Transcripts For CSPAN2 The Political Roots Of Racial Tracking In American Criminal Justice 20150301

[background sounds] hello, everybody. I have the job of introducing dr. Moore for todays book presentation and discussion. Now, when i agreed to do this she and i talked for a little bit about the best way to introduce her in the talk and we decided the best way was to mix things up and change it up a bit. So im going to begin by briefly introdiscussing her Research Interests and professional activities and then say a bit more about what where shes coming from in the book. First, her Research Interests. Her first book examined the interaction of race with the United States Senate Procedures from the 1950s onward. The book shes currently working on probes the politics of the Supreme Court Decision Making on race. And the book to be discussed tonight is about race and criminal justice. I guess you can say dr. Moore practices what she preaches. He was appointed by governor paterson to the new York State Commission and later appointed by the new York State Senate to the Advisory Council on underaged drinking and substance abuse. Last book, yet by no leans least, she was selected as princeness to review as one of the top Princeton Review as one of the top professors in the country. The largest Housing Project in the United States. Sociologist William Wilson used the Robert Taylor homes to el strait the growing problems of social dislocation in the inner city. Wilson observed in 1983 only a little more than. 5 of people hived in the prompts however however,11 of the citys murders and 10 of its aggravated assaults were committed in these promptings. These severe circumstances helped to explain why she skews the us versus them paradigm. Project kids, as she and her friends were called, grew up as part of a multiteared minority. They were minority black within a minority, within a minority poor within another minority mired in concentrated poverty. There was still yet another layer of minority identity within these Housing Projects for dr. Moore. As her family was a twoparent, devoutly religious household in a sea of socalled broken homes her father gainfully employed and her tenancy shorter than most. As to the overall Robert Taylor community, the folks lived in the intersection of race, crime and the american system of justice in the 1980s. The greater visibility of drug use and trafficking, and the launch of the national war on drugs all converged like a perfect storm in the 1980s. And as with any storm, those in the center were subject to multiple crosspressures. Moore reports about having the experience up close and personal of her friends being forced to submit to random police patdowns and searches in full view of the public, pull down their pants or spread eagle on the concrete ground. Several years later came the police sweeps coordinated by eight different state and local Law Enforcement agencies unannounced warrantless police searches during which residents were forced to remain seated and stilled while police rifled through their bedrooms and personal belongings in hopes of finding criminal evidence. Widespread arrests for petty offenses were typically all that resulted. None of the dragnets made a dent in the high crime rate in the area. They did however manage to fortify the wedge between residents and Law Enforcement officials, black and white alike. Just as impactful as these firsthand observations of Police Access and ineffectiveness was having experienced the loss of childhood friend to a Violent Crime. For dr. Moore the analyst side of her the murder of her friend symbolized many of the recurring themes that preoccupy studies of race, crime and justice. Trade da was brutally raped and beaten to death virtually beyond recognition. Her assailant was black and a serial offender. His pattern of criminal activity was known beforehand to local police and his victims but not published to the community at large until after the fact. News of the brutal murder occupied all of few sentences in local newspapers. There were no marches no demonstrations and no name brand civil rights leaders demanding anything neither in regard to the perpetrator nor the police. Following 17 hours of interrogation and forced injection of tranquilizer police obtained a confession a conviction and a 3445year 45year prison sentence. Madden served only three years of his sentence and then was released back into the community. In the wake of the murder and maddens conviction things returned to abnormal. Violent crime in the area continued on course, so did the intensity of the intrusive but scarcely effective policing, and so did a widespread a the widespread arrests and eventually mass prison and commitments. The only viable solution local, state and federal policymakers could fathom was to completely demolish the Robert Taylor Home Projects and dismantle what Little Community had managed to survive for more than 30 years in the midst of all of this. Dr. Mere asserts that pretty much everybody was complicit played a role in perpetuating this vicious cycle even if only by virtue of their failure to mobilize and actively demand meaningful change. In his interview as a country, we often continue to play much of the same role with money of the same dire consequences but on a much wider scale. So the goal of this book is to help shed light on what we all bring to the table to expose our collective obligation to do more and to bring into sharper focus why we have not. With that i introduce you now to dr. Nina moore. [applause] thanks so much for that, zac i really appreciate it. And as the rest of you come in please feel free to grab the seats in the front. Thanks also to mary and to grace, i believe grace has already had to leave for the day, but most of all thanks to the cspan tv crew who took the truck up here from manhattan with a few twists and turns. You nonetheless made it and, of course, thanks to all of you who are in the audience. And i really appreciate an opportunity to talk about my work. This is something ive lived with for several years, and you sort of picked up from comments that zac just offered, its near and daughter to my heart so im near and dear to my heart, so im grateful you all are here. I would like to talk for only three hours [laughter] and then after that have a couple of questions. And those of you who would be interested in asking a question, well ask if you would please go other to the stationary mic. It just works better for picking up sound and so forth. I imagine that quite a few of you are reacting to some of the recent news Media Coverage of events. It has not been often the case that we get this regular sort of, you know onslaught of Headline News coverage. And i will tell you when i can stomach watching it because when you live with this sort of subject as i have for so many years, sometimes you need a break from it. But i have to tell you on the one hand i have been pleased with the fact that the country has turned its attention to what i consider to be a very important issue. I would even go so far as to argue that this is one of the main human rights issues that we face in this country. But on the other hand, have you all noticed that its already starting to fade a bit . Were not walking up to hearing about it were not seeing it in the Headline Newspaper articles so forth. So what worries me about this sort of up and down, the ebb and flow the in and out coverage is that it gives some the impression that these sorts of