That the criminal Justice System is dividing the country into two americas, he was interviewed by author elizabeth. Its so wonderful to have you here. Its an important contribution to america and the world, i think, right now. Im wondering what brought you to this topic is right maybe talk about your trajectories and be a meritocracy to this very compelling and compassionate work on american criminal justice and Law Enforcement. Guest in some ways of both books are books about the same thing which are what i would call democratic pathologies, if you think about the body of politics as a body that has different processes and functions and they can go wrong in different ways but both books are diagnoses about infections, infirmarys in the body of politics. Ways in which im a real believer in my one quarter of a secular state is democracies, small the democracy and democracy is the most radical profound, idea in the history of human civilization and its so radical and found that we have a hard time maintaining it, thinking. Implications, constantly being grounded to return to our conceptions of freedom and so, colony is about how are we outsourced it to the leaders. This book is always our democracy has gone bad by essentially based on section of our population under conditions that are not really free in the fundamental way we want to be free. We want they really in a way. In the terms of the specifics of this book, im a kid who grew up in the bronx which is my core identity on some level. Im a white kid grew up in the bronx in the 1980s which i would never trade in for a million years in terms of what it meant for me, in terms of that i think about race, politics but it was really fraud in the city was dangerous and i thought about crime in pleasing, criminal justice all through my life and in all sorts of different ways. What i encountered as i was doing reporting on ferguson and baltimore was beginning to see the sort of desperate able to see the situation weve built from different angles. The appeal of giuliani and the rhetoric, what it has brought for communities of colors and it felt like it was useful. Host it seems like ferguson is an anchor in many ways of the book. Im wondering how your experience reporting there illuminated what youre talking about growing up in the bronx in the 80s . Guest the thing about ferguson that blew my mind was if you grew up in a city, group in the bronx, you have this conception of cities as distinct to think that cities there are these racial frictions and you have bad neighborhoods and good neighborhoods, all kinds of loaded ways in which police please communities differently and all kind of loaded ways in which the borders of different neighborhoods sit atop each other, overlap and create this sandpaper friction and all of that to me was tied very deeply to either the bronx, new york or cities. When i moved to chicago and i lived in dc and all the things pertaining place. The thing that blew my mind about ferguson it just the municipality of 3000 people. Its anywhere, usa. Its between the Northern Edge of st. Louis and the suburbs. You just drive through. It looks like anywhere. Its just strip malls and parking lots and houses and the idea that what i experience there was the level of expectation and the level of racial oppression and friction, the level of the basic policing, the intensity of the filiation all that was in a place that was anonymous and it blew my mind. It wasnt that i was like, i didnt think people felt this way about please, i had reported it in new york but it was that experience, in this place that National Media had no idea existed that made me think, how many other fergusons are there we have this amazing doj about the ferguson but we only have it because Michael Brown was shot and killed in the wake of that there were protests. The doj came in and they undertook a comprehensive investigation of the department and they looked at emails and other stuff. But they just shine a flashlight at one place almost at random comments and whispered if they took the flashlight and went to some other place in Milwaukee County what they find the same thing but i think they probably would. Host you say that ferguson was hidden in plain sight, can you give a specific example of something that really moves you while you are reporting there and that angered you or that i would need to write the book with explain whats going on and make it not hidden anymore. Guest had his experience where he went down there and i would be talking to people all day. What i found is that i could literally do this on air. On air in live tv program i could take my microphone to an africanamerican resident of ferguson is a, tell me about your expensive cop and story after story after story. You can tell when people are telling the truth about dramatic things and when they are not. This is people just telling me stories were shocking. The state senator who tells the story of high school a fire truck was forget us repair Something Like that and a fireman invited her to sit in the fire truck which is an iconic part of being a kid and a Police Officer pointed a gun on her. A state senator and then it was someone else, this is a class about a friend and wants to, youth member of the and eight double cp and his mother got pulled over and thrown against the back of a car. Other peoples experiences in mashed in criminal records and then engaged in the drug trade, talking about harassment and cops using the and word. It was boom, boom, boom, microphone, talk to people, story after story after story and one of the things that is so important about that department of justice document in some ways is that it is a thirdparty, you know, confirmation, of the truth of what those people were saying. Not that it was needed but in a sort of official funds. These artificial agents investigating the claims saying this isnt some mass illusion, they arent crazy. I joke about this at one point in a book event sometimes and ive done in, i feel like i have a unique position writing about