I am wes it is a distinct honor to sit here talking about the new book and it is great to be with you. I am glad to be here. So to give a background how i came to know about your book. I was sent this book by the good. Cspan said there is a new book coming out do you mind if we send it to you . Because i know about the work that you do and i read your book cuz and i was blown away. Just the power and in honesty with that structure taking place so it is a pleasure. So even before there are so many questions even before that talking about your process because this is a new type of book so what was your process to get to that point that you want to tell this story . There are a lot of different pieces in all honesty as a very talented writer having a hard life ending early so in the back of my head so i am a professor with an invitation and this was a famous lecture series and i agreed to these lectures to give the abstract titles and as we got closer we could not possibly talk about the africanamerican experience in contemporary america without telling the truth of the story of my cousins life. So that is the first big thing to doing that and then reaching out to Family Members to say can i have your permission . It is everybodys story even michaels mother and i needed to interview people that one of the hardest things it is embarrassing but my family never talked about what happened to michael. I had to interview my Family Members it was the first time over years since he had died that we tried to gather to understand. That is the worst thing of these events the stories dont come to the surface and dont achieve understanding and we are just a microcosm and as a result with a profound failure to understand what is happening with young people so im embarrassed what took so long for my family to talk about this but was it about a family coming to understand and that was the core. Host do you feel now the process has come to this beautiful tangible conclusion . Where is the family now . I am so grateful. My and in particular was incredibly strong and she said yes. Tell his story and come talk to me. I am grateful for her willingness and openness that she said this is an experience that has brought her piece and also to express gratitude and for all of us everybody had a piece of the puzzle and wrestling trying to understand what happened to this beloved child putting them together you can make sense of it there is absolution in that. I was taken by the title because i feel it is a beautiful double entendre because that is my cousin and my family and my blood but also it is cuz almost like because. Even the title. That is a great question going back to the riders process when i was a kid i loved poetry i wanted to be a poet when i grew up. The single biggest thing. I didnt do the work you have to do but it always stayed with me and has given me access to make sense of my world. As i was wrestling with the need to tell michaels story it just came to me one day the story was called cuz. Thats it then i knew what to do so what are my questions why was he killed . Why was he in prison for so long . Why did he end up on Street Corner with a gun taking somebodys car . Then i had a way to approach writing the book poetry gave me the title and it all came together. There is a section i would like you to read this paragraph here on page 60 i have highlights all over the book but can you just read this paragraph . Eight years after i got grounded for sneaking to class in a friends car my cousin Michael Alexander who didnt have a drivers license was arrested for the first time for attempted carjacking. If you months later after he turned 16 he was in court just inside the courtroom wearing the orange suit 1995 as a judge determined he would be charged as an adult. It is the story of children. Yes. I was in california i wanted wheels to sneak to my College Classes. But i wanted that mobility and i was not allowed and my cousin wanted mobility he wanted wheels in a different context and one of the worst neighborhoods in los angeles i pursued that in a way not to dangerous my cousin pursued that in a terrible way and ended up in prison for 11 years. When he started to go through the process you explain in vivid detail what the system did to him almost like it was baked in. What was that happening watching in real time . But just looking back on it you know how it comes out other than the predictable. So the nature is you have to completely imagine the alternative trajectory. You have to. That is part of the challenge you cannot proceed without hope that yet hope by definition pushes against the biggest view of reality and you have to separate against that it is hard to stay in that contrast what you need to hope and move forward with the dynamics you try to overcome. Those who have not had a chance to read the book, talk about the background. I am one of two kids growing up in a college town our Nuclear Family was an academic family with lots of books and going to conferences with my parents but my dad was from a big extended family one of 12 siblings growing up in southern florida a big sprawling africanamerican family many ended up in Southern California so we had a lot of cousins cant even count the number at family holidays but there was one set we were close by dad youngest sister and her three children spent a lot of time with us as a single mom working her way in nursing very hardworking and persistent it is hard to stretch those resources. Talk about michaels background. A beautiful kid a gorgeous smile the first thing everybody said was his smile. A motormouth and super talkative a stammer when he was little but he felt because he was so much he was so excited about he could not get it out fast enough. A very loving and gentle kid. This is the crazy thing of his story to end up in prison arrested for a Violent Crime but yet he is not a person to be violent in our lives or the lives of his friends, nobody that we knew growing up would ever describe him as violent. How does that happen everybody says this is not a violent person but ends up involved . What was that like . I did a lot of work requested the state level equivalent to get documents from the Police Report and the judicial records with the most amazing details was the witness or the victim of the carjacking that the gun was pointed at the ground the entire time. Thats