Came about your book. I was sent this book by the good folks at cspan and they were like, we have this new book coming out. The mind if we send it to you to check it out . Id love to check it out. And i read your book and i was blown away by it. Just the power, the honesty , the critique of a larger structural challenge thats taking place and how it impacts individuallives. So it is really a distinct pleasure. Host guest youvery much. Host and even before, i had so many questions i wanted to ask and i didnt prepare to sit down with you, even before that i love to talk to you about your process. This is a new type of, its not your first book but its a new type of book then what youve done before. What was your process to getting to the point where you were like, i wanted to tell this . Guest there are a lot of different pieces to that in all honesty. Michael was an amazing person and he himself was a very talented writer. He had a hard life that ended early but before he died, we always thought he would tell his own story so in the back of my head there had been a question of how to tell michaels. At the same time im a professor, i live in universities, i had an invitation from professor at harvard to give a lecture called the do boy lecture so this is a famous lecture series and the purpose of those lectures is to try to Say Something about africanamerican experience at whatever time the lecturer is speaking and i agreed to do these lectures and i kept referring to the date of them and i kept getting these abstract titles, race and equality, and so forth and as they get closer we finally had the dates on the calendar and i thought i couldnt possibly try to talk about africanamerican experience in contemporary america without telling the truth of the story of my cousins life. So that was the first big thing was committing to doing it and the second thing was reaching out to my Family Members and saying can i have your permission to do this because its everybodys story, but especially michaels mothers tory and i needed to interview people to put the pieces of the story together and the most important thing, one of the hardest things is its embarrassing to say but my family never talk about what happened to michael. Sorry. So when i went around to interview my Family Members it was the first time, it had been years since he died. It was the first time we tried together to understand and that seemed to me the worst thing about these events in peoples lives, the fact that we dont bring the stories to the surface and never achieve understanding. That was true in our family and i think we are a microcosm, thats happening all over the country. But as a result of that we have a profound failure to understand whats happening with young people. Young men of color in this century and im embarrassed that it took my family so long to talk about this story so the process at the end of the day, you asked about process was about a family coming to understand itself. That was the core of what writing thebook was about do you feel like now the process has become to this beautiful tangible , inclusion if you want to call it that, where is the family now . Im so grateful. Its really my aunt in particular is an incredibly strong woman and from the beginning she said yes, tell michaels story, come talk to me and im grateful to her for her openness and willingness and grateful that she has said that for her this has been an experience of liberation herself and that its brought her piece finally along a number of different dimensions and whose siblings have also expressed gratitude and for all of us, all these crazy things, everybody had a piece of the puzzle and everybody was wrestling to try to what happened to this wonderful child and when you put all the pieces together you can make sense of it and there is absolution in that kind of sense making. Host i was struck by the title because in some ways i feel like the title is this beautiful double entendre because its cut. Thats my cousins, thats my family but its also because. Almost like the cause. Can you talk about that and how you felt about even the title . Guest thats a great question and it does does go back to process, a writers process. When i was a kid i loved poetry, more than anything else, i wanted to be a poet when i grew up and thats the single biggest and i wanted to be. Im not a poet, i didnt do the work you have to be but poetry has always stayed with me andgiven me access to making sense of my world. So as i was wrestling with the need to tell michaels story, it literally came to me one day that the story was called cuz. Thats it, it disappeared and i knew what to do. I understood that i was answering those why questions and i said what are my why questions . Why was he killed, why did he end up on that Street Corner holding a gun trying tos take somebodys heart. Once i knew that those were my questions, i had a way of approaching. But it was, it was just poetry gave me the title. Theirs is. Host theres a section of the book id like you to read if thats okay. Its this paragraph here on page 60. And i have highlights all over the book but that paragraph there where you see the scar, if you could read that paragraph. Guest okay. Just where it starts here and not the line below . Okay. Eight years after i got grounded for sneaking to class in a friends car, my 15yearold cousin, Michael Alexander allen who also didnt have a drivers license was arrested for