good evening, everyone. my name is nick turner, i'm lucky enough to serve as the president of the vera institute of justice. i'm glad to have all of you here and to have an audience from c-span here as well to participate in this discussion. we're very lucky, i want to say a little bit about what we're doing tonight and introduce both fox and dan in a second. but first, i just want to say a quick thing about the vera institute for those of you who don't know. this is a wonderful organization that has been committed to justice reform longer than i have been around. i'm lucky enough to be the fifth president of it, but we got our start in 1961 working to reform the bail system here in new york city. there remains lots of work to be done nationally, and we are still a part of that. the organization is a terrific one that's committed both to producing what we hope are breakthrough ideas that inspire the kind of change that we need in american justice systems, but also delivering them in a very concrete way in systems that we rely upon for safety and security and justice. we are really lucky tonight to be able to welcome fox butterfield who is a reporter who i have, i think, fox, this might be the first time that i've actually met you, but i was, you know, google stalking you before there was google to stalk you with, and so was dan wilhelm who sits to your right. dan is -- let me just make a few quick introductory notes, and then i'm going to turn things over to dan and fox. dan is the ceo of the harry frank guggenheim foundation and is a longtime friend and colleague of mine. he worked at vera and was the chief program officer up until 2014. and has advised many criminal justice reform efforts including that of the mac arthur foundation, the safety and justice challenge which is perhaps the largest effort -- it is, in fact, the largest effort underway to reform what we call the front door of mass incarceration, the way cities and counties use their jails and how they should, in fact, shrink their use of jails. dan and i were working here together at vera in the late -- actually, not in the late '90s, but in the early 2000, and we were both working on issues around sentencing and corrections reform. and i remember at that time that fox butterfield was one of the very few voices of intelligence and analytical integrity that was working in the journalistic field covering criminal justice. and he was at the times at that point, and dan and i spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get to him and talk to him -- [laughter] about the work. so now we've got you. [laughter] now you're here. it took, i don't know, 15 years, but we actually -- but, you know, but fox wrote a lot of really important pieces very early, i think before criminal justice reform had any reform in it and has laid part of the groundwork for the work that we're doing now in this country. and it is a very different time. i first got to know fox's work because when i started here at vera in 1998, i was assigned the task of working with the city's department of juvenile justice to help them on a strategic planning process. and so the very first thing that i read was "all god's children" which was fox's book about willie bosket who was a figure in new york, a young man, i guess, 15 when he was accused and convicted of crimes that eventually led to a dramatic transformation in new york law around how we handle young offenders. and it was the very first book i read as an entry point to think about the juvenile justice system and to understand how it functioned and where its roots came from. so it's really nice to have you here. i'll just say a few quick, a few quick words about fox. those of you who don't know him, he has had a 30-year career reporting for "the new york times." i've talked a bit about his work on crime and violence, but he, he won a pulitzer along the way in those 30 years and was part of the team that published the pentagon papers. and the reason that he's here tonight and the reason that we're lucky enough to have dan be able to talk with him is that he's produced a new book that has received rave reviews already called "in my father's house," which i think in many respects is not unlike the book that he wrote about willie bosket in that it tries to tell the story of crime and violence and our society's responses to it through the lens of individual and family. and so one of the things that we will hopefully bore into -- and i'm really interested about in this -- is how in "in my father's house" looks at crime and how it arises in families at a particular moment when i think as we all in this room know, we're very well aware of the challenges of our justice system and the massiveness of its imposition of burdens on individuals and families and what we -- and the arbitrariness and the injustice that we see. that, it is written at a very different time than when you with wrote "all god's children." and so i hope that we'll be able to have a chance to hear you reflect on what the contribution of this book is now. and so welcome to fox and, dan, thank you very much for having the guggenheim foundation support this effort and for your being part of it. and i will turn things over to you. before i do, however, just so that you all know, what dan and fox will do is just engage in conversation maybe until around 7:15 or so s and then we'll open up for question and answer. at 7:30 we'll go back to the lounge where most of you were, and there'll be an