right. He wouldnt be shooting at somebody so why was he there . If you have to compress that into a small answer when he was ten his mother met and married a man with high hopes for the future but he was violent it was a destructive and unstable relationship in a period of five years at a point to meet him and marry him michael went to five schools in five years that was happening in the middle of the Academic Year that critical age in adolescence just hormonal changes and figuring out who you are and so forth. He was very lonely and isolated so when they landed back in los angeles when he was 14 then there was the social world of gangs that provided the opportunity for connection. She was surprised to learn what i learned by doing this and this is what they mean about having tthe pieces of the puzzle together. They thought that is all there was and they didnt know about the other piece and when you put them all together you can see that kind of increasing level of involvement in this period and its completely fits the pattern. The danger this period gets involved after they have the first addressed that the common pattern and it fits. But literally none of us knew and the fact that we didnt know failed to see that and talk in a way to coordinate care for this person we all loved. So there is no question about that. Host can you talk about that . Guest theres the period in the 1990s in california where california has passed the three strikes youre out law and they were still figuring out what that meant and it was being used in ways that would be surprising to people. Convicted of three felonies and its 25 years to life. But what people dont often notice you can get a felony charge from a single incident so for example the attempted carjacking had to felonies and it in one incident. After he was arrested, he confessed he also attempted to rob a couple other people and those were other felony charges they added. That was the framework. It may have been the determination that he would be tried as an adult. It was in the period were wearing the age they were trying people and trying to use as adult since he was caught right in that access and got a sense of that of other sentences retch respectively and it disproportionately. Discovering that it was different and we understood to be so collectively we just didnt gather the forces and resources effectively to respond to the situation. But also feels impossible the use of mandatory minimums in sentencing and the three strikes youre out law and so forth has produced all sorts of absurd sentences in the criminal just said system and the country needs to recognize that we have incredibly distorted the criminal Justice System where the proportionate injustice is huge and as a society come a lot of people know that and try to talk about it, but we need a broad wake up on the topic. When you are thinking particularly about kids and so forth. Its as a brutal place and first arrest, first conviction they are very much in development as a person and have a chance of going in a different direction. You are cutting that chance off i do believe, so juvenile justice is a place that we should completely reorganized how we are approaching it. You really try to help the reader if they dont have experience with the facilities or experience with the juvenile side or the adult side of the system. In the book, you try to make them see it and visualize it. One man and of the spectrum would be to talk about the efforts to get an education in prison which in the 90s if it is very good opportunities for to pursue and education beyond the ged with no libraries or courses and things like that. We paid College Classes and the university and then you learn that the only classes you can take are the ones that have soft cover books. They are big textbooks with covers etc. And reduced to the two classes that were viable on this kind of criteria but it does speak to the kind of control and the number of hoops you have to work your way through to get anything at all even a small thing like enrolling for english 101. One of the details that stayed with me is prison life is very structured along the racial lines. White, latino, black theres just an incredible intent structure inside the prison. The fights recount along the racial lines and so we remember michael telling me one time that they had a latino dance partner is how he described it in the fights broke out and they would act like they are fighting so that the demand get hurt and they were not participating on the side they were this to be participating on curious about was a little detail about what it takes to survive in a place like that. Theres a lot more that i could say but i hope that its something of a cent. It is those small details about survival that i think are important for people to understand. It is impossible for someone to enter a situation like that and come back the same. Not necessarily that it is impossible for them to come back and be the same. How was he described when he came home . That is a good question. The stammer was gone. He was certainly quieter and he still has his capacity for joyfulness. But you could never say that about him any longer. There was definitely a much deeper quiet underneath he was very protective of his mother and stronger over time as a gentle kind of attentive care he directed that his mother and i think that was you often hear people say folks whove been in prison they just dont talk about it the same way people who fought in world war ii will go to their grave and the kids will hear the stories. Thats what its like there is a wall of silence. So if nothing 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 of then a wall came down and there was no more talking about that. Host how much exposure did you have to criminal Justice System prior year until it became personal . The funny thing is retch roast actively i can see that my whole life has been in the criminal Justice System in the sense that i grew up in the tds when the criminal Justice System was exploding and ive never thought about that subconsciously that it was the phenomena in the world i grew up in and when i got to college i mentioned this in the buck with all these speeches from courtrooms with pages and pages of material in the course there is no mentioning of prison. Like there there is a world wit prison how can that be so it was a