Shout out couple families. I want to shout out my pbs family who [applause] thank you. You all taught me how to be a lawyer. I want to shout out my family, David Domenici and in particular, and you all taught me how to fight for children. [applause] [cheering] and i want to give a shout out to my sn double c. Family. [applause] im wearing my button tonight and right now i am thinking of you all and of my data. And i know that he is here with us. [applause] i want to start by talking a little bit about why i wrote this book. The first reason for writing this book is that i dont know if you all are like this but im the kind of person who when i go to a movie and theres no black characters in the movie and then afterwards people are like what did you think about it and im like its pretty goo good but we were the black people, and i feel that way about our history as well so it was important for me to write a book that had africanamerican characters at the center of the narrative. This is a book of history, a book of argument and argumentative lee and fundamentally a book of stories. One of those stories is about a young man named brandon. He was one of my first clients 15yearsold, charged with and convicted of and pled guilty to possession of a gun and possession of 20 worth of marijuana. The word in court, i was there as a public defender thinking of the work i would do as the civil rights work of my generation. I was in court. I had joined pbs because i knew one in three young black men was under supervision and i knew even though we didnt have the term incarceration yet, i knew that the United States just past russia and south africa as the Worlds Largest chamber. So, im in court and im asking the judge to get a Second Chance, to put him on probation. I have letters from his counselors, social workers, his mom and grandmother were in court and i pointed to them. The prosecutor in the case was asking for a defendant to be walked up and sent to oak hill. You know the dungeon that was oak hill. The judge in the case ultimately had thave to make the decision,e walker. I changed the names of the lawyers and the judges in the case. Judge walker leaned back and then he looked forward. He said mr. Foreman has been telling me that you have a hardd life and you deserve a Second Chance to. Let me tell you about segregation and about a movement that fought for your freedom. Martin luther king died for you to be free and what he didnt die for is for you to be embarrassing your community and your family. So you might get that Second Chance one day but right now, youre going to go to oak hill. As i came to see that people like judge walker were not unique there were many of them and it caused me to stop and ask a question how was it that they came to lock up so many of its own and that is what i set about to enter the buck. The answer to that question is in the book and i hope you buy it. After cow but i know you all are not going to let me out of here until i at least give you a preview. [laughter] [laughter] so let me tell you some of the main arguments of the book. The first thing we have to understand is crime and addiction and violence and the toll that it took on this community and still takes, but especially in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. In the 1960s, washington, d. C. s homicide rate tripled and it wasnt just dc, if doubled in philadelphia and cleveland and los angeles. In dc in 1967, they tested all people entering the jail for drugs in the system. In 67, 3 tested positive for heroin. One year later in 68 was 45 . That is an epidemic. And its not just the numbers. Its also the stories. When i went over to George Washington library and archives of the city councilmembers here in dc, they donated his papers and they are not super wellorganized i spent a whole Summer Reading through page after page of the suffering of the letters. People were writing saying i dont recognize my six anymore. Im scared to go outside. I feel like a prisoner in my own home. I feel like a stranger on my own streets. Now, who was receiving these letters and biscuits to the second argument of the book. The first generation of elected officials and prosecutors. There were those that the first generation of officials many of them came out of the civil rights movement. My book is filled with civil rights workers. Whether it came out of the movement or not, they were well aware of the history of under enforcement of the law in the black communities. They knew of the times when you did not call the police because they were probably the clan and they were going to do wors be wn if they didnt. They knew of the time that when a black person i becom died, Law Enforcement says thats just one more dead black person and they didnt see the person. They knew about history and they were bound and determined as they came into office in the 1970s to make black life matter. They didnt use the phrase but thats what they were doing a. Because their lifes work is to make it expensive and make it valuable. Why did they do it through Law Enforcement and police and prosecutors and prisons. This gets to the next argument of the book which is an argument about the constraints and the limitations that they were under. I told you this is a story about what africanamericans thought and said and did but any story about the agency is also a story of constraint and limitations and also of the Larger Society which limited their options so they were constrained in all kinds of ways a history of racism that produced a. A. They didnt want to do everything that they were asking for so the people i ask about, the mayors and city council people, the judges and prosecutors, many of them didnt want only Law Enforcement. They wanted job training and more money for education and housing. They wanted many of them said a Marshall Plan for urban america. But they couldnt get that because africanamericans with the power that we had was concentrated locally and in cities and the defense control congress or those levers of power so i say that African American officials had in all of the above strategy to fight crime and violence and addiction. They wanted to throw everything at the problem, police, prosecutors, courts, jobs, housing, schools, parks and wreck. They got what they wanted, because Law Enforcement. Now, you might be wondering, and i think it is natural