the first time for an attempted carjacking. A fewmonths later after he turned 16 he sat in california in court , that standard kind of swinging gate inside the doors of the courtroom, wearing an orange suit. December 1995 and january 1996 the judge determined he would be charged as an adult. Host its the story of children. Guest yeah. It is. Thats what struck me, i was a kid in Southern California, i wanted wheels. I wanted my wheels to speak to my classes. But anyway, i wanted that mobility and i was not allowed by my parents to ride a car, that was one of the rules and my cousin wanted mobility, he wanted wheels, in context one of the worst neighborhoods in los angeles so i pursued my mobility in a way that was not viewed dangerous so i was lucky, i got grounded and my cousin pursued it in a way, taking this car and ended up in prison. Host when he started going through this process, you do the detail about what that history did to him. Where almost like a conclusion of michael because you come to a complete conclusion of your brothers life where it had almost been like this has been baked in a long time ago. What was that like for you watching that happen in realtime to your family . Its clichc to say but its a different living through it from looking back on it. Looking back you know where it comes out and you can see the trajectory. Living through it, all your energies are directed towards the trajectory and a direction other than the predictable one. And the nature of hope is that you have to concretely imagine an alternative trajectory, you have to. So i think thats part of the challenge because you cant actually proceed without hope, yet hope by definition pushes against the most clear eyed view you might have of reality. You have to separate from that. I think its a really hard thing in that contrast between what you need in order to hope and move forward and the sort of dynamics of predictability and so forth that you are trying to overcome and ultimately you dont overcome. For the people who are going to watch this who havent yet had a chance to pick it up and read the book, can you talk about your background and your childhood . Sure. Im one of two kids, i grew up in a college town in Southern California, younger older brother so im faculty brat, my mother was a librarian there. And in many ways our Nuclear Family was the kind of essential academic family. Lots of clubs, going to conferences, this kind of thing. Parents in the summers and so forth but my dad was from a big extended family. He was one of 12 siblings who had grown up in southern florida, an africanamerican family, many of them had ended up in Southern California so we had lots of cousins and i used to say i cant count the number of cousins i have and family holidays and things like that and we had one set of cousins and we were close, my dads youngest sister karen and her children and a lot of time with us. She, a single mom worked her way into nursing and was a very hardworking, consistently working single mother but she was a single mother and its hard to stretch the time and space and resources around three kids so their lives did not have the stability that my mother and i had but we did spend a lot of time together growing up. Talk about michael background, who was michael . Just a beautiful kid, gorgeous mouth. First thing everybody always said was this incredible smile. He was a motormouth, super talkative kid. He had a stammer when he was little that you always felt like the stammer was he had so much he couldnt get it all out fast enough. And he just was a very loving kid, very gentle kid. This is one of the crazy things about his story is he ended up inprison or arrested for a Violent Crime and attempted carjacking, yet he is not a person who had been violentin our lives, in the lives of friends. Theres nobody that we knew growing up , he was a very gentle personality. Host how did that happen . How did the person who everybody would say this is not a violent person, a person who goes out to hurt people but ends up involved in a Violent Crime, what was that like west and mark. There are a couple things to say, i did a lot ofwork , i had this information act request to get documents from the Police Report to arrest and some of the judicial records so one of the most amazing and important but recognizable details in the Police Report was the witness , the victim of the carjacking testifying that michael had had his gun pointed at the ground the entire time. Thats right, this is not a kid who was shooting at somebody but why was he there in the first instance . I think you have to compress it into a very small answer, it is that when he was 10, his mother met and married a man with high hopes of course for the future but he was violent and it was a destructive and unstable relationship and in a period of five years from the point of meeting and marrying him, the family moved frequently and michael went to five schools so he went to five schools and five years with that happening in the middle of the Academic Year and that 10 to 15 period, critical age that we are all going through. Its these hormonal changes in trying to figure out who you are and so forth. I was thinking if he was very lonely and isolated in all the moves to different places so when they landed back in los angeles, when he was 14, then there was a world of gangs i think providing an opportunity for connection and affiliation and as a stranger to that