opportunity to get the book and to have fox sign it. or maybe dan could even sign it too -- [laughter] so thank you very much. i'll turn it over to you all. [applause] >> great. thanks. thank you, nick. and, fox, thank you for being here this evening. thank you all for joining us in the room and on c-span. as nick alluded to, i have read the book. it's a remarkable effort. and it really does a masterful job, i think, of drawing both from a sound basis of criminal only call research -- and really a multigenerational tragedy in many ways. but i think it might be instructive and useful to put a frame around this a little bit. as nick was saying, you know, you're a person who has spent many years covering the criminal justice system. i will note for the record that as the enterprising and highly astute reporter you were, we didn't have to find you, you actually found us here at vera. [laughter] as you were writing stories on what was going on in sentencing and corrections around the country. and so you've had a longitudinal perspective on what's happened, and i know in your years covering the crime beat at the times, you had the opportunity to go around the country. and tell us, if you would, what you saw there and how that may have sparked an interest that led to the creation of this book. >> yes. so, first, i want to say thank you to you and the harry frank guggenheim foundation for sponsoring this evening. and nick for hosting this evening. so, yes, so the book actually grew out of my early experiences in visiting prisons, something i really didn't know anything about until i started research for the book that became "all god's children," and then i developed this into a beat at "the new york times" covering crime and criminal justice. and as i visited prisons in many of the states -- and federal prisons around the country -- one thing kept popping up at me. i was intrigued to see inmates in one cell, and it turned out to be a father and his son incarcerated in the same cell. and in some cases it was a mother and a daughter locked in the same cell. and in some other cases i actually found a grandfather, his son and the grandson. not in the same cell, because that would have been too many people, but in the same prison. and i would ask is the prison officials, do these guys commit the same crime together? why are they all here together? no, they didn't commit the same crime together. they both had committed multiple crimes, and there was crime running in their families, and so they ended up being incarcerated in the prison, and they got together. so i thought this is, this is really flabber fasting, and i -- flabber fasting, and i started reading in criminology about it. and then i discovered this rich, detailed statistical studies done in the u.s. and elsewhere. the ones in the u.s., the most notable ones were pittsburgh, rochester, in denver and then really amazing study done in south london in the u.k. and there's more to come, we could talk about that maybe later because there's another very big one, maybe the most important one is going to be coming out, i think, in the next year. >> please, tell us about what caught your attention. >> the london study, it had a sample of 411 boys whom they followed from, if i can get this right, from roughly 1960 right up until 1990. and they found that 5% of the families that they were studying were responsible for half of all the crime. and the 10% of the families in the sample were responsible for two-thirds of all the crime. the thing was the other studies were coming back with very similar figures. so you have to ask yourself what is going on here with those percentages, because they're -- they don't seem quite natural or normal. >> right. and that's the study that was conducted by david fairington at cambridge and others -- >> from cambridge university study. >> and that largely validated earlier work that had been done in the u.s. at harvard law school, right? >> yes with. the good glucks were a husband d wife team at the harvard law school, they were researchers, and they did a study of boys in boston, 500 boys. one sample of 500 boys in a control group. and in those, in that study -- this was done in 1940, so quite a while ago. they found that of the boys who had been incidentsed by a judge to -- sentenced by a judge to a reformatory in massachusetts, two-thirds of the boys had a father who had been arrested. and half had a grandfather who had been arrested. and half also had a mother who'd been arrested. so this was, to me, i mean, quite astonishing to see that powerful effect. and then there were two scholars who followed this up in recent years. one at the university of maryland, and rob sampson, who some of you may know, who's at harvard now. and they, actually, they went back and they tried to retrace the glucks', the researchers' footsteps and were able to update the boys from 1960 to 1990. and, again, the findings came back, they were very powerful. >> very consistent. so you're seeing consistency across time and place -- >> time and place, very different places and different times. should i mention the new study that's going to come out? >> sure. >> so the new study is by rob sampson at harvard, and it's not out yet, but he's got a sabbatical, he's working on a book, and he told me last week that it's going -- he's got a bigger study, and, but he's finding the same kinds of statistics, these relationships. so he's got a thousand kids, boys from chicago who were born in the