as we sit here in the 2017 to think they must have known what they were doing, they mustve understood the consequences of doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on Law Enforcement. But a big argument in my book is that in many ways they didnt. Because there was no moment when there was an up or down vote on the mass incarceration. That i isnt how it was built. No one said should be the largest prison population of the world, shipping them off more people within africa, no one asked that question. Instead, what happened was lots of people acting in different spaces in the system. Police officers arresting, prosecutors prosecuting, legislators passing laws, judges and parole officers making decisions, probation officers supervising people on parole. All of those actors, all became somewhat more punitive. Everybody got harsh in their space. Maybe the sentence is a little bit longer and maybe they were paroled a little more often. But the thing is if everybody does it, and everybody does at over 40 or 50 years, then the result is mass incarceration. Now the last thing im going to say before we turn it over to questions is mostly this book is about how we got here. It is one chapter on what to do about it and how to get out and the one thing about that but i want to say tonight is that we are going to have to get out and dismantle the system dot in the same way it wasbuilt, which is to say everyone, all of us in small ways pushing in the other direction. So the next time somebody says to you that solution or the proposal or that legislation or that mass incarceration, say no it wont. That by itself wont. That plus that over time will. We have to recapture a certain amount of humanity. And thats going to mean in the public sector, but its also going to mean in the private sector. Each of us has to ask what is our sphere of influence and what do we control . Do we run a business that has an hr policy coming and what does that hr policy say about people that have criminal convictions . Do we want a university that has admissions policies and what do those look like for people that have been involved in the criminal Justice System . Are onl we part of a Church Community that have been adopted to somebody a returning citizen that has come to our community and help through the church to find housing, help them find a job . We have to do it through law and through these private spaces. But if we d do absolutely, we wl dismantle this massive and unjust system. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] i want to think about the kind of chat sessions question in two ways. One really is nationally [inaudible] what can we do now that we have the administration that has values and policies that are so counter to some of the incremental policy that was being made and to death, my inane response that isnt going to be an answer to the question to the kind of National Audience is that its this problem is fundamentally a state account for the city and local problem. So 88 of the prisoners nationwide are in the state facilities, not federal. 85 of all enforcement officers nationwide are city, county, local Law Enforcement officers, not federal. Just like president obama and attorney general holder got all the publicity in the last administration of criminal Justice Reform but actually had a relatively small slice of the problem they could effect is also true that donald trump and Jeff Sessions have with all of their sort of retrograde policies they are proposing in particular with a relatively limited ability to to do damage and if the movement that we built to nationally should include this fact as part of the state and local level and is going to have to be dismantled. So this comes up a lot. In the u. S. And california come in with californians especially in the area whenever a social justice issue comes up, they always say that is an important issue. If i lived in a red state or trump state maybe i would need to work on it, but i live in liberal california or liberal new york. And what i wan want to see on criminal justice and mass incarceration is there is no liberal bubble. Purchased in the country. New york until recently was one of only two states in the country to prosecute all juveniles 16 to 17 as adults. So, this is a National Crisis in agreement and cranny in the country so we need to know the people in the statehouse, we need to know the local prosecutor. Okay, thats all well and good nationally. But as we see it remains the case through this unique and problematic system of the prosecutor reporting to the president what that means is that you do have this crisis so exciteits like everybody operan this influence comes to one of the things that i noticed when writing this book is just like nobody said we want to be the te worlds biggest jailer essentially nobody said that in africanamerican communities. I cant find a single example of people saying anything along those lines. But its also true this is going to be a harsh version of the statement that im going to put it this way theres a sort of pass the buck attitude. Theres a lot of people when confronted in the unjust system that say when i interviewed prosecutors about the book they would often talk about the police and the problem is that police bring us these cases and if the police would bring us a different set of cases than we would prosecute a different set of cases. Then when i interviewed judges, they say the thing is the problem is the prosecutors. And how someone else is working or not working is always a problem. But what can you control and as a judge, you have a love of power and if you dont like the way things are going certainly under the sentencing system, you have a lot of authority and that is true for everybody else in the system. So i guess what i want to say is it is going to be bad. The question then is what can everybody else to do in their influence to negate that and i think it is more than sometimes we assume a [inaudible] [inaudible] virtually you could almost ask what do we do now and then you could ask what is the opposite. Then my recommendation would be to do that. [laughter] said, we have in one of the things i write about in the buck i will run down a long list and i will be specific. Im sorry . That is exactly the problem, but it isnt one thing. Its everything. I completely agree, i dont want to wait