incidents occur on just a periodic basis. So lets see if i can get this to work for me. But the fact of the matter is whats happened to Michael Brown, what happened to mayor rice, what happened also to eric garner in new york city, these are the sorts of things that have been happening in this country for decades for decades. And even current Government Data show that and this may surprise some of you it happens virtually every other day here in the country. Again, Government Data show that roughly 200 people die during the course of an arrest. And more specifically 120 of these are the result of Police Homicides in particular. So there are all the other types of arrestrelated deaths which is what we call them such as Natural Causes p accidents intoxication, and then theres a sort of unspecified category as well. And these data show pretty much the same thing going back to when they first began to be traced regularly by the fbi. So theres nothing really new here. And then beyond the issue of police killings, which is what weve really sort of been shocked by, right . As a community, are other types of treatmentrelated issues such as what happens when an individual is stopped during a traffic stop, what happens when someone is out and needing help and knocks on the door and is met with a doublebarreled shotgun . What happens in all sorts of otherrennen stances other instances having, again, to do with differential treatment issues. But this is what i want to suggest, that the treatment issues are the tip of the tip of the iceberg. What i consider to be a much more troubling and much more deeply embedded problem is the high rate of felony convictions and also imprisonment in the black community. And this is not something that we find shocking enough as to have regular conversations in the news media about it. But let me give you a sense of why i find this really, really sort of a horse of a different color. The prevalence of imprisonment and the black community in the black community is nothing short of extraordinary. Roughly one out of every five black persons is projected to go to prison at some point in his or her life. One out of every five. And thats significantly larger than the 3 of nonhispanic whites who are expected to do the same. How about if we compare in a different way blacks go to prison at a rate thats six times greater than their white counterpart, and youll hear me say a couple of times, and i sort of indicated here the problem of overrepresentation or at least i in the next slide. So if you estimate, you can slice the black population all sorts of ways. But if you estimate that they claim roughly 13 of the residential population, they claim a p whopping 33 share of sentenced prisoners. Sentenced prisoners. This does not include jail which are people who have not committed a felony. So these are really conservative measures. And did i already say a couple of times that these are Government Data . Right . So that means we can even take those with grain of salt. So theres the issue of imprisonment, yes, but then theres this category of people referred to as exfelons people who have not necessarily served time in prison but have been convicted of a felony. A felony usually nets one a prison system, and roughly 44 , 44 percent of the black male population in the u. S. Is classified as an exfront. Exfelon. 44 . And as i was working on this project, you know, this is, like, depressing stuff. [laughter] so i had two moments where i just sort of stopped and said i have to take a moment and get back my sanity and to sort of you know, get some distance from it. And that figure struck me. So the 44 actually compares to 9. 5 of nonhispanic, white males. So theres the exfelon population issue but in addition to that is the impact, the impact of having a felony conviction the impact of having served tame in prison, the way we have things structured now is one never really recovers from that. There are longterm, truly devastating effects that run the gamut, and perhaps ill have an opportunity to get into some of what those effects are perhaps in the q a. So what i do in the opening chapters of the political roots of racial tracking is i give what i consider to be the most comprehensive account to date using mostly that its call data of racial statistical data of racial tracking which is the twin problem of both differential treatment as well as overrepresentation in prisons. And i really sort of go overboard here. I have about a hundred different statistical indicators for doubting minds. I hopefully leave knowing this is a very firm empirical foundation. At some point i would really love to share this with the head of the new York City Police union, so hell know that this really is real, and its not just a figment of some imagination. So i give you all of this portrait of what the experience is like, and weve heard a lot of these data in other ininstances, right . Michelle alexander i think, did a fabulous job on her last book the new jim you, and unpacked a lot of that the new jim crow. What im trying to add to this conversation is how do we appropriate political responsibility . How do we bring politics into this . Quite naturally because im a political scientist, thats the sort of thing that i want to do. And i think its also important for us to do that because too often when we have these incidents happen in the country or conversation about what has happened, our conversation about who is to blame is too narrowly focused. We ask the following types of questions was officer Darren Wilson justified in shooting Michael Brown . Was officer daniel [inaudible] in new york city rightly or wrongly using the chokehold . We talked a lot about well, should the jury the grand juries in both of those cases have indicted or not, and thats pretty much where the conversation stopped. Im sure that very few of us who are passionate about this and have followed it are aware that the Obama Administration will soon announce its plans to not pursue charges against officer Darren Wilson. And so we already see it sort of being relegated back to the sidelines and at a time when one you have might have expected something more. So i think we need to broaden the conversation. And the real questions we should be asking are not about the officers on the scene but rather why is the country why as a country have we permitted this to happen time and time again, decade after decade in city after city and without stepping up to do more . Why are we comfortable with abiding the fact that our prisons are now filled, the majority of the prison population consists of blacks and latinos. Why are we comfortable with that when these are the minority groups in our country and more specifically, why havent we done something to address these . My answer is its because were not doing anything about it. Its because we have not prioritized this issue. In essence, we are all part of enabling it abiding it, and i really wanted to title this book we are the man. I couldnt get my editor at Cambridge University press and i did try a couple of times. I dont know if hes going to watch this but well after it was submitted it came back and i said are you sure you dont want to go with we are the man, because i think that gets to the essence of the thesis. Blacks as well as whites thats something we really tend to think about not something we tend to really think about but blacks as well as whites democrats as much as republican lawmakers, president obama and i come from a family of obama