Guest in prison you or figures i want to see some talk to remain of the other red flags as well for instance to we have host what was it that a demographic that is caused a reaction . Indicating we irrigating more young people from high crime . No. Guest unless i turned my life around you would see me as in fact, the population is a monster or murderer and as a father, nobody wants to have aging older people or the that type of burden for their crime threat so i dont child to look at it in the most terrific or for a thick way. Host your son who you basically dont know i that you have been locked up, whats the impact of those letters in the journey . Guest the first laid the foundation for me turning my life around and really being able to see myself from a different perspective and the letter from my son was a spark for me to find a pathway and move forward in a way that honored my existence o on earth and my row was a father and as somebody who the community was looking up to. Host my favorite character was your daddy and you are also one of my favorite characters in this happening. What role did you play . Guest we met in 2006. I get a two years before i was on the parole board and we began a correspondence in 2006 we became good friends of a supersmart beautiful woman. And at the time everybody thought she was crazy for exploring the relationship of anmegiven that i was incarceratd for seconddegree murder. So here is this beautiful model, recent doctorate graduate and she falls in love or as we say grows in love with me while im still struggling to get out of prison and we ended up establishing a wonderful friendship that endures to this day. The twoday she is the mother of my child and one of my best friends, actually she is my best friend in the world. A super courageous woman, very smart, cares about real issues and works to change the issues. Host you said it wasnt so much falling in love but growing in the. Host she taught me how to live in a different way. Somebody that can help me unpack some of the hardness of prison life and she was a safe place to land when she came into my life. Eventually 19 years later, you are released. What was it like to leave prison after 19 years and walk out of the jail what did it feel like . Guest i walked out of prison one day after my 38th birthday. It was a very different world like walking into an episode of the chip jetsons. The internet didnt exist when i went to prison. Basically it was just a thing getting started. So i came to a different reality than the one i left a. While i absolutely loved walking out of prison i realized we were in a lot of trouble in this country because we are not preparing them properly. As a relatively smart person i know a lot of the men and women incarcerated have thirdgrade reading skills so thats the scary thing that we are not preparing people for life after prison. Host you said you were a relatively smart person. You are brilliant not just intellectually but spiritually to evolve in a way that you have. One concern some people have is we spend a lot of time thinking about nonviolent drug crimes. A lot of these ideas about ways to do things differently also apply to people who are at risk for Violent Crimes and people whove committed Violent Crimes and murder. The guest heres the thing, politicians for decades have played this game with the mind of american citizens. What theyve done is said you know, we are going to lock them up and thro throw away the key u vote for me. The reality is they lock people up and hide the key until it is time for them to come home decades later and then they release people on the unsuspected Society Without proper skill sets, without counseling and without access to employment and housing. The American Public has been duped into believing only nonviolent offenders get out of prison and thats hogwash. Its one of the same tactics politicians have used to get voted into office over and over again. We have a choice in what kind of men and women returned to the society. We have to start warehousing people in the environments and expect them to get out as Healthy Human beings and it doesnt matter if you go in as a nonviolent offender. If you end up in prison you resort to some point of violence to survive the experience. To me we used the language for so long that its no longer relevant. We are getting out and we can do something to ensure no matter what youve been convicted of if you get out of prison, when you get out a you can get out and obviously possible. Our challenge is to be honest with the American Public and the likelihood of that happening is probably nonexistent, but this again is what makes the book so important because you get an inside look at what is happening in the system and how they can fix it and how we can produce better outcomes. Host you are an inspiration. Oprah said after she talked to you it was one of the most powerful conversations that she ever had. Thank you for writing this book and for all of the important work that you are doing now in the big birds o perks of a beaul struggle for the system. Guest thank you very much. I appreciate your insight into the book. Its amazing and heartfelt so i really appreciate the interview. Thank you for checking out the book. Th the rise and fall of Violent Crime in america looks at how about Violent Crime has fallen in recent decades about whats behind the trend in how long it might continue. He was interviewed by samuel at the urban Institute Justice policy center on booktv after words. This is an hour. Host with highprofile spikes in violence in chicago, dc, the question and issue of the Violent Crime has a salience that it hasnt had since the 90s. Barry latzer has written a new book the rise and fall of Violent Crime in