters this gets to the second part of the story the people that are receiving these letters are this first generation of african american elected officials nationally there's an eight hundred percent increase in black elected officials in the hundred seventy s after the decline of formal jim crow still too few but a lot more than there had been these folks and many of them came out of the movement a lot of them were from the south and all of them understood the history of under protection under enforcement of the law in african american communities chapter two of my book is called black lives matter because they didn't use the term but this was the idea this was the motivation these were folks that they remembered when you do you didn't call the police in a black neighborhood when there was a there was a fight or a crime or robbery because they were going to come home and if they did they were just going to make matters worse they were remember when sheriff's mostly in the south but not just in the south in cahoots with the klan they said it wasn't murder one was a dead black person that's just another dead black person and they did not use the words black person so they remember this history they come into office they are bound and determined to protect these lives to make black lives matter to use everything at their disposal to protect a community that for hundreds of years since brought over as slaves had been denied that protection but why police and why prosecutors and why prisons walk protect black life that way this gets to the third big piece of the story which is that the people that i'm writing about these african american elected officials police officers prosecutors judges from officers parole officers they are not acting without constraints they're not acting without limits this is a story i said up front that i wanted to write a story about with black people front and center as decision makers but any story of african american actions an agency is also a story of the constraints and the limitations on that agency some of those constraints are historical right the folks that i'm writing about black elected officials because of a history of racism and white supremacy means that they have to protect communities that have been disenfranchised that have been deemed us realize that have been under educated that have been stripped of their wealth that have been segregated and isolated and have been ignored those are the neighborhoods there are sponsible for protecting and the other constraint is a combination of politics and racism fear officials that i'm writing about our local officials their city black elect a black political office holders are overwhelmingly concentrated in cities and cities are important but they're not the only thing that matter for policy and in particular the folks that i'm writing about they don't control the federal government so you see time and time again in my research i see people who say we want police we want prosecutors some people even say we want prisons but they also want housing and jobs and education and drug treatment and mental health programs and parks that are full of syringes and they don't get those things because they're making pleas to a national government that won't hear them they say over and over again following congressman conyers from michigan we want a marshall plan for urban america we want this nation to treat black communities the way america treated europe after world war two and reinvest and develop and revitalize but we didn't get that the people that i'm writing about didn't get what they got was law enforcement so those are some of the big arguments of the book the big points about how it is that we got here and i want to spend a little bit of time especially in this community because i know that this is a place where more so than some other places that i go to talk where people are kind of pushing forward there's a kind of a reform momentum that that you see there's a lot of things that you're doing here in seattle and king county which are which are not being replicated across the country and so i want to talk a little bit about what this history that i'm writing about what it means for contemporary political debates debates about the future of our criminal justice system and the first thing that i wan the first thing that i want this if this book is only used for one thing in our national debate this is the this is the thing that i pray that it will be used for because one of and i want to and i know the  professor from princeton is coming in she's going to be talking about black lives matter movement in in a couple weeks so one of the things that comes up whenever there is a protest about police violence from the right so  quote rudy giuliani in this book but i could have quoted many other people too is african americans protest some active police violence and then rudy giuliani or somebody like him says how come they only care about police violence how come there's never any complaints about so called black on black crime he doesn't say so call but i'll say now there's a lot of answers to that question right not least you know of course we hold law enforcement to a higher standard than we do criminal gangs but that's not the main point the main point is that this is a two hundred forty page rebuttal to the argument that african americans have not cared about violence in black communities black communities and their leaders have been consumed by the issue and have always thought of it as a civil rights issue so the next time you hear a giuliani tape say that shove the book in their direction but beyond that beyond that i want to talk about what we can do to get out of the crisis the human rights crisis that is it is mass incarceration and what i think some of this history tells us about what to do i think overarching message of my book is that it's so tempting to look for a particular moment when we got mass incarceration rate is so tempting to identify a speech from nixon or reagan or or a particular executive action but the truth is that's not how th system was built this system was built instead by a series of micro acts some of them tiny imperceptible across fifty states and the federal government in the district of columbia three thousand counties and over a forty and fifty year period and if everybody moves in that direction right if