Transcripts For CSPAN2 2019 Brooklyn Book Festival 20240714

2020th election, and more. A full schedule is available on our website. Now were going to go inside for the first conversation. This is live coverage on tv on cspan2. Good morning, everyone. I am michael cahill. It has been my pleasure and privilege to serve as dean here at Brooklyn Law School for just about three months now. Its going really well. [laughter] and, of course, i am happy to welcome all of you here and to welcome those of you watching at home on cspan. We are here, of course, as part of the 14th annual brooklyn book festival which will draw tens of thousands of people to downtown brooklyn over the course of the day, several thousand of those people will be passing through here at Brooklyn Law School where we have been a proud partner of the book festival since 2012. And that has been a wonderful and natural collaboration since the law school and the festival are committed to the free exploration and exchange of ideas in an effort to better understand our world and, ultimately, hopefully to change our world based on that understanding. So pleased to have you, pleased to be part of the festival. And as part of that spirit of inquiry and discussion, i am very pleased to be moderating todays panel and to welcome our three panelists. So very briefly identifying them, each of whom has long and impressive bios, but i will try to keep it brief. On my immediate right, rachel barko, regulatory play and policy at nyu school of law, former member for todays purposes relevantly are of the u. S. Sentencing commission and, more relevantly for the book festival, the author of prisoners of politics breaking the cycle of mass incarceration, which is available for purchase and signing. To her right we have john fass, professor of law at Fordham University school of law who is also sometimes known to teach criminal law here at Brooklyn Law School. He is the author of locked in the true causes of mass incarceration and how to achieve real reform. And last but certainly not least, my colleague, bennett capers, is the stanley a. August professor of law here at Brooklyn Law School, and he is the author of the forthcoming book not yet available in physical form but soon to be available at all major outlet ares the prosecutors turn. So please join me in welcoming all three of our panelists. [applause] so that bought me time to get to the table here. So careful listeners will have noticed that the term mass incarcerate appears in the subtitles of both rachels and ooh johns books, so i thought it might be a good place for us to start there. We can talk in a few moments about the causes of mass incarceration and what we can do about it, but i think first it might be helpful to get a sense of what mass incarceration is, because its, it may seem obvious but, in fact, it isnt. It is true that we imprison a lot of people, that we impress more people both in absolute imprison more people both in absolute terms and as a share of our population than anyone in the world. Leaving those aside, we are the world leader in imprisonment. But that fact does not necessarily mean the same thing as the conclusion or assessment that we imprison too many people. So id like to get a handle on what exactly is the nature of the problem of mass incarceration so that we can get a sense of what it is. And, john, maybe we can start with you because your book begins by asking the question of what massen incarceration is. Why do you take it to be a problem, what are the biggest signs that it is problematic, and how big a problem is it, and how much would we have to do to get a sense that we were meaningfully addressing the problem . Yeah, thats a great question, and i start by saying i dont actually know what the word means. I dont think anyone really does. When you go from small to medium, to large, to mass, i have no idea where those are. We have about 1. 5 Million People in prison, we have about 750,000 people in jail on any given day but about 10 Million People get admitted to jails every year, and a study came out this year that probably about 5 million unique people every year cycling through our jails with about like, what, 4 Million People on probation and parole, 1012 the million arrests a year. In many ways, thats punitive, that we dont pay as much attention to in the past, that giant part underneath. And i think the reason why i think of mass incarceration now is that whatever an optimal size is at least from a Public Safety perspective, we know this size is far too lang. The datas increasingly clear, prison is an ineffective way to deter crime. To the extent that what deters crime is the criminal Justice System, taking that as our first take that, and maybe we shouldnt, but accepting that within that silo are, right, detection is a far bigger role than punishment. Several months ago tom cotton says [inaudible] the rate at which we make arrests is abysmally low. And hes 50 right. Our clearance rate is awful a. For murder, only twothirds of all murders result in arrest. Of thats appalling. The collusion is not to lock more people up. Thats the worst response to that. And so we know that more time in jail, prison increases the risk of reoffending. Theyre not committing crimes while in prison, but [inaudible] and i think we have a really growing understanding of Violent Crimes, there are Better Solutions that work more effectively and that an increasing number of victims would prefer that theyre not prison. I dont know what the right number is. I know the number were at right now is vastly too large, and we have alternatives that we could use and for various clinical and physical and budgetary reasons generally dont. I should point out now that although we all know each other, we have done no collaboration in preparing for this panel. [laughter] and i hope that it will seem spontaneous rather than unplanned. But i am happy to have either of the other panelists sort of share their own gloss, their take on what mass incarceration is or what they find to be the problem. Ill just add a little bit to what john said, give more ways of thinking about it and where were at. One in three adults in america has a criminal record, and i think it just kind of defies imagination, comprehension to try to imagine that we really need to treat one out of every three adults in the United States as criminal. Given just thinking about human nature, that that is outrageously high. One in two people have a Family Member who has been incarcerated or is currently incarcerated. So its just affecting that entire sweep of the population, but of course it disproportionately affects communities of color. So just thinking about all those numbers, you know, we have cities in america where one out of two black men are under criminal supervision. One out of every two. So the numbers are stagger thing. Its staggering. Its always hard to figure out how to bring home exactly what were talking about in terms of how big this criminal justice enterprise is in america, but it, you know, its touching almost everybody in very direct ways, and its particularly touching communities of color. And the only thing ill add, because i think one thing that might have been left out is just how this has all changed over time. So to us, sort of a lot are incarceration is natural, seemed natural to me when i was a prosecutor. But if you actually look at graphs of how our cost ratios have increased over time, until we reached the 70s all of a sudden theres a steep the incline. And, you know, if youre a person who grew up in the 80s and 90s, it might look very natural to you. But if you go further back in time, you realize just how much we incarcerate and also how little it is connected to increased levels of crime. So its partially connected to increased levels of crime but not entirely. If i could add one more thing, i think what that touches on is a really important aspect. Rachel talked about policy failures, in the 50s and 40s and 30s, the policies didnt cause mass incarceration. And in many ways, you know, at the end of the day mass incarcerations an ideology. Choices we could or couldnt make. Earlier this week a Police Officer in florida arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted and booked a 6yearold girl for having a tantrum in school. And earlier in that day he had arrested, handcuffed and booked an 8yearold boy because florida has no minimum age for criminal liability. You can arrest a newborn in florida if you wish, 13 states are that way. Theres no policy compelling that arrest. And as bennett points out, we just kind of internalize this is okay. This is how it is done. And we could change it all tomorrow without a single legal change if we changed our entire political framework in our heads, right in. [laughter] thats all it takes. Thats all it takes. [laughter] i think its important how much of this is an ideological choice more than a set of policies. At the end its really politics and ideology that drive it. Lets take a moment to explore where mass incarceration came from, but maybe at the outset of the conversation its worth pointing out as both of you do in your books that its a bit of a misnomer and misleading term to say there even is an american criminal Justice System. So what were really dealing with is at least 51 jurisdictions, 50 different states as well as the federal system, and perhaps in a more meaningful way, over 3,000 systems in that a lot of criminal Law Enforcement is county by county, and there are 3100 counties in the United States. Having said that, each if you take a very even if you with take a very low incarceration state like maine or massachusetts, that state would be among the most incarcerative countries in the world if it stood alone. So the problem is pretty widespread. Having acknowledged that it is a problem, id like to get all of your thoughts on where that problem came from, because its causes might give us a sense of its possible solutions. And i think, ray cheryl and john rachel and john, in their books offer different senses of where the problem came from. To oversimplify a little bit, i think theres a fox and a hedgehog situation. Rachel points to many, many Different Things each of which individually and all of which collectively contribute to the problem of mass incarceration. John is more focused on one big thing that he identifies as a significant cause. So maybe, rachel, you can start and john can offer his sense and bennett can break the tie. [laughter] im going to offer you [inaudible] so i think, you know, one way to start is just to ask when that shift happens in the 1970s that bennett talks about, it is important to note crime was up. We had an increase in violet crime in america, and it was the noticeable to people in their daily lives. It certainly would have been noticeable to people who lived in new york city and in other place. And, you know, it was a period of social unrest as well. So, you know, you had people protesting, rioting, use whatever terminology you want, and is so it looked like a time in america when there was too much disruption, too much violence, and the public was demanding that something be done about it. And both democrats and republicans responded to that and thought that the current, thencurrent approach to dealing with crime and disorder budget working, and they needed to do something different. And that really kicks off this kind of new way of thinking about how were going to attack and think about problems of crime. And so a whole package of things start to happen. So one thing is instead of giving lots of discretion to judges and parole officers to decide kind of the ultimate