fanatics. My mom is absolutely committed to obama, and i have lots of family members who stump, and im going to have to be a little bit careful here if i want to stay in the family. Of president obama as much as reagan, both congress and the Supreme Court alike, all of these are implicated. We all are the man. We all are the man, as i said because we enable or abide racial tracking. So to establish this thesis of the political process the policy process as being primarily the reason why this continues over time, i used roughly eight chapters in the book fully 68 tables and figures and then wait for it, 499 footnotes total. As i was writing it, it was like okay, ive really got to make sure im bringing it if im going to say everybody is to blame. I better have something to back it up, and i think ive accomplished that. So in the three hours that a im going to have you all here tonight, i think i will just offer a very brief overview of that and, end again, id like to have some dialogue so ill try and get quickly to the q aful before i jump into this q a before i jump into this i want to say i admire the tremendous amount of research out there that has already been done on this question. And this research stretches over several decades. And i pore over this in Chapter Eight of the book. In order to sort of get this out there right from the get, the reason we havent done anything and im getting ready to use a double negative here its not because we dont know what to do, its not because we dont understand the issue, its not because we dont know what sorts of policies to develop. In fact, we have quite a bit of research that points us in that direction, and those have to do with the more immediate causes. And ive categorized them in four ways. Again, i really cant do justice to this very rich literature. But if i had to categorize it, then they would include the following; racecentered bcs which essentially argue that there is either deliberate or subconscious discrimination on the part of both lawmakers as well as Law Enforcement officers. The second set centers on what i call legal issues and these people argue that its the way the system operates, that its the way that criminal court apply laws in particular cases. And also they point often to mandatory sentencing laws as playing a big role here. The third set focus on socioeconomic disadvantage. And implicit in these arguments, the next two, is the idea that there is criminal ip equality along racial inequality along racial lines. There is this idea that, yes, blacks are committing crime at higher rates than are others. The first two theories dont necessarily concede that. But the socioeconomic disadvantage argument says well, its about poverty its about inequality its about disadvantage, its about not having access to opportunities its about being socially isolated living in neighborhoods where theres no substitute to job, and finally one of the more popular and i say popular because it seems to be a little bit more attractive and sexier and that is the culture of violation ceases. And unlike the prior two this is really saying its something about the individuals. Something is wrong. The values are off kilter, etc. But most who and i say most, i really mean most who are the more respected in the fields of criminology and sociology they recognize that perhaps there may be culture differences there but that those cultural differences themselves are traceable to socioeconomic disadvantage. In other words if people are accepting violence as a way of life, it is because they have not been left with very many other options, and they dont have access to mainstream American Life where the mainstream values would give them a different way of viewing the world. So if you take all of these and you mix them all together ultimately they all are traceable to society forces one way or another. And what that means is that theyre all fixable. Theyre all fixable through public policy. So as i said, there are some things that we can do at the societal level. So the question then becomes why have we not addressed what we know to be the forces most immediately driving these issues . Now, not just because im someone who studied the Supreme Court and i really love studying the Supreme Court, but perhaps for you guys too, the first place you would look would be to the Supreme Court. Because were talking about racism at least in some way, and were also talking about inequality both of which run up against the equal protection clause of the constitution. So theres that but theres also the historic role that the Supreme Court played in dismantling racial segregation through its 1954 brown v. Board of education decision. That decision, many argue in turn spurred the Civil Rights Movement which in turn led to the Ground Breaking civil rights legislative reforms of the 60s and later. So the average person would say okay well, lets look to the Supreme Court. And i do that. I go through 60 cases and i cover a time period from 19322005 in the book, and what i find is this is the one area where the court has, in fact, operated in a color blind fashion. It has ignored, sidestepped pretended to not see the systemic racial forces that operate. Theres been this reluctance to acknowledge its not these individual cases that are brought before the court and where it may side with the plaintiff, but rather theres something very deeply wrong about how recent criminal Law Enforcement race and criminal Law Enforcement interact in our cup. So, you know we tend to say, well the conventional wisdom tells us this is really about conservative courts. This is more specificically about berger and rehnquist specifically about berger and rehnquist, and i would like to challenge that a little bit in that, challenge it in the sense that its not simply the conservative court. So if we consider, as i said the time stretches that i look at from 1932 to 2005 we will see all throughout that period as we shift from liberal courts to conservative courts, there is this steady trend of just pretending that they dont see whats really happening. So some of you may be familiar with the 1932 powell v. Alabama decision the infamous decision where there were boys in which they were tried, convicted and sentenced to death all in a oneday trial, and these were relatively young people. But even in that the court is really saying okay, there has to be a right to counsel not that this other stuff was really messed up, right . There was another case, moore v. Alabama, in which the defendants are literally on the stand, and they have lynch markings on their necks. Theyve been whipped, they have sort of lashes on their back. The sheriff in the town admits on the stand that yes he beat them, and he used the nword, he said but i didnt beat them too bad for, and he used the nword. And the Supreme Court just pretends to not see that. So what we find with the Rehnquist Court is that the Rehnquist Court is squarely presented with the question, squarely asked, okay, weve got this evidence here. This is not anecdotal, this is not piecemeal, this is just a i few people of we have got this hard ed in the form hard evidence in the form of something known as the [inaudible] which took into account literally hundreds of factors, used very careful controls and the court looked at it, and the court really didnt question and say, well did you do it the right way, did you use the right coefficient, okay, fine, well accept it. But guess what . We dont see these kinds of statistical