these issues because i dont experience the law in the way of people of color do. Im a reporter and in some ways reporting is always this weird, youre always reporting outside of your experience but this is a particularly loaded one. Part of the thing, part of the project of the book is to be like this is not made up. Thats a ridiculous thing to say and why should it be the case that people need to be vouched for in that way but i do thin think i saw some Interesting Data where we are seeing changes in Public Opinion of among white americans about the reality of truth of this. Its working whether the coverage, videos, protests, activism, Public Opinion is moving on this stuff and i do think if you are if you live your life completely shielded from this experience it seems insane, it really does. If you dont have a firstperson experience of it youre just like, really . Do they really do that to a cop pulled a gun on you in a fire truck, why would they do that. Host thats why the book is so important and critical right now. I do think youre reaching a full new set of audiences with the book. So, what you described in the residences of ferguson about every one of them having some kind of story to tell about their negative experience with the Justice System and it speaks to the frame of your book. Ferguson is essentially a county. Setting it up as a colony nation drying from bracket radicals, anti colonial activist and even Richard Nixon. I was shocked that you said nixon himself said they didnt want to be a nation. Can you lay out what that analytical framework. Guest its fascinating that dick nixon said that. It speaks to the intensity of his time. Black nationalist view of colonization was so prevalent that it would fight its way in this osmotic way into the mouth of Richard Nixon this is an idea in some ways that see the end the boys, carried through the garvey framework in its own kind of way, particularly in the 1960s the moment of the third word solidarity which is the term people use then and we dont use now but you have this movement of independence and nationalism against colonial oppression in which people of color have been colonized by white folks and they are working to get selfdetermination. Theres this amazing crosspollination have and that kind of work happening all over the particular african continent. Thats all kind of in the air at the time, when it comes out of nixons mouth and thats, malcolm x would especially call oakland, in one speech was colonized territory. The black panthers has been astray. Black power, black nationalist comes out of the book. I think in 68 or 67, right all of these ideas have been developed and scholarly debate about whether that framework works. Whether the colonial framework of expectation is exposed to where the population is exploited in the way slaves were exploited, in the way the mind workers of bolivia are exploited which is to say theyre not a surplus population, there needed to produce surplus value. Theres a question about whether africanamericans and midcentury are that are the a surplus population or are they actually being used and exploited in this classical colonial fashion that the deep academic debate. Part of the project here is to take the notion a little bit out of the marxist context and put it closer to home to our own colonial experience. To me, colony means the subjective experience of state authority as external. The experience of the state, in particular the state violent parts of the state, which is the pleasing function, the experience of that as external authority. The connection between that experience and the function of the external authority to the colonial forefathers who experienced the crown as external authority and literally thought a revolution about that. Host can you talk about what i found so interesting is the way you tie in our colonial past that makes this argument. Can you rank some of the earlier struggles in the revolution. That what works. See today . That came through beautifully in the book. Guest we think of revolution as being taxation and representation. Its true. Taxation is the point of conflict but taxes at the time are not collective through automatic payroll deductions and a filing with the irs. They are almost entirely collected as customs duties. The enforcement of the custom duties is done by custom agents who are in the most literal sense, Law Enforcement, cops. They go around, i didnt know their badges or not but they were cops. They apprehend people, bring criminal trials against them in court, they take goods that are smuggled, what you have at the time of the crown is as incredible black market. Its a gray market. Its really interesting. Its one of the things were a huge amount of goods is moving in and out of the colonies, being smuggled outside of the reach of the customs laws and theres this look the other way. Everyone involved understand the lifeblood of the colonies and the smuggling is so central that even extremely high status figures like john hancock was a smuggler are engaged in this. The smuggling is the lifeblood. The one product the colonies produced better than everyone else is wrong. That rom is coming from sugarcane that is coming from colonies that are outside the british reach are all being smuggled in. Yet this distilleries making all this money. The crown decides to crackdown. They basically decide that we cant look the other way because we need that revenue. We want to crackdown and get those taxes. When they crackdown what they mean is searches of everyone, every time, you have these sort of official documents that allow these widespread searches and people freak out like theres an official freak out in the cards, benjamin began writing about it and john adams writing about it, mopping out for someone gets apprehended and a mob will grab the customs agent, beat him plenty in the middle of straight or tar and feather him and march into the streets of newport or boston and they will steal back madeira wine which was from portugal and smuggled in that