territory, he was obliged to prove himself in ways that people who came up in those neighborhoods work always happy to do. We know that combination of being in a community and being an outsider made him vulnerable to the sort of recruitment of the gang culture. Host was it ever a topic of conversation amongst a member . Guest this is what i mean about the tragedy of our failure to talk and see and know. We had no idea michael was involved in gangs. I learned this by working on this project, michaels mother did not know. She was surprised to learn what i learned. And this is what i mean about having to put the pieces of the puzzle together, a couple people have knowledge about things he had been involved in but they thought thats all there was, they didnt know about the other piece and when you can put it all together you can see a kind of increasing level of involvement in this period from late 13 to 15 and that completely fits the sociological literature. Theres this dangerous period kids start to get involved with and then they have their first arrest, thats a common pattern and it fits michael to a t but literally, none of us knew and thats sad again, just to speak of the question of embarrassment and shame, the fact that we didnt know, theyll to see that, failed to talk or coordinate care for this person we all loved. Theres no question about that, weve had to come to an understanding. And then when hes still just a teenager. Yeah, i think it was. Well, i mean, it was that period in the 1990s in california where california had just in the preceding year to 18 months past the three strikes and youre out law and the judicial system was still figuring out what thatmeant and it was also being used in ways that would be surprising to people. Host just so you understand, three strikes youre out, convicted. Guest convicted of three felonies and its 25 years to life but what people often dont know is you can get more than one l h art from a single incident. The attempted carjacking had to felonies in it. Just in one incident. And those both count when you are adding those up, and after he was arrested, michael confessed that in the preceding couple of days he had also attempted to rob a couple other people and so because he confessed to those, those were other charges they added in. So what the judge said was basically, you get convicted on all these things and you can test all of them, thats three strikes so you are looking at 25 years to life. That was the framework , the rhetorical framework for inviting michael into a plea bargain. Thats the point of that kind of structure. That all depended on the fact that it was a different judge that had made the determination that he be tried as an adult in california, it was in that period and lowering the age, it was very trying youth as adults so michael was caught right in that nexus and got a sentence that when you stack it up to other sentences, retrospectively its unfortunate and disproportionate but i think the experience of living through it was one of being surprised by discovering that the legal train was different then we understood it to be. So just thinking collectively within the family, we just didnt gather forces and resources effectively to respond to the situation. Host and it also feels impossible for him to be able to prepare. An almost unfair. Theres no question that the use of mandatory minimums in sentencing and the three strikes youre out law was produced all kinds of absurd sentences in the american Justice System and the country needs to recognize that. We had an incredibly distorted criminal Justice System where the proportionate injustice is huge and as a society obviously lots of people know that and are trying to talk about it but we need a broader wake up on this topic and yes, i think when you are thinking particularly about kids, offenders and so forth, there is literally, thats probably overstating but it does seem to me impossible that a young person sent to an adult prison is going to come out better off and able to live a productive life. It does not compute because its a brutal place and when you put a young person in their, first arrest, first conviction and they are very much in development as a person, they do have a chance of going in a different direction, you are cutting that chance all i believe so i think juvenile justice is a place where we should completely reorganize and we need to recover the commitment to rehabilitation and development for especially three juveniles. Host you really try to help the reader who if they dont have experience with facilities, if they dont have experience with the Justice System, you really try to in the book make them see it. Make them visualize it, make them understand what we are talking about. Help our viewer right now, help them understand what we are talking about. Guest theres so many little details. You can one end of the spectrum would be to talk about michaels efforts to get an education in prison which in the 90s again, states and federal government just even serrated opportunities for inmates to pursue an education beyond a ged. Theres no access to College Courses and they didnt support to programs for taking College Courses but thats a big structure of everything but i was supporting michael and setting up for their privately paid College Classes in university and you go to enroll for the classes and you learn in prison the only classes he can take are ones that have