contrast between the little i grew up in and what i was reading that drove my intellectual interest and career that urged from the contrast so although begin because i wasnt kind of software about it as an 18yearold, i was pursuing these historical lines but i was thinking about punishment from that point forward trying to understand the deterrence and whyd you pick one another in the use justifications for the system so philosophically i got engaged quite early on and i wrote my dissertation in history on the system. I was trying to understand these developments and strangeness and i had this hope when i wrote the dissertation that this three strikes law would be like a slave act that in the 19th century the juries would not enforce said they would be brought in for not having returned a fugitive slave and they would do the jury nullification. They cant be published for the decisionfortheir decisions are e supposed to enforce the law but if they decide that it is unjust and decide im not going to convict anybody on this judge, thats what happened to the fugitive slave and it is unenforceable. In the early days in california it looks like there might be something of a nullification of a non when people are coming in with life sentences for stealing a pack of diapers but im not going to convict somebody for life on this. So for that i have been interested in criminal justice from the beginning. Host but its interesting the power of the narrative and the story helping people to understand. Because this book, i hope people will go out and read it. This isnt some academic understanding of the criminal Justice System and its history and application. You write it in a way that people see it in their own lives whether they are connected to it or not, the humanity and the inhumane nature of the book. Guest i was just trying to help people see it from god just the perspective of crime and punishment but the way that we are raising young people this way and in order to see that you have to walk through a younger persons life and remember what it feels like to be ten to 11, 12, 13, what it feels like to be 15 when youve are figuring out your own independent trajectory and so forth and you have to remember we all did things that were on the verge of danger so why was i safe and why did i make it through okay and then there was a whole lot involved and in the degree of difficulty issue yeah my degree in the college town was little words and my cousins degree of difficulty and hes responsible for his own choices and so forth but weve got to acknowledge that and i believe as a society we have to be reducing that you cant see that with the degree of difficulty issue and the hard pass through adolescence and think about what the adored bedroom look like and the kids you were hanging out with, what are the dangerous choices you were considering and no now i pt those same things sidebyside. This personal responsibl rese ability or societal what is your answer when people ask that . You cannot separate these things because collectively, we build the world that we live. We build the opportunity patterns. It doesnt just fall out of nowhere. And in the world tha world we le there are varying degrees of difficulty confronting young people depending on the context which they happen to be born and yes so it doesnt matter where you land on that degree, there is always somebody that can pull off on that. The gymnast that did not passively difficult thing theres always somebody that can pull it off but most people would break their back. There is a high error rate that we just know that. So in that regard, yes. People can overcome all the circumstances but we have got to address the incredible disparities and difficulty conferencing people when they come into the world. Said, comes home and still very much a young man who now has this context of being institutionalized as a core part of his childhood. What did you see about his prospects . His ability to reintegrate and live a successful life, when did you start to realize that there is a problem . He had been out for about six months when the problems started to become apparent and the Biggest Issue was the hold of the social connections from prison. It makes sense when you think about it and in his case it wasnt just the social connections generally. He had a girlfriend, someone he loved and have met in prison and we didnt know that she was still in his life and became apparent at about six months and when he got out, he didnt know whether he was going to reconnect with her and return it to her or not. In some sense it was the drama of the First Six Months out with a decision about whether or not the 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 the world completely separate from all the social life he had in the last 11 years. You do a really good job of being able to explain the dynamics of the relationship and understanding the fact he did have a pretty clear sense of the fact this wasnt the healthiest relationship but he kept coming back to it. What do you think was the psychology behind that for many people who were watching they can all think of experiences in their lives where if they are being honest with themselves and others theres something on the coffee about this but thats where you are. Host somebody wrote about the relationship that had all of the intensity and i think that is fair and hes never had any kind of relationship and comes out of prison after 26 with a relationship that has lasted three or four years and it makes sense that it would be an adolescent relationship in some ways. Obviously they are at that point in their 20s thinking of adult ways but they had to have a chance to have a low stakes practice relationship i guess is that im trying twhat im tryina sixmonth relationship. It helps to understand from those that work on the development and sort of thing because what it does is not the kind of trajectory of an adolescent to eight adult relationship that you see for a lot of younger people to have the skills to give a good diagnosis. [laughter] host . Why is it a big stop the development in a number of ways to. Host use all this with his life as latifah and structural. To mend relationships and their structures in place we realize how difficult it is for a person reentering back into society. Guest there is no question about it. When you think about some of the facts