everybody from police officers to prosecutors to judges to probation officers to brawl officers if everyone gets ten fifteen twenty percent harsher almost without even seeing it if everybody does that at the same time over fifty years we get two point two million people in prison and seven million people under criminal justice supervision and we can't even count how many people who have lost their right to vote and lost other basic rights because of criminal convictions we get hit with a series of micro acts and they're sometimes acts that are even coming from well intentioned people so one of the folks that i wrote about in the book  a lot of examples of this in the book but one that i'll share with you is a guy named dave clark he's actually the one of the mostly this book is most about african american officials is one of the white guys who gets a lot of  a lot of airtime in the book he's civil rights activist went to howard law school gets elected to d c council he's not a drug lord he supports legalization of marijuana in the one nine hundred seventy s then he becomes the chief of the city council and he gets letters from citizens these letters that i was describing you a lot of them about used this is the language of the of the letter i don't endorse it but you know there's a junkie out in front of my house my apartment my business you got to do something about it he takes those letters he forwards them to government agency then he gets a letter back from the chief of the government agency and he then forwards that response to the service and so th this is great service constituent service you write your city council member they make the request they let you know what they've done but here's the thing this guy is not a drug warrior does he send the complaint to the department of addiction services to the partment of mental health to the department of health know he sent it to the police department because he was constrained by his own imagination we've all become constrained by a lack of imagination we understand things that we should think of as public health issues we understand them as criminal justice issues including people stop strung out on the corner in front of somebodies business so this is an example when i'm talking about of the micro acts over fifty years across systems that bill mass incarceration we're going to have to dismantle it the same way there isn't going to be a single action there's not going to be you know a reform oriented president and attorney general not even to mention our current ones are ever going to solve this for us so what do we do one of the first things and this is a lesson that's less crucial for ya because compared to most places this is an example where you're doing pretty well but we need right by comparison i'm sure there's i'm sure that what i'm about to say that there's further there's more that can be done but local prosecutors county and city prosecutors are the most powerful single actor in our criminal justice system everybody you know jeff sessions are getting a lot of attention right now but remember he's in charge of twelve percent of our prison population eighty eight percent is state county and local and this past election back in november for the first time in my lifetime people ran for prosecutor on a campaign of we're locking up too many people in america the drug wars run amok my predecessor participated in wrongful convictions you didn't run this not how you ever ran for prosecutor in my lifetime a guy in corpus christi texas texas now defense attorney with the words not guilty tattooed on his chest ran for prosecutor and won reformers won in florida in alabama in colorado in in houston in corpus christi texas an hour ago i got the best criminal justice news of the day from my standpoint a guy that was just a race they anybody from philadelphia went to the polls in philadelphia today there was a guy a civil rights lawyer first of all again no civil rights lawyer ever ran for d a in my lifetime until this past year he was he threw his hat in the ring with two months it was it was going to be a regular mainstream lock them up types running against each other prosecutor he saw what happened last november and he said on their end he ran an anti mass incarceration platform they just voted he won thirty he wanted he beat he won by thirty six percent of the vote in a seven person so he's the democratic nominee and in philadelphia  that's a general election so he's going to be the next day and now philadelphia voters have to hold him accountable because a lot of people run and then they turn around but this is getting involved in local politics and getting people who are progressive elected at the local level is the most important thing we can do the other side of it is the defense so this book and a lot of ways is a lot of love letter to public defenders there's story after story of valiant public defenders i hadn't even realized this but somebody said to me you know i like a judge who commented on the book recently said i really like how you you criticize everybody in the book but you're fair to everybody and when he said that i realized that he was actually wrong about one thing i don't criticize public defenders at all we're like the heroes in this book but then the sad part right so two percent of our spawn of two percent of what we spend in criminal justice spending in this country is spent on public defender two percent one of the stories that i tell in the book i tell lots of stories about work that my colleagues and i did one of the stories i tells about a young man who had been convicted of a violent crime but he had a really really difficult background his mother had been a drug addict had a been in him to the streets and as and and he had a lot of potential in particular he was incredible working with his hands and so i got him into this job training program but the only way i was going to get the judge who who was the same judge that i told you about in that opening story that judge curtis walker the only way he was going ever to agree to let this guy who had pled guilty to armed robbery to go to this program was if the victim of the crime said he agreed so i spent hours at the victim's home so i tell the story in the book and a public defender came up to me a couple few weeks ago and said you know that's really inspiring but you need to understand