softcover books. If a course has a hardcover book, you cant take it. Comics, those were always big textbooks so we were reduced to two classes that were viable on this criteria so its a tiny detail and it doesnt the violence of prison but it speaks to the minutest of the control and the just number of hoops you have to work your way through to get anything at all done, even a small thing like enrolling for english 101. So or, just a different example, one of the details that stayed with me is prison life is very structured along racial lines. Whites, latinos, blacks, people are housed separately and theres incredible intense social structure inside a prison and the world of prison is connected to the world of on the streets so things there can affect the dynamics of life inside prison so fights break out and they typically break out along racial lines and so i remember michael telling me one time that he had a latino dance partner was how he described it that when a fight broke out, they would find each other and they would act like they were fighting so that they didnt get hurt and nobody would think that they werent not on the side they were participating on. Thats a key detail about what it takes to survive in a place like that. So theres a lot more i could say but i hope that helps give something of the sense. Host its those small details about survival there that i think are really important to people to be able to understand where its impossible for someone to enter into a situation like that and come back the same. Not necessarily saying irreparably damaged but it is impossible for them to come back. How was he doing . Guest gosh, thats a good question. The camera was gone. The stammer was gone, thats a definite thing, the stammer was gone. He was quieter, more astute. He still had his capacity for gratefulness but where as a child he was just, joyful was his middle name, you could never say that about him any longer. He brought light into social spaces after he was out also but there was definitely a kind of much deeper quiet underneath everything. And i think the other thing is, he was very protective of his mother. It was stronger over time so sort of a real gentle kind of attentive, caring directed at his mother. I think that was, you will often hear that people say folks who been in prison, they dont talk about it. The same way people who fought in world war ii, they will go to their grave and the kids will never hear their stories and thats what its like so theres this wall of silence so the thing that i learned about michaels experience came mostly from when he was in prison and i was talking to him while he was there and visiting him while he was there and after he got out. It was like, boom, a wall came down and there was no more talking about that time. How much exposure did you have prior to visiting michael . The funny thing is, retrospectively i can see that my whole life has been spent in the criminal Justice System in the sense that i grew up in Southern California in the 80s when the criminal Justice System was exploding and i never thought about that selfconsciously when i was a kid but thats the most meaningful phenomenon in the world and when i got to college , i mentioned this in the book but i took this class on ancient at the end democracy and we read all these speeches from courtrooms, pages and pages of material from courts and like, reading all this stuff, theres no mention of prison in here. Theres a World Without prisons . How can that be . So thats what i mean when i say talk about sharp contrast between the world i grew up in and the one i was reading about in page history that that drove my intellectual interests, my entire scholarly career emerged from that contrast. So although again, because i wasnt selfaware about it as an 18yearold, i was pursuing this historical lens of inquiry but i was speaking about punishment from that point forward trying to understandrehabilitation, deterrence, why you pick one or another or these justifications for a penal system. So i got engaged early on and even when i wrote my dissertation in ancient history on the ancient athenian penal system, the introduction had a section on the three strikes law in california because i was trying to understand these developments and their strangeness and i had this hope when i wrote that dissertation that was the three strikes law would be defeated which in the 19th century, juries would not enforce northern juries so that was something that i brought in and juries would do this thing called jury nullification because juries cant be punished for their decision so they are supposed to enforce the law but if they find out the law is unjust, they decided im not going to convict anybody on this unjust law and thats what happened to slavery, it became unenforceable and in the early days in california of the three strikes law it looks like there might be some sort of jury nullification where people were coming in with light sentences for stealing a pack of diapers. Im not going to convict somebody for life on this. So thats , i had been interested in criminal justice from the beginning of my career. But its interesting the power of narratives and a story in helping people to understand. Because this book and for everyone, i really hope people read it, this is not some academic understanding of the criminal Justice System and its history and application. You write it in a way that people really see it