Transcripts For CSPAN2 James Forman Locking Up Our Own 20171009

Policy put in place 30 or 40 years ago are having an adverse effect today. You will hear from him next on book tv. [cheering and applause] thank you. Thank you everybody for coming out. Want to think politics and prose and busboys poets for hosting this event. Obviously there are too many people here who i love and have known for a long time to shout out everybody individually but i do want to shout out a couple of families and i want to shut out my pbs family. [applause] thank you. You taught me how to be a lawyer and i want to shout out to my maia angela family, you all taught me how to fight for children. And i want to give a shout to my sick family. [cheering and applause] i am wearing my button tonight and i am right now thinking of you all and im thinking of my dad and i know that he is here with us so i want to Start Talking about why i wrote this book. The first reason for writing this book is that i dont know if you all are like this or have friends like this but im the kind of person who goes to a movie and there is no black characters in the movie and after the movie people ask what i thought about it and im always like it was pretty good but where were the black people and i feel that way about our history, as well. It is important to me to write a book that had africanamerican characters at the center of the narrative. This is a book of history and arguments and it is ultimately fundamentally a book stories. One of those stories is of a young man named brandon and he was one of my first client that the Public Defender Service. Fifteen years old charged with and convicted of and pled guilty to combat in possession of a gun and 20 worth of marijuana. We were in court and i was there as a public defender thinking about the work i was doing as my civil rights work on my generation. I was in court and had joined [inaudible] because i knew that one in three young plan such as black men were under criminal investigation and even though we had didnt have the term mass incarceration yet i knew that the United States had just passed russia in south africa is the Worlds Largest dealer. I am in court and im asking the judge to give brandon a second judge and put him on probation and i had letters from his counselors from teachers, from social workers, brendans mom and his grandmother were in court there and i pointed to them. The prosecutor in the case was asking for brandon to be locked up and sent to oak hill. Those of you have been in dc for a while know that dungeon that was oak hill. The judge in the case ultimately had to make the decision. Judge walker, i changed the names of the lawyers and the judges in the case. Judge walker leaned back and leaned forward at brandon and he said brandon, mr. Foreman has been telling me that you had a hard life and that you deserve a Second Chance. Well, i dont doubt that you have a hard life, son, but let me tell you what hardship is like. Let me tell you about jim crow and let me tell you about segregation. Let me tell you about a movement that fought for your freedom, people marched and struggled, died and Martin Luther king died for you to be free and what he did not die for was for you to be running and gunning and plugging in embarrassing your community and embarrassing family. You might get that Second Chance one day, young man but right now you will go to oak hill. Ever since that day in court and in many days like them as i came to see that people like judge walker were not unique and there were many of them. It causes me to stop and ask the question how was it that this African American Community Came to lock up so many of its own . And that is what i said to answer in this book. Now, the answer to the question is in the book and i hope you buy it and i will sign it. [laughter] but i know you all will not let me out of here until i at least give you a preview. Let me tell you some of the main arguments of the book. The first thing we have to understand is crime and addiction and violence and this told that it took on this community and it still takes but especially in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. In the 1960s washington dc homicide rates tripled and it wasnt just dc, it doubled in philadelphia, in cleveland, in los angeles and in dc in 1967 date tested all people and tea entering the dc jail for drugs in her system. In 673 of entering inmates in the dc jail test positive for heroin. One year later in 1968 it was 45 . That is an epidemic. It is not just the numbers, its also the story. When i went over to George Washington library they have archives of many of the former City Council Members in dc and they have donated their papers and they are not super well organized but their well organized enough that you can get a sense and i spent a whole Summer Reading through page after page and the pain and suffering from the citizen letters is palpable and people writing and saying i dont recognize my city anymore. I am scared to go outside. I feel like a prisoner in my own home and i feel like a stranger on my own street. Now, who was receiving these letters . This gets to the second argument of the book. People who were getting these letters, the first generation of elected officials and prosecutors and judges and Court Officials in washington dc in the 1970s and in black communities around the country that first generation many came out of the Civil Rights Movement and my book is filled with civil rights workers and whether they came out