There is obviously too many people here i love you and have known for a long time to shout out everybody individually, but i want to shout out a couple families and my family who [applause] you told me how to be a lawyer. I want to shout out to my family and the david particular. You all taught me how to fight for children. [applause] and i want to give a shout to my end of the on sncc family. Tonight im thinking of you all and i band and ive noticed that he is here with us. I want to start by talking about why i wrote this book. The first reason for writing this book, im the kind of person when i go to a movie people are like what did you think about it and id like it s pretty good but where are the black people, and i feel that way above our history as well so it is important to me to write a book and have africanamerican characters at the center of the narrative. This is argumentative lee a book of stories that one is of a young man named brandon who was one of my first clients of the service 15yearsold charged with and convicted of possessing a gun in the 20 worth of marijuana. We were in court, i was there as a public or thinking of the work i was doing as the civil rights work of my generation. I was in court and i joined because i knew one in three black members without criminal justice supervision and i knew even though we didnt have the term incarceration yet i knew they just passed russia and south africa as the Worlds Largest jailer so im asking for a chance to put him on probation and i have brandons mom and his grandmother in court and i pointed to them. The prosecutor in the case was asking for brandon to be locked up and send to oak hill. The judge in the case ultimately have to make a decision judge walker. I changed the names in the cases. He leaned back and then he looked forward at brandon. He said mr. Foreman has been telling me you had a hard life and deserve a Second Chance. Let me tell you what hardship is like, let me tell you about jim crow and segregation, about a movement that fought for your freedom. People died, Martin Luther king died for you to be free. What he didnt die for is for you to be running around embarrassing your community and your family so you might get your Second Chance one day but right now youre going to oak hill. Ever since that day in court and many days like this as i came to see people like George Walker were not unique. There were many of them it caused me to stop and ask the question how was it that this Africanamerican Community came to lock up so many of its own, and that is what i said to the book. I know that you are not going to let me out of here unto i give you a preview. The first thing we have to understand his crime and addiction and violence and the toll that it took on this community especially in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. Washington, d. C. s homicide rate tripled and doubled in philadelphia and cleveland and los angeles. One year i and later 1968 was 4. And its not just the numbers, its also the stories. When i went over to George Washington library and archives here in dc that donated their papers and they are not super wellorganized but well enough that you can get the sense that i spent a whole Summer Reading through page after page and this suffering from the citizens letters is palpable, people writing saying i dont recognize my city anymore. Im scared to go outside. I feel like a prisoner in my own home, like a stranger on my own streets. Now, who was receiving these letters and biscuits to the second argument of the book. The people that were getting these letters, the first generations of elected officials and prosecutors and judges and Court Officials in washington, d. C. In black communities in the country many of them came in off the Civil Rights Movement and my book is filled with civil rights workers whether they came out of the movement or not, they were well aware of the enforcement of the law and they knew what times you didnt call the police and they were going to do worse than if they didnt. They knew the time if a black person died of Law Enforcement said that is just one more dead person. They knew about history and they were bound and determined as they came into office in the 1970s to make black lives matter. They didnt use the phrase but my chapter is called black lives matter because it was to make it valuable. Why did they do a throug do a tl enforcement and police and prosecutors imprisons the interest the next argument of the book which is an argument about the constraints and limitations that they were und under. Its also a story of constrained implementations in the Larger Society that printed up their options so they were constrained in all kinds of ways, by history, racism that have produced residential segregation and had reduced entrenched crying patterns. They were also constrained by the fact that the Larger Society didnt want to do everything that they were asking for a many of them didnt want only Law Enforcement. They wanted more money for education, they wanted an industrial fan for the cities, they wanted many of them set a Marshall Plan for urban america but they couldnt get back because with the power that we have concentrated locally and the community didnt control congress were those leverages the power. So i save africanamerican officials had in all of the above strategy to try to fight crime and violence and addicti addiction. Now you might be wondering and i think it is natural as we sit here in 2017 to think, but they must have known what they were doing. They mustve understood the consequences of doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on Law Enforcement. But there was no moment everything up or down vote on dot incarceration. That is not how it was built. Nobody ever said should the United States is the largest prison population