in their own selves and their own lives whether they are connected or not inhumanity and the inhumane nature of so much of what we built and so much of what we create. What i was trying to do was help people feel this not from the perspective of its a system of crime and punishment but this is a way in which we are raising young people. We are raising young people this way. And in order to see that, you have to walk through a Young Persons life and remember what it feels like to be 10, what it feels like to be 11, 13, lost and confused what it feels like to be 15 when you are figuring out your own trajectory and you have to remember , what were the, all of these things that were on the verge of dangerous and that period, why was i say . Why did i make it through okay . You begin to realize there is a heck of a lot of luck involved and got to throw in the degree of difficulty issue. My degree of difficulty in a college town family was way lower than my cousins degree of difficulty and yes, he is responsible for his own choices and so forth but in the context of a major different degree of difficulty scale, we have got to acknowledge that. I believe as a society we ought to be reducing that degree of difficulty for young people, kids in a disadvantage context generally but if you cant see that degree of difficulty issue, of luck involved in relationship to the hard path through adolescence, what you step back in each of those years, you think about what did your bedroom look like western mark who were the kids you are hanging out with . What were the choices you were considering and look at michael, but those things sidebyside. Host somebodys stated is it personal responsibility or is it denial of responsibility . Whats your answer . Guest a double helix, you cannot separate those things because collectively, we build the world that we live in. We build the opportunity pattern. Guest there is a higher rate of back breakage if you know that. In that regard, yes, people can overcome these circumstances but at the end of the day you cannot do it all on personal responsibility and we have to address the incredible disparity in the degrees of difficulty confronting young people when they come into the world. Host so, michael comes home, still very much its not a child at that point but a young man who now has this context of being institutionalized as a core part of his childhood. What did you all see about his prospects . His ability to reintegrate, his ability to now live a successful life and when did you all, as a family, start realizing there is a problem here . Guest i think he had been out for about six months when the problems started to become apparent. Yeah, six months. The Biggest Issue was just the hold that his social connections from prison had on him. It makes sense when you think about it but in his case it wasnt just present sections generally but he had a girlfriend someone who he loved only he and met in prison, a fellow inmate. We didnt know that she was still in his life and that became apparent about six months. Honestly, when he got out he didnt know whether he was going to reconnect with her or reconnect to her or not and in some sense, it was the drama of his First Six Months out was a decision about whether or not this one and only love of his life was going to be what he stayed with or whether he was going to cut that off and try to build a world completely separate from all the texture of social life that he had had for the last 11 years. Host im not going to spoil it but you do a really good job of being able to explain the dynamics of the relationship, ill put it that way. Understanding the fact that he did have a pretty clear sense of the fact that this wasnt the healthiest relationship for him but he kept coming back to it. What do you think was the psychology behind that and the fact that even though again, it wasnt just in his case but for many people watching they can all think of experiences in their lives or their going through right now where there in a situation where if they are being honest with themselves and others there is something unhealthy about this but thats where you are. Guest somebody wrote about michaels relationship with three and that had all the intensity of the adolescents love affair and i think that is absolutely fair. I think that, you know, he goes to prison at 15 and hes never had any kind of relationship and he comes out of prison at six the relationship that has lasted three or four years and it makes sense that it would be an adolescent relationship in some ways, not obviously that they were at that point in their 20s and thinking about the world in adult ways but they hadnt had the chance to have a low stakes practice relationships, i guess, that im trying to say. They didnt have the six month relationship in high school thats crazy and intense and youre obsessed and but then its over any going for the summer and theyre starting over and. People have worked their way through layers of that and there is this is where i need help to understand this from people who work on questions of adolescence and intimate relationships, development and thats the thing because one does feel that its not the trajectory of an adolescent to an adult relationship that you see for lots of young people and i imagine that person has something to do with that and i just dont have the skill to give a good diagnosis of how and why that person that was bad. [laughter] host