release date of a person, that whole mold gets called into question model gets called into question because people start to lose faith in in rehabilitation and the idea of reforming people. Unfortunately, it was based on one marley influential study, and it wasnt even a careful read of the study can and a lot of programs were underfunded and werent working right. But the conclusion that was drawn was nothing works. You know, none of these things work, so we need a new model thats really dealing with this problem. So theres a turn to mandatory sentencing, mandatory minimums, theres a term to longer sentences. Theres a buildup of the number of people who do the jobs of criminal Law Enforcement in america, more police, more prosecutors, more prisons. And so that kicks off the kind of creation of whats going to then become an Interest Group for keeping things exactly as they are. So theres kind of the initial impulse which is crime is rising, kind of sensible til you want to respond to that, think about what to do. And the strategy is kind of an all hands on deck, lets really go all in on Law Enforcement. And i should just say that is a choice. As john says, that was a choice that was made. Instead of saying, hey, why are people so upset, should we be thinking about urban development and investment, maybe we need to do more with schools and job programming and health care and Mental Health care and the kinds of things these communities were also asking for, but instead of kind of thinking about preventing crime by offering more resources to communities that were really underfunded and really suffering, the response was were going to deal with crime by getting just tougher in our response to it as it happens with Law Enforcement. So theres a big buildup of Law Enforcement. And what happens is, you know, crime was rising, theres this response. When crime starts to fall, you might have expected as bennett pointed out that we would say, oh, okay, now crimes falling, lets reduce that, or we dont need to do things quite the same way. But instead, the buildup continues and, in fact, we incarcerate more and more people. We build up more and more facilities to house people, more prisons, more jails. And i think kind of one thing to keep in mind is is how that then becomes its kind of like closing military bases where its very hard to do that once they exist, right . The politics of that is just really hard. They become financially important to communities. That is true of this whole setup that we have in criminal justice. Prisons can be really important employers in certain rural communities, and a lot of them are placed there. And even though there are studies that say they dont help the economy of these places, the perception is that they do, and they certainly employ a lot of people. So its really hard to close them once theyre there. How are you going to get rid of these thousands of prosecutors that youve hired around the country . Theyre going to find things to do to justify their existence, and thatll segway into some of the things that john will say. I think its kind of it makes sense when you think of the initial buildup is about crime, but then it takes on a life of its own, and we have long since lost any connection to any of these things effectively working to tabling crime. And if anything, theyre now really counterproductive and cause crime. Now we have people who the immediate reflexive response is a punitive approach, longer and longer sentences. We make it so much harder when people come out of their time, and 95 of all people who are incarcerated come back out again, they rejoin our communities. We should want them all to succeed. We should kind of want that as a matter of shared humanity, but even if you dont buy into the shared humanity, you should want it for your own Public Safety, right . So that theyre on the right track. And the system that we have doesnt do a good job of that. And kind of a last footnote ill add to that is when all this is created, you might have thought thats a Big Government buildup. Big government in the most kind of prototypical way. Like, were going to get the state to come in and expand and solve your problems. Like surely we would want accountability. We want to measure that its working. We want to know, you know, this prisons doing a particularly good job of programming when people come out. We dont measure a single one of these actors for effectiveness to make sure theyre actually reducing crime. No one is held accountable in this system, and i mean nobody. And so its able to kind of keep existing and growing in this kind of statistics factory universe because we actually dont hold any of those folks accountable for results. Thats how you can have cities with clearance rates for homicide that are 20 . That show, how to get away with murder, i tell my students just commit one [laughter] because the clearance rate is so low, no ones going to catch you. Theres no accountability. All those actors just use rhetoric, oh, were going to get tougher. But no one holds them accountable. Theres more to say, but i want to make sure so i guess my hedgehog take [laughter] burrows into one thing and digs into it, i spend most of my time blaming prosecutors. Lets be clear, looking only at the 90s and 2000s because remarkably shoddy, staggeringly bad criminal justice. I dont think anyone can understand just how profoundly horrific in quality our criminal justice data is. Its amazing. As we fight over whose data is worse, and for a really long time people are really depressed because mines even worse than yours, and were all right. [laughter] and so data from the 90s [inaudible] as crime goes down, prison goes up. Crime goes down over the 930s, arrests 90s, arrests go down. Prison admissions keep going up and up and up in a weird way that ill talk about in a second. And what we see thats really driving that increase is not the risk of being sent to prison, its the risk of a prosecutor filing felony charges against you. That goes up even as arrests go down. The chance of going to prison doesnt change that much, its a all little noisy and crazy, and in the 90s and 2000 doesnt really change, and its not that listening, right . The median time for release is one year. Violent crime is four years. And the only Violent Crime thats seen a dramatic increase in time served, and we should cut this back, is homicide. Everything else is fairly short. Longer than europe. In the netherlands, 90 of people are out in four years. Were still off the charts compared to the rest of the world but not nearly as long as we actually think, right . Is so my question is what drives the prosecutor. And we dont really know. Theres 2,200 offices, we dont track them at all. We have really nothing, theres no centralized data on d. A. S anywhere of any sort. But the sense is these really boring things that, from the policy side, these boring things. Staffing, when crime went up in the 70s, we hired 3,000 more. In the 90s as crime went way down, we hired 10,000 more assistant District Attorneys. And we dont have Good Measures of productivity, but every proxy i can find tells the same story which is that the average assistant sitting at his or her desk today is no more punitive than in 1990, theres just 10,000 more of them. And when you arrest 12 Million People a day, youre not playing mind sweep or anything. You can justify the position. And its just that boring thing. Or another thing, and rachel touches on this also in her book, theres these weird fiscal breaks. Theyre profoundly boring to talk about but matter so much. The d. A. Is elected by the county, hes a county official. Jail, pretrial detention and misdemeanors, county expenses paid for by the county, run by the county. Probation, misdemeanor punishment, paid for, run by the county. But prison, felonies, the longserving sentence paid for by the state, not some Political Science state new york, new jersey and alaska. They pay for the prison. And if youre a prosecutor, being tough on crime is actually cheaper than being smarter on crime. If you send them to prison, its onto the state books, and someone else pays for it. And its not a national decline. Half the decline nationwide is just the state of california alone. Everybody else is just kind of following in californias wake. California made counties pay, and all of a sudden counties thought, hey, what . [laughter] like, no. This lowlevel crime doesnt need dont make us pay for it. Californias messed it up a little bit, its complicated, but these thing it is really matter. All that said, the prison trends over the 90s and 2000s built a fascinating picture that i think is at the true heart of mass incarceration. Look, crime isnt dropping for years, yet 60, 70 of americans think that crimes going up every year. From 2000 onwards, thats true. Theres a fascinating picture of 19742000. In is 1994 in 1994, 80 of american think crime going up. Theyre right. [inaudible] in 2000 it hits 48 think crime is going up. We werent. Wed caught on. Americans get it n. 2001 it drops to 40 think crime is getting up, 60 get it and remarkably gets lost in the day taxer but state prison populations have been slowing down, and in 2001 state prison populations drop by 1,776 people. [laughter] fed prisons went up, the numbers inclined [inaudible] and we actually brought this giant, lumbering machine to a halt. We actually slunk state populations for the First Time Since 1974. And then in 2002 it goes from 40 to 75 , and state the prison populations jump up dramatically 2011, 9 11, it has nothing to do with crime. Americans are traumatized by outside attack. And we respond to that politics of fear by being terrified by everything. Whats remarkable is that gallup runs a second question alongside that first one, is there anywhere within a mile of your home that youre afraid to walk at night, and that drops in the 90s as well. We understood that our own neighborhoods were safe, and that doesnt change after the attacks, but the country as a whole, thats terrifying. Now its rational policy just to lock everyone up in sight, right . And when do we finally get it to drop back down . In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Were spending more on prisons than in 2009. Thats all a lie. Its a useful lie but its a lie. Its an ideological lie. It takes one trauma to knock us out of another trauma. And much of what happened in the 2000s is not a response in crime at all, but acting out in fear about sort of what had happened and our general sense that were afraid, just punish, and that will make us feel safer. So if im supposed to break the tie [laughter] theres no tie to be broken. I think in a way, i mean, were sort of all in agreement theres so many causes to mass incars ration. Incarceration. You know, like john i strongly believe the prosecutors played a major role with the state of affairs that we have right now. Thats part of what my book is about. But beyond that, i want to go to something that he and rachel mentioned. In the end its sort of us, like society. Wewe in a sense have been bamboozled. The whole idea that i just want to return to that mass incarceration happened without us noticing. Literally its been, what, five, ten years that people have been talking about mass incarceration. It was happening for decades before that, and we were oblivious to it. We were, in fact, participating in it, you know . Crying out for more incarceration. Sure, you know, numbers might have gone down in terms of whether people thought crime was going up, but people were still wrong, you know . Their estimation was still highly inaccurate about whether crime was going up or down. But