shelter that has some sort of aftercare i think that s what we ll be needing to do more and more because we know people with mental health issues are landing in jail and not getting the help that they need. yeah. we re all in agreement on that. i want to go to this other story real quickly. and it s switching gears dramatically, but it s out of kansas and a world war ii veteran faced city code violations because his office building has a cracked exterior bricks and he s been arrested. it sounds like a debtor s prison. can they do that? technically, yes, they can. it s what we called code violation and you can be called before the court for not keeping your building up to par. again, let s flip this, martin, right? being a lawyer that s what i do being on both sides, what if the bricks fell and hurt somebody, a child or something like that? i will say i think the judge went too far. the judge has discretion. if you want to find the elderly gentleman he s 88 years old, martin, 88,
going through and as a preventive measure to sort of send a message to these medical institutions that if you mess up this badly, there has to be a punitive measure as well and that s what we call punitive damages, so you re going to see the families seeking all of these different recourse. and it s not, you know, money can t bring a child back but, again, you do want to send the message that you have to be so careful when you enter into these surgeries to make sure that everything s done properly. yeah. you know, naturally we would never wish any of this on anyone. right. but these are kind of the lessons we learn from these sort of tragedies that we all can apply. thank you to all of my guests, sherrie, thanks, holly, jeff as well. we re not done with you yet because in a moment we ll talk about a couple of other cases. a world war ii veteran in kansas he can t afford to make repairs to his business, so he s been thrown in jail. it sounds like debtor s prison. the details next.
beer. this is like stories from an era we think of like debtors prison, for the least in fraction. another thing to think of, 0% of the people going through the justice system represented by public defenders, 0% are poor. 95% of the poor people are going to jail or becoming felons. that is outrageous. that is disenfranchising a whole host of people which has then ripple effects on your political system. it s something affecting our entire democracy. bank of america steals from its home owners by not giving them mortgages they absolutely had a right to, but none of them go to jail, even though that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, put family out street
i can t fathom. i cannot fathom turning around to his mother after a jury has said guilty. that was another scene from the documentary, gideon s army, a film that follows the life of three public defenders to challenge the assumptions of the u.s. justice system. the woman featured in that scene is one of my guests, brandy alexander who makes sure there s a lot of emotion in the work they do. not just personal emotion. poverty is a regular part of this. i kept thinking this was debtors prison. you had folks who could have had these other alternative but because they didn t have $3,000 in bail they couldn t do it. also then your poverty. that scene of you sitting there with the stack of student loans. i mean, how do you do this work when it s really so poorly paid? that s a good question. still trying to figure that out. i think this is what i m supposed to be doing at this
without jobs. among 18 to 29-year-olds, the unemployment rate is 11.7%. what is the impact on society that so many young people are jobless? well, i think it is a terrible impact. they re not getting those first jobs, these college graduates where you get job specific skills and become more valuable over time. and a lot of them are going back to universities to get mbas from guys like me and they still can t get jobs. that s a big mistake. then they have huge debt. older people are running down their iras. we re creating a not a army of indigent people down the road. among the young people we re creating a debtor s prison themselves cannot get rid of the education debt they re taking on. the way they re dealing with high unemployment is to go back to cool and borrow partly sunny to live. it is a terrible system. by and large, what kind of jobs is the economy creating right now? the economy is creating a good jobs for both high school