america. What inspired you to reinvestigate the issue of the Violent Crime . Guest no one had studied in a comprehensive way the history of Violent Crime. I felt that needed to be done especially because as we both know, the Violent Crime rate had sky rocketed in the 60s and had really become a major concern for the entire nation for the next several decades, two and a half decades. I felt given the significant Violent Crime in the postwar period, the major work on that needed to be done. Host you do something really unique in this book. When people talk about Violent Crime they talk about the 60s and 70s. What made you decide that he wanted to take a perspective on the Violent Crime . Guest when i wrote the manuscript i went back even further than that, but they decided to publish the period from the 1940s and on, the period of the memory of people that are still alive. And i feel that is to really understand Violent Crime and most major phenomenon. One has to go back in time and see how things develop and that is true with crime as well because ive learned that crime has its ups and downs and there are reasons for it and without a historical perspective, one cannot fully grasp that. As you know many, logical study are maybe a years worth of crime and these have great value to. They dont give you a broader perspective, and thats why i wrote this book. Host before we get into the story of crime in america would set the stage for the viewers. What is Violent Crime, what kind of crime are we talking about . Guest they define it as four different crimes. Murder, but of course that could be treated as a manslaughter if there are certain what we call elements of the crime present or not present. When i poured with major migration but first and the africanamericans had been slaves where they were obviously treated very badly because of jim crow system that developed in history. But africanamericans in the south in part are influenced by whites in the south to have a culture of violence to deal with personal insult and personal disagreement. The use of violence was is common in the south, whites and blacks in this resort to violence of personal conflict is essentially migrated north with the africanamerican population that great one dash migration was italys great but a positive benefit who moved away from the jim crow system and made tremendous gains in terms of income and Work Opportunities who share the back breaking labor of the sharecroppers of the south and who really inspire the Civilrights Movement but there is a high rate of interpersonal violence that is the negative side of the great migration and was transported in this was a massive migration in 1960 about 800,000 headed to the north and also to the west coast the next decade it is a million and half it is a major migration so unfortunately there is a reluctance to deal with the issue but it does bring a great deal of Violent Crime and is a factor in the rise of Violent Crime. Yet factors that relate word demographics of the baby boom as it has become to be known to comingofage in the 60s did in the 70s that as of 18 to late 20s and for males especially this is monday expect the peaks of Violent Crime so of course, as it is it is wellknown to have that bulge when the soldiers came home given the prosperity of the country we had many people burying and having children and the baby boomer generation reach those years in the early 60s in this was true for blacks and whites have had now that the loan alone but something happened where it contained a contagion where people could copy the behavior of the other young people so with the baby boomer group we have a development of a crime contagion in this grows like wildfire in reaches the Tipping Point and that brings us to the third factor so when that reaches the Tipping Point and explodes the criminalJustice System can cope. Is this want ended is the swapping of the system that provides the third major element. What happens is the police started to arrest fewer people. We know the numbers if really get the rest rates or the complaint for each crime greasy that those numbers actually go down while crime is rising and then the convictions of the case go down and the prison commitments per conviction begin to diminish in then the time served per conviction goes down so while crime goes up into expect the system to respond by more people to give wonder sentences, the opposite is happening this system is collapsing it can handle that sudden increase of crime but the migration of africanamericans i should add those impoverished ones that are raging in high levels of crime in new york city that the collapse of the criminal Justice System contribute to what became the great crime. I want to focus of this culture of violence. Where does this come from . How do we understand this . It is important because we dont want to be understood as the biological argument some racism is more prone to crime than others or that i certainly dont believe that but that accounts for some groups engaging in more crime than others. If that isnt a genetic explanation than that is where values and norms and culture interest in. They can be viewed as the values and norms and some would add the behavior of that group and over a fairly long period of time here should be something short run. So as we are hearing to certain values and behavior is over long periods of time we say that is the culture and as it happens over the course of my research i discovered Something Interesting and im probably not the first. I found that poor people monopolized Violent Crime they do the overwhelming and a immelt of violence. However for groups to more Violent Crime than others even though theyre comparably pork adversity may be comparable but the