in the world, should we lock up more people out of apartheid africa nobody asked that question. Instead what happened was lots of people acting in different spaces in the system. Police officers arresting, prosecutors processing, legislators passing laws, judges imposing sentences, parole officers making terrible decisions, probation officers. All of those factors that really got harsher in their space may be 10 or 20 , maybe the sentences they imposed a little longer maybe they were paroled a little more often. But the thing is if everybody does it over 40 or 50 years, then the result is mass incarceration. The last thing im going to say before we turn it over to questions exclusively the book is about how we got here. The one thing about it but i want to say tonight is we have to get out and we are going to have to dismantle the system the same way that it was built which is to say that everyone, all of us in small ways. That by itself wont, that plus that over time will. We have to recapture a certain amount of humanity and that is going to mean in the Public Sector but its also going to mean in the private sector. What is our influence and what do we control blacks do we run a business that has an hr policy and what doe is that hr policy y in those that have a terminal condition, do we run a university, what do those look like for people that have been involved in the criminal Justice System are we part of a Church Community . Have we adopte adopted some to a returning citizen that has come to the community to help through our church come help them find housing and help them find a j job. If we do it slowly it will be an unjust system. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] so what are your suggestions pushing that under the length for the administrations . I want to think about that question in two ways. Its the booktalk and around. Nationally people asking this question say what can we do now that we have this administration that seems as value and policies that are so counter to the incremental process being made in the last administration and to that main response which isnt going to be an answer to your question but to the kind of National Audience is that this problem is a state can car cou, city and local problem. So, 88 of the prisoners nationwide are in the state facilities, not federal funds. The Law Enforcement officers nationwide are city, county, local Law Enforcement officers, not federal. So, just like president obama and attorney general holder got all the publicity in the last administration around criminal Justice Reform but actually had a relatively small slice of the problem they could effect is also true that donald trott and Jeff Sessions have a relatively limited ability to do damage and that if the movement that weve built up as a state and local National Data shouldnt lose sight of the fact that the system was built at the state and local level and is going to have to be dismantled. A lot of californians whenever the social justice issue comes up they always say thats an important issue. If i lived in a red state, then maybe i would need to work on that, but i live in liberal california or new york. And what i want to say on the criminacriminal justice and mass incarceration is there is no liberal bubble. Its the secondlargest in the country. New york until recently was one of only two in the country to prosecute all juveniles as adults. We need to know the local legislators and people in the state house and local prosecut prosecutor. Now okay that is all well and good nationally. But it remains the case that through this unique and problematic system of the prosecutor reporting to the president what that means is that you do have this crisis. So there i would say its a little bit but i was talking about earlier about every operating in their sphere of influence. So, one of the things i noticed when writing this book is just like nobody said we want to be the worlds biggest jailer worldr especially nobody said that in africanamerican communities. This is going to be a harsh version of the statement but its going to be a pass the buck attitude. Theres a lot of people when confronted in the unjust system they would often talk about the police. Its how somebody else is working or not working is always a problem. But what can you control, and as a judge, you have a lot of power. And if you do not like the way that things are going certainly under the sentencing system, you have a lot of authority and thats true for everybody else in the system, so i guess what i want to say is its going to be back. I think it is more than we sometimes assume [inaudible] [inaudible] my recommendation would be to do that. One of the things i write about in the book i will write a long list of. That is exactly the problem. It isnt just one thing. It is everything. I dont want to wait for everybody. I want everybody in the state that they operate to look at where they are controlling. So if you are a Police Officer or Department Ask your self do we do pretext stops in this community do we stop people on the basis of a minor traffic infraction with the stated and soul goal of getting access to that power car and because they want to search the car if we are doing that, we know that that type of policing produces more of the Racial Disparity that we have and we want to stop that. If you are an employer, one of the people i write about in the book is a woman named sandra who stops under the pretext policing for the cars searched and they find 20 worth of marijuana. The Prosecutors Office relatively has no papers per case they dont prosecute her. Shes a probationary employee at fedex. Sometimes it is as the lawyers know this really big things and sometimes. Of that employer and employee is like it could stop having practices that say we are not going to hire you if