disparities as evidence of constitutional impropriety. The constitution does not and i have a quote here the constitution does not require the elimination of any common available disparity that correlates with the potentially irrelevant factor in this case rate. So, you know we sort of see this coming. Its been happening up until 987 up until 1987. In 1987 it was just stated outright for doubting minds who were wondering whether or not it was actually going to happen. This is the Rehnquist Court. Most people say, okay, what did you expect . But then i argue that we really cant absolve the warren court either, the infamously warren court who ushered in what we know as the second judicial revolution enormously expanded not only civil rights, but also Civil Liberties. The warren court, even when it would strike down Death Penalty cases involving minorities would do it without recognizing there was some really screwy stuff going on here. That lynch mob that was outside that probably shouldnt have happened. It sort of carries on, and one famous case which was a Death Penalty case, there at a time when death executions at least 63 of them in this country were claimed by blacks. On one hand i am pleased to say that there is a set of lawmakers who was then champions of their Racial Justice agenda in the proposal included in the Racial Justice agenda are those of you there on the of these laws are targeting racial different visit montfort meant for the introductory remarks of those introducing non. In other words, they are explicitly tied to this issue of Racial Justice. I have to tell you. You had this problem from the last election, but john conyers is an unsung hero. He has made this his a. B. Since 1981 year after mccleskey came down virtually every year has introduced some sort of pill. Theres an interesting mix of characters here because there is also representative Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson lee. On top of that senator Jeff Sessions, a vocal republican even of late and reportedly tied to some degree tvt party as well senator dick durbin out of illinois shes the assistant majority leader, highranking democrat and former senator Russ Feingold out of wisconsin. I went through roughly 25 years poring through congressional proceedings and found a handful of very, very small group. They said we are going to try everything. Will try everything from lets go with a bill that just says its wrong nothing more. Just condemns racial profiling. There were those who for example, a few introduced by representatives jackson lee in Maxine Waters says look Pamela Pfeifer sound area we know to be problematic to get preclearance before proceeding with the prosecution that kerry capital sentencing possibilities as well and there are others that did a number of other things. As i said not a whole lot has happened here. There is a resolution put and i just wanted to say follow me closely. Its a sense of the house of representatives that congress at some point in the future should encourage state to condemn racial profiling. And it went nowhere. None of these bills went anywhere. Im not in another cells is problematic. The congress isnt doing anything. What i find to be even more problematic is while congress is reject the racial reform on one hand, it has taken not been anticrime policy strategy we know as law and order that has exacerbated the need for reform. They are rejecting racial reform but making racial reform of the more necessary because of the bills being pushed. I am sorry for the small font here. Just realizing its relatively small. Here is Congress Version of law and order consists of. First is what is known as the federalization of law. The federal government got into the business of fighting crime during the late 1960s. I like to think its because they needed something extra to do a newest part of the southern strategy and is appealing for all sorts of other reasons. The Heritage Foundation a conservative think tank has pushed against this and found that one point that the federal government has more criminal law on the books that even the Congressional Research service account. Do you guys know what a is . Near lake ave. Course they do. [laughter] because the other students are saying im not sure i want to knit that i know. So it is a crime just to have it. And so the Heritage Foundation has seen this as an overreach of government, but they make the point really nicely that there is this explosion of criminalizing behaviors which means criminalizing people which means opening up opportunities for people to be snared in the criminal process. A second component is the incarceration centered policy. It has not always been the case in this country that are in search reverend faction of criminal law is to send people to prison even for nonviolent offenses. I am not one of those flaming. Im not liberal at all. In fact i am right of center. It is odd to me that people have drug addictions. We find it perfectly reasonable to send in to present. I will point out later when this was put in place there is a plethora of Health Services and organizations, Doctors Pharmaceuticals representatives and so forth is that this is not the way should do this. This isnt how you do with addiction by putting people in prison. The use of postconviction punishment. What this means is after people have done their time in prison, well after theyve done their time in prison they are a strip of some of the most basic aspects of liberty of full participation in American Life, of opportunity and on down the line. The right to vote even parental rights. There is a sort of let her stay in effect think and not elements of the law and order agenda. The dilution of defendant rights, which demand many ways as an encroachment on Civil Liberties for all of us and finally the preoccupation with enhancing the infrastructure for enforcement as opposed to the infrastructure for prevention every ability shouldnt. They are woefully out of balance and in the book i show you how politicians talk. When you look at where they put the money and they keep saying we are helping people and trying to prevent crime, most of the money is going to enforcement. Status this connect to raise . Blacks are disproportionately among those who are arrested and sentenced and those who are imprisoned and so necessarily without any safety mechanisms to make it the impact of these bills, they are acutely disadvantaged by this particular approach to law and order. So who do we blame for this . We tend to blame those on the right. Sometimes without even thinking about it, sometimes without questioning. Sometimes entirely on the right. Leading politicians on the right present a more complex portrait that we normally hear about. So do we credit with war on drugs . Reagan. It was reagans war. Reagan clearly didnt combat the war and his own, clearly did not fund it. That is a job for congress to do. Let me give you a small example. A lot of people look at the antidrug abuse act of 1986. By the way that is the legislative centerpiece of the war on drugs. People say this penalty structure whereby one is penalized excessively for crack offenses where people who use powder are not so much. Recall that the 100 to one ratio. Are you familiar with . The thinking was mostly minorities and the poor are using crack this is clear evidence that the racialized intentions behind this bill. I wish you do 100 to one . The bill that reagan introduced for that introduced for them is introduced on behalf