thats part of the problem. Part of the problem is were now a society and have been for decades where our initial reaction to almost anything call the police in a by we wouldnt have done, you know, 50 years ago or 60 years ago. We expect the criminal Justice System to be the remedy for everything. Foolishness. Call the police. The opioid crisis, call the police. And the other part of us being bamboozled is we just wanted the problem to go away. So when we saw problems, we just wanted it to disappear. We werent willing to ask the tough questions, whats causing the rise in crime to begin with, or whats causing homelessness . How do we address those issues . So when we started using, you know, prisons sort as the panacea for the world, of course this is what we end up. But luckily, as i think all of us are pointing out, there does seem to be this real interest in changing things. So so the question for all of us now is how do we harness that energy to affect real change and get the numbers back to something that makes sense, something that we could all live with. The other thing i would just add, can and i hate to say this because part of the argument in my book is that were really not as punitive as people think we are, but a lot of us are. And its is sort of absurd weve gotten to a point where its quite common now, you know, like oh, somebody shooted a hundred people, lets send them to prison for 185 years. Its absurd in certain respects. In other respects, i think as john pointed out, more and more victims are beginning to realize, wait a minute, youre not really solving the problem. Especially going back to rachels point where we as a Society Start to wake up to the fact that, you know, one out of three homicides is going unsolved . Property crimes i think is like 64 , if i remember, of all property crimes go unsolved. How many people in this room have been burgled, burglarized . I see one of my former students, robin, raise her hand. But numbers are very few. And i mean, were not indifferent, but we sort of have become society where were like, oh, arrest more people instead of becoming a society saying, wait a minute, why arent we solving the crimes we care about . So hopefully we can start to make that change. So i think think its fair tl three of you point to, among other things, two big factors in the rise of mass incarceration, one of them being prosecutorial practices. I think thats a through line in all of your remarks. The other being some combination of popular will and politics. Turning to the first one first, and id like to start with bennett, to the extent that prosecutors are the problem, how do we deal with prosecutors, and what can we change about that . And im starting with you, bennett, because i know you have the most provocative [laughter] idea to throw out this, the idea of eliminating the public prosecutor. So maybe all three of you can suggest some of the changes or reforms that you think we might engage in to try to rein in this prosecutorial trend. So the thrust of my book which will be published by metropolitan books but which isnt out yet, it is really an argument i came to after my experience as being a federal prosecutor for ten years and being a law professor and thinking about lots of reforms and realizing after probably a decade of writing and coming up with ideas, i was really just tinkering at the margins. I was tinkering with the machinery of criminal justice but not really suggesting something that could affect real change. And i really took to heart Michelle Alers sort of alexanders sort of suggestion in her book the new jim crow that we need bold, new ideas if we really want to change mass incarceration and overcriminallization and Racial Disparities and all these other issues with the criminal Justice System. So thinking along those lines, i started thinking, well, wait a minute, why to we need prosecutors . Prosecutors are part of the problem, public prosecutors. Maybe sort of changing our ideas about prosecution and radical race or might be part of the solution. So most of the people in this room probably know theres a nascent movement to abolish prisons. Part of what im sort of suggesting is maybe we need a movement to abolish or at least curtail public prosecutors or at least the role they currently play. So this, as dean hale said, might seem like a radical idea. Im going to make it less radical in, like, one minute [laughter] its radical, but its also part of our collective dna. One thing we dont really talk about is, sure, prosecutors have all this power. This power didnt just happen. This power was 300 years in the making. In fact, the very existence of prosecutors was 300 years in the making. We tend to take prosecutors for granted. In fact, its not part of our common law history. If you went back in time to the 1600s in england or went back in time to the 1600 in colonial america and look at the criminal Justice System, one thing you would notice is there were no prosecutors handling daytoday crime. Basically, our system, our collective dna is somebody stole your cow, you would go to justice of the peace, you would ask for an arrest warrant, you would prosecute the case. The turn to or creation really of public and just to be more accurate, there were attorney generals at the time, but they only handled matters that directly affected the crown. Daytoday criminal matters people took into their own hands. The people had the power. So gradually what happened over time, over 300 years starting first in connecticut in 1704 is we taliban to say, oh, private we began to say, oh, private prosecution is a bad idea, were going to let public prosecutors take over, and with that came prosecutors gradually taking more power and more power and more power until they had a monopoly on criminal justice. And victims, losing power because im sure the people in this room have been victims of a crime probably notice that the prosecutor wasnt really representing you. The prosecutor is representing the state. And the prosecutor might have been curious about your interests but really wasnt that curious about your interest. So what im advocating for in my book is sort of a return to a system where at least the victims, actual victim of crime actually have more Decision Making authority. And believe it or not, i could talk more about this later, but believe it or not, i think if we actually gave victims of crime more authority about when to prosecute, how to prosecute, what kind of remedy that would restore them, it might actually contribute to a lot of other things that could benefit us all, might actually contribute to reducing mass incarceration. It would certainly give power back to the people, and it would do Something Else that i think might be really interesting. Once we start focusing on victims again and the power the victims should have in the criminal Justice System, we might start to recognize that there are all these crimes out there that the state has been prosecuting that never had any victims to begin with. I mean, we should all sort of be outraged that the state is wrong in prosecuting for drugs if theyre not harming anybody. We prosecute so many crimes where there are no victims, and maybe if we started to focus on victims again, wed actually start to realize, wait a minute, maybe those shouldnt be crimes at all. So just a few of the ideas that will be in my forthcoming book. [laughter] john . You dislike prosecutors. You want to get rid of them . So i think for if i had not become a law professor, i would have become a prosecutor. Im not antiprosecutor, ive just come to realize they play e this end credibly huge role in the system. I had a student drop my class after saying that once. [laughter] the look of shock on her face was striking. You want to think thats the reason. [laughter] fair point. So i think one thing to stress is that we are the only country in the world, literally the only one that elects a prosecutor. Were also the only country that elects judges, and the only country where parole responds directly to a publicly elected governor [inaudible] so in many ways we have a certified democracy in criminal justice, and those two things do not go well together. And before you think im so some antidemocrat, the fed is designed to make [inaudible] and were okay saying some things shouldnt [inaudible] i think its important to realize thats a a weird pressure we have, that we keep talking about we, and we is not a term that applies here, right . There is no one we, there is no one us. And frankly, too, you can see prosecutors are elected by the county, and counties are really weird, strange things to elect prosecutors for, right . Because crime, at least street crime, tends to be a very urban phenomenon, and most of these larger counties, what you end up is people least affected by crime, more suburban, white, wealthy, conservative voters have an i dont want sized i dont want sized voice in outsized voice in voting for the prosecutor. They dont know them, they dont see them. Even before you get to the dehumanizing aspects of racism, which are huge, they just dont know these people. You know, its a huge disconnect. And so we want to be aware of that challenge. I think its not surprising. When you think about this move towards the progressive prosecutors, radical changes from the [inaudible] philadelphia has no suburbs. The county, prosecutor didnt have to win over the suburbs. Brooklyn has a very progressive [inaudible] again, no there to do it. Boston, not really much of one, chicago not much of one anymore. Where the urban voters have the largest voice is where you get the most progressive d. A. S. From a reformer spective, at least in the short term, that might actually not be such a bad thing. We have 2,200 prosecutors offices, but the top 1 of counties by population handle 25 of all felony cases. The top 10 of all d. A. Offices handle 65 of all felony cases nation wild, because thats where all the people are. A couple blue dots in illinois and texas, thats a map of voting but also a map of people, right . Blue is where the people are, and red is where the people are not, right . And thats also true, evidence showing more liberally inclined tend to live on top of each other, and this is how our maps play out. Thats also where crime tends to be. You can elect progressive d. A. S who have a radically different view, you could have a huge impact in the short term because they would tend to be hechted where the crime is. The question is elected where the crime is. The question is whether that can work, and we just dont know. [inaudible] theres not a lot of data there, you know . The theres already people complaining in both boston and philadelphia that the reality doesnt match the rhetoric. Larry [inaudible] runs an office of 600 lawyers. You dont change that overnight. I understand all sorts of things his office and not the metaphorical sense. Room 704 with name plate, cases coming through because its hard to trust that Senior Management has been there. Its hard to turn these things around. You saw that during the brooklyn campaign. Gonzalez would get up in the debate can and say i dont demand [inaudible] and tweet out 30 seconds later then why did my client get hit with 5,000 bail last night for x . One, gonzalez is lying, or two, hes got some 23yearold ada being told by their manager you will demand bail, thats not going to make it all the way up to eric gonzalezs office. You dont turn bureaucracies around overnight. Thereses also a big question theres also a big question, the Office Changes the person. Is that because they never were progressive, or is it because when you become a prosecutor, the office