early 1990s, but he not only has data on the boys and their histories of arrest and incarceration, but he has it on the father and the mother, he's got it on the grandfather and the grandmother, on their brothers and sisterses, their cousins, aunts and uncles. and he finds this criminal relationship going on through these other parts of the family very powerfully. and because it's a much more modern, much more recent study and chicago, big city with a lot of crime, it's a very robust study. >> robust is one of the favorite words researchers like to yiew.z yiew.z -- to use. you had your own firsthand experience seeing the intergenerational effects of crime as you toured around the country. that led you to dig into the research to understand there was some underpinning for this phenomenon, so how did you get from those initial insights and that initial legwork to finding the bogle family, and in particular rooster, who is the linchpin -- the patriarch of the family and the linchpin of the story in many ways? tell us a bit about how you got there and why the bogles. >> yes. so, i was so intrigued by these studies and the statistics, i really wanted to try to find a white family. and i wanted to find a full family with multiple number of offenders who'd been sent to prison. i wanted a white family because i wanted to sort of take the spotlight off people associating blacks with crimes. there was too much emphasis on that. and i wanted a family because i felt something was going on in the family. so i began asking around does anybody know a family like this. and very quickly a friend in the oregon department of corrections said, yes, he did. he thought he had a family with six members in prison. and he said if you're willing to come out to oregon, he said i could let you interview them. with their permission, of course, behind bars. and so i went to my editors at "the new york times", and i told them what the story was, it would be a chance to write about this white family with multiple numbers of people in prison. little -- and "the new york times" agreed, and i went out and wrote the story with those first few that i had behind bars. and we, this was now much more than ten years ago. what we didn't know then was the real figure was not six members in prison, but 6-0, 60 members who have been in prison in four generations of one family. so -- >> and that that's 60 people, not 60 separate incidents. >> 60 people. and many of them with multiple arrests, convictions and periods of incarceration. so should i --? >> tell us about rooster e. >> so sort of the family that i chose to go with was a man always known in his family as rooster bogle. his real name was kind of different, because his birth certificate doesn't have any name on it. it was something that irked him all the rest of his life, so he called himself rooster. but he grew up in amarillo, texas, where his family was at that time. they had moved from tennessee early in the story, that time of civil war where i first found the family, to texas and moved across to amarillo and later to oregon. so rooster had been -- the youngest member of the family by quite a bit, the seventh child in the family at that point. and he had grown up, he loved to hear stories about his father and mother who'd been in a carnival for 20 years, he loved to hear the stories about his older brothers who committed all kinds of crimes all over the country. and rooster wanted to be just as big and bad as they were. he wanted -- so he would pick fights on the street or at school with other kids, and he had a little set of homemade brass knuckles. it was an iron pipe wrapped with gauze that the he would use. when somebody would offend them, he would hit people in the head, and he'd usually knock people out right away. so he went on, and there's one interesting crime that the whole family committed together happened in amarillo. the whole family took part in what was to that point the biggest burglary in the city of amarillo's history. we don't -- today we don't think much of burglaries, they're kind of small time crime compared to drug dealing and other kinds of crime where you can make more money, but they got $20,000 stealing a safe out of their local grocery store. and when it came time to divide up the loot, the mother sat at the dining room table with the cash and would deal a deck of cards, so much for you, so much for you, so much for you, so much for you. so she divided it out -- >> the cut for herself. >> she cut an absolute -- kept an absolute cut for herself. she was probably the worst of the bunch because she was a big enabler, and she did her own crimes. let's see -- >> so rooster was brought up in an environment of lawlessness. >> yes. and her mother really enabled him to do this. she didn't punish him, she would reward him, give him money for things. but rooster went off -- the police actually solved this burglary, and they put all the brothers in prison. rooster got five years in the state penitentiary at huntsville. they let the mother go because the boys agreed to plead guilty, they felt bad for their mother, and one sister in the family also the police let off. she had furnished the truck that was used as the getaway vehicle. >> and from there rooster then eventually migrated to oregon where he, with his own children, correct? >> right. so rooster migrated to oregon after all the boys had gotten out, the family decided to move to oregon because they wanted to get away from their criminal