of the Reagan Administration by former senator bob dole on september 23rd 1986 do you want to know what that called for . Its no mystery because i have it up there. It called for a 20 to one ratio. It was congress then increased it to 100 to one. The 20 to one even though the disparity as they are and we still buy into the thinking that the pharmacological effects are much worse but the Obama Administration put in place in 18 to one ratio. Clearly not as bad as reagan. I will offer you that as a way of thinking about whether the right is rightfully blamed for much of this. Another twist is something i alluded to earlier. Republican senator Jeff Sessions who introduced the first major bill to equalize drug sentence in. A republican senator in alabama continued to be active. He served as the u. S. Attorney and used his role they are also to try to equalize. Meanwhile we rarely see politicians on the left is contributing to this. We usually see them as champions, right . At the Time Congress was charging full steam ahead with this girl in my punitive law and order approach, senator joe biden basically not only cheered them on but some of the world enough to remember the willie fort not the bush one campaign in 1988. Everybody looked at that and they said that is so incredibly racially charged. It is a scary type take in a very subtle way and that is pretty much the tegal not add. The fact is in 1988 joe biden sort of got on that boat picked out the very same name and im quoting, one of my objectives quite frankly is to lock Willie Horton in jail. Everybody would want to lock him up. This mightve been an opportunity to sort of semantic tags, to offer some balance to mitigate this push by offering the other side. Not everybody is the willie wharton. Not every last person as the willie fort. He jumped on the bandwagon. What i find really troubling about what then senator joe biden did it in 1994 when congress was putting in place with bill clinton called the toughest and smartest crime law ever enacted in the history of the country, the Racial Justice advocates i showed you before, what they wanted to do as clinton was expanding the Death Penalty to dozens more laws they wanted simply to include a Racial Justice measure. It wouldve said okay, for those in state, where there are clear statistical disparities in capital sentencing along racial lines, lets allow the defendant to knows cases to present that as evidence and then prosecutors would have to rebut that and show that there are nonracial influences. In other words its not about race. Just a relatively innocuous way of helping to mitigate this. Joe biden basically said Racial Justice is not as important. He said the question is whether to accept the house provision Racial Justice which will kill the bill and not was scrapped and eventually signed by president clinton. Jesse jackson, a very noted a very admirable civil rights spokesperson during his run for presidency in 1988 and not necessarily in the public view but they are a couple people in the administration who were worried jackson was going to steal their thunder and push for the drug war and jackson went to a hearing and embrace this combative concept of dealing with drugs, pretty much bought into the same drug rhetoric we were hearing from both bush as well as reagan and received to the administration coming you need to do more in this drug war. To fully appreciate that, you have to look at the entire transcript. But ive got some snippets here to make the point. Drugs are the biggest source of crime and connecting influence on the entire fabric of our society. Drug pushers are terrorists and the nations security depends on the drug war success. This is your work talk from the civil rights leader. So these are the leaders but they were hardly alone. There was a chorus line of lawmakers that offered were really turned out to be a bipartisan consensus. If we look at the breakdown of congressional support for these main laws, the function is the foundation of law and order. What you see is the overwhelming majority of numbers of both the house as well as the senate voted for these bills. If we were to a Party Breakdown to see what percentage of democrats versus percentage of republicans, pretty much the same thing as well. The only reason you see a much larger amount of support to the 1994 bill is many of those who voted nay were republicans who felt the bill didnt go far enough. So can duplicate this and this and say this is about people who are racist, and this is about conservatives, people who dont get it. This is not democrats. This is a very compelling way that it is not that. So what are they doing . Wouldve a following . They followed a call a Party Playbook and they follow the same Party Playbook. The rules of how we do this. You notice how i took the logo so they are facing one another. As opposed to facing outwards, just assertive drive home this idea. They are on the same page, following the same rules. Here is what it consists of. Might i say to you that the evidence points in just the opposite direction as where they are going. The first is this idea for nationalization of crime started in 1968. Some of the world enough you dont have to admit it, but old enough to remember when this push for crime in 1968 and some of the claims were spreading everywhere. Nobody is safe anywhere. Suburban americas wireless rural america. It is everywhere. If you look carefully at uniform crime reports what they show is crime did not spread geographically. Crime remains very much concentrated in the inner city where minorities live in larger percentages. Another element of the Party Playbook. The thinking here was there are certain groups we have to give very special protection to because they are victimized and they were especially concerned about Children Women and the elderly. Pretending that in fact wasnt black who were most often victimized, we look at data on women. Like women in particular are three times more likely than their white counterparts to be. This is the second statistic i came across where i thought okay ive got to push back because its a bit too much because i had no idea about this. I looked at data on homicide of children five years and younger. You know what i found . Black children five years and younger are seven times more likely than their counterpart to the murdered. Seven times more. But if you look at the bills named the amber alert i list all of these. Not a single one of them for black children. Some of us dont even know this is happening. There is in a conversation about this. Defend the rights not just a living man by saying more for defendants rights as opposed to victims rights even though the full well know blacks and other minorities tend to be decreased and complained against police out of space for access. Access of all kind of forms. Finally a drug epidemic at this is my favorite. Go back and look at some of the speeches. You think the world is going to in a hand ascot. They claim the drug epidemic and its tearing apart our society and how are we going to get past it . Will never live. We are all doomed. Block, block. This is filled specifically by abuse of and. But if you look at data that, that the monitoring the future produced out of the university of michigan it shows from the 70s through 1982 in particular cocaine use was in an academic and an academic dennis wasnt spreading because in the two years before reagan declared war the two years just before he said weve got to do something, drug