is confiscated by smugglers, where they cant get prosecution because no jury will contact customs, theyre bringing case after case after case and winning only 10 of them. This is the norm of the community that theyre okay with it. So, the key insight to me and i didnt have to give a shout out to peter, his great book smuggler nation which is a great work on this. The key is to understanding how much Law Enforcement and smuggling is the point it was the point of friction that wasnt the thing. Theres this john where he says, when he goes to this famous trial where a lawyer is essentially defending the smugglers against unwarranted search and speech there was the sense of revolution born. Everyone went away saying this is our great cause. In the declaration of independence Thomas Jefferson writes in his bill of complaints about the crown that the crown has sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out our substance. Which is just insane at the police. Almost literally, swarms of officers, go talk to people in ferguson, go talk to people in new york city in neighborhoods that are pleased under the worst. Swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance one as you call it in the book, the parallels are so clear. The police there are operating as armed tax collectors can you talk about the ways the extractions and fees are working in ferguson just to emphasize those parallels. Guest ferguson is the neatest parallel because going back to this question about expectation for suppression because fundamentally the Police Department is attractive. And the documents that are produced by the various wording of areas and was the doj review was you emails between the manager and the sheriff in which they talk about policing as a revenue function. Host this came out in the doj report. Guest we need to get your new enforcement zone up to the public revenue pipeline but you need to go out and write more traffic tickets so we can get that revenue to make our budget. Host this is a zerosum game. They are jacking up enforcement of a traffic so they can extract revenues to pay for municipal costs that will save them the political pain and the wallet pain of raising taxes. The report is very clear and the statements of the authorities themselves in their email, they talk about it openly is fundamentally the departments goal is to produce revenue for the municipality and not just traffic in person. They have this insane system where its almost a payday lender. You get a hundred dollar ticket, you get a court date from them. The courts only opened six hours a week and it always has more people showing up to court that can actually be processed. You stand in line and then you dont get in and then you get a citation for being absent in court that then cost you money and then you have to come back again. Then you dont have enough money to pay for it see you have of it and they charge a fee for a late payment. People can start off with a simple parking ticket, theres a story of a woman that starts off with a simple parking ticket ends up owing like 600 and being arrested and put in jail three times because she has outstanding warrants on her. Thats the thing that is so dangerous and this happened across america, right track all infractions plus a missed court date equals a warrant. Then the next that person has interacts with the cops and the plate is run, zero theres a warrant. Next thing you know, your india. You could end up in jail that started as the most minor initial offense. Host right, im laughing because its so absurd. And angering. You detail these processes and whats going on in new york city or what went on with broken windows and zerotolerance in the way the criminal Justice System has been used to essentially manage citizens. Im wondering if you can talk about how citizens in the colo colony, as you described, are pleased differently than citizens and the rest. Guest theres this famous atlantic article written by james in 1982 that was called public of broken windows. I would say its got to be one of the most influential Magazine Articles ever published. Its amazing. Its just a Magazine Article not a scholarly piece that was peerreviewed but the two people who did our academics but it was a public it starts off from an interesting in some ways really good place. The initial experiment that they are writing about is a new work experiment in which they basically are trying to get cops out of their cars and to walk the beach. Theres a lot of reason to think thats good. The experiment is if fox underwent cops focus on order maintenance, not just law, will they reduce crime. Whats incredible about that article is that the experiment they site finds no reduction in crime but what they do find is that a pc will affect which is that people report feeling safer. They then take this finding to make an argument to completely reorient policing towards an older model of policing. They were very explicit about. We want to go back to the good old days before the war in court and procedural is him, before miranda, and even joke about all sorts of things cops would do to maintain order back in the days to rough up the young ruffians that when it passed legal muster. We want to go back to this old order maintenance model of policing which, to be told, was a very long period of time model of policing. In the face of whats been the war in court revolution and we want to focus on order maintenance and what it means is to use the title of the book, if there is one of broken window in a neighborhood what it communicates to the community is that no one is policing, no ones watching, one broken window will lead to more. Theres a group of teenagers drinking out of an open bottle and the next thing you know you get muggings, robberies, murders. There is a slippery slope in which if you think the order of the community as a woven garment and if you start pulling at the loose threads to these small infractions before you know it the whole thing has unwound. Thats the argument. Is enormously influential. Even