reputation because the police were practicing an early form of what you'd call family profiling. they were familiar with the bogle family, and they knew the cars that they had, so they would follow them wherever they went, and the family just got tired of it, and they thought they could get away by moving. of course, when they moved to salem, the capital of oregon, they just continued to do what they've been doing. so they got caught this. >> at this point rooster has children of his own, right? or soon will have. >> well, rooster married his sweetheart from amarillo when she was 12 and he was 19, and then when they got to oregon, they were married when they got to oregon. rooster also acquired another girlfriend named linda -- the first wife is kathy. you'll forgive me if i use the shorthand here. so ruther would, at night he would go off chasing linda, the girlfriend he was making, while leaving kathy at home with his first two children. and eventually rooster got the idea that he would invite linda to come live with him and kathy and their children. and bizarrely to us, kathy agreed to invite linda into the house because, she said, that way rooster -- i'll see more of rooster because he won't be out at night chasing linda. so linda moved into the house as the second wife or girlfriend with these children and eventually there were -- linda had two children and rooster had seven with kathy. so it was -- and then jumping forward, but rooster got paranoid that kathy was out sleeping with other men. imagine him thinking that. [laughter] so he divorced kathy because he thought she was cheating on him. [laughter] and so the boys would explain to the people at school that -- the way they described linda and kathy was quite wonderful in a way, awful in another. they would say this is my mother, and this is my other mother. and it just was not setting a great example. >> talk a lit -- talk about how the mothers in the household didn't set a good example. >> so rooster had some bizarre habits. he -- well, one thing he encouraged the boys to fight, and he actually set up a boxing ring outside and would have competitions with other families, and he would pay the boys off if they won, he would punish them if they lost. he also would take the family out to commit crimes. they'd or burglarize their neighbors' homes or steal their chickens or cows because they were living in a semi-rural area, or even break into their mailboxes and take social security checks. and all of this was fine as long as they didn't get caught. if they got caught, he would break a branch off a tree and use it as a whip and hit the boys repeatedly until their legs and backs were covered with blood. >> and he'd also, as you tell so effectively in the book, he would basically psychologically abuse them. >> oh. >> i mean, he would fire rifles at them, he would force him to watch him and the women in the household having sex. >> it's amazing that anybody survived at all. so, yes, he actually would tell some of the boys to stand in line, and he would put a match in their mouths, and then he would go off to the side with his rifle after he'd been drinking a lot, and he would try to shoot the match out of their mouth, which he did. then when he got really drunk he would say to the boys now i'm going to stand with a match in my mouth, and the boys were shaking, they were so terrified. >> there was a quote finish tony, one of rooster's funds who was on trial for capital murder in arizona, the defense attorney who represented him, you quote him as saying if you're going to go out and create the perfect criminal, this is how you do it: you take young children and mentally and psychologically torture them, take away their dignity as human beings so they have no sense of etch think, then they become the perfect psychopaths. >> that lawyer really hit the nail on the head. >> so, you know, having grounded yourself in some of the criminology around these issues and having delved into the bo to gle family history, and you saw some of the mistakes that were made by rooster's parents were ones he then perpetuated and expanded upon with his own children, what is -- tell us what's going on from a krill logical perspective in this case. i know there's a couple of theories you talk about in the book, social learning and social control. >> let me just interject one more little anecdote, because it bears on what you're saying, and we'll come back to that. so ruther would not only encourage his kids to steal or commit other crimes, but at least once a week he would take the boys fish dog a lake southeast of salem -- fishing to a lake. and on the way with they had to pass by a big prison, the oregon state correctional institution in salem, which was covered with mounds of shiny razor wire. and he would tell the boys, look, and he would point at the prison as if it was some kind of great castle. look carefully, boys, because when you grow up, this is where you're going to live. he was not only teaching them to commit crimes, but he was happily prophesying their future. so right away when i started talking with some of the boys, tracy was the first i interviewed, bobby was the second. they sort of gave the story away by almost espousing some of the schools of criminology. tracy said what you are raised with you grow to become. there is no escape. and he said if i'd been raised in a family of doctors, i'd be a doctor today, but i was raised in a family of outlaws who hated the law. and i knew, all