of the moment or not they were well aware of the history and i think under the law under and black committees and they knew of the times when you didnt call the police because the police were probably the clan and they wouldnt come in if they did they would did worse than and they knew of the time when a black person died Law Enforcement said that is one more dead black person and they didnt say black person. They knew of that history and they were bound and determined as they came into office in the 1970s to make black life matter and they didnt use the phrase then that is what they were doing. Chapter two of my book is called black white matter because their lifes work of this first generation of officials was to make black life expensive and to make it valuable. Now, why did they do it through Law Enforcement . Why did they do it through police and prosecutors and prisons . This gets to the next argument of the book. This is an argument about the constraints and limitations that they were under so that i told you this is a story about what africanamericans thought and said and did about black agency but any story about africanamerican agency is also a story of constraint. Its also a straight story of limitation and story of a Larger Society which admitted their options. They were constraints in all kinds of ways and they were constrained by history of racism that had produced residential segregation and had reduced entrenched crime patterns. They were also constrained by the fact that the Larger Society didnt want to do everything that they were asking for. The people that i write about, these mayors and City Council People and these judges and prosecutors many of them didnt want only Law Enforcement and they wanted job training and they wanted more money for education and they wanted more money for housing and there wanting many of them a Marshall Plan for urban american. But they couldnt get that because African Americans with the power that we had was concentrated locally and concentrated in the cities and the black community didnt control congress and those levers of power. I say that africanamerican officials had in all of the above strategy to try to fight crime and violence and addicti addiction. They wanted to throw everything at the problem. Police, prosecutors, courts, jobs, housing, schools, parks and rec. They wanted all of the above but they got from the Larger Society one of the above. They got Law Enforcement. Now, you might be wondering and i think it is natural as we sit here in 2017 to think that they must have known what they were doing and they must have understood the consequences of doubling and tripling in quadrupling down on Law Enforcement. In the argument in my book is that in many ways they didnt and because there was no moment where there was an up or down vote on mass incarceration and that is not how it was built. No one ever said hey, should the United States have the largest present happen in the world so we lock up more people than apartheid south africa. No one asked that question. Instead what happened was lots of people acting in different spaces in the system. Police officers arresting, prosecutors prosecuting, legislators passing laws, judges imposing sentences, parole officers making parole decisions, probation officer supervising people on parole. All of those actors, all became somewhat more punitive. Everyone got harsher in their space. Maybe 10 harsher, maybe 20 harsher, maybe the sentences they impose got longer and maybe they revoked parole a little more often but the thing is if everyone does it and everyone does it over 40 or 50 years then the result is mass incarcerati incarceration. Now, the last thing i will say before we turn it over to questions is mostly this book is about how we got here. There is one chapter about what to do about it now to get out. The one thing about that that i want to say tonight is that we will have to get out and will have to dismantle the system, attend the same way it was built which is to say everyone, all of us, in small ways pushing in the other direction so the next time someone says to you well, that solution and that proposal and that legislation and that mass incarceration was right say no, it wont. That by itself wont. But that, plus that come up is that, plus that over time will. We have to recapture a certain amount of humanity and that will mean in the Public Sector but its also great to me in the private sector and each of us has to ask what is our sphere of influence and what do we control. Do we run a business that has an hr policy and what is that hr policy say about hiring people that have criminal convictions. Do we run a university that has admission policies . What does those look like for people that have been involved in the criminal Justice System. Are we part of a Church Community and have we adopted somebody from a returning cynicism who is come to our community and help to our church up to them find housing and help them find a job. We will have to do it through law and will have to do it through these private spaces. If we do it slowly we will dismantle this massive and unjust system. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] thank you for that. I want to think about the Jeff Sessions question in two ways. So, one really is more nationally. I apologize for responding to your question with my back turned. The book talk in the round so, nationally people asking this question and they are saying what can we do now that we have this administration that seems to have values and policies that are so counter to some of the incremental progress that was being made in the last administration. To that my main response, which isnt going to be an answer to your question is more of an answer to a National Audience is that it is really this problem is fundamentally a state, county, city and local problem. 