though the fundamental empirical case has never quite been settled in any definitive way. Theres all sorts of studies on order maintenance and crime and find some effects and find no effects. This idea of policing of focusing on order gets adopted particularly in new york city and gets adopted right before crimes start to fall in new york city extremely dramatically and it produces i dont think its unreasonable or insanely produces a causal story for everyone to go to hell. Rudy giuliani said ill get rid of this we demand which was the skirt of new york city in my youth, you get stopped at red lights and was always a man and a man of color who was poor would come to your window and start washing your window with a squeegee and then you would be controlled into paying them in this way that felt like vaguely threatening but also put a knot in your stomach. People didnt like it. Again, yeah, its fine not to like that and its sort of a pain but that became the symbolic villain of the giuliani era. Not only but the idea was that there was this causal chain that links the squeegee man here to murderers here. And that by going after squeegee men you would say about murders and what happened was Rudy Giuliani went after squeegee men became much more aggressive, order aggressive became much more a third priority and crime went down so Rudy Giuliani and William Brennan was his police chief at the time and went to la and then came back to new york and everyone could say the basic cause of the work. Again, 20 years later, 30 years later, we still dont have a good handle on my crime dropped so precipitously as it did. Theres no definitive empirical work bearing out that this is what happened but police and city and meteors can administer and believe it deeply. What you have now is a fundamental reinvention of the Justice System in a city like new york. The Misdemeanor Court system becomes an entire massive court system to control public urination, public drinking, selling m ms on subways, selling handbags on the streets, all of these municipal violations are part of the broken window code of enforcement and then you start channeling people into this huge funnel into a criminal system whose job is basically to sort people between the kind of people who will show up for court date and we dont them and and those who are so lives are so distorted that they dont indexing your felony convictions. Host the question is where do we go from here . You pull out one of my favorite quotes about what its like to live in the colony that you imagine which is the only way to please a ghetto is to be oppressive and nobody knows what i mean, my name, please operate as a soldier in a bitter house. How can we improve relationships between people in the colony and in many cities like ferguson the people who are being placed live in the colony and those Police Officers themselves live in your conception of what the nations. Guest through the writing of the book i become convinced that we have to, in some ways, undo a little bit of the wilson revolution. Theres some part of me that is freaked out about coming to that conclusion. In some ways, i like not having the fact im pretty honest about than the book. The experience of the city really changed and it changed for people like me who were not subject to stop. The cost for paid by people i didnt see. A trend in neighborhoods i didnt spend time in. The fundamental alteration was pleasant. Theres some fear that will go back to the battle days and therell be graffiti on the train and all the stuff. I do think the fundamental idea of order maintenance and the role of police is particularly in communities of concentrated poverty and violence, which in has created toxicity. I also think there has to be a way, people talk about Community Policing, theres camden as an interesting example where theyve been committed these Community Policing that have reduce crime and complaints to Police Officers. At the most toplevel way we have to view the job of this whole system of producing safety and security as opposed to order. Or even lawfulness. Host right to the thing we want to have his safety and security and we want to find channels another priority and this is the flipside of this whole conversation which is really explored in the book about homicide and a get aside the doubleedged the other side of the corn about the devaluation of our lives when they lose their lives is like the devaluation of our lives when they lose their lives in murder. It has been historically the case. In 1966, not 1966, 1963, malcolm x gives a speech where he is literally like how is the case that the most violent neighborhoods also have the most police and yet still have the most murder perspective what is wrong with this picture perspective which is still the case today. One of the things she focuses on and make the case for she is a great line about the plea system is that a bully that will intimidate people over small infractions but is revealed to be a coward in the face of murder one over policing and under protecting dispute that is exactly it. Under policing and over protecting. Part of the thing you bring up in the book is that getting the bad guy and instead of helping people. When we approach Public Safety and policing itself as something thats like a service is about helping people and not necessarily. [inaudible] guest what i run in my head is what if there was one Mental Health counselor and one addiction counselor for every one cop on the west side of chicago. I almost minas in a literal sense. I would love someone to fund this experiment. A neighborhood that has a lot of crime and lets just say theres back and forth about harlem childrens zone but that was a another context idea. What if we put these resources together and what if we decide lets pick a neighborhood baltimore, chicago that is experiencing exactly this, over policing and underproduction. Dual problems. And we just said lets approach it with this sort of whole spectrum where there one prong of the three ligands dual