i knew of the law was cops coming to arrest me and take me to prison. they all repeated one version or another of this same notion, and that was straight textbook criminology, what criminologists, socialologists would call social learning, learning by the example of your parents or other close members of your family. so they were learning, they were modeling their behavior off that of their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles or older brothers. then a second school of criminology emerged pretty quickly that, basically, there was very little supervision in family and very poor discipline, and the family did not allow the kids of to have connections to anybody else. so they were not allowed to have sleepovers with other kids either at their house or to go to their friends' houses for the night. there was a lot of clannishness. and the kids never joined a sports team. rooster didn't hike sports. they didn't play little league baseball or any other sport. so what was happening was, and they didn't go to sunday school, didn't go to church, they didn't belong to the y. and if you looked around, you couldn't find anything they were ever connected to. so that falls under the heading of they didn't have social controls, didn't have these ties to the rest of the world that could protect them, they could fall back on. ands that was, again, straight out of the textbook and like the walking, talking the advertisement for the lack of social controls. >> and then we don't have enough time to sort of go through each, you know, chapter of the bogle family, but sort of fast forwarding a bit, you see the sons come to emulate their father's behavior and their brand parents' behavior. >> yeah. so tony, who was the oldest of rooster's children, i mean, was abused the most. in fact, he also was he did commit a murder or in tucson, arizona, with his then-wife. tony got life without parole, and his wife only got five years because it was never determined who actually committed the murder, but the prosecutor said that tony was the really bad guy, and so he's the one who's going to get the long term. and little did anybody know then that a few years later a prosecutor presented false testimony in another murder conviction case, and the police who presented it were the same police who had investigated tony's crime. and the prosecutor became the first prosecutor in american history to be disbarred while presenting false evidence in a capital case. >> but tony's experience was not unique. all of his siblings -- i believe he was the only one that was convicted of homicide. >> in that immediate branch. yeah. his other immediate siblings and half -- >> so just for example, tracy and bobby committed a crime which was charged as a series of crimes. i involved kidnapping, aggravated assault, armed robbery, car theft and rape. and all in one incident, it happened in one person's house. but tracy got 16 years because he had just turned 18, he had no previous adult convictions, and his older brother bobby got 30 years. and they're both still behind bars. >> the courts and juvenile justice systems and probation and parole agencies all have parts in this story, and do -- and the characters they usually play are responsive and ineffectual in terms of their ability to either dissuade the bogles from committing crimes or get them to desist from committing future crimes. what observations do you have about the roles these various agencies have played in the gbogle' lives and what conclusions has it led tow to? what other approaches might be more successful than sort of the classic -- there ought to be some part of the criminal justice system that's responsible for getting this kind of family criminal history. you would have been able to head off some of these kids, hopefully, from getting in more trouble themselves. and so the bogles actually got on more than four generations, and there's still six members. some of these crimes were committed back in the 1920s right up til now, and they just keep on doing it. there's six members currently in prison, and there are three on escape status. i say that because law enforcement could find them if they wanted to, but they don't really want to, because they don't want to return them to salem because it's not worth their trouble because they would just, they would serve their time, and they'd be back out and commit more crimes. so one of the interesting things i came across was that the, basically, the local law enforcement and the state law enforcement officials had given up trying to deal with them. and the most interesting figure of all, i should mention, was the judge who happened to get many of their cases. his name is alvin norblad. he'd had chose to 7500 trials with the bogles. he had tried more criminal cases than any judge in the history of the state of oregon. and he was a, in his court he had been a very strong conservative republican who believed in, tough on law and order and lock 'em up and throw away the key. but after dealing with the bogles, and he told me he had five other families whose trials he'd preside over who had just as many offenders as the bogles, so that was six families in one court with that kind of -- so we're talking about 2-300 people at least. he said he finally, he wanted to lock them up and throw away the key, and he wanted to give them a long time in prison, but he said that that's just wasting the taxpayers' money. it wasn't doing any good to sentence them to longer