80 of prisoners nationwide are in state facilities, not federal ones. 85 of Law Enforcement officers nationwide are city, county, local, lawenforcement officers, not federal ones. So, just like president obama and attorney general holder got all the publicity in the last administration around criminal Justice Reform but actually had a relatively small slice of the problem that they could affect is also true that donald trump and Jeff Sessions have with all of their sort of retrograde policies that they are proposing have a relatively limited ability to do damage. If the movement that we have built up at the state and local level nationally that movement shouldnt lose sight of the fact that this system was built at the state and local levels and it will have to be dismantled there. This comes up a lot in of spending a year in california and a lot of californians especially in the bay area where the social justice comes up they always say that is an important issue. If i lived in a red state and if i lived in a trump state then maybe i would kind of need to work on that but i live in liberal california or i live in liberal new york in what i want to say on criminal justice in mass incarceration is there is no liberal bubble california has the second largest system in the country. New york, until recently was one of only two states in the country to prosecute all juveniles ages 16 to 17 as adults. This is a National Crisis and its a crisis that every nook and cranny of our country and we need to know our local legislators and we need to know the people in our state house and we need to know our prosecutors. That is all well and good nationally but in dc it remains the case that unique and problematic system of the prosecutor the reporting to the president and it means that you do have this crisis. There i would say everyone operating in their sphere of influence but one of the things i noticed is that no one said i want to be the worlds biggest jailer especially no one said that in africanamerican communities and i cant find a single example of people saying things along those lines but what is also true is there is a harsh version of the statement but there is a pass the buck kind of attitude and when confronted with the unjust system that say when i interviewed prosecutors about this book they would often talk about the police and the problem is that the police bring us these cases and if the police would ring us a different set of cases then we would prosecute a different set of cases and when i interviewed judges they say the thing is the prosecutors in the prosecutors prosecute these type of cases and what i want to say is yeah, that is how someone else is working or not working is always a problem but what could you control and as a judge you have a lot of power and if you dont like the way things are going under these dcs sentencing systems you have a lot of authority to buck that. So what i want to say is the question is what can everyone what can we do to mitigate that harshness. You made mention of [inaudible] my recommendation would be to do the opposite. We have in one of the things i write about in the book i will run down a long list and i will be real specific. Im sorry. Thats exactly the problem. It isnt one thing. I completely agree with you. I dont want to wait for everybody. I want everybody in the space that they operate in to look at where they control and if you are a Police Officer or a Police Department and ask yourself do we do pre check stops in this community and we stop people on the basis of a minor traffic infraction with the stated insole goal of getting access to that car and searching that car not because we are doing Traffic Enforcement but because we want to search the car. If we are doing that we know that that type of policing leads to producing most of the Racial Disparity that we have in placing and we want to stop it. If you are in employer one of the people we want to write about in the book is sandra who stopped under pretext policing in her car is searched and a fine 20 worth of marijuana. The Prosecutors Office relatively progressive and they dont prosecute her but shes a probationary employee at fedex before the end of her probationary status she has to come in with a certificate of clean records. Those random lottery of the Dc Superior Court and the metropolitan Police Department record searches sometimes as lawyers miss really big things and sometimes really small things pop up on the computer. In her case, the arrest for possession of marijuana popped up and she had turned it in and she thought because it was no paper that it would be okay and she lost her job. That employer and employers like it could stop having practices that say we will not hire you if you have an arrest for Marijuana Possession or many others. I could go down the list and what im saying is to respond to your question we would have to go down the list and look at every single aspect of our system and ask how can we make it more humane and how can we make it less harsh. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] could i reply . [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] i would like to respond to that. So, thank you for speaking up. One of the things i believe is really important and one of the things that i sir, one of the things that i think is really important and i one 100 agree with you and is one of the arguments i make is that we have not raised up the voices of people who have been incarcerated in we have not raised up voices like yours and we have taken people who have been convicted of a crime or have been incarcerated and we have said you dont have a public platform. We have stigmatized people and i think that needs to change. One of the things im a big advocate of is exactly the point youre making in that the criminal justice for women, people trying to reduce the number of prisons we have and reduce the number of people incarcerated, reduce the amount of racism in the system, that movement hast to have voices like yours, front and central and in leadership positions. You do know and you know things that i will never know. One of the things that i have seen when i have talked to some activists and advocates on this issue is they say especially 20 years ago that it was impossible to get a voice like yours heard in and among the right civil rights activists in the Prison Reform movement because sometimes wellintentioned people say if we give them a voice then we will lose our organizations credibility on the issue and i think that is wrong because that position reinforces the stigma. Lately that has been changing. I interviewed a former public defender who now runs an organization out of ohio, a guy named David Singleton who a lot of people in this room no. He told me that his organization has recently been hiring and promoting and putting out front and center and other criminal convictions precisely because those voices changed the minds of legislators in the way that other voices cannot. There is one other thing he said that i totally agree with which is you talk about poverty and you talked a lot about class and a big part of my book is about exactly that. Its about how even in africanamerican communities that we have a Class Division and that we dont talk enough about. Since the 1960s the chances of going to prison for a black man who have dropped out of high school is gone up 10 and the chance of going to prison for a black man who is graduated from college has not gone up at all. That difference has a huge impact on the decisionmakers because they dont necessarily feel the pain of incarceration in the more elite segments of the community that in fact, have more power to make these laws. I thank you are what you said and i thank you for making that powerful statement. [applause] thank you. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] my plan right now is to make it through the day. [laughter] in all seriousness, when you say are you interested in engaging with, you could fill in the blank and drop like there and my answer to that is going to be yes. As a new author of a new book, i want anybody who is willing to be in conversation with me about this topic of the book and i want to be and specifically and seriously i want to talk to those communities that you are invoking right here because i agree with you. In a lot of ways that is who this book is written for and that is my principal audience. I dont have and i dont have a plan but i know that you know a lot of people and i want to sit down with anyone who has those kind of connections or as part of those type of convening and i just give a talk in baltimore last night in judge andre davis, retired federal judge, circuit, he came and gave a response and was very generous in his words and one of the things he said was as an africanamerican former prosecutor, judge, he said we need to be reading this book and having this conversation in our communities. I agree with him completely and i agree with you. Lets continue to talk about how to do that. I would love to. I want to do more, in fact. [inaudible] [inaudible] a lot of the answer is to education and my question is being a potential and having to serve with the Public Defenders Office do you feel like you may lose some of your impact on society and young people as opposed to being in there and representing them for short. Yes. [laughter] everybody that leaves pds goes through a period of mourning because the matter what job we go into, we go into a space that will have less impact than the job that we left and less direct impact, even certain jobs at an abstract level you could say well, you can make an argument for but see what i just did . You have to make an argument for it. At pds you dont have to make an argument, you feel it is there every day in the trenches fighting and so, yes, i do. I do. Can you talk about how [inaudible] yeah, so most of our prison system is still public but i want to talk about both parts of it because the point that you raise is a crucial one. I think that we have an incentive problem and you said incentivize and i think we have an incentive problem on the public side and on the private side. Right . Even if we look at the public system we have in some states like california the correctional officers, Prison Guards union has a very powerful and these are Public Sector employees but they lobby for tougher laws and they been lobbying against the laws to try to unwind the brutality of that system. Even on the public side, right, whether its prison building in Rural Communities or the Corrections Officers we have made this a business, a big business, a money making business and in america if you make it a Business