and there instructors and appear violence and people have done things along those lines. They have not had the resources of the diprima department. More money goes to the police. Host exactly. Guest the amazing thing the police are able to do i dont want to leave this idea that this is bad. There are so many Police Officers i have talked to who are in good faith and want to protect people and make crime go down. High levels of administrators who are datadriven and really sophisticated thinkers about the stuff and if you look at baltimore right now its extremely upsetting whats happening there. The homicide rate is emergency and theres a real grappling with what that means. Right . Fundamentally theres this amazing thing that the place where it has been able to do. Crime is going down, right . Then police need more money because what they are doing is working. And if you cut them off crime will go back up. If crime is going up and any more money because they dont have enough money to keep crime down. Host exactly. Guest you have this incredible argument where the place is always whether things are going well or poorly theres always a sense that you need more policing and more money for police. Host is because we invested so much from social welfare programs for the past 50 years. I want to get back to something you said earlier that was interesting about the fear of what happened if we do completely get rid of broken window style or order maintenance policing because one of the central concepts in the books that you use to explain how we get these policies is white fear. I thought this was really interesting. I will quote you and this is in the book, white fear expresses the forbidden knowledge that all white people carry with them weve got it better. If white people have it better than is and its only logical that black people will come and take what we have and then you go on to talk about the theory stemming from this that whats good for the colony is bad for the nation. You see this so much playing out. Even in the ways in which different groups interact. I found this extremely profound and it could be a way to think about development of the socalled indian wars, the jefferson saying. Guest partly because it was true in certain ways. The the foundational experience of the country, right, is essentially white people coming to a land that is not their own and conquering, settling it while through incredible struggle in violence at the huge cost of lives of other nonwhite people but also as a subjective experience of hardship and terror. It wasnt like, we did it. This experience of the colonies is just unceasingly terrible and terrifying. They are west terrifying than the Indigenous People who are rendered extinct but they are subjectively that show the frontier. Its even true if you go and read the handbills that were passed around the southern. During slavery where they were constantly worried about slavery uprising. Even if you win, you conquer, youre on top of the social order and at the precariousness of that on top of this that sense that because you are, because youve won the zerosum game that you have to defend it all the time we as people will come for it. In a literal sense, a lot of the stuff in the early foundational of the colonies was this land. You will form it or i will permit. So, that experience of white fear, the experience that the twin feeling of the ability of white people to feel terrified while committing atrocities we look at the pictures of lynching and now, right and the people who went to lynch mobs like they would tell you what they were doing was defensive that they were enforcing a social order because if they didnt their women would be part of that is an excuse for savagery but part of it is actual subjective experience. I think its really important that core feeling that i have a version of when i think about what the city would be like if it was policed differently and what that would mean for my wife, theres two ways of thinking about the zerosum. Theres a really interesting debate right now about this. One is i feel like black intellectuals that i really respect, really do say White Privilege is an actual tangible material gain at the expense of black people and that it is a version of a pie that has been cut with one slice significantly bigger than the other. Thats one way of viewing it. It is sort of zerosum if the material gain at actively expense of material loss for nonwhite people. The other way of viewing it as a social pathology that stands in the way of mutual human flourishing. That i am of the belief perhaps partly faithbased that a less racist, lest society would be better for white people. I really do believe that. Partly because i believe in human beings and that burning the potential of a millions of people on the bonfires of criminal Justice System every year, absolutely makes us worse off and poorer. We deftly sacrifice collective wealth, betterment to the process. I also think that white fear is a shackle of its own kind. Host can you talk about that a little bit . What i appreciated in the book is the ways in which you wove your own personal experiences to highlight your larger kind of socioeconomic analysis. Can you talk about your own white fear and how that shapes your understand these issues . Guest it was really formative to be in new york when i was 1213, and particularly, when youre like a 12 or 13 yearold boy youre just a sitting duck. You save up money to buy your fresh start or cap or you save up money to fire fresh sneakers or your dope new winter coat and then you bump around asking to be mugged. If the experience of my adolescence. I developed my experience of the city was so inexorably inexorably bound up with fear. Every step was peripheral vision in this very specific way of looking at your eyes are up enough to see whats going on but not enough that you never made eye contact because that might initiate the reaction and might plant the idea in someones head to mess with you who didnt have it. That experience was