inevitably changes you and that its just hard, youre fighting against history and the establishment and seeing people at their worst day after day and not seeing the humanizing public defender side of it. [inaudible] the Justice System rather than adversarial things. The jag corps, you never know where youre going to be at [inaudible] there are more radical ways of thinking about it. Im stop talking and let rachel talk. [laughter] okay. Ill put one category, could we just have a whole rethinking, could we stop electing them, could we stop having them category. But i dont know what the box is also like, just tries to stay really super practical. So here are the things that i think are more immediately feasible that i think are critical, because prosecutors dont just get their power from nowhere, they get their power from laws. They get their power from the things we give them to do. So one thing we could go do to take some of those powers away, we need to eliminate cash bail. When we think about the number of people who are ine cars rated, as john points out, the statistic hovers around more than 600, 700,000 people are in jail, and most of those people are there pretrial. They havent been convicted of anything. Theyre not guilty of anything, right . Yet. Some of them will be. But theyre pretrial, and most of those people could not afford to make bail. And a prosecutor went into a courtroom anded is for a certain and asked for a certain dollar amount, and that person couldnt afford it because they are living on the margins. If we eliminate cash bail as a tool of detention, prosecutors no longer have that tool. One, it increases the pretrial population, but people who are in jail will plead to just about anything to get out of jail, right . And even if theyre not guilty of the thing theyre being charged with, if theyre told, hey, if you plea, youll get time served, and youll go home to your family now, you know, ask yourself what you might do in that situation. Its an enormous if tool that prosecutors use, and we know it from the data, to get people to plead guilty. If you eliminate it, you both help the pretrial population, and you take away some of their power to get those guilty pleas. Second huge power they get is they have the power to bring charges that have mandatory minimum sentences attached to them. And in those instances, that means the judge is going to have no discretion. Its a huge bargaining chip for prosecutors. You do away with mandatory minimums, you take away some of their bargaining leverage and their ability to, again the system that we have, and im not sure if weve even sized this ensized this strongly enough. The system that we have, and its not really a system, its many systems, but the operation of criminal law in america is all done through pleas, its all done with people pleading guilty. And is so you might ask yourself, wow, why arent these people exercising their trial right . We have this constitutional right to a jury, and the reason is because prosecutors make it too costly to do so. They say you want to go to trial . Let me tell you what im going to charge you versus what ill do if you plead guilty right now. We need to think about how you change that dynamic, and how you do that is, one, you get rid of mandatory minimums. Two, you might say hows it even constitutional that the prosecutor can say if you want to exercise your jury trial right, thats going to cost you risking a sentence thats, you know, three times higher than the sentence youll get if you plead guilty. Thats because the Supreme Court decided in a divided vote that i think is wrong that thats okay, that somehow thats not an unconstitutional condition on the exercise of your jury right. So the other thing so this one might fall in the pie in the sky category, but i will just tell you the composition of the Supreme Court changes, and one thing that i really hope that the people who care about criminal justice is will Pay Attention to is who is on that court and on federal courts around the country. Those seats really matter because a they decide these kinds of things that then give prosecutors enormous power, and most of those people are former prosecutors, i would say. So we need to change those kinds of things. We also need to impose fiscal discipline. The point that john made about its a correctional free lunch for a District Attorney to use state prisons needs to stop. Theres ways you can do it, make prosecutors have to focus on the costs of the things theyre doing. And lo and behold, when people have to pay for things, they use them less. They spend a little time thinking about it. Theres different models that we could use to think about doing so, but we can. And thats thing ill say about prosecutors who are critically important is its not enough to elect somebody who is a progressive prosecutor. Its important, its a huge thing to do, i encourage everybody the Pay Attention who they vote for for prosecutor. I totally agree with john that they are if we had a pick in rank and importance, the actors in the system, theyre number one, but its not sufficient. Itll never be sufficient. And if you want to see a case study for that, philadelphias a good one because larry has tried to do a lot of things there, and hes getting pushback from the police, hes getting pushback from the judges. So he has actually really tried hard to have his prosecutors stop asking for people to get detained pretrial, you know, with bail. And the judges are saying no. And so, you know, now reformers are like, wow, we might need to elect new judges. And you do. You will need to elect a different slate of judges, get different judges in place. Youll need to rethink who your elected sheriff is and put pressure on your mayors. Its like my favorite show in the entire world, the wire, says its all connected. Youre going to need to target all those focus. But i do think in the kind of prosecutor triage theres things we could do that would help a lot, and if i had to pick my top two, it would be ending cash bail and mandatory sentences. Michael, can i just add one thing . Even though this whole panel is about prosecutors, i just want add something. The other thing we need to do is sort of ask why arent we providing more funding to the defense. Yeah. You know . Because its that major a problem. Were all willing to, you know, pay taxes to help the prosecution, but what about the defense in. I agree. Every president ial candidate says we needs to abolish cash bail. I think the issue really gets to heart at why this is not a policy issue. Were going to do something california has where we can detain you [inaudible] its not about Risk Assessment tools. Judges do the same kind of Risk Assessment. Yesterday i saw l. A. County proposing legislation that its a crime for [inaudible] causes a reasonable person to fear physical violence or property loss. And given our general view of the homeless, theyre threatening me, and thats enough to get a conviction. So we want to decriminalize poverty by getting rid of cash bail. Great. I mean, great. And so now the system shifts, it adapts, it moves. If we still want to criminalize poverty, we will. Because now were going to make asking for money a crime, were going to build up their prior record, and then when that next serious, oh, we dont have cash bail. Your 17th conviction, charges for streetlevel aggression. Theyre calling it aggressive by stopping. We use that. But thats, of course, only something we hit the poor people with. And unless we attack this underlying ideological desire to punish the poor and marginalized, its like whackamole. Well crush cash bail, and then well criminalize being on the street, use a prior record as a nonpoverty base [inaudible] core laided with correlated with poverty to still get at poverty itself. My book is all pure policy recommendations, still buy it [laughter] in the past two or three years i realize as im saying this, my editors are crying. Stop saying your locked in. [laughter] buy the next one too. Theyre great together. [laughter] the policies matter. They stop things in the short run, but we dont adjust at the same time the ideology, and in the longer run the systems will adapt to get to where they want to, that piece of it. So time is running short already, but given that we are on cspan and given that we are about to enter a primary election campaign, as a lightning round i wanted to give each of you an opportunity, should you wish, to call attention to some candidates criminal justice platforms that you think are interesting or candidates, perhaps, that are or are not attending to the problem in a way that you think is good or bad. Ill do this quickly, because its lightning round. There are things that president s just cannot solve. Most of these are like my platform is to give everyone candy, riches and to make them younger. Like, it wont happen because the president doesnt have control of really almost most of the things in a lot of these plans. So my litmus test for candidates is tell me what youre going to do with the powers that you have as president. And the key things i look for a, one, the president has basically Unlimited Power to use clemency to reduce federal sentences. And thats, its a big the federal systems only 10 of our overall system of incarceration, but its one of the biggest jurisdictions incarcerating where theres almost 200,000 people there, and that is actually uniquely a population of people there for drug offenses. Not crimes of violence. Theyre serving ridiculously long sentences. Its kind of an outlier in johns overall portrayal. So a president can use the clemency power and reduce those, and someone whos serious about mass incarceration, to me, is someone who says on day one im going to do with the clemency power, and tell me who youre going to appoint as your United States attorneys, your judges and your sentencing commissioners because those will also be things as a president you get to do. Youve got senate confirmation, but you appoint those people. And if youre not looking for people who are committed to criminal Justice Reform and committed to enforcing constitutional guarantees, then youre not really serious. What rachel said is spot on. I would just add two other details. Centen citys great clemencys great, if they empty the system, all of them, we still have the highest populations in the world. Were still number one. The other thing i look for is the feds really cant do much, it gets even harder because, to her credit, harris says i cant do much, ill use these incentive brands to do it. Thats really hard for the feds to do, and they overstate what they can do, all of them do. Local governments spend 200 million a year on criminal justice. The doj has a budget of 25 billion, so they turn the doj into nothing but a granted organization [inaudible] doj does a lot. And usually feds come to about 1 of what we spend on criminal justice, and theres plenty of evidence including the anticrime act that everyone talks about that had no impact, the feds cant offer enough money to get states to change their mind. No one took 94 million asking states to do things they wanted to do, now were trying do them to do things they dont want to do. So i think in general, rachels right, theres nothing much they can do at the state level. Where they can use their bully pulpit, thats their power, shaping conversation. My problem is with these 6,000word plans take 30 minutes to read we dont have law review articles that long. It takes three hours to read all the plans correctively, no ones going to read them. [laughter] outside of here, no ones going to read them. They lay out this vision of its a