harvard professor. Guest anyway, that was bad. Why is it that prison obviously it stems development in a number of different ways but what is the ways in which complicates growth in intimate relationshi relationships. You know, its obvious that it would but we dont know how to talk about that. Host and i think what is also interesting is and you saw in michaels life, as well, its even the structural that are created in terms of ability to keep relationships, ability to mend relationships there are structures in place that actually keep that from being the case. You look at the fact that right now how difficult it is for a person to enter back into society and to reintegrate their society and go into public housing, other basic things and its interesting because both of the psychological but then theres also the structural that is in the way of that. Guest absolutely. There is no question about it. I think when you think about some of the facts and statistics, for example, the spread of hiv right now, people dont know there is a crisis in hiv especially among africanamerican women and why is that . That is because we have a lot of hiv circulating in prison and men come out and sexuality and heterosexual and bisexual and all kinds of things and so forth and so yes, the numbers are staggering and its a considerable Public Health crisis which we are not addressing. Host absolutely. So, when you all got word about michael and his death and killing, what was your gut reaction. Guest openness. There are so many tragedies in the world and im slightly embarrassed to claim anything special about ones own because watching Hurricane Harvey right now and are so many devastating stories but its an inner collapse which one feels emotionally. I was at a garden party, light, jovial occasion in england with my husband and my husband is british with his extended family and it was a sunny day and it was one of those moments where everything goes white, blank, you. Host how did you find out . Guest my dad called me. My husband had my cell phone at this party and my dad called and my husband handed me the phone and just said, its michael and i just waited and he said hes dead. Which, you know, i had just seen him, not even a month earlier because we just got married and had been at our wedding and it was literally less than a month and, you know, in my head he was as beautiful and energetic and brilliantly smiling as ever and, you know, you never expect to go from that picture to the absence in the disappearance. Host what space was he in the last time you saw him. Guest this is where, again, by the end of his life i think he had gotten very good at keeping his life with his girlfriend and his prison connections separate from his life with his family. When we saw him at the wedding and family occasions, special occasions, he seemed good. He looked good. He looked healthy. He looked clean. He looks great but he was, by that point, getting increasingly involved in the violence world connected tos girlfriend and her own cousins, a Different Network cousins. So, i dont know the details of the end of his life but ive got snippets of rumor and so for that something from the Police Reports the gift investigation of his killing but it is clear that by the end of his life criminality had become what he was involved with. Host its interesting because you layout that its almost like the people who were at that point intimately involved with things that he was into work probably less surprised by his death and even Family Members. Guest right, exactly. Absolutely. Yes, a way of underscoring the contrast in the two worlds is here to Funeral Services. Host can you talk about that . Guest his mother had one for him and his church and, you know, it was the kind of thing that i was used to with my grandmother was a baptist preacher in southern georgia and is full of beautiful music and there was big emotion, color and this fire of Community Warmth recognizing images of the civil right easement and there was a service that michael attended that was headed by a pastor that had made it partly his mission to minister to you engaged in street activity and its not what i learned about recently but both turned out at that one were closely connected to the world michael was now living in and the Police Showed up at that service and they were there because they were investigating his death and things like that would i think that was that day of his two Funeral Services was the first really clearview that we started to have of what his life had become in the last year of his life. Host how did your relationship with michael change after he died . Guest oh goodness. Thats interesting. Well, that is super interesting. So, michael used to send me mothers day cards when he was in person. I was very grateful for and still very grateful for them and i think when he was in prison we were very close friends, as well as cousins. We talked about writing and other things and i think there was a peer relationship. Host he was very proud of you. Guest he was. He was a very supportive person. Although he had this terrible end and was doing terrible things by the end of his life, he is this voice of wisdom in my head because i think he helps me the danger signs and other People Better than i would have previously. He has taught me how to look for the troubles that people may be in for to see the struggle that people have. For an example, michael loved to be