terms. so the mother kathy is one of the people who's on escape status. she walked away from a probation sentence, and she didn't pay the state back the money she owed it, and it's now up to a million dollars, but she obviously isn't of going to repay it. i'm just trying to figure out where in the criminal justice system we go to get a better handle on information. >> there's so much more we can talk about, and i'm hoping when we turn to questions and answers, we'll be able to delve into some of the issues such as race, your decision to focus on a white family, nick if's question about what's -- nick's question about what's changed from this book and 20 years ago when you wrote your earlier book. but i want to just wrap up this part of the conversation by noting that while the book is a true page-turner and it's a pleasure to read, it's also often quite difficult to read because of the bleak, the grindingly bleak lives that are portrayed in it and the sense of preordination or predestination that these young people's fate has been already foretold. but it's not hopeless story because there is one family member you write about, ashley, who -- spoiler alert -- who has made it. tell us about her and what makes her so special. >> all right. it took me so long to do the research and writing, as my wife tell you, that in the end, we had a surprise happy ending. so i close the book with a young woman, one of rooster'sed froms, ashley -- granddaughters, ashley, who's 25 now, and she actually managed to go through high school with straight as, she never got arrested, and she's, she then got to go to college. she graduated, and she's now working in a hospital as a computer technician just outside of salem. but, of of course, every day whn she commutes -- she's got her own apartment, her own car, and she's got a 3-year-old daughter who she's raising as a single mom, but every day she has to go past the prison i was describing before, the oregon state correctional institution, and inside is one of her first cousins who's exactly the same age whom ashley has known since the time they were both born. and so she's the very different case here. >> and what -- did you reach any conclusions about why she's able to be successful in a unsuccessful environment? >> so, yes. good question. part of it is ashley is just different. from a very early age, she was clearly very bright. she liked to learn. she wanted to go to school. and as she tells it now, she always said to hearse that she didn't -- to herself, that she didn't have to let this contagion, she didn't have to be part of the family curse. she felt she could decide on her own when to stay straight or to fall boo this dark -- fall into this dark hole. but she had some outside help, i suppose is the way to say it, on her mother's side of the marriage. tim, her father, was a bogle, but her mother was not a bogle, and her mother came from a very different family. in fact, her mother's father had been a police detective in salem and then transferred and became a prison guard, and he actually became held of the guard of the -- head of the guard of the prison at the oregon state correctional institution. and he had helped raise many of the bogle boys, and he didn't want anything to do with them. and when his daughter was going to get married to tim, he tried to prevent the marriage. he tried to get a court order to point, then he tried to scheme to get the police to arrest him and charge him with murder, and he had the evidence the prove that tim committed the murder, and tim was going to get locked up. but they dissuaded him from doing that. oh, and ashley's -- the wife of the captain of the guard, she was a nurse. so there were two parents there who were very, very different. and i think that has to have played an important role. >> so there's some hope. >> yes. >> thank you so much. i believe now we have an opportunity for you all to ask questions, and there's a microphone if you have a question, just raise your hand, and this gentleman will bring the microphone over. great. and if you could say who you are and if you have an affiliation you'd like to share, please to. >> my name is rhonda watson, i have many affiliations. [laughter] during your interviews, did you get a sense that that any of rooster's children or grandchildren, were they hostile towards him? was -- >> hostile towards him? >> towards rooster. were they hostile or was there a sense of admiration or anything? >> it was a sense of admiration. they were -- he boasted about his young career at committing crimes, and that was an honor to him, and he taught the boys to see it as a great honor in the family. so they would say things like it's an honor to go to prison for the family. now, this is not an organized crime family, this is a totally disorganized, dysfunctional family, but they had some of that same character to them. so the children all kind of looked up to rooster. it's kind of perverse, but there it was. >> there was a question over there. you can pass the mic down, please. >> i even know this person. [laughter] >> hi. i'm anne marie cunningham, and thank you both for the discussion. at fox news i'm a journalist, and i've been following your crime story in oregon for five years, and i wanted to ask to what degree, fox, do you think this story is specific to oregon? for example, the -- i know the razor wire outside the oregon state correctional institution. [laughter] i've been to the building that was the mental hospital in one