policy fix, and our job legislative policy agenda. No, the president s job is to tell us a moral story that were doing this morally wrong, and we need the change it, think about it. They just dont even give you a fix, they just say you are thinking about this wrong and they dont even think about it. Bennett, quick last word . Everything they said. Ill just add what i care about is figuring out what the nominees care about. To me, thats more important than anything in their platforms, do they care about mass incarceration, do they care about letting out people who have committed Violent Crimes, not just nonViolent Crimes. What do they care about. The bully pulpit, i think what they care about sends a message. And i hate to use the term trickle down, but sort of has a trickledown effect even for state jurisdictions. Please join me in thanking our panelists. Thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] now, while we wait for the next author event to begin its a conversation about Critical Thinking and the future of the planet were going to show you a portion of tonights after words program. Our guest this week is michelle malkin, and shes discussing u. S. Immigration policy. And, you know, it would be one thing, again, if we could just point fingers at beto or Julian Castro and say, whoa, theyre really out there, they want to decriminalize border trespassing, and theyre talking about this seriously. They want they really do want to abolish i. C. E. And not replace it with anything else. But working behind them, of course, are these larger corporate interests that how the crazies and the radicals to give voice to the ultimate working agenda of their own organizations. I mean, they will be very happy if every last willing worker in the world is headed across the border for dollar an hour wages. Host let me ask you this on a related point, and were talking about Business Community and free trade, right, is really important in texas. And nasa and having a free flow of goods and services across the border to mexico. My observation is youve got a burgeoning and growing middle class in mexico because of nafta and getting free trade, and our goal as a society ought to be to encourage Economic Growth throughout the hemisphere. We want that to occur, we want to decrease the pressure valve for people to come here. But isnt part of that is the Economic Situation and making sure we stand up for free trade . I would note that nancy pelosi is blocking the president s goal of giving usmca done because she doesnt want to give them a victory, but also why dont we recognize that enforcement in order to stop the magnet for people come across is part of that . In other words, its better for mexico, guatemala, honduras, el salvador, vens whale and south of america for us to have a secure border where Everybody Knows what the rules are, theyre welcome to come here through the open doors, and they would actually that would actually result in better lives for people from other countries. Guest i agree with you. The formulation is basically that interior enforcement and enforcement of our own borders is empowering to, you know, the people in these home countries to create more wealth in their own countries and to convince them to take more accountability for their own homes. But, no, were just racist for believing that the best way for people to improve their lives and prosperity does not have to risk, you know, their own kids lives and enrich drug cartels and all of these ngos. And here again the financial imperative comes into play. I have a section in chapter one called banking on illegals where i talk specific about all the financial institutions, bank of america, wells fargo, now there are all these apps, and paypal is in on it and a lot of the Silicon Valley to be able to more seamlessly send remittances back home. We have President Trump who has vowed and promised and signaled and telegraphed that hes going to start taxing the billions of remittances that are sent back to mexico and the rest of the world. Hasnt done it yet, and shockingly i think for most people,al although i know you know this, the Federal Reserve itself runs a Remittance Program called directo mexico where it recruits illegal alien customers in america by throwing festivals and having carnival games for the children to sign them up so that they can get a cut too. Host well, one of the things that i think grabbed my attention in your book is a little bit about talking about the media, and i think you referred to what some of the media personalities have done to create a climate of hate. So kind of what weve already been talking about a little bit there, you know, can you talk a little bit about that and how thats impacting the whole conversation right now with respect to how we actually solve the problem in a rational and sane way, believing in sovereignty, believing in free trade, believing as people of faith wanting to help people who need help, but believing the best way to do that is to have a system that works, where the laws enforced and where it isnt this open borders, winkwink, can you talk about the medias fomenting that wrongly . Guest yes. So it is incredibly difficult to talk rationally about policy consequences when you have open borders, pop began da propagandists in the media constantly smearing patriots as haters. And seizing control of the absolute moral authority card, you know, to confer essentially the Immoral Authority only on illegal aliens and their families at the the expense of American Families who have been separated. You know, that never, ever comes up. Actually, i wrote a column this week about questions that i know the open borders media are not going to ask the democrat president ial candidates. I mean, the debate is in houston, right . Houston, which is a sanctuary space where Jocelyn Johnson lost her husband. Both of them members of the Houston Police department host right. Guest and she does not have standing in american courts to be able to sue to hold the sanctuary anarchists accountable. Where are the bleeding hearts on the left for families like this . She and her husband are both africanamerican. There are so many stories like that, is and yet you have an open borders media that when President Trump finally embraced many of these angel families and told their stories during the state of the union, these media types on twitter were proactively smearing them, sneering at them while they were being applauded in the chamber. They have absolute contempt for american citizens while they exalt every last supposed victim of the illegal immigration racket. And in many cases lie. I talk about the straightout narrative deception. We talked about sanchez, many cases like that, and it certainly doesnt help that you have outright illegal aliens in the media like Jose Antonio Vargas whos calling himself a real american, obliterating the very fundamental difference between people who came here legally like my parents did from the philippines and people like his who came here illegally. And that was michelle malkin, our after words guest this weekend. Watch the entire program tonight at 9 p. M. Eastern and pacific times. [inaudible conversations]. [inaudible conversations] hi, everyone. Thank you for coming to this session on thinking about thinking. In the editorinchief of public works, which is a magazine devoted to cutting edge ideas and can be found online at public books. Org. I will be moderating today for a conversation with these three authors, all of these books talked on this question, how should we think . How can we think forward, how week can remember and what kind of attention should be paid in the present . We will talk about thinking across time and hopefully we will also understand more about our own processes of thought. The first speaker will talk about his book about five minutes before we go to conversation, lewis. Lewis has written an interesting and experimental book called a primer for forgetting. Hes a poet, essayist and translate and poet, im very happy to say hes written book that are connected to my field. His new novel but it was not a novel, its not a poem, hopefully he will give you the tools to think about what is in this book that it represents. Next to lewis is denas written a book called me telescope that looks at the long range and thinks about future implications and the problem of foresight. In addition to being writer and journalist, teaches the science of technology into Society Program at mit. I just learned it will take up on leadership role very soon. Next to denas james, rights, freedom and resistance and attention to the economy. Speaks of carving out our own forms of attention around our values and the challenges to doing that today under social media and technological diffusion. James is a writer on technology in general. This book he has written has been described by techcrunch as an instant classic in the field of test epics. Id like to have everybody introduce that book about five minutes and then will move to conversation and questions. My book is an experiment in thought and form. Seek out places where forgetfulness is more useful than we are remembering. Formal experiment is, its not set up as an argument its a collection of many short pieces which are ranked as a collage. Rose done after some years of collecting things for my collage, i tried to put them into category so the book now has more notebooks. One of which firsters mythology, there are many old myths about how we think about memory and forgetting. One example, all over the world, you find the beliefs that the unborn soul knows many things. I find it in judaism, greece, china and the promise when you born, you forget everything you know. It seems like a tragedy. You can flip it over and say that its a good thing that forgetfulness is the precondition of birth and new life does not appear unless you can forget. The first picture in the book has mythological information of this sort. I believe that they give us a pattern of thought to look at whatever is going on. The second notebook is concerned with individual psychology, forgetting, like we all do. And meditation practice, you study the self, forget the self. If you forget yourself, the world get real again. It has a sequence, its not about repression or amnesia but a kind of practice in which you look at how you thought about the world, or habits of mind and become familiar and less controlling. Its a benefit, certain kind of self forgetfulness. The greek word for forget, it has to do with hiding, something forgotten has been hidden in the mind. You know your students names but theyve been hidden in your mind and you cant remember. The opposite, has been the course of things you cannot hide in your mind, the unforgettable, things that haunt you or harass you day and night. Unforgettable is an example of where might want to do some work to put those things to rest. Not that you dont know they happened but youre not in control of your own mind. The third section, i call it nation. Its around an old remark from the 19th century, talked about the natures of place where people have many things in common but they have also forgotten many things. He thinks of the french becoming french, had to forget the middle ages were when they slaughtered protestants. Its hard to build a nation around those differences. So the book is about collective memory and forgetting. Its harder to do, it doesnt work as well because nations have many minds. In that section, it fails several times. Look at how we remember the american civil war, we havent forgotten it and we shouldnt. The final section is called creator about spiritual