really formative and was really visceral. Also socially cultivated. Thats what makes white fear so potent. I call it in the book a call in response in the speaker and the crowd any citizen donald trump rallies that you are individually experiencing that fear social amplified by the media and i thank you come to attach suspicion with blackness. I think for me it was mitigated by the fact that that the other thing that was happening in my adolescence was that blackness was also associated with this kind of certain sophistication, coolness, aspirational in some way if you are a new york city kid in high school the dominant culture to aspire to was black culture he had this very complicated relationship with it. Whats most interesting to me is how potent it could be. As messed up as the racial politics could be like new york are and can be where people are on top of each other with amazing is that can be exported to places in which that isnt the case. Host can you talk about that thats where it seems like this concept is key to helping us understand the rise of mass incarceration and why we have grown in some places even more segregated and unequal. Guest right, because someone is writing a book about this called the problem i live with because theres two parts of the story. All of this starts and you read about this, in some ways this era of what we know starts at the moment of the sort of the peak victories of the civil rights movements and that chronologically bounded sense of it and it starts at the moment when jim crow discrimination and segregation is being dismantled and huge fights up to northern cities and they come to northern cities where the fight is lost. You get the Fair Housing Act which is someway a high watermark but then you have the blessing the fights and you get a sensually a society that gives up on the project of desegregation as a social project through a million different distinctions through dozens of Court Decisions that whittle away including recent ones like parents involved which essentially makes it almost impossible to create a desegregation voluntary for school district. To the abandonment of fair housing legislation often like the enforcement of it, right what facilitates all of this is that we have this People Living near each other, weve given up on the project of desegregation, in its place will put the project of corralling and controlling. [laughter] that to me a big thing that ive come to believe in writing this book is that it actually should be a priority to revive and resuscitate, unfit desegregation especially in those terms as a social project. Host part of that respect because we are so divided and separate, it seems like that fear of the unknown and white fear played out in the most recent election and it was exploited in the rhetoric but also in who showed up at the polls and why, make America Great again and it seemed to be playing in the white fear. Im wondering in the context now of the Trump Administration and you were writing, even working on this book well before the election and im wondering especially with things like the doj report and discussions where you think we are now with trump and how the indications of your book might be different or the same or just reinforced. Guest my book is very not why we. This is a great example of why we built this. Heres my sort of unified theory of donald trump in respect to the book. The great mystery in some ways of the auction is how does a new york city, urban, billionaire real estate error, connected viscerally to the White Working Class of materially decimated places across america outside youngstown, ohio. Why . Why him to the answer to me is that the mans worldview is formed in 1980s and 1990s new york which is an experience of material declined, place is going to hell and its done at the hands of some other. It turns out that that story is endlessly exportable across the country. He went to erie county, pennsylvania and mahoning, ohio and kenosha wisconsin and said youre experiencing material declined and will bring you back to greatness and its people both that are causing the decline. In this case, it was the prime villain in the story was immigrants rather than black people. In some ways that are interchangeable. Look at what the doj did today is there announcing their new website that will show crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants which is just this, itll be the official project of the government to publish essentially create in the public mind an association of criminality with unauthorized immigration. That is the project that was carried out over the course of several decades through law and order rhetoric to associate blackness with criminality its not a reaction to Rudy Giuliani and its not an accident that Jeff Sessions said that we talked about Police Departments to being hamstrung by the dojs. Its the worst impulses that im precisely identify and are inviting the highest reaches of government the worldview of the government embodies this zerosum idea. It embodies this broken window idea. The border wall is a literal manifestation of a broken window. Host house so. Guest at some level the appeal of broken windows is the fear, neurotic fear about unraveling and penetration in the jungle reclaiming the civilized what is more literally a manifestation that you are physically, literally build a border to keep out the disorder and not only that sell that to people who live 1500 miles from the border work what do they care for smart think about the people that cheered the mexico will pay for the wall. A rally in michigan. Hes a hundred miles from the northern border, hes however miles thousands of miles from the southern border and people are cheering that they will build a wall on the southern border. What you care what does that do to your life for what it does is that in that same kind of broken windows way, that same sort of fear of disorder and disorder as a particularly authorized non white catalyst it says i will wall you are and i will protect you