that i have three hundred cases at a time and you had more time to talk to the victim in that case than i have to talk to my client normally right so until we change for the next time there's a ballot measure or other opportunity to vote for increased funding for public defenders in your community that's got to be a critical item now that's a criminal justice system but i want to talk in my last couple of minutes about what people can do because most people in the room you're voters yes but most people aren't full time thinking about the criminal justice system but we all one of the big arguments in my book is that we all built this either actively or because of we were complicit because we were silent we allowed our tax dollars to be used for this and we all have an obligation one of the things that you can do that people should think about is most folks in this room are an employee or an employer most people work in a company what's your company's policy about hiring people that have criminal convictions the ford foundation does amazing work on criminal justice reform they recently were presenting their work at a prison in new york and after they did the whole present ation and the c e o of ford was there dan walker and they ation and one of the guys who was locked up said that's amazing crees intention i'm really inspired i just have one question when i get out with a ford foundation hire me and they couldn't answer that question but to their credit they went back they found out the answer was no they scrub their h r policies and they change them to make it to make them selves an employer that was much more welcoming so they still of venture only ask about criminal involvement but now they do it at the very end of the process not up front and i've seen the difference in my own life that that can make it was mentioned in the introduction that i started a charter school when we started it we hired a bunch of employees and we were upstart we didn't we weren't even thinking about asking people about criminal records and then two days into our we had hired everybody and then two days in to the job a young man came african american came in office he set down with me in the co founder of the program and he said you know on two days into training and i just have to tell y'all something nobody asked me but i feel like i need to tell you that i was convicted of a crime and i'm on parole and we said ok you know tell us more and it was on robbery now i'm going to tell you this i am super committed to this work and i'm super open hearted but like any employer i get one hundred applications one of things you're looking to do is narrow the stack down right just so you can get a manageable number and if that had just been a question on page one of our application i don't know that we ever would have brought him in for an interview let alone hired him but now that fact of his arm robbery conviction and he gave us that paperwork and letter from his parole officer that fact wasn't the only thing that i knew about him but i knew i knew he was how to big heart and had a lot of energy and was going to be great with kids right i knew all of that and i knew that he had this conviction so still a hard case but we kept him on and he's he's a national leader in criminal justice for that was twenty years ago he's the mean you've probably heard of him he's in c so that's employers but it's not just employers right because is anybody here connected with the university in any way like you work at a university professor student yeah so universities like employers have a really wide range of approaches to people that have criminal records some people just ass up front right on page one and send a message that you know what if you check this box you might is not even fill out the application because you're not going to get hired and other places consider as part of their holistic review of the applicant back to end of the process after they've learned everything else and after they've admitted the student and the research shows that if you have that second kind of process you admit and accept many more students that have criminal convictions and if you have the first kind of process where you threaten people and scare them even before they apply churches and religious institutions are another thing that we have to i think spend some time thinking about we have nine hundred thousand people that come out of prison in jail every year most of those people the biggest obstacle is that they don't have connections they don't have networks they don't have somebody can help them with even small things figuring out how to fill out that job application giving them a ride to the job application helping them figure out where they can apply for housing getting an id you get out of prison the only idea you have is a prison i d and most people want to accept that so you need an idea cost twenty thirty forty dollars to get an id people say well it's only twenty or thirty forty doubt if you don't have any dollars thirty dollars is a million dollars you don't have it we have three hundred forty thousand churches synagogues mosques temples in this country that means that in each one of our religious institutions if we adopted three people on the time on hundreds to about three three people a year coming back to our community and said we'll be your rock will be your home will be a welcoming place that will help you get an i d apply for a job apply for housing that would go a long way towards transforming the reentry crisis that produces so much for citizen last thing i'll just about the question of what we can do i've been thinking a lot about this in i was being going out and giving talks the last few years of telling people about the ways we can reform our criminal justice system and how to making this argument that you know we all have a sphere of influence domain that we can control and we all have to to not just say well what can you do about it but what can i do about it and so then i really started taking that to heart and i started thinking about i'm a professor i teach a class i love teaching but i teach you know in one of the most elite universities in the country in the world what i might do and so i got trained in a program called inside out and this is a program that class in the criminal justice system now i teach it inside a connecticut prison ten