practice and logistics prospect. In terms of art, what you want in art is kind of self forgetfulness. I dont drifting of the mind. Many artists for whom the work has to begin with forgetting our history, they school they brought up with. John cage once said you go to the studio and work and everybody is there with you, parents and teachers and if youre lucky, they slowly leave the room. If youre very lucky, and you leave the room. Thank you. The guy wrote is called the optimist, thinking ahead. I believe people alive today, we are part of a generation of humanity who has never faced a greater need for higher stakes of thinking ahead. I think its true whether you look at our life span, we are looking so much longer than our grandparents. So the sense of what our future is as much longer than what has been historically for generations of humanity. Its also true when we look at the Biggest Challenges we face in as somebody who is to look at Climate Change directly in the obama white house, ive been motivated by trying to understand how we individually and collectively can grapple with changes on this planet and the way in which we are today changing the atmosphere and climate the people want have 50, 100 years from now and beyond. We have power and knowledge to shape the future and we also have aspiration and values to look across world religions, the founding documents of democracy, these doctrines and ideas and values around future generatio generations, subregional and Human Experience to want to care about, to care about future generations. Here we are in a culture of instant gratification where we are focused on whats immediately next into the many factors at play that encourage that. I went off on a journey of studying this idea of thinking ahead because i believe that we need to deal with it better and that change will experience in our own minds requires greater imagination than we have right now about whats to come. We have to imagine and be able to imagine what we will do in our lives and communities to address that. It let me fire away from crime change, to claims of thinking in ways we can think and aid our imaginations to think about the future and get out of the trap of shortterm thinking. What i discovered is studying a number of science, social science, economic and biology but traveling around the world and collecting stories and looking at examples of people communities have struggled or succeeded at thinking ahead and planning ahead. Thats a dangerous misconception but permeates our culture and thinking which is that this shortterm is a course of human nature. We might as well give up on problems like Climate Change and prepare for the apocalypse and i disagree. I strongly disagree. I found was evidence and stories that show this is not a trait of human nature. It has to do with the environment, conditions, its a choice we face. We have to acknowledge that as a choice. If we choose to be shortsighted, its a conscious decision we are making. Its constructed through stori stories, it brings in intuition and art and science. In order to be to some degree, its something of a roadmap, for the first time at the degree to which we need it. Another consent, its a collection of insights that can be used both on a personal level but also throughout the organization and society. I think theres a responsibility we all hold for thinking ahead but also institutional and cultural factors we need to hold accountable are leaders in deal with the change in society and build from the individual up. In this exploration, im looking forward to being in conversation around memory because theres a special role they play in inhibiting or aiding our ability to imagine the future if there are examples of that in the bo book. A japanese engineer who insisted on building it at a Higher Elevation with a high wall on the coast. He did that based on his knowledge of a flood in the shrine of the year 869 and that decision to build this Nuclear Power station led to sparing that Nuclear Power station from 2011 tsunami arduino destroyed fukushima so there are all these ways in which history and memo memory, individual memory are at contention. One of the other things we might talk about here, anchors for the imagination. Ways we can protect ourselves into the future so i write about the church in germany where john cage is being played over a time 670 years and every few years, there will be no change in spring assembled and reassembled for this music to be played. Its one of the more artistic processes but there are many but come from the concrete to help us to be able to be thinking across generations. Thank you. Thank you for having me today. My book, i was working at google many years ago, in addition to external Environmental Crisis that our planet faces, is an internal environment so crisis, are technologies were playing a major defining role in our crisis. Ive got to begin the book with observation in the 1970s. It creates a scarcity of attention. We describe our technology and information, we assume the changes of information data but when i saw in the industry was essentially most of the products we use becoming our primary goal to capture and monetize and explore our attention. Its an ecosystem of unbounded persuasion of a new kind of power and problems we are seeing. So the title of the book is stand out of our light. This comes from the story of the closest thing i think hes ever produced. An agent grease, he was exiled from his hometown for evasion of currency, lived in the markets and would do all sorts of things to draw the people. He would loudly disturb them. He is admired by one of the most powerful person in the world. Alexander the great comes to visit and hes flanked by his soldiers and he says, i respect you and advise you. He was lying in the sun at the time and said stay out of my light. [laughter] i use as a parallel to say the people who make our technology are well meaning, they want to improve your lives. But they are standing at a light that they didnt realize was the light of our attention. I wanted to elaborate this problem, information abundance has effects on our thinking and habits and lives but then the way this industry, which came to maturity in the 20th century and has been supercharged by knowledge of psychology in the infrastructure, global communications. The way in which this might of our attention and doing the things you want to do. I think a lot of the time we think our attention is hijacked and distracted. Somebody just asked me and that i go back to what i was doing. As a tradition across the world, when we give attention, its what we are. I wanted to deepen whats at stake and by coming up with deeper senses of attention that relate not just to moment to moment, we are all giving each other right now attention years of this. Questions of habits, identity of pursuit of longerterm goals, not just task goals and even the capacities like metacognition, it enables us for values in the first place. I embark on a project of interrogating this problem, deepening whats at stake and getting heading for at least Simple Solutions because this problem is a multilevel problem. It will take structural change of a fairly in this economy around. I started in the book by saying to do what matters, we have to give attention to what matters. I think all of the problems in the world, anything, unless we can get the right kind of attention to them, we cant if we tackle them in the right way. It seems like the dynamics are producing or taking us down a very straight path. I do think theres hope in writing the book. In the dark time, i think theres a lot of fronts right now but im hopeful our eyes are beginning to see respect to many others. Each of you have questions of continuity, we need to think in one way that in order to get to Something Like foresight or attention, we have to change to get that. That raises the question of identity and the continuities in the sense of self or cultural focus back and oftentimes lead to doing things in the same way. So how do we pick about identity when theres also this imperative for a change . One of the discoveries of my research is that cultural identity can have a high influence on our ability to value the future. You take a marshmallow test which people know about, test of whether they would indulge in the first. It led to this when i think to be a misconception which was that there are just certain kids who wait for the second marshmallow into they are better and will do better in school and on achievement tests and end up earning more in their careers, which was the correlation which is what they found. But that actually, as you look at the literature and all that is been done since the initial test, its a much more complicated picture. You find that toddlers who are the kids of farmers are passing this test in poverty and scarcity, they sacrifice the future. Having the inability to think past the moment. They pass that test at 70 in american toddlers pass about 30 . There are studies that show that the norm is that the kids in the group all wait for the second treat. They will adhere to the cultural norms. I think these ideas about identity are culturally and socially dependent. We can change the environment and norms around us. Thats just one example of how that can happen. I do think the abundance of information in the immediate can interfere with the ability to see ourselves as having consequences in the future, having the future that exists around, beyond our media. In our immediate surroundings, we have the input of everything we want right in front of us whether its a donut or marshmallow or what we are doing in the moment. Information we get in the present, the abundance, and might understanding, that can be a way of reinforcing the present over the future and inhibiting that ability to imagine future consequences or desires or aspirations. I think part of what we have to do is limit some of that input of the information when our norms are not reinforcing the identity. That reinforcing the take, take, take to get us in that. That reminds me of the media, the distinction between media that can access or space and over time, etchings in the stone tablet and carry ed across the ocean. Maybe not so much over time, identity is our self representations in some form of media, it would make sense that media that is over space but not time, would have a hard time keeping that stability of identity in these forms of media. I think we are one way to think about it, where in our ecosystem can we lead into these prime elements . I think theres also the question about the extent that this ecosystem thats designed to get us to want certain things to care about certain things. I think this question of, is it are true or authentic expression is also a big question in the environment where they interact with having goals. In my book, the assumption is that memory and identity are connected. They know who we are by what we have identified with. That means that if you wanted to change identity, you need some form of forgetfulness. One example is the 19th century, they were trying to create an American Literature into they were clear about the need to forget european literature so there beginning of europe at the project in 19th century america, the authentic ocean is in the crossing should have helped us forget europe. The pacific is three times as wide and we could keep going west. One of the things you say about identity that comes up in my book is that a lot of identity is made by opposition, i know who i am because im not this other thing. Its gets put into play politically. As a moment in my book where backup. The