People are going to exploit those opportunities and when what you are exploiting is the suffering and misery and in recitation of another human being, right . Its one thing if youre exploiting something that is abstract or exploiting something that is not a living but when youre exploiting other human beings for profit really just up there and as soon as you say here is the set up we will have a system and were going to force people into it and people are going to make money off of running it so that the cheaper and the less money you spend on food and Housing Conditions on getting people access to Educational Programs and the less money you spend on that, the more goes to your shareholders. Really, to me that you have to state the facts and the injustice and the humanity of it is obvious. Yeah, we have done that in its wrong in its one of the first things that we need to unwind if were going to change the incentive structure of this whole system. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] thank you. Mandatory minimums is a good way i think into the conversation and it in the 1980s right, you get a series of laws and many of them pass in response to rising addiction and rising violence in the crack cocaine era but you get the like the 101 crack distinction and you get mandatory convictions for drug this. The moment to make this point and sometimes when people ask me about this book one of the questions that they ask is by focusing on the role of africanamerican elected officials in the development of the system are you saying that the system is not racist or are you saying that there has been no racist motivations in the creation of the system in my answer to that is absolutely not. We have a huge and powerful literature, right . People, public intellectuals making arguments about the profound ways that structural racism, institutional racism, historical and ongoing have shaped American Society and shaped american criminal justice. Mandatory minimums would be one manifestation of that, one small one and i am moved by and persuaded by and adhere to those arguments. What im trying to do is write something to supplement that. Im trying to write something alongside that because in my view that crucial part of the story isnt the whole story which is why i chose to write this book. You can see that in the context of mandatory minimums. Chapter four of the book is about mandatory minimums. It specifically about a moment in washington dc in 1980, 1981, 1982 when a member of an africanamerican number of the city council and former police chief, first africanamerican police chief in dc, someone who came into the police force in the 1940s and overcame awful racism to rise up the ranks, those two individuals led a Citywide Movement in favor of mandatory minimums for drug and for gun offenses. And they passed. They passed, not the city council, they passed in the direct vote to the voters of dc. Anyone who lived in dc in 1981 went to the polls and you all voted if you are here or if you could have voted and it cast mandatory minimums past. Now, the drug mandatory minimums were there repealed by the city council but the gun mandatory minimums still exist so i agree with you and i want to talk about mandatory minimums and this is one of the reasons why i wanted to follow up on nicoles comment and get with the africanamerican elected officials is that those gun mandatory minimums still, right as we speak, as we sit here now, with all that we know about the racial disparate impact of minimums are still law and Laura Hankins and my colleagues at the Public Defender Service try to go and get those repealed and they cite the evidence of the racial discriminatory impact of those mandatory minimums and they are not making any headway. Still, even today so we have a lot of work to do. One more question, the one back here. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] the mayor put 13 billion on the table and only 13 on education because once a tax credit. Both of the kind of difficulties i see that further reduce and diminish the capacity of the black community to embrace the kind of issues that you are suggesting, the wherewithal is [inaudible] the second part is where is our fire . Where is our sense of resistance . Where is our cooperation with the nonsense . Its a lot of nonsense. We look at the [inaudible] thank you so much. [laughter] [applause] well, i think either what we need to do is spend more time listening to you. [laughter] you are right. I do think that so i do think at one level some of the fire has been lost that you are describing because i also think it is cyclical. I think that it is always the case that people say our community has lost the ability to fight right before the fight begins. I predict that it would be the case that if we went back and we looked at what older folks were saying right for you all launched the movement that changed all of our lives and change our society forever and i would predict that two years before you did that for two years for montgomery, years before north carolina, years before selma, years before birmingham, years before albany people said this generation they have given up and they dont know how to fight. We knew how to fight. Then you all showed him that you are ready to fight. I hear what you are saying but you are right, i do have more faith and i think that i dont know what it will be five years from now, ten years from now, there will be a moment where we will look at it and we will say oh yeah, they were ready to resist. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] you wont be surprised based on everything that you have heard and also my response to the last comment but i do think that there is the potential for the basis for such a movement and i think it will have to be a movement that has people who have been convicted and incarcerated in leadership positions and it will have to be a movement that focuses locally and its a movement that will have to change the way we think about the treatment of crying hundred and crime victims because one of the things happened in this country is that we mobilize crime victims and we have told them this massive, butyl, punitive criminal Justice System that is developed is for you and this is to respond to your pain and but it doesnt have to be that way. One of my one of the stories that i tell in the book is of a young man by the name of dante and he was also i represented him in Juvenile Court and he was charged with Armed Robbery. He went up to a man at a bus stop on 14th street, not far from here and he had a knife and he didnt pull it out but he robbed this man. He took a small amount of money, chump change really. He iran away and was caught a couple blocks later. He had the money on him in a knife on him and he was arrested on the scene. He confessed at the police station. When i went to my supervisors people were like mayor kennedy who is here laughing now thats pretty much what she did at the time. I need a defense merrier mary kennedy and she laughs. We didnt have a defense. The only option that i had was a lastditch kind of option and we didnt use it that often because sometimes it could backfire on us was to go talk to the man that he robbed. I called on mr. Thomas, his name in the book, he was a laborer, working, moving boxes, backbreaking work, africanamerican man, as was dante and no one deserves to be robbed but mr. Thomas, least of all. I went to talk to him and i told him dantes story and i told him about how dantes mother had been addicted to drugs and she hadnt been able to care for him and she had left him alone to raise himself and he had fallen in with the neighborhood crew and they had put him up to this robbery is part of the initiation rite. But also dante had tremendous potential. He was incredibly good with his hands, he was the spinster woodworker. It got them into this program, jobtraining program, a carpentry type program and it had a counseling component and run it by a minister out of a Storefront Church in southeast and his grandmother loved it because of the religious component and he was either way on the part. He got in and no other traditional programs would take him because he had an Armed Robbery conviction and they said we work with lowlevel offenders, not violent ones. But this program took him and i presented it to mr. Thomas and he heard me out and said i will think about it. For the next three weeks every day for the disposition what they call sentencing in Juvenile Court i would think about what would happen in this case and on the day of this centage i went into the courthouse and they called it the jm level, the bottom level of the courthouse where they do juvenile cases and i saw mr. Thomas and he was sitting on the benches there by himself and i was surprised because normally the prosecutors would have him shuttered off into a separate room precisely so that what is about to happen didnt happen and he pulled out the papers i had given him two papers. I had given him the apology dante had written and i had given him dantes confession on the night of because he had apologized to the police that night and he said at the bottom, im sorry. I wanted mr. Thomas to see that he had done that before he even met his lawyer. Mr. Thomas pulled out these crumpled papers and said mr. Foreman, you asked me to forgive your clients and he said i cant do that. But i am trying. He said i will go along with that program. We went into court, the prosecutor was his, the judge was surprised but the judge went along with it. He put him into that program. Years later i lost track of dante because at the public defender you see your clients to get rearrested and you see those who dont make it onto the ones who make it you dont see them again. I was walking down the street and i heard mr. Foreman and i looked up and i was Downtown Metro Center and there was a construction site and i looked up and it was over a decade later and there was dante. He had bulked up and was a man and had a hard hat on and came down to talk to me and i wanted to go to cozy and sit down and have a meal, this is a great moment for me. He wanted to keep it brief he had a sound of his own. When i left him that day, i thought about something that i thing about all the time which is one of our criminal Justice System was more like mr. Thomas was that day. What if we were oriented toward mercy, oriented toward redemption, anything is possible. Thank you. [applause] [applause] each year since 1950, the National Book foundation has selected what they consider to be the best books in poetry, young peoples literature, fiction and nonfiction. The winners of this years National Book award will be awa announced on november 15 in new york city. One of this years finalist for nonfiction is Duke University Timothy Tyson he recalls the life and death of a met hill. That starts now on the tv. Okay, good evening again. For those of you who dont know Timothy Tyson, tim is a Senior Research scholar at the center for documentary studies at duke, visiting prso