use was on the decline. And all of the years following that time point receive drug use dip below 5 and remains so. So we dont really expect officers lawmakers to be terribly honest with us. Though we might ask them, what is it that would drive lawmakers to do this in ways they know to be counterproductive in incarceration policy has been shown to not only not reduce crime, but actually we build prisons to do exactly the opposite of what sins is intended to do. After having poured through literally dozens of hearings, they didnt do it because of the information they receive from experts. They didnt do that because of pressure from Law Enforcement lobbyists and i can tell you Law Enforcement officials got a lot out of it. They had the power to sell them and use them. Place the bill to add 100000 Police Officers and to supplement their salaries of 50,000. Authors of benefits you get under Governor Andrew Cuomo and said he was really proud when he said you can expect to have a job by supplying prisons in keeping people in prisons. But that wasnt the reason all make her his pursuit of roche. Its not the reason they ignore Racial Justice in your brain might even a little bit of trouble. We know black voters are not demanding democrats do something different. Black votes for the Democratic Party is not it is not driven by what the party is doing here. Ever since 1968 blacks have voted for the Democratic Party even though the party is just as complicit here as republicans. So they dont penalize. So politicians are you doing whats this with the public mindset. They are doing what face with the expectations and the understanding and positions of the American Voter plain old electoral politics. So when we start pouring through what is it that American Voters believe it may surprise you to know they actually do believe there is a problem with racism and criminal justice. Im going to go ahead and ask those of you who are antistatistics to bear with me as i do this. But a majority believe racial profiling and roads and highways is widespread. This has been done by several different organizations and over several years. A whopping 80 say that racism is some of the reasoning behind black imprisonment. So there is a problem. You have to live under a rock to not know that. But still the sense that there is racism doesnt change the other things im going to talk about shortly for in this country even though we say we know Police Officers are in age where they see a significant portion say significant portion say we know they are engaged in racial profiling, at the same time we still consider Police Officers heroes. We give them very high marks and even higher marks than we give to clergy. Theres a ranking of institutions. Police officers are fairly consistently at the top. So how is it we reconcile knowing about racism but at the same time thinking of Police Officers as heroes because of beliefs about lax. A significant portion of americans believe blacks are criminally oriented. 47 to be exact. 62 say the reason for their hires dustin imprisonment rate is due to the fact that they commit war crimes. This literature out there that says thats a bunch of racists. Who ask these questions . By geneva not that . When you look at black opinion data, i just told you 47 of the country as a whole believe blacks are more violent. You look at black Public Opinion. 41 of blacks say it. A very complicated game. I will tell you that black criminality as part of a much larger framework whereby blacks are judged negatively along several different dimensions which im happy to get into during the q a. So that is how they set aside their racism. They are partly responsible but theres another piece of the public mindset and that is believe theres a serious Violent Crime problem in this country even though we dont have it. We dont have a serious Violent Crime problem. Even those who believe it theyll tell you they police are not personalized. So if you ask are you afraid to walk at night near your home . No. Do you fear you are going to be murdered and so forth . No. Assaulted . No. Probably because so few americans have actually been victimized by Violent Crime. Fewer than one half of 1 . It is blacks that have a much higher victimization rate. The worry is really a worry about something out there like this phantom monster and we get this by asking questions like do you think its worse . Yes much much worse. Do you think its Getting Better . No. Absolutely not. Another way of getting on it is to say how do you protect yourself and ensure you dont become a victim . I dont put a certain neighborhoods. There is an idea that there is a boogie man out there somewhere that could soon arrive at their door. What do you police do . Police protect them from the boogie man. They are at the dividing line. How could these grand juries do this . The grand jury said weve got your back because without you was that Jack Nicholson has said we are standing on the wall . They will stand behind you. So given all this when you ask what is that the criminal criminal Justice System should be doing . What kinds of policy should lawmakers put in place . Racial justice is nowhere near the top of policy priorities for criminal justice. What americans want is a system fairly focused on crime in terms of increasing criminal accountability through tougher sentence is and so forth and also to a lesser extent putting in place preventative measures. When they have all of that and include race in iran for a National Surveys racial reform of criminal justice never makes it to the top of the list. So in sum and substance it is grounded in our thinking on the book i characterize Public Opinion as the primary groups. There are lots of groups, but it is the primary groups. So wheres the public getting this from . Wide . Why did they think this . How do they know . Well i say it is because the news media. Here is that they and i want to lay the groundwork for this. I am almost done. That was a quick three hours. So most americans get their stores of news and information from what mediums you imagine. Television. Still today the Pew Research Center does a fabulous job of pointing out how even though theres an increasing reliance on Internet Sources that increase has not supplemented that has rather extended the amount of time devoted to consumption of news. Generally not supplanted the importance of intelligence. It plays an even more import rule four race for white americans are concerned. See if you can follow me on this. Because of racial segregation. What that amounts to is very limited interracial interaction in a meaningful way. It is common to hear ive got a black friend. It is not as comments here that black friend is regularly part of my life. If youre not getting the information for personal interaction, television figures that much more largely. When you turn to television, the blacks are criminals script. Sort of this barrage of the idea that most crime in the country is silent when in fact it isnt. More importantly, that the rash of reports that blacks are the main cause of crime. Frequently when you see blacks on television and local news they are either being depicted as victims of crime, perpetrators of crime or as charity cases. Youre sort of bombarded with these images on a raid to their bases. I am not excusing that. When you see this on a regular basis, should we be surprised this is what people think . Should we be surprised this is how long forstmann officers are reacting to see a black