outdoors, loved it. He needed to be outdoors and imprisoned he thought buyers and that was the best part of his life he was part of the california inmate firefighting crews and you could hear it in his voice that those were called, good periods and his schoolwork was the best when he was also really busy with physical activity, outdoors and i got clarity about that after he died that he needed those things together and there was a year that he iran the la marathon in school and that was a good part of the school life and then when he wasnt doing that any longer things got rocky and he needed those push together. I have two kids, one is a little boy and he loves to be outside and he loves to spend hours outside in the back garden and i watch him and im like, that is what michael was like and for this kid he needs a way to see outside and do outdoor things a lot longer at school. He will need that. I dont think i would have spotted that, in all honesty, without michaels voice in my head. Host what do you now tell your Family Members, particularly kids about michael . Guest that he was a beautiful person and that people move farther from the family and the like his look and if you dont know that talent is everywhere in our world read the story because talent is everywhere and dont give me this thing that there is no talent in this poor innercity neighborhood or theres no talent in this devastated part of talent is everywhere. If we dont foster it and foster everybodys potential, whatever it may be, as a society we are feeling and that is my big message and to friends and family its about the need to just be much more selfconscious about talking to each other and not hiding trouble and not letting shame keep you from telling people what is going on. That was, again, michaels life was hindered by the degree of difficulty our society set for him and it was hindered by criminal Justice System full of injustice but it was also hindered by a family that hit its shame and didnt talk and couldnt honestly dive into the problem that we addressing and, as a family, i think that is what we all are now thinking about. Host the idea that we all understand the structural challenges that exist but by not being open and honest were still being complicit. Guest right, thank you for saying that. I didnt get to that formulation but thats exactly right. Yes, that is what i am trying to say. Actually, i gave this process of the beginning of this conversation and i gave a lectures which is a strange idea at harvard and it was a very weird expense for the audience because i basically cried all the way through the whole thing and i was. Generous and they expected a lecture and i would weep for hours. It was this Incredible Group therapy which they were so generous but the other thing that was powerful was the number of people came up after words and said ive never told anybody but i have a Family Member in prison and this was white and black. This wasnt a racial thing but everybody. You have to recognize that when a person system is as big as ours 5 of the World Population in prisons despite the fact that we only have 5 of the worlds population attaches everybody. Theres a lot of stories out there that we are not telling and yes, by not telling the stories we are letting this thing live. We have to get the stories out so we can see the damage that we are doing and fix it. Thank you for saying that. Yes, not talking about it is complicity. Host i think the reason that people someone once said to me that they said the best way to make a friend is tell them a secret. The best way to make a friend is tell a secret because at that point they feel that you have been vulnerable enough with them that they are vulnerable with you. Part of the reason that people feel that you are willing to be vulnerable. Guest its one of those things that i feel like i subconsciously realized i was getting into which was slightl slightly in other words, i made myself vulnerable and its not that i set out to do that but oh my goodness, did i really do this and did i really agreed to do this but there i was and what else can i do its on the schedule and its been advertised and im standing there so there you have it. It happens. Host what you want people, if someone says what you want people to get from the story and what you want people to get from michael and what is this thing that you are if nothing else, i want you to walk away with this. Guest our prison system is found in justice and we need to find our way out of mass incarceration. Host and its because its what its doing guest to millions of young men like michael. And to every one of those young men another 3050 people is people connected which means, you know, theres 2. 