for everybody. I want everybody in the space that the operator to look up where they control they ask do we do pretext stops in the committee and stop people on the basis of a minor traffic infraction of getting access to that car and searching not because of traffic enforcement, but because the want to search the car. And if we are doing that, then we know that a type of policing produces most of the Racial Disparity that we have in policing coming and we want to work with data. One of the people they write about in the book is a woman named sandra dozier. She stopped under pretext of policing for her car searched behind a 2they find 20 worth f marijuana. The Prosecutors Office relatively progressive, no papers, they dont prosecute h her. Shes a probationary employee at fedex. Before the end of the status she has to come in with a certificate of clean record. The random lottery up to a pc cord and records searches sometimes they know they miss the really big things and sometimes really small things pop up on the computer. And in her case, the arrest by the possession of marijuana popped up. She turned it in and thought because there was no paper that he was going to be okay, and she lost her job. That employee or and those like it could stop having practices that say we are not going to hire you if you have an arrest for Marijuana Possession or any other crime. So, i could go down the line and say we would have to go down the list and look at every aspect of our system and ask how can we make it more humane and less harsh . [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] speak of him if you dont have money you dont get justice [inaudible] a murder charge and if the prosecutor determines the murder charge [inaudible] the judge is there and if you are found guilty [inaudible] [inaudible] fifteen times and he didnt do it just because im black or just because i was in the wrong neighborhood. If i was guilty, they didnt know that. One thing i do know [inaudible] i am the book speak [inaudible] im making a statement. I am the book and i in the citizen [inaudible] i would like to respond to that. Thank you for speaking up. One of the things that i believe is really important to [inaudible] one of the things that is important and i 100 agree, its one of the arguments i make is that we have not raced up the voices of people who have been incarcerated. We havent raced up the voices like yours. Weve taken the people that have been convicted of a crime or been incarcerated in said you dont have a public platform. We have stigmatized people and i think there needs to change. One of the thing im a big advocate of is the point that youre making. The criminal Justice Reform movement, people that are trying to reduce the number of prisons we have and the number of people incarcerated can reduce the amount of racism in the system, that movement has to have voices like yours frontend central in the leadership positions because you do know one of the things, and you know things i will never know, things i see when i talk to somtalkedto some activists as on this issue if they say especially 20 years ago, it was impossible to get a voice like yours heard in and among the civil rights activists and among the Prison Reform and because sometimes you know wellintentioned people that if we give them a voice then we are just going to lose our organizations credibility on the issue, and i think that is wrong because it just reinforces the stigma. The plea that has been changing. There was a former public defender but a Good Organization out of ohio. A guy named David Singleton who a lot of people in the room know. He told me that his organization has recently been hiring and promoting and putting out front and Center People whove been incarcerated and have a felony and other criminal convictions, precisely because those voices change the mind of legislatures and the way that other voices cannot. So i agree with you and there is one other thing that you said that i totally agree with which is you talk a lot about poverty and you talk a lot about class. In the of maury leaked segments of the community that have more power to make these laws. Sova thankyou for what you said in making that powerful statement. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] for. [laughter] [laughter] [applause] and not. My plan right now is in the day end all seriousness when you say are you interested in engaging with . Youve just fill in the blank my answer will be yes. As a new author of a new book anybody who was willing to begin a conversation with me i want to be and specifically and seriously i want to talk to those that you are invoking because i agree. In a lot of ways that is to this book is written for. That is my principal audience. You said you had a plan. I dont have a plan b and a whole lot of people and i want to sit down with anybody who has those connections for is part of that. I gave the top half baltimore last night from a retired federal judge Fourth Circuit to gave a response and was very generous in his words. One of the things he said was a former prosecutor prosecutor, judge, we need to be reading this book having this conversation in our community. And i agree completely. I agree with you so lets continue to talk about how to do that there is nothing i want to do more in fact,. [laughter] i have a cousin but i was five years old so because i really feel. [inaudible] yes. [laughter] so everybody that leaves go through a period of mourning because no matter what job we go into we go into a state with less impact than the job that we love to. Less direct impact even in certain jobs that the abstract level you can make an argument for it to. You feel it is there every day so yes, i do. [inaudible] yes most of the prison system is still public but i want to talk about both parts. So to incentivize i think that is on the public side and on the private side. Some states like california the correctional officer has very powerful the publicsector employees but theyll lobby in the lobby against the laws to unwind the brutality of that system. Even when it is prison building or the Corrections Officers with a big business a moneymaking business and in america if you make it a Business People will exploit those opportunities for growth and what they are exploiting is suffering and misery and incapacitation of another human being. It