students that are incarcerated and ten students from the law school learning together in a seminar setting learning the same material learning from each other now the main reason to do this is not a self interested one it is also true i will say that i got the best teaching of valuations that i ever got in my career  and that's from the yale students who have a formal evaluation system but but the most meaningful ones were from the inside students the incarcerated students one of the guys wrote the end of the class he said i like learning the policy in the law but he said really the thing that was the most meaningful to me was that every time we came to class we sat around in a circle and people treated me like i was smart and i had something to say that i was an intellectual he said that has never happened to me in my life that the the real is that he has that experience the tragedy is that he's never had that experience in school before he was never treated like he had something to say another guy in the class wrote he said for two hours a week every week i felt like i was in prison so this class changing the employer rules universities admitting students electing progressive prosecutors funding indigent defen treating addiction as a public health issue not a criminal justice issue none of these things by themselves is going to undo mass incarceration but collectively as a community if we do all of them and we do all of them at the same time and we all pitch in and we all accept our responsibility then i don't know i'll come back some years from now and i have written a book about the generation that took down mass incarceration thank you proposes crashing the system to form the system where she believes that public defenders and criminal defense attorneys so just go to trial and somehow that burden the system i wonder if you can just see a little bit about whether or not you disagree or disagree with this and why yeah thank you for that so on i mean i should respond to that particular kind of suggestion so i think it's an interesting and important one but even beyond that i should say that i don't disagree with her argument to the extent that she's identifying racism and white supremacy as major drivers of what has produced the criminal justice system that we have today and i also very much agree with the idea so i can see where the gentleman who asked the question thank you thank you s i also very much agree with the idea that one when in which our criminal justice system is very much like jim crow is that both of them give you a status and a stigma that marks you for life and that is almost impossible to escape so my book is full of stories of people who made one mistake right there's a woman that i write about named sandra dozier who i met when she came to my office for what we call duty day and duty day is the day when lawyers just put away your cases and you respond to questions from the general public and that my audi in my office we had to do it about once every other month and this woman came in and she explained to me that she had been stopped by the police they had asked to search her car she had agreed they had found twenty dollars worth of marijuana in her glove box she had told them please don't arrest me i have a job at fedex and she pointed to her uniform in the back seat the officers actually were pretty reasonable and said yeah we're not going to take you in we're not going to book you and hold you overnight because we know that means you're going to miss your job the next day if we do that and they had the discretion to just give her a notice to appear in court she shows up in court and the case is no paper which is in d c court lingo dismissed by the prosecution so so far everybody in the criminal justice system has actually been operating like pretty lenient lee and pretty reasonably but why was she singled out to be stopped in the first place because she lived in a community that had been identified as a community and this is not me making it up this is eric holder on the record on interviews in d c in the mid one nine hundred ninety saying we are putting police in these neighborhoods and we're going to have them stop everybody on my own minor pretax and ask them to search the cars because we're looking for a gun and she lived in one of those neighborhoods they didn't find any guns but they found twenty dollars of marijuana now her case gets no paper but to get off probation at fed ex she has to bring in a certificate of clean record she goes to the courthouse to get that certificate and the arrest for marijuana shows up she brings it into her employer because she feels like well it got dismissed and no papered and they'll understand but they had a rule that even if you are arrested while you're on probation every status happened all of us as have been all of us so cinder dozer loses her job now when she left my office that day she left behind i tried everything i called i spoke to her supervisor nice guy heard me out he was like i didn't make the policy i think this is crazy but this is the policy she lose my office on we you cry a lot in the public defender office because it's so unfair i'm on the verge of tears she leaves my office at the end of day i'm cleaning off my desk i find a five shoes very dozers she had left accidentally this file it had in it her high school diploma from ballou high school this is a high school with a forty fifty percent dropout rate but she had graduated she had siblings that were in the criminal justice system she had told me that but she had made it through had never been arrested until this time she had it in turn of the month certificate that she had gotten from an employer when driver somebody who overcame incredible obstacles and unfairness to graduate from high school never be arrested be in turn on the month stand on job lines in jobs fears for a year and a half get a job at fed ex do that job well her supervisor told her she did in a maze told me she did a great job that's when the reasons why he was sorry about this none of that mattered what mattered was that top pro now one line possession of marijuana so that is a status and the stigma that attaches to her for a lifetime and one of the very very impressive things about michelle's in his book among other books is to point that out so i very much agree with that other work in the same vein brian