you have been arrested for Marijuana Possession or any other crimes, so i can go down the list and what i am saying is we would have to go down the list and look at every single aspect of the system and ask how can we make it more humane [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] or how the system works speak of [inaudible] fifteen times and they didnt do it just because of the neighborhood. One thing i do know about this here to do the interviews to write the book [inaudible] i am the book. I am the system. The system is underfunded and if they do not have the resources or the experts i would like to respond to that. Thank you for speaking up. One of the things i believe is really important [inaudible] it is actually one of the arguments i make is that we have not raised up the places of people that have been incarcerated. We have not raised that voices like yours. Weve taken people that have been convicted of a crime or have been incarcerated and said we dont have a public platform. That needs to change. That is the point you are making the criminal Justice Reform to reduce the number of prisons we have that reduce the amount in the system, that movement has to have voices like yours front and center in leadership positions because you do know things i will never know. One of the things ive seen when ive talked to some activists in advocates on this issue they say especially 20 years ago it was impossible to get a voice like yours heard because sometimes wellintentioned people they said we will just lose our organizations credibility on the issue and i think that is wrong because it just reinforces the stigma. I interviewed a public defender that ran in organization out of ohio. He told me his organization has recently been high gearing and promoting and putting out front and Center People who have been incarcerated and fell under the criminal conviction precisely because they change the minds of legislatures in the way that others cannot. You talk about poverty and class and a big part of the book is about exactly that, we have a Class Division that we dont talk about enough. Since the 1960s, the chance of going to prison for a black man who has dropped out of high school, the chance of going to prison for a black man whos graduated from college hasnt gone up at all and that difference has a huge impact on the decisionmakers because they dont feel the pain of incarceration and the more easily tdelete segments of the y that in fact have more power to make these laws. You make a powerful statement. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] black Political Leadership present and so one of the arguments from the tragedy its gaining the likelihood of [inaudible] in all seriousness when i say are you interested in engaging you can fill in the blank and the question is going to be yes. As the author of a new book, anybody willing to be incarceration with me about the topic of the book, specifically seriously i want to talk to those communities you are evoking because i agree with you in a lot of ways that is who the book is written for. That is my principal audience. I want to sit down with anybody that has this kind of connections that spurt of those kind of convenience. I just gave a talk at baltimore last night at the retired federal judge Fourth Circuit that came and gave a response and he was very generous of his work. We need to be reading this book and having this conversation in our community and i agree with him completely and i agree with you. Lets continue to talk about how to do that. I would love to. Theres nothing i want to do more tonight. [inaudible] i commend you for what youre doing at the foundation. I feel my question to you is do you feel like you may lose some of your impact . Yes anybody that leaves and goes through a pee a period of g because no matter what job go into, we go into a state thats going to have less impact than the jobs that the left, and less direct impact. Even certain jobs at an abstract level you could make an argument for. But see what i just did you have to make an argument for it. Its there every day in the trenches fighting. And so, yes i do. [inaudible] the points you raised is a crucial one. The problem to incentivize i think we have an incentive problem on the public side into private site. If we look at the public system, we have in some states like california the Corrections Officers that are very powerful. These are Public Sector employees but they lobby and theyve been lobbying against those to try to unwind the brutality of the system whether it is the communities or the Corrections Officers we made this a business, a money making business and in america if you make it a business, people are going to exploit those opportunities. And when what you are exploiting is the suffering and misery of another human being is one thing if you are exploiting something that is abstract or that is not a living being that when you are exploiting other human beings for profit, just stop right there. As soon as you say here is the setup, we are going to have a system, we are going to force people into it and people will make money off of running it so the less money you spend on food and Housing Conditions and giving people access to educational programs, the less money you spend on that, the more goes to your shareholders. To me you just have to state the facts and then be in justice and humanity of it becomes injustice so that is wrong and that is one of the first things that we need to unwind if we are going to change the incentive structure of this whole thing. C2 [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] mandatory minimums that is a good way i think heading into the conversation about the racism and crimina in the crimie system and so in the 1980s, you get a series of laws. Many of them passed, but you get a