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 thos