flew over the cook coo's nest -- kick coo's -- cook coo's nest. they believe in a quaker concept i'm sure some people in the room know about that says anyone can be rehabilitated. to what degree does this attitude on the part of the criminal justice system in your state, how did that affect the bogles and how they were treated? >> you mean the specific -- >> the fate of the bogles overall. it sounds as though they were repeatedly tried, repeatedly convicted, and then they did it again. was that because oregon thought they had rehabilitated them? >> i don't think that oregon ever believed that they had rehabilitated them. they basically always served out their full sentence. they didn't get early release. they didn't get -- there was no question the bogles had committed these crimes and probably lots of others they doesn't get caught for. so i think the first part of your question, could this happen elsewhere, oregon's not unique. you could find families like this in other states, in other places. salem's a funny place, it's not a big city, and it's not the countryside. it's kind of an overgrown cowtown even though it's the state capital. but it's not a big city. so large parts of it have a very kind of rural or a agrarian feel even though it's a small city. but i think the story could be replicated elsewhere. >> master speaks. >> jeremy travis, also many affiliations. so dan asked you'll a question, fox, which had an interesting answer, pointing out the ways in which the bogles over time interacted with various agencies within the criminal justice system, parole, probation, corrections, police, courts, ohs. and asked you whether those interventions and those interactions had been effective or not, and it would appear or from the evidence that they've not been. so then you posited what if any of those agencies had had full knowledge about the family, not just the individual, and had shared that knowledge with each other somehow and so police knew what probation was doing, emergency rooms knew what mental health institutes were doing, corrections knew what was happening within the family. what would you expect those agencies to do differently if they had full knowledge? we had an e-mail exchange about this last night which is kind of a fun mind experiment. what would we do differently if we knew? >> i'll answer your question with a story which is where some of this comes from. i was very lucky as part of my beat on criminal justice to go and visit a program developed by the state's attorney or ticket attorney in our terms -- or district attorney in our terms in jacksonville, florida. his name was harry shornsteven, and he's -- shornstein, and he's a liberal democrat in a very conservative part of the country. jacksonville, although it's a big city, is a very right-wing, christian conservative kind of place. he tried to implement some of the programs. so one of the things he did was he took some money that was coming into his office for kids who were in the juvenile part of the system, and he would, convene a meeting. he would take three kids each week, and the people -- he had hired a psychologist. instead of hiring another prosecutor, he hired a psychologist, and they'd form these teams, and they would come in, and somebody from each of the agencies that we're talking about. they had somebody from the police, somebody from parole, they had somebody from the state child welfare division, they had people from the school, the local schools, and they had somebody from the hospital where the kid had been born. and they would sit around at the table, and they had all their s. the question is what do you do with this kid. it turned out that the mother had been crack-addicted, and the baby was born addicted, and the father was in prison for murder, and it wasn't his first murder. and we began to get a much fuller picture. he had multiple incidents at school where he assaulted other kids. so the question then was what's the judge going to do. well, the state attorney had worked out an interesting program. basically, he couldn't force the family to accept therapy, but jacksonville had a large retired military community, it's a big air force and navy base. he got volunteer mentors who were retired military, and he would say to the parents of this killed, if you're willing to sign a civil contract with me that you will accept respondent for them -- respondent for them and the kid completes the program, we can drop the charges. in this case, the mother for freddie agreed to this, and a mentor was brought in who was a retired navy officer. and he would be there in the morning to take freddie to the school, and he would be there, made sure freddie stayed in school, he would be there in the afternoon, bring him home, make sure he got dinner, got to bed at time. and this was kind of seven days a week that somebody was watching this kid. and after a two year period, the kid was contracted for, he did not comet any more crimes. and i talked to harry the other day, and over all this time just freddie has finished high school. so it's a different, it's a very different approach. of course, unfortunately, the state of florida being florida, has dropped -- harry decided not to run again, and the state immediately made his program go away. so we lost all that. but just watching this process go on was so interesting, and i thought what happens if we replicate that in some way and get a fuller picture of what's going on in the family. anyway, that's a