stevenson's book just mercy time hasa coaches book between the world and me these are books that have powerfully and persuasively and urgently describe all of the ways in which racism has helped to create american society that we all live in and the criminal justice system that we live with and i view this as sitting alongside those works i don't view it as a rebuttal i don't view it as a disagreement i view it as telling a part of the story building on those works and then telling a part of the story that hasn't fully been told yet because we still need to understand what's going on with judge curtis walk our system only survives because of all of the guilty pleas that ninety five percent of cases plead out if we didn't if defense lawyers didn't allow their clients  then the system would come to a crashing halt that is absolutely correct it's also not how a defense attorney can ethically operate that is true as a policy matter she's absolutely right but individually see i represent a client that client deserves the best representation that i can provide because that client the guy next to me will use brandon as an example all his life he's had people in power take advantage of him ignore what he wants make arguments about what the system needs and not listen to him and if you're doing it your job as a public defender you know you don't make the decision about whether somebody pleads for the whole notion that we should stop pleading arc it's not our decision we can i can advise him but i would have to advise him the advice would have to go something like this so brandon if you take this plea let's assume these are the facts i think there's a much greater likelihood that you will get probation lets just say these are the facts if you go to trial we might win but you have the gun on you and i don't really we don't have a good defense for that if you get convicted you're likely to get more time now we have this political project afoot we're we're not going to we don't want people to clean so i would like you to take it to trial because if everybody takes it to trial we'll like of intially gum up the system but you probably going to serve more time along the way and i could tell him something like that and then he would have make the decision that he would make and i think it's right it's perfectly appropriate for clients to make decisions factoring in the political realities right they could use their case as a way to launch a revolution in the courthouse but that's what i have to tell him and most people i think are to be like i'll do the revolution thing later right now i'm trying to not be locked  up i what do you think about the fact that we cannot wait to two thousand and eighteen to elect a few officials we've got both the democrats gone along we've got very few of them calling them out and spouses and standing with the masses against it so we're in a very critical period so congo this war and chicago now from trump so what do you think about how we're going to drive these spouses out i think it's very related to mass incarceration and torture people in prison you're welcome and i agree i definitely think it's very related i mean i said it's related in a lot of ways i said that you know we have to focus on local prosecutor elections right not focusing on jeff sessions and or understanding anyway that the relatively limited role that he has if he only controls twelve percent of our criminal justice system having said that twelve percent is a lot of people and those are people there are people right now in federal court that are suffering direct talks because of some of the things that he is trying to institute there are going to be people that are serving much longer sentences for in the federal system mostly nonviolent crimes  and it's atrocious the other thing that's happening it out of the trump administration in the criminal justice arena that's i think really devastating is you know i was talking before about the fact that the folks that i'm writing a on writing about say you know we want all of the above right we don't only want a criminal justice response we do want that but we want more than that as well and when you look at the administration and their proposal for health care legislation in particular they are guiding and proposing to guide the precise kinds of interventions i said we need to treat this as a public health problem there's actually in the act's we now have funding my wife's a nurse practitioner she says she sees this every day in her clinic she sees people that come in and they're getting treatment for addiction and for mental health issues that are related to addiction that are only getting it because of the expansion of health care under the affordable care act and under the medicaid expansion in particular and these are all things and many of these folks who are getting this care are the precise people that president trump said that he was running on behalf of a lot of them are white working class rural folks in kentucky in pennsylvania that's those are states that i happen to know in ohio but i'm quite sure out here as well who are getting that kind of care and and now are out of the criminal justice system or of the potential to stay out of the criminal justice system and what the president is doing and what jeff sessions are doing would directly undermine that i also think i mean it's hard to keep up with the daily news i mean just an hour ago it seems like something you know i can't even process the information it's so rapid and so demoralizing but yeah it's also clear to me that nobody before that has assumed the presidency has assumed it with such distain for the basic norms and ethics of democracy like the basics truck share that has made art to the extent that we've had success as a nation is come from following certain precepts that we thought we could take for granted the notion that you don't just say well we're going to you're going to lock up your political opponents the notion that you don't invite the head of the i in to your office and say so here's the deal don't investigate my friend who also if you investigate him it might lead to me where you don't do that it's not what we do but it is what this gang is doing and so i do agree with you very much that i mean i think two thousand and eighteen and two thousand and twenty are important but i think very much that before we