from the disorder that is threatening your material while billy. Being in the full recipe. Host to me it seems that it stems from alongside the civil rights and you quote that this idea that the first civil right is actually. [inaudible] i was wondering, ive struggled with in my own work about the implications of domestic policy what do you think the kind of the first and foremost civil right is do you agree that its safety . If you frame it that way its hard to get away from it. At some level thats the title of the book about the way that liberals build america and its literally a quote of nixon in that same 68 speech. At some level there is a core kernel truth in the sense that they bury an idea of a monopoly on. [inaudible] it is the case that what the state does at its most essential for existential level is to arrogate to itself the ability to arbitrate disputes and to monopolize violence. So, a place like somalia in the midst of the state is incapable of extending any rights. Without a functioning state, right but it also seems like a really low bar. Host i thought given some of what you say in the book you would have study quality. Given our values it seems like, there have been a point in American History where that has been a champion as during civil war with Abraham Lincoln for instance. Guest i guess i dont i reject the idea of what a first civil right is. I guess what i would say is the most charitable version of that argument on the other side is that equality would be impossible under conditions of warlordism, which is true. True, right, you have to essentially produce you need the basic to produce the kind of pushing. He or she committed a crime or broke the communitys arm and are held accountable what would the elite look like and how would people with resources and influence choose to police themselves if you gave them the ability, so these are philosophical may be impossible to answer questions but i dont know, what would that look like . Part of what that looks like his campus justice. We have parallel justice syste systems. The campus code is like the violations of norm and the law. There is drug policy presence but its in the same spectrum of plagiarism. I love how you describe College Campuses in the way people talk about low income communities. If we actually package the whole thing someday you will be a successful investment banker, lawyer or doctor and we will send you off to a place in but you will be in the room where you wont be able to hurt yourself badly because the wealthy in this environment like you will go bowling with these things in the gutters and youre not going to get arrested. I have some theory is that a huge part of crime is about the way human beings are supported in their adolescence and early adulthood. It is thrown in at period of their life from lots of Different Reasons its easy to get knocked off course where peer pressure has an incredible effect. College is a huge part of that. The way they deal with at period of time and the structures they built as opposed to impoverished communities are able to. But its a lot of the same stue your pressure peer pressure, rebellion, substance and roman romance. What are they but peer pressure wanting to belong and what do they tend to be about. It gets dealt with in totally different ways. You have to go out of your way to get a criminal record. The potential that some gearing off course shouldnt be a thing that gives you criminal record and identifies the future that you are in some way. Its what to do and how to design the system that punishes and holds accountable people that commit the acts of violence and th norms. That is always the question that it is instructive to look at this level when they have total control basically of designing the system. Dennis hastert who was apparently sexually abusing boys got letters from his buddies in congress saying this is a good person and thats because they separated in their mind the absence from the acts he committed and that is what they are able to do when they know the person but its some other. Getting this towards the end what would it mean if the nation and the colony were joined if the borders were raised and the full outrageous citizen were recognized in our society to start in the policy. I do think the first place to start is Civil Society together. Its the egalitarian movements to build that they can be built and when they are built when you look at the movement as it is being built in North Carolina right now people come to view each other through collective work. The work of citizenship and activism and politics thats the thing that does it. People say really dumb stuff but it does mean its the activity of being jointly active togeth together. How do you get people to overcome that saying i want to rebuild this. Thats why fighting on things that are not about Racial Justice can bring justice. That is kind of the potential. Im fighting for a 15dollar minimum wage and im not going to fight for racial deficit and going to fight the wage but you and i are in this fight togeth together. People are being organized around their concern. Even if the place they are starting with isnt, im signing up for this. Host what hope we can begin to dole down this Movement Students that are going to graduate this spring and summer from college are going to change jobs, not just jobs that industries the first decade of college. And all of the unsettling scary stuff that produced progressivism was about the idea that Job Description created all of these ripples into the networks. A lot of what people panic about them is what we will experience forevermore well have 40, 45yearolds getting disrupted and intermediated not only on the jobs and firms that hold industries we will create a civilization of lifelong learners and no civilization has done that. Former secretary of state and president ial nominee Hillary Clinton discusses her upcoming book books that have influenced her in the 2016 campaign. She spoke at the book expo america can then chain in new york city