and statistics for example the spread of hiv right now people dont really know there is a crisis especially for africanamerican women. And why is that . You have a lot of hiv circulating in prison and then come out and sexuality, heterosexual, bisexual and all kinds of things and so forth and so yes, the numbers are staggering. Host brings you all caught word about his death and killing what was your gut reaction when you first found out . There are so many tragedies in the world i guess i would be embarrassed to claim this when there are so many devastating stories but it is just this complete inner collapse which one feels physically as well as emotionally. So, i was at a garden party kind of end my husband is british and with his extended family that was one of those moments where everything goes blank. And how did you first find out . My dad called me. My cell phone at this party, my dad called and my husband handed me the phone and he just said its michael and i just wasted and he said hes dead. I had just seen him not even a month earlier because we had just gotten married and hed been at our wedding so literally less than a month. He and my head was as beautiful and energetic and brilliantly smiling as ever. You never expect to go from that picture to 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 he think he had gotten very good at keeping his wife with his girlfriend in the prison connections to separate with his wife with his family, so when we saw him at the wedding, family occasions, social occasions, he seemed good, looked good. He looked healthy, he looked great. But he was by that point getting increasingly involved in the violent world connected to his girlfriend and her own cousins and different kind of habits. So i dont know the details of the end of his life. Ive gotten sort of snippets of rumors and some things from the Police Report and 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 lay out its almost like the people who at that point were intimately involved were probably less surprised by his death than even the Family Members. Guest yes, absolutely. A way of underscoring the contrast he had to Funeral Services. Host can you tell us about that . Guest his mother had one at her church and that was the kind of thing i was used to growing up with my grandfather as a baptist preacher in southern georgiabeautiful music, this kind of fire of community warmth. Recognizing peoples kind of images of the agenda goes from the Civil Rights Movement and things like that and then there was a service o at the church tt michael attended, which was a church headed by a pastor that have made it partly his mission to minister to the youth engaged in the street activity. The kind i learned about more recently in at the folks that turned ou out about that one wee those that were much more closely connected to the world d that michael is now living and the Police Showed up at the service and they were there because they were investigating his death and things like that and so i think that was you know in some senses that day of the Funeral Service was the first sort of clear view that we started to have devoted his life had become. Host how did your relationship with michael change after he died . Guest thats interesting. Well, that is super interesting. So he used to send me mothers day cards when he was in prison which i was very grateful for and i still am very grateful for them and i think when he was in prison we were very Close Friends as well as cousins. Talked a lot about writing and other things and it was a kind of pure relationship. Host very proud of you. Guest he was, a very supportive person. So finally although he had a terrible end and was doing terrible things by the end of his life, he was kind of a little voice of wisdom in my head because i think he helped me to see danger signs in other People Better than i would have previously. So i think hes taught me how to look for the trouble people may be in o order to see the strugge people may have. To give a teeny tiny example, michael love to be outdoors, he loved it. He needed to be outdoors, and in prison he fought fire and that was sort of the best part of his life, the california inmate and you could hear it in his voice. Calm good. He worked good with physical activities outdoors. As after he died i got a clarity about that but he needed both of those things together. He ran marathons at school and that was a good part of his school life and when he wasnt doing that any longer, i have two kids, one is a little boy and he loves to be outside. He loves it, spending hours outside in the back garden. I watch him and im like thats what michael was like. So, this kid needs a way to be outside and do outdoor things a lot alongside of school. He is just going to need that. And i dont think i would have spotted that without his voice in my head. What do you tell your Family Members . Guest just that he is a beautiful person. I always like to say if you dont know that talent is everywhere in the world, read this story because talent is everywhere. Dont give me this thing like this no talent in this innercity neighborhood or theres no talent in this devastated area. Its everywhere and if we dont foster the peace potential we are bailing. And then to friends and family, its about the need to be much more selfconscious about talking to each other and not hiding the trouble and wedding shame keep you from telling people whats going on. Because again, his wife was lifs hindered by the degree of difficulty the society set forth for him and hindered by the criminal Justice System but also by the family that hid its a shame and it didnt talk and couldnt honestly dive into the problems that we are addressing and as a family that is what we are all now thinking about. The idea that we all understand the structural challenges that exist by not being open and honest we are being [inaudible] thank you for saying it because i didnt get that exactly right. That is what im trying to say. I first gave this as a plextor which was a strange idea at harvard and it was a weird experience for the audience because i theyre afraid they basically cried all the way through the whole thing. They were very generous. But then the other thing that was powerful for me is the number of people that came up afterwards and said i never told anybody but i have a Family Member in