or send . This is pretty common. If you will notice the gentleman to the right Jesse Levi Matthew eventually was siding connection with the disappearance of a woman later found to have been murdered that he was involved in reckless driving that takes us back to the over criminalization of all things that we do. Its easy to blame the media. Is on the medias fault. But the fact is the media can only sell what the public buys. It is a Market Driven industry. The public tends to guy that claims and stories that are defend with existing belief remarks. So that is why conservatives watch fox news and not is why liberals watch other news channels. I could list them but i will stop there. Because its comfortable. It fits. It doesnt create too much cognitive dissonance, too much thinking that has to be done there. So we come back to the public. It is what we are actually watching. A fundamental belief we have that wed need new stories to stick to is this idea that everything happening is the result of individual choices. We are still married to this site yet in the country that would country that whatever ones fate is it is because he worked hard got up early and studied hard. You pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. Everybodys got to straps and boots. So if you end up in prison, lockstep because its something you did. We dont live in a society where people are just screwed. It doesnt happen. Theres this idea that individualism, individualist ideology runs deep in this country and i think we are comfortable with that. So during the 60s and 70s as features are coming out and saying heres the other stuff going on economic disadvantage relative deprivation et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Our politicians knew they needed to shut that down. It is the difference between individualism and structuralism. If you believe structureless and theyve got to do something about it and that is not an easy thing to do. Why not leave the individual and say theres nothing we can do about that. Go to church more. Go to tumble more pray more, become a better person. One of our most popular persuasive president s hope to really reinforce our thinking here and so all this information is coming. Its how you get when they were Holding Hearings i was impressed at the number of researchers who filed in and said you are going about this the right way. Here are the studies done. I called them the crime preventers and justice advocates as opposed to crimefighters. They outnumber crimefighters by five to one. And so i will close with this quote from reagan which checks the concept of individualism. We dont buy it anymore. And i am just declaring the depth of structuralism and the reunification of individualism. At the root of this philosophy the idea that there are things beyond individual control and society has to make sure that the Playing Field is level because at the root of this philosophy lies utopian presumption about human nature that is primarily a creature of the material environment by changing this environment through social programs. This philosophy holds that government can permanently change man and usher in the air in virtue in much the same way an individual wrongdoing is seen as the result of poor socioeconomic conditions are underprivileged background. The philosophy suggesting short that there is crime or wrongdoing and that society is not the individual is to blame and he declares in 1988 times have changed. A new political consensus among the American People utterly rejects this view and so i will stop there. [applause] thank you. That is a short three hours. I wanted to leave some time for q a. Would anyone like to come and ask questions . Please. Okay, i guess my first question [inaudible] i guess the question i have is how can we utilize the information he presented us . How could we move forward . [inaudible] they will only what they say is the issue there. What about petitions . What do we do . People at the grassroots level, what could be done to raise public consciousness. I think we have to expand the conversation beyond what we have been focusing on. We begin by asking what is obama doing . What our members of congress doing . I really didnt blacks have a lot of power here. If blacks condition their vote on this issue in the same way latinos and other immigrants made very clear that their votes have to be earned that might be one place to start. So using the power we are to have in our hands, but the other is to embark on a public consciousness raising enterprise of sorts. We look at the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s that we tend to think that was really about four siege. If you read dr. King very, very carefully and i had an opportunity to do that and he was asked why confrontation . Why these demonstrations . He said because it shocks the public conscience and a way of educating the public in helping the public understand the quiet ways in which people abide really has a brutal underside and so when he went into one town, dont quote me. Another towns in alabama where the sheriff had read dr. Kings writings before he arrived with the protesters he knew he needed to rob. King of the opportunity to get the publics attention and educate the public. So i say that has to be yet to find ways to be less accusatory and help people understand. I got to tell you this. I talked to people about race because thats what i do. Thats what i study, what i teach and write about. Youd be surprised at the number of people who would say im sick of hearing about race. I ran a survey. One was openended and so the survey asked which do you think should be prioritized, racial reformer criminal Justice Reform and i got some of the most shocking responses including the, of course grind. The others were the only people that continue to talk about race are raise the various. This comes from everywhere. Sarah pei lin okay nevermind. Do you find people who said okay it is time to move beyond this. Either get questions like is there any such thing as race, just having a conversation but at the same time using the power. I think lax have tremendous power here especially with the country so evenly divided and once upon a time the black vote functioned as a commodity where Neither Party could take the vote for granted. In may 260, nixon went into heartland and was courting voters. It was possible. So i think they has to think about the need to educate more than we have. Thanks for the question. Any other questions . The reason we positioned the mike series just because the sound and the camera works better. I enjoyed the presentation and i guess it is less of a question im more of a kind of explanatory challenge. I was thinking about especially those pictures in the media. I started thinking about that and maybe this is where were going and why do people want those . Why do especially not black people want to see that all the time . Another thing that reagan was in favor of is an anticommunist. To say look, we have also had consensus that america is not a country the equal rights, but not in equalitarian approach. People are increasingly accessed enormous levels of inequality in this country. All americans have an incentive. There is going to be some agree of inequality and people are concerned that a lot of people you know what maybe im never going to be a philanthropist or Something Like that. Body a mac at least let be not be at the bottom. If i look at the media and i cannot send and making me feel