politics is the systematic organization so what we do politically, to get a Political Movement going is to figure out who your enemy is and get people to rally around this. I quote Ronald Reagan who goes to philadelphia, mississippi, a famous set of murders in the 60s and announces hes in favor of states rights. What hes doing is invoking the category of identity by difference. You know who you are because youre not black or you are not, or you do believe in states rights. So again, the project here is if you want to transcend the politics of identity by difference, you need to forget your differences then theres a project cause. I was going to be my next question. I think you are all pointing to environments that are there which reinforce our assumptions and oftentimes assumptions we would like to move beyond so its hard to build new norms or identities when we are all operating under the consumer and corporate environment that gives us structure that reinforces a present oriented focus and focus on scarcity which then reinforces a sense of necessity in the present which drives action but will sacrifice long term. Or other strategies which might get us to think about the future more. Let me say one quick thing, it links to what james does. And i think links to capitalism. I was struck in your book by him, he describes the way all our Computer Systems now lay down cookies, which keeps track of what youve done in the past and so forth. Also these thirdparty cookies, which operate across different platforms. When we one way of thinking about this as its creating your identity in cyberspace. Through these linked Information Systems the world knows who you are in a certain way. This is the creation of identity and i began to wonder, is there some way to erase these cookies . To take control of the identity thats been created for you by capitalism, or by a system where market triumphalism is the goal. Your autonomy is not the goal. Cookies, capitalism, how about you james . [laughter] one thing i point out about cookies as they originally started as a way to essentially enable task successful on website to be able to say this is the same person across different stages of a shopping cart process, websites. It was extended beyond websites and then extend initially beyond devices. I think this gets at the questions of perceptions of identity. The identity i have for myself which is then i express and see reflected back in different ways, then the identity that other people other entities, companies, that assume that i have, the profile me in certain ways. Giving attention to certain aspects of my life that happened to be relevant to the goals they have. Then you see this reflected back, it feeds in on our own sense of who we are. I think, certainly i think its this sort of colonization, monetization of identity in the form of profiling in the form of cookie, in the form of i think its absolutely an important piece of a lot of this problem. We are living in a period of on saturday, highly on regular and capitalism which i think is important to talk about and point out. Is capitalism inherently incompatible with longterm thinking . I think its an interesting question but i think whats clearer and more easy answer at the moment is, is this period of unregulated capitalism incompatible to a large extent or discouraging us from valuing the future whether the future of our Natural Resources or the future of our societies and their communities, i think clearly thats the case but i also think we have to recognize the choices that we have within that system as well. I looked very closely at Capital Markets and the way that investors are driving companies to focus on the quarter in the way that Corporate Leaders are pointing the fingers elsewhere saying, i have to manage for the quarter and not managing for longterm value and how that really, people get all upset when they hear about corporate fraud like wells fargo and the fraudulent accounts that were set up, or enron and the accounting scandal but more value, more pension holders and 401 k holders investments are lost by the routine and very Legal Practice of ceos managing for the quarter and taking resources on a research and development for growing their companies in a way that would be good for workers. These are very clear choices that both are proud policy regulars and Corporate Leaders and investors are making. In some instances they are making them differently. What i think is important to point out those examples is to show that there are indeed ways to orient, even in the system toward more longterm thinking and to not have that reinforcement. That said, its very hard for us as consumers on the subway platform in boston theres a sign from uber, good things come to those who refused to wait. Youre being advertised to not wait, to indulge in the immediate. At a constant rate. As james rightly points out theres a whole profitmaking machine around focusing our attention on fulfilling that next immediate desire and not focusing our attention on what we might ultimately want for ourselves. I think its also, is there another system of an economy that could better encourage us to think ahead, possibly, but i dont see a clear example of that except the extent ive seen traditional what i would call heirloom economies working in fisheries around the world and documented where the resources being passed to the next generation and divide alternate modes but they are not yet or they are no longer the dominant Economic System that we operate under. Im interested in both what do the examples show is about where we could go and the directions and what we need to preserve of heirloom economies but also if our economy is to remain in this format what can we do within that because we cant give up. I love the idea of the heirloom in your book. I gave a different way of thinking about what an economy could look like that wasnt about this precedented oriental capitalism we got today. It always raises a question about the family in the work and the family inspirations that i read both in aand your work. I was wondering how you think about that. Where does the transition between generations come into your thinking . I think i noticed it first because you dedicate the book to your parents. For my parents across oceans for the sake of the future and your mother comes up very early in the book as well. Traumatic memory is the easy case to think about why one might want to forget something that happened to you. But one thing i do in the book is to widen the sense of what trauma is. The greek word actually means wound. There are all kinds of wounds. I began with odysseus in the odyssey as wounded by a bore when he was out hunting with his father. Its a tribal or group wound is the kind of think you get when youre greek in the situation. In terms of my own family i was not exactly wounded but my parents thankfully forced me to do certain things as a young man. They forced me to learn to read. [laughter] they forced me to learn to spell. They forced me to learn to be handy with my hands. My family was very important to be smart not dumb. Ive been anxious about this my whole life. My point is a simple one, trauma might be the easy case but all of us have come into the world shaped in a certain way the more you can come be conscious about a i think thats interesting because i think we are leaving heirlooms all the time and whether we do it consciously or not, sometimes trauma is a form and even heirloom and sometimes the heirlooms are much more positive or expensive for us. I write in the book about an heirloom i got from my greatgrandfather who, as far as i know, the only other writer in any of my extended family has existed and he was a music and art critic in the early 20th century had musicians and artists who would give him objects but his wife, my greatgrandmother squandered them, she sold most of them off because she wanted to travel the world after he died but this one instrument survived and was given to my grandmother who gave it to me and its called a bill robot and its played with the bow and has more than 20 sympathetic streams for mainstream is made out of mahogany. Very beautiful. This heirloom to me change my thinking and gave me an anchor to get myself as a stitch and a fabric of generations to think of myself as an ancestor and descendent and also to understand what an heirloom truly is i think its very different than a legacy and that it heirloom is an object that is its replaceable with any amount of money. Someone stole this instrument from me i could never really replace it because its meaning is carried from the past from someone i didnt know to me. When i pass it on it will be passed and shepherded into the future. For me thats a metaphor and why i wrote about all the way up from heirloom economy to heirlooms for the planet but there are certain irreplaceable resources we have that you cant just leave a building with its name on it or bench or trust fund or account and replace an aquifer that has completely dried up or a fishery that has completely been destroyed. That we as communities can come together and do what we do as families which is protect something that is that kind of value for the future it doesnt require us to perfectly perfect the future. It doesnt require us to know what people five generations from now are like, it just requires us to pass it to the next generation allow them to use it and adapt it and value it and share with them what it is we value about that object. For me thinking about my family and having this connection put my sister and i very much forward and first in our future that that became a way of thinking about what we actually need to do more broadly as a society. Understanding there is a connection a continuity between the two. We have a few minutes for questions if anyone would like to ask. [inaudible speaking] [inaudible speaking] [inaudible speaking] [inaudible speaking] seem to be the corporations and recently in this room tim wu was talking about his book the attention merchants. In order for us personally to manage our process of consciousness, how much time do we have to spend thinking about the fact that its other people who are thinking more about managing our consciousness then we do and controlling it. I dont think its inherently better people are thinking more about than we are about managing our own lives as long as they are on our side. I think how much time do we need to allocate to this in our own lives, i think throughout various religious traditions you mention the sabbath, one day a week, you are not working, you are being, getting back to that essential thing. But i think thats one way of describing the situation we are in is theres a lot of people thinking about what our lives ought to be, how we ought to think, etc. The goals we ought to have. But they are not necessarily on our side. Trying to optimize the certain shortterm petty metric circles. The problem is large groups want you to think a certain way. Its a wonderful line from jamess book the freedom of the mind is the first freedom. There is a tradeoff between trying to make sure somehow your own mind is sequestered for sufficiently its free to think. And then what is this relationship to the larger imperatives to think that come to you from your group. Just two quick answers to that. One is that we shouldnt assume we have to do this alone. One of the stories i tell actually researching having interviewed professional poker players who live in las vegas and the way that they developed a subculture around thinking ahead and patience and nonreactive, nonimpulsive gambling. And the way in which they