crime rates are not. This intrigues me why should that be . Why shouldnt we be able to measure to find a correlation between the deaths of diversity in Violent Crime . Usually we cant so that led me to conclude there must be cultural differences and apparently it is a worldwide phenomenon. Of the in english criminologist was talking have the caribbean is an agent in the u. K. He said the agents are badly treated in terms of discrimination relatively impoverished and their situation is comparable the afro caribbean to have much higher Homicide Commission rate so this must be a universal condition as he found other examples as well so that it seems some groups facing similar adversity to have more violence than others and that is where culture must enter something about the values of the group, the behaviors overtime that we engage in more Violent Crime. Know i am only interested in the other behaviors as well as im sure there are rival interested in the Violent Crime. Think of the culture in the United States context where you see the start of the great migration where does that come from in the United States . That is fascinating i came across a book called albions seed that is the ancient roman name for the Roman Catholic kingdom and this book traces the migration from england to the United States is largely the 18th century but it is pointed out some of the migrants from england especially from this distinctive part the portion between scotland was a very Aggressive Group of people id like their brethren from other parts of england and it turns out that the very Aggressive Group from these borderlands of england ended up roughly coming to the appalachian area around pennsylvania and headed south whereas the other groups, the puritans tended to migrate to new england and he went on to describe the norms and values in behaviors of this group that came from the border lands and ended up in the south but it turns out they were rather violent and very sensitive to insult they would take the law into their own hands for retribution viewed as the al laws and deserving of punishments to they engaged in lynchings or free justice says you may call it, and fischer claims it became the southern culture of violence and it seems this developed in the south among the white southerners so it is my hypothesis this is the origin of the southern culture of violence and i should explain this involves generally interpersonal conflict where people have disputes either in a longrunning french or just disputes arising of perceived insults in their resolve often violently and this became a way of behaving in the south if one or if not two centuries with the works are written the late 19th century with the murder rate in the south and the murder rate of new wings went to be true and persistently true that those rates are much lower so it is my argument misses the origin of the culture of violence sometimes referred to as the garner culture and sounds a little exaggerated or oldfashioned but what they mean is people are easily offended, they are very sensitive to indignity and being slighted in the result to defend their honor that culture of honor develops in the south and it is my contention africanamericans were liberated but then remained in the south because 90 percent of the africanamerican population lived in the south to route the 19th century through the early decades of the 20th century the great migration begins at the turn of the century but it accelerates through the 40s which provided Job Opportunities so it is my contention in the late 19th century the africanamerican developed because of the white neighbors this honor culture of violence and it is my claim because of the jim crow system and the racist practices in the country and blacks were not permitted to an advance to middleclass and tell really late the culture of violence is perpetuated throw the 20th century with the lower income africanamericans so thats why when we have a migration thats why we have this transportation of violence with that group. One of the other things that you mentioned was resection in many regions where the state has no power to command compliance with a lot that means theyre doing a the rule of retaliation talk more about the lack of control may have contributed . This is very important in the south especially in rural areas i noticed most of those lynchings took place in the rural areas because there were no police if you have an area with no police you have a much greater likelihood people taking the law into their own hands so this is what happened in the south as the remains orgy rule largely rural areas with the immigration from europe who packed into the citys so the south remained isolated and largely rural areas in this fed into the culture of taking the law into your own hands to respond to insult perceived or real and that is why this culture of violence takes root more in the south. And what author argued even up through today this violence in the Africanamerican Community do you think we see something similar where the state neglects the Africanamerican Community that contributes to the cultural retribution to act . Yes. Ed is very interesting idea most contemporary books do leg victimization without looking at the offenders i thank you need to look at both sides of the story. But i have heard it said and i suppose in one sense there is the under policing of black communities but of course, there is the claim there is over policing in the black community. Is this responsible for people taking the law into their own hands . I am not fully persuaded. I think it is more likely that is the traditional way there and if you are insulting door offended you take care of business and resort to violence. Often times youn