reassured, there is somebody under me [inaudible] i have a different colored skin than that division, but that reassures me. I was thinking the idea that in the south, that politicians were able to tell the poor white sharecropper, you know what, at least youre not lack. I wonder if im hearing sort of framing individualism versus the comfortable social specification and how do you think it fits together . Yeah. And i dont know. I wonder if it really is the comfortable mass stratification more so than it is having not the worst position within not as you were alluding to. As long as youre not at the bottom insert by some of that is fair because of a lot of work i came off a lot of which are all in this need like the Jerry Springer affected need to have someone you can vent on as you pointed out, someone you can at least feel that you are better than any gives your life a little bit more value. I would say also that i hope i get it because i think you had a lot of fascinating concerns. If i dont address them all, please bring me back to them. I think there is also this need people at the bottom have two feel hope and to feel a sense of control over their fate and their lives and to feel when they get in the car and they are headed to work they need not worry about being subjected to something they did not bring on themselves. Miles davis, the great trumpet player jazz player when he lives in l. A. She would get on the telephone before he left his vanished labor head and said im getting ready to leave now. So if youre going to stop me just letting you know. Most people dont want to even think that way and to access the very real possibility no matter how much they play by the rules no hunger how much they work hard, no matter if its a cell phone in their handler not they need to believe that the worst is not going to happen because if we accept structuralism, what do we do about it . If we wake up thinking this could all be for not, working hard as heck to get good grades could be pointless. I think there is that also just need to have the belief, the hope to continue to move forward in that explains some of that nature always always of wanting to talk about race or not run into would not wanting to record highs heres a group of people that isnt really working the way it should. A wonderful book called the racial divide on some you just mentioned and matters that lower class white americans they are more closely tied to their black counterparts than they realize. When you think about globalization the worldwide decline in wages, the transit the in employment and so forth, the impact of the shaft from the goods producing to Service Producing job they has to lose. One would expect there would be an awareness and willingness to join together been that doesnt happen as you pointed out the one that is white skin and ill take that. Thank you. I would like for you to comment you talked about how weve gotten the action to focus that a while racial profiling profiling comment on the degree to which lawmakers and the Supreme Court have the power power [inaudible] artier mac and whether or not affirmative action [inaudible] but the message that directly cause that all of the research of safety in importance. Yeah yeah. So to the latter part of your question about affirmative action, the court has heard it said and i am going to try to dance around this carefully. The court has said it is still permissible to consider race a suspect classification but to do so in the context of education because the court has said diversity are an important part of the educational process silly habit completely invalidated affirmativeaction although it has severely restricted the applications for areas in which it can be utilized to the bigger question you asked of whether affirmative action would be the way to offset some of the inequality that ultimately unwinds the phenomena weve talked about. The answer would be no because affirmativeaction has utilized within the College Setting a small minority business setaside program and also within Government Employment very few of which are accessible to what wilson refers to as the truly disadvantaged. So a place like Colgate University but is that going to be something realistic for those who are very poor come from the worst high schools . Is a something they can take advantage of an affair admitted to survive without struggling in a very big way. The other question you asked about what kinds of things can government do given the costs of massive social programs geared towards rehabilitation and prevention. Consider this. The average amount of money we spend on prisoners is somewhere between 20000 to 25000 per year. Per year. The recidivism rate is as high as 70 . So even after we spend that amount of money per year per prisoner we set them up so we guarantee they come back. So we are now well into the tens of billions at doing this. Conversely, consider the smaller amount we expand on a per pupil basis closer to 10000 to 15,000, which produces something. So the question of costliness this is a policy costing us and not giving us a return on investment. Yet our lawmakers decided to deny access to school loans are those committed to does a drug felony. When Governor Cuomo recently announced wanted to provide Community College education to those in prison, the state went berserk. How dare you educate prisoners. And thank you to much rather pay for them the rest of their lives . That is a better alternative . We are so focused on retribution, retaliation rather bad sentence. That is sort of the word of the term penitentiary and learn and become productive members of society and this goes back to the question which is we now have a class of people that we refer to as excons. There can be something as small as one program of crack. So that means that is a risk in community, to society as a whole. We deplete what economists refer to as human capital. The question of costing me is really can we really afford to continue doing this . Eric holder i have tremendous respect for attorney general eric holder has begun pushing for a bill. Not called fair sentencing. That was the title of the bill and not in 2010. What that meant was we are being fair to those who are subject to the 100 to one penalty structure. Smarter sentencing because maybe we would get smarter and figure out that we should be ensuring, but we are talking roughly 7 million people. In our communities, all of our communities. So there are studies that show the reduction in productivity the reduction in gdp the impact on families that imprisonment especially black males that contributed to the breakup of the family, the breakup of the family is connected to poverty. Poverty is connected to education, so forth and so on. I dont think we can afford to not do something different. [inaudible] so what . I think the only way theyll succeed is equal Employment Opportunity permits employer for the potential liability of higher the next alan and it is because there is something to happen as a foreseeable consequence. If we change the rules employers cannot be first of all sutin held responsible, its possible that icebergs. Most employers play it safe rather than not higher. Does anyone have any other questions . Thank you call again. [applause] from politics prose cumbersome and steve israel of new york is next on the tv. He talks about his novel about a pharmaceutical sales in who gets caught up in a top secret government program. It is about 45 minutes. [inaudible conversations]