reinforce each other through language and norms and increasingly in our society we do need to do this in community, to be reinforcing each other to put our attention and consciousness where we want it to be and reinforce our values because of this larger set of forces and the second is to really hold accountable our leaders. We need to be voting in leaders and thinking about using our political power or community or social power in any way we have that in order to not have this be so unfettered at the level of the way we are being marketed to you. Or the way fossil fuel companies are destroying our environment. I want to ask a question, this is a fascinating panel by the way. I wanted to ask a question about distraction. How would you explain, yesterday there was that huge climate marks, mostly of young people. If anybody is accused of this distracted generation, its young people. How do you explain that these young people are thinking about the future and even though there are these distractions, how do you explain the thousands of books that are sitting outside that people manage to read, write, even with all these distractions. It just reminds me when i was a kid it was the boot tube. It was going to ruin all of us, it was a distraction, now we have a golden age in television. How do you explain this distraction combined with not being able to look into the future with what happened yesterday. I think its a great question. I agree with you, with your sentiment about the idea that generational thinking is not usually helpful. Technology is destroying millennials. I think a lot of this is because we see certain things in others or rejected on others because we dont want to see them in ourselves especially distraction which i think we moralize as a failure of selfregulation a lot of time. It seems to me that the climate forecast yesterday was precisely at the response to a distractive oral. We havent got as far as we need to that this push had to happen. The weight in which they did it they had to do it is in the intention economy to have this in it enormous show people around the world getting attention. I think its in line with the narrative of us being distracted. For the problems of books i think the prevalence of books and the prevalence of existence of book festivals is evidence that the book is not the primary for room media in our culture. The fact that we have to encourage people to read books, there is no internet festivals up the same. [laughter] once Something Else comes after the internet if it does maybe well have those. I dont think its initially exclusive i think these things are intention constantly. I want to tie the income you mentioned memory at the beginning, i think the first two and then you are ab maybe just talk a little bit about memory and how mythology works and the extent to which maybe we lost that or its been transformed in the history which is its own mythology but we dont think of it that way. How can we learn from the past . How can we keep the mythologies while we are moving away from organized religion which kept a lot of those lessons in certain ways. The memory palace, this comes out of greek and roman rhetoric. These are devices by which the rhetorician somebodys going to give a speech can remember his speech or her speech. The idea is that you imagine a palace or house and you move from room to room and in each room you have mentally placed an image so striking you wont forget it. The images are connected to the topic you want it next to your talk. This particularly i think worked in an oral culture as in cultures where only the elite are readers what you do is design your church with a whole set of images around the edges of the church which explain the stories of the bible or whatever your story is. People come see it and they are in the memory palace of the story that culture story. Because my book is about forgetting, actually attacked the memory palace. Im trying to think about forgetfulness but have to be in the book to find out what to say about that. Thank you so much for coming, its been a terrific panel. Thank you authors. [applause] id like to remind you that the authors will not be signing their books at the signing table outside the building where barnes and noble also will be selling their books. Thank you. Thank you kate for putting together such ab [inaudible background conversations] there will be more live coverage of the book festival in just a few minutes. Next up is a discussion on nonfiction writing. [inaudible background conversations] in the meantime, we want to show you a bit of a program he will see tonight at 7 15 pm eastern time. Here is former utah republican congressman jason chase its on President Trump. The Oversight Committee was founded in 1814. It was there to oversee any and all government expenditures. Its had gyrations Different Committee names, Abraham Lincoln when he came on the committee, this was his Committee Assignment when he was in the United States congress, its interesting, he became known as spotty because he was challenging the president , where were the origins of the mexicanamerican war and he didnt believe, theres a great history there of this committee and what its been able to do. Whats interesting is what changed when i left. The oversight and Government Reform Committee changed and now Nancy Pelosi Elijah Cummings changed the name of the committee, its called the committee on oversight and reform. Democrats dont believe that government is a problem. They think its a solution to everything. They dont need to go look at what government is doing because of government is all good. What you see now are hearings and oppress to go after individuals and individual corporations. That is not necessarily the purview of the United States congress. The committee is this wide, probably the widest birth of any jurisdiction. There is two Supreme Court cases we lay out here where oversight was wings were clipped back to try to get it on the straight and narrow, which is look after government. We had a hearing smile in pharmaceutical and the epipen situation, farm boy. Where we did call it into individual corporations. But what we also did was called in the fda and health and Human Services to say, how does this happen . When Elijah Cummings is doing is now demanding and sending out subpoenas and directives to go and letters and record amounts, to look under the books without any evidence of wrongdoing by the way. Presupposing the outcome on fishing expeditions to go look into the lives of individuals. If you have proximity to donald trump, look out. Because that is a prime time target. This operating agreement, which nobody has seen the light of day between Elijah Cummings, jerry nadler, maxine waters, adam schiff, and i want to say theres a fifth one, about how they are going to do investigations and how they were going to do impeachment. These people lay this all out before the 116th Congress Even started. But its all premised on the idea that they were going to be essentially i believe the Campaign Research arm for the democrats. I think thats what they are doing right here right now there is no justification or evidence to justify a lot of this. There just literally want to find out, lets go figure it out then we will go figure out what the crime is. It all starts with the idea and the promise that we dont need to look at government, we need to look at people and individuals. Its kind of scary that the congressional, the branch of government that they would engage in this kind of witchhunt. This kind of power grab. This sort of diving deep. It is scary the abuse of the power that is going on there. One of the most highprofile examples of the confirmation process of justice kavanaugh. He talked about how choreographed it was from the opening scene maybe you can give us a little sneak peek. We go through, whole books you could write on just the kavanaugh situation. The prework what we try to focus on is the work that they were doing and he outlines that they had, no matter who it was, this was going to be a narrative about a frat boy who was out of control and gone awry. The clearest example, and its been out there, its not brand spanking new and my book but we remind people about the press release that was already written with abthey just needed to fill in the name. When you see that in some total in retrospect put together in the way we did it in this chapter, it reminds you of how evil and how bad it was and i think its almost humorous that these democratic senators, every single one of them had pledged to vote no and then complained about the lack of openness and transparency. You still have senator schumer and the others say, this is a trick they always do, they always do this, they ask for things that they know cannot be given to them. You cannot reveal, by law, grand jury material. There is executive privilege that a president has with his seniormost advisors. With jerry nadler does time and time again, dated it part in the kavanaugh situation, they asked for information that the president has executive privilege on. Its the same claim that barack obama claimed, believe me, i wanted to get ben rhodes before a committee to talk about that iran deal. I invited ben rhodes to come testify before the Oversight Committee. He was in a new yorker, he was doing public speeches. Certainly he has time to do all the media and public speeches. He can come talk to congress about this. They claimed executive privilege. They said there is a separation of powers issue and i dropped it. I didnt issue a subpoena. The difference now is cummings and nadler will issue subpoenas and say, see they dont comply. They know that if it goes to court they will never win. They dont care because that court date is going to come after the next election. They want to create a narrative, i guarantee you, you will hear nadler and cummings, we issued a 250 subpoenas and they never responded most of them are wholly bogus. And the court would laugh them out. The reason jerry nadler became the chairman of the Judiciary Committee as he went before his colleagues on the democratic side of the aisle and said, i better suited to pursue impeachment. Come with me, im going to do impeachment. Thats how he beat out aand became the chairman of the committee. This is what hes doing, abusing his power. One last question for me then we will shift awe will end on a positive note like you do in your book. What should conservatives be looking toward to rain this in . And tried to do this in the deep state, i did this in paragraph on purpose, i dont want to just lay out all the bad. You come and listen and you are like, bummed out. Its not the feelgood meeting of the year. Try to end on a positive note that this is the greatest country on the face of the planet. Somehow someway the American People for liquor these things out. They sniff out authenticity. They understand these issues but we have to be aware of them. The very fact i write that you are reading the book is good news. The fact that people want to dive deeper on these issues but i also think its incumbent that we engage in federalism that we push back on abwe push these the federal government does too many things to too many people. So much of this shouldnt be done at all or should be the purview of the states. Somehow we got to neuter the power of the federal government and just get them out of so much of this business. I think a lot of those answers will be pushing for states rights and doing those types of things. The entire program with jason schaefers will air tonight, check your Program Guide for more information. [inaudible background conversations]