long way of answering you your question. i'm sorry. >> [inaudible] >> sir, if you could wait for the microphone. thank you. >> i'm henry earl. i think this is extremely important. and one of the things that strikes me about it is how ignorant we are about all this. both in terms of causation and the progress and progression of it. my question is about the genetics of this, where this has been looked at in terms of the family genetics. now, as you know in psychiatry, it's very difficult to work out the genetics because it's not a single gene. it's probably small effects from multiple genes interacting. but i wonder, you know, in the u.k. now they're preparing to do whole genome sequencing on a million citizens. i wonder whether anybody's looking at this, because it's very striking. like this young woman who's escaped. it sounds like she's somebody who doesn't carry the yes genetc inheritance. and some of the others sound like they do carry a genetic trend. >> thank you very much. you asked the billion dollar question. is so this needs a little explanation from the criminology side. and jeremy can correct me if i'm saying this wrong, but there has been a lot of skepticism or more than that, there's been a real pushback by american criminologists because i think there's been some fear of being tarred as being a racist if you introduce the genetic explanation, especially when we have such a disproportionate number of blacks in prison. so if you start talking about genetics, are you condemning people in prison to the further trouble. so it's been, basically, essentially illegal. i don't know from state to state what the rules are, but largely impossible to do any kind of genetic research in the u.s. criminology is not favored. but we now have a new day, so there are some people starting this. and i, particularly one i know is a professor at duke, terry moffett the, who came to criminology from psychology. but she found after a number of years doing research that she didn't feel her explanations really explained what was going on. so she went back and got another ph.d. in genetics, and then she happened to get married to an israeli geneticist. and because they couldn't do the work in american prisons, they moved to new zealand to the south island, and she began doing studies in new zealand and in england of some inmate population where it was possible to do this kind of research. so he's published a number of papers now in the best scientific journals where she has, is looking at is there a role for genetics in explaining criminality. and she starts out right away there's no crime gene, it's not possible. just as you said very eloquently. there are maybe certain baers which are precursors to committing criming -- crimes. so people who are very imprinciplessive or have little self-control, she's looked at this whole human genome explanation, and there's some agreement on that. but what she found was when she'd been testing inmates, the ones who had not gone to prison hat more of these good genes for education. the people who had been in prison in new zealand had very low rates of that, that series of genes. so she's, then she's published the boehner. it's out there now. so it's opening cringes up, but there's still a lot of skepticism. what would you say? [laughter] >> well, it sounds like from the ed that is being created, it sounds like there's a complicated interplay between genetics and environment that's going on. >> in fact, that's what with, i mean, that's what she basically says. she says right off the bat nos the interplay between the genes and environment. the family is the variant. if you happen to grow up in a family like bogle, then of a convenient and you earn this. sow -- you also have the varian i can't that codes for whatever it is. it becomes like a double whammy and much more difficult to escape which might be an explanation for people raised in a family like that have a hard time going straight afterwards. it's all on how people fall boo a life of crime. >> it's a work in progress. unfortunately, we're out of time, so we're going to have to leave it there. but if you could all join me in thank fox for joining us. [applause] on behalf of the harry frank guggenheim foundation and the vera institute for justice, thank you all for coming. please join us for books and sign anything the other room. [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some authors recently featured on booktv's "after words," our weekly author interview program that features best selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. national review's executive editor countered open borders. fox news host tucker carlson, and citizens united's david bossie and former trump campaign manager corey lewandowski argued that washington bureaucrats are seeking to undermine the presidency of donald trump. in the coming weeks on "after words," stephen moore will discuss the economic policies of the trump administration. louise shirley with the emergence of new technologies, and this weekend activist derayy mckessen reflects on his work with black lives matter. >> you know, when king says of the more occupants toward justice, i think when we say the arc bends gauze people bend it, that's a hope. we believe our tomorrows can be better than our todays. so i think everybody who came on the streets in those early days was deeply rooted in the belief that this can't be the best version we've got. ..

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