prison and this wasnt a racial thing. A prison system as big as ours 25 of the worlds prison population despite the fact we have 5 of the worlds population they are the last story we are not telling and yes by not telling the stories we are letting this thing live. Weve got to get the story out so we can see the damage we are doing and fix this. So thank you for saying that. Not talking about it is complicity. Host someone once said something to me they sent you know the best way to make a friend, told them a secret. Because then at that point, they feel you have been vulnerable enough with them that they are now willing to be vulnerable enough with you and part of the reason people have responded to is because they feel that you are willing to be vulnerable. Host guest its one of those things i got myself into probably more than i realized i was getting myself into a. So yes i need myself vulnerable. Its like did i really do this. Did i agree to do this but there i was. It was on the schedule and advertised. Host if someone does what do you want to get from this story, what if nothing else i want you to walk away from this . Our prison system is a profound injustice and we need to find our way out of mass incarceration. Host because of wha of whats doing guest to the millions of young men like michael. And every one of those young men at their 30 to 50 people is deeply connected which means if theres 2. 5 Million People in prison right now, we are talking about 60 million who are already directly implicated in this negative current that flows out from it. Guest at this point, ive come to believe that we have to end of the war on drugs. Its not the sole cause on the mass incarceration. When i say and the war on drugs but they mean by that specifically is legalize marijuana and he criminalized harder drugs, cocaine, heroin and so forth and tha that is a important distinction between legalization and decriminalization so its like alcohol, its because you can go into a store and you can buy it. Decriminalization means its still a misdemeanor to possess but its not a felony so you dont get a felony on your record and places like portugal its a misdemeanor and people are more likely to ask for help. So you have to connect that to a serious investment in Public Health at first to prevent and defend to deal with addiction so its a hard reduction paradigm. The war on drugs operates in an abstinence paradigm like there will never be any drug use like ever. Thats what we are pretending that americans spent 100 billion a year on illegal drugs. Lets take the black market out of it with all of its dynamics with regards to marijuana and then you invest the resources but then its by going after this at the lowest end of the spectrum. To some extent we are already doing some of this in the sense that at this point in criminal courts for example they dont prosecute people any longer for the use or possession. Theres still a lot of disparity is about that but although they dont actually do whats on the books legally, people dont know that. People think what they are doing is a felony so they will hide it and it just means we can keep sub urging that publichealth problem. We can use the tools of Public Health and so forth, Harm Reduction to treat drugs, reduced the scope of the black market and try to bring a lot of people back into the legal economy because that is a big part of the picture as an Economic Opportunity and the disadvantaged areas and how when people are currently participating in the illegal black market economy is to pull them back into the legal econo economy. When people make the argument that we have to end the war on drugs, people will come back as a 14 of the people in prison right now are in prison for drug offenses, so get rid of the drug law i think that is a argument because so many of her actions are connected and the effect of living in a space outside of the rule of law. So the number of things because of the drug market generally its bigger than 14 i believe, and also because so many of the resources and the criminal justice have been directed to fighting the war on drugs he cant do the job they need to do on the other parts of the criminal Justice System and that is adding to the problem. Its kind of complicated to explain the links but the sources where they are needed in different places like this they can drive down homicide levels and help restore the peaceful equilibrium in the neighborhoods that are currently tormented. Host and the data reinforces that as well. I have one final question for you. What is next for you . Guest well, its always something, you know, so i have the luxury of being a professor that i control my own time and get to work on the things i love and so, i have an ongoing passion for the declaration of independence and i continue to do work on that. I am a political philosopher that is my core academic subject and i have a philosophical book on the political equality that im working on now. Im sophisticated to the publishesupposed to get it to to that is what has gotten most of my attention. Ou a lo i want to discuss on that one as well. Im incredibly thankful for this time and for your contribution and incredibly thankful for michael. It is an incredible story. Guest thank you so much for taking the time. Guest every month for the past 20 years, one of the nations top nonfiction authors has joined us on our in Depth Program for a fascinating threehour conversation about their work. Now, just for 2018, in depth is changing the course. Weve invited the 12th fiction authors onto the set. Authors of historical fiction to National Security thrillers, science writers, social commentators like Colson Whitehead and brad ford, brad meltzer, Geraldine Brooks and many others. Their books have been read by millions around the country and around the world. So, if you are a reader, join us for in depth on book tv. Its an Interactive Program the first sunday of every month and it lets you call and talk directly to your favorite authors and all kicks off on sunday january 7 at noon with david ignatius, Washington Post columnist and the author of ten National Security thrillers. You can join live on sunday january 7 or watch on demand at booktv. Org. Next, on booktv afterwards, former fox news host gretchen discusses Sexual Harassment in the workplace and is interviewed by sally quinn, Washington Post