5 Million People in prison right now were talking about 60 Million People who are already directly implicated in this and the negative current that flow out from it. It is insane. Its just insane. Host where do we begin and what things have you seen around that issue that are starting to give you hope . Guest so, there are two places to begin. One of which i address in the book. I have been pushing and pulling the question of how you and mass incarceration and turning it every which way for a long time at this point. I have come to believe that we have to end the war on drugs. It is not the sole cause of mass incarceration but mandatory minimums are another huge part of the problem but i think we have to talk about both of those things and when i say and the war on drugs what i mean by that specifically is legalized marijuana and decriminalize harder drugs, cocaine, heroin and so forth. Thats an important distinction between legalization and decriminalization. So, legalization is like alcohol and you can go into a store and you have an id and you to be overage but you can buy it. Decriminalization means it is still a misdemeanor to possess or use it but it is not a felony. You dont get a felony on your record and cases like portugal have experimented with this and when its a misdemeanor people are much more willing to help so you have to connect that to a very serious effort public to prevent use of drugs and to deal with a direction so its a Harm Reduction paradigm. Currently, the war on drugs absence on an absence that there should never be drug use ever and that is what we are pretending. Americans for the last decade has spent hundred billion dollars a year on illegal drugs. This is a real fiction we are telling ourselves. It is happening and lets take the black market out of it with all that terrible dynamics with regard to marijuana and then you invest the resources that you dont want attack the highlevel traffickers and direct your resources going after the lowest people end of the spectrum. To some extent, i hope we are already doing some of this in the sense that at this point in federal court, they dont really prosecute people any longer for mere use or possession. There are still disparities about that but although they dont actually do what is on the books legally people dont know that. So, people think that what theyre doing is a felony and so they will hide it and that means we keep submerging what is a huge Public Health problem, individual Health Problem and under this veil of darkness and silence and secrecy. I believe to rent that bail and bring this into light again, using the tools of Public Health to deal with drugs to reduce the scope of that black market and bring people back into a legal economy because thats another part of the Economic Activity in disadvantaged areas and how people are currently participating in illegal black market economy is to put them back into a legal economy. When people make the argument to and mass incarceration with to end the war on drugs people will come back and say well, only 40 of people who are in prison right now are in prison for drug offenses so, get rid of the drug laws and youre only reducing it by 40 . I think that is spurious arguments because so many other actions are connected to the world of drugs and other kinds of violent offenses and not only that but its an effect of living in a space outside of the rule of law and the numbers of people in prison because of the drug market generally in the war on drugs is much bigger than 40 , i believe, and also because so many of our resources in criminal justice have been directed to fighting the war on drugs that they cant do the job they need to do on other parts of our terminal Justice System and that is adding to the problem. It complicates if you talk about the causes and links but they can focus their resources where they are needed in different places honestly could drive down homicide levels, for instance, and that could help restore a peaceful equilibrium in neighborhoods that are currently tormented. Host data reimburses that exact point, as well. I have one final question for you. What is next for you . Guest oh gosh. Theres always something on the boil. So, i have the luxury of being a professor you control your own time and you get to work on the things you love. I have this ongoing passion and project around the declaration of independence i continue to work on that. Im a political philosopher and that is my core academic subject and i have a philosophical book on political equality that i am working on. That is due and its was to give it to a publisher a year from now so thats the thing that has most of my attention. Host a lot to discuss on that angle as well. Guest yeah, there is. Host im incredibly thankful for this time incredibly thankful for your contribution and incredibly thankful for michael. Its an important story. Guest thank you, wes, thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, this man was created as a Public Service to americas Cable Television companies. It is brought to you today by cable or satellite provider. You are watching the tv on cspan2. Television for serious readers. Heres our primetime lineup. That all happens tonight on cspan2 the book tv. Here is a look at upcoming books fairs and festivals happening around the country. Next weekend we will be at the baltimore book festival taking place at the citys inner harbor featuring sociology professor michael dyson, photographer devon allen, historian Robin Spencer and others. In october, we are headed to nashville for the southern festival of books with former Vice President al gore. Later in the month there are two book festivals happening on the same weekend. In the northeast, is the ninth annual boston book festival and in the south, the louisiana book festival will take place in baton rouge. For more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals watch previous possible coverage, click the book fairs tab on our website. Booktv. Org. Beginning now it is the final author discussion of the day from the annual brooklyn book festival. This is about the science of time and you are watching live coverage on book tv