is one thing if you are exploiting something bad is abstract. Really stop right there. As soon as you say here is the set up we will have the cesta system forcing people all into it so the less money is spent on food or Housing Conditions getting people access to educational programs, the less money you spend on that the more goes to your shareholders. Says state the facts sandy injustice and inhumanity is obvious. It is one of the first things that we need to unwind if we change that structure of a whole system. [inaudible] [laughter] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] so all mandatory minimums so the of a criminalJustice System in the 1980s you get a series of laws many are passed in response to rising addiction or violence in the crack cocaine sarah but with that distinction and the one thing to say when people ask me about this book one of the questions they ask is by focusing on the role of africanamericans and elected officials are you saying the system is not racist or this is the of motivation in the creation . To have a huge and powerful literature. With the profound ways that structural and institutional racism historical and ongoing has shaved american criminaljustice. Mandatory minimums are one manifestation. I am moved by and persuaded by a those arguments. What i am trying to do is write something up alongside that because in my view that a crucial part isnt the whole story. You can see that in the context of mandatory minimums. It is specifically about a moment in washington d. C. In 1982 and africanamerican member of the city council the first africanamerican police chief and d. C. To overcome awful racism. Those two individuals led the city Wide Movement in favor of mandatory minimums. They pass not the city council but anybody who lives in d. C. Went to the polls you could have voted. To pass mandatory minimums for so that was repealed but those minimum still exist. This is one of the reasons. To get rid of the africanamerican and elected officials because as we speak with all that we know with their racially disparate impact at the public defender service. They cite all the evidence theyre not making any headway. We have a lot of work to do. [inaudible] [laughter] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] where is is our sense of resistance . [inaudible] [laughter] [applause] and i think what we need to do is spend more time listening to you. [laughter] you are right. I do think that by lovell of the fighter was lost but i also think it is always the case was in the ability to fight right before it begins. So i predict that would be the case if we look at what all the folks are saying right before they oblige the movement that changed our lives but two years before montgomery years before selma or birmingham or albany. We knew how to fight. I hear what you say but i dunno what its going to be 10 years from now to say they were ready. They were ready to resist. [inaudible] [inaudible] but i do think there is that potential. For those that have then convicted or incarcerated i feed it has to be a movement to focus locally. It changes the way we think about the war victims because one of the things that happens to mobilize crime victims and we have told the of so this is for you. This is to respond to your pain. But it doesnt have to be that way. One of the stories that i tell in the book is a young man by the name of dante and represented him in Juvenile Court charged with Armed Robbery. He went up to a man at a bus stop not too far from here and he pulled out a knife better rock the robert this man took a small amount of money and ran away and was caught few blocks later the but he was on him in the knife was on him. He was arrested on the scene for go he confessed that the police station. When i went to my supervisors laughing now that is what she did at the time. She laughed. We did not have a defense. The only option i had was that last ditch type of option was to go talk to the man that he robert roe he was a labor working by moving boxes back breaking work and an africanamerican man for girl nobody deserves to be robbed but i went to talk to him and told him dantes story out his mother was addicted to drugs and she could not care for him she left him alone to raise himself and had fallen in with the neighborhood crew and this was like the initiation. But he had tremendous potential he was a master woodworker i had gotten him into this program of job training a carpentry type of program with a counseling component run by a minister he loved it because of the religious component. None of the traditional programs would take him because of the Armed Robbery conviction that we need lowlevel offenders not violent ones. I presented this to mr. Thomas he heard me out and said i will think about it. For the next three weeks before the despot disposition i would think of it and on the day of the sentencing and went into the courthouse because the bottom level with juvenile cases and i saw mr. Trump sitting on the bench by himself normally the up prosecutors put that in another room precisely because what was about to happen did not happen in. I gave him the apology that dante had written and also his confession because he apologized to the police that night. I wanted him to seek he had done that even before he meant his lawyer. He said mr. Foreman you ask me to forgive your client for girl i cannot do that but im trying. I will go along with that program and went into court and the prosecutor was best and the judge was surprised that the judgment along with them put him into the program. Years later, i lost track of dante as a public defender couple eupepsia those that dont make it but those that do you never see them again per girl i was walking down the street by the metro it was a construction site over a decade later. He was a man with a hard hat and came down to talk to me. I wanted to sit down and have a meal it is a great moment. He was keeping a brief. [laughter] as a lawyer were so excited but i reminded him of a terrible time. But he quickly gave me the story. He struggled but he got through the program eventually have fulltime job and was not rearrested. When i left and i thought about what if our criminal Justice System was or like mr. Thomas more oriented towards mercy and redemption . I think it is possible. 8q. [applause] [inaudible conversations]