get there the only way we're going to stop what they're trying to do before then is if we're vocal if we're mobilize we were just talking about this this morning you know one of the things i think the mistakes that people make is if you live in a relatively liberal jurisdiction or your senators at least on the national level are voting you know fairly progressively but those folks still need to be pressure because there's a lot right now there's levels of standing up to this administration right there the well i express concern about what they've done there's demanding a special prosecutor there's demanding a spec independent investigation and there's also more direct tony and things like refusing to grant consent for the senate to continue operation as long as you we have a president who we have good reason to believe is trying to shut down an investigation that would lead to him so yeah there's a lot we need to do thank you for sharing your insights about mass incarceration i'm led to ask about something that is slightly tangential but maybe not entirely and that is about education and having taken note of your experience in founding the turner school and wondering what comment she may have about education and the learnings that you came upon through your experience with the school yeah absolutely i mean i think education is it's crucial on so many levels right so it's crucial as a way of this isn't the main reason that people should be educated but it is true that education is incredibly protective against going to prison so just consider the african american  incarceration has had its most devastating impact all of america has been harmed black people have been harmed most directly and egregiously even during this period of time when incarceration rates have risen right this whole mass incarceration period they haven't risen for african americans who have attended college and it's also true that the lifetime risk of incarceration for a black man these are where we had th men i suspect this is this gap would be true for black women as well but they haven't run the data on it not that i've seen the lifetime risk of incarceration for a black man who's dropped out of high school is ten times higher than the lifetime risk of incarceration for a black man who's attended college so yeah attended not even graduated is attended this particular data set so so we know from that level right that it's protective we also know that i know from my work with high school students that one of the things really the two things that the students that i worked with who were in the juvenile justice system when i would ask them what do you need what do you want like the court system is telling you where you should do x y and z but like i just want to know what do you want what do you think if you had that would keep you out of this system that would get you out and keep you out and what i heard time and time again was a job and a good school they're both important us about education the job part is is crucial as well because the reason why one of the reasons why education matters to people is and i think for those of us that grew up in houses where education and higher education was the norm and grew up in communities where growing were jobs were plentiful that people don't even realize that this is going on in their minds but a lot of people get educated because they believe that is going to lead to a future that has a job that is going to pay them well and to allow them to have a house and live in a neighborhood that they want to live in and have a good life like we do you know as teachers we try to make school inherently interesting but like the truth is it's boring sometimes and you do it if you stick with it because you've absorbed certain norms about what it's going to do for you later now if you live in a neighborhood where there are very few jobs it's hard to convince kids that they should keep their nose to the grindstone and do all of the boring things that you sometimes have to do in school just to learn stuff and so that's why i think that in communities that's why you know people say that i was talking to some folks from chicago was out in chicago and we were talking about the violence you know in that city and people were saying you know if you know if you were mayor you were czar you know what are the things that you would do and for me it's you know we have saturation policing right we have hotspots policing where we have when we have a crime wave we throw you know double triple quadruple law enforcement detectives stop and frisks make bus and what i want to do is i want to do saturation jobs i want to take those neighborhoods you give me the three or four most high crime neighborhoods in any city and you say i was just it's i just was at starbucks today i was talking to them about this view put jobs whether it's factories whether it's infrastructure jobs you know i live in new haven which has a very high unemployment rate of poor african american city it also has the largest employer yale university which is building stuff all the time like you walk around yale and there's scaffolding on every third building and you hardly ever see black people working on those projects this is in a city full of black people who can do those jobs and who can be trained to do those jobs if they can do them today they can do i'm after a month or two of training and then the president of the university sits idly by and they send out reports every day we get alerts about another crime the second place on this corner on that corner on the next corner and i just want to shake the administration and say don't you see the connection nobody has a job there's crime you have jobs that are available all you could do something to solve the moral crisis and by the way you my head of a university that people didn't always know is a place where there are shootings going on every week or month but we're so java so i think alongside schools it's got it it's got to be jobs and that to me is just that's like you know i said earlier it's not one thing there's no silver bullet it's a million things we all got to pitch in and i believe all of that but if you hammer me down when you're like all right i know but i don't have time for a thousand i can only do two my two are going to be jobs and schools and if you're like you can only do one it's going to be jobs