lot of mandatory minimums and one thing that is a good moment to make this point, sometimes when people ask me about this book, one of the questions that they ask is by focusing on the role of africanamerican elected officials in this development of the system are you saying that the system is not racist or that there have been no racist motivations in the creation of the system and i answer to that is absolutely not. We have a huge and powerful literature. People, public intellectuals, people making arguments about the profound ways that Structural Racism and institutional racism, historical and ongoing have shaped american societies and shaped the american criminal justice. Mandatory minimums for the one manifestation of that. One small one. And, i am moved by and persuaded by and adhere to those arguments. What i am trying to do is write something to supplement that because the crucial part of the story isnt the whole story and you can see that in mandatory minimum, chapter four of the book is about mandatory minimums and it is specifically about a moment in washington, d. C. , 1980, 1981 and 1982 when a member of the city council and former police chief, the first africanamerican police chief in dc to somebody that overcame the office of racism to go up the rank goes to the individuals that led a Citywide Movement in favor of the minimum and they passed not the city council but in a direct vote to the voters of dc, anybody that went in 1981, you wont vote if you were here or could have in the past mandatory minimums past. The drug mandatory minimums were then repealed by the city council, but the gunmen mandatory minimums still exist so i agree with you and i want to talk about mandatory minimums and this is one of the reasons why i want to follow up on the comment and get to the africanamerican elected officials. Still as we speak and sit here now with all that we know about the impact, they are still law. Still even today we have a lot of work to do. [inaudible] her father who im sure is so very proud [inaudible] you lived in a variety of circumstances that no one chose to accept. The only selected one. The second is if you put a hold in the community on the initiatives that confronted the problem of hyping the secrets, that doesnt happen anymore. Something happened to us in terms of our ability to resist and refuse to accept the nonsense that becomes public policy. Why do we reconcile those. She put 13 billion on research for education. Those are the kind of difficulties that further reduce and administer the community to embrace the wherewithal of those in need but where is the sense of resistance and the last cooperation because thats what it is is a lot of nonsense. Thank you so much. [applause] i think what we need to do is spend more time listening to y you. Its always the case that people say our community has lost the ability to fight before the fight began. But we look at what the older folks are saying right before the movement that changed all of our lives and efforts. Two years before you did that years before selma and birmingham and albany people said this generation has given up and they dont know how to fight then you showed them that you were ready to fight. I dont know what its good to be ten years from now, five years from now there will be a moment with a look at it and say they were ready to. The [inaudible] [inaudible] in response to the last comment i do think it is going to have to be a movement that has the voices of people that have been convicted and incarcerated in the leadership position and a movement that has to focus locally. I think it is a movement that will have to change the way we think about the treatment of crime victims because one of the things that has happened in this country as we mobilize the crime victims and weve told them this massive criminal Justice System that weve developed, this is for you, this is to respond to your pain but it doesnt have to be that way. One of the stories i tell in the book is of a young man by the name of dante. I represented him in Juvenile Court and he was charged with Armed Robbery. He went up to him on 14th street not far from here. He had a nice, didn knife, didt off but he robbed this man, took a small amount of money and ran away. He was caught a couple blocks later. He was arrested on the scene and confessed to the Police Station when i went to my supervisor that is pretty much what she did at the time. [laughter] she laughed because we didnt have a defense. The only option that i had was a lastditch kind of option but sometimes it can backfire so we have to talk to demand that he robbed. I call him mr. Tomlinson the buck. He was a laborer that have been working and moving boxes. An africanamerican man as was dante. I went to talk with him and i told him that his mother had been addicted to drugs and she hadnt been able to care for him. She left him alone to raise himself that he had fallen in with the neighborhood crew and they picke put him up as an inin rite. But he had tremendous potential. He was a master woodworker and i got him into this program, a Job Training Program and he had a counseling component run by a mr. He would have loved it because of the religious component. He was kind of either way on that part, but he called him and no other Traditional Program would take him because he had that Armed Robbery conviction. He heard me out and said i will think about it and for the next three weeks before the disposition with a call sentencing in Juvenile Court on the day of the disposition sentencing i went to the courthouse where they do juvenile cases into how mr. Thomas sitting on the bench by himself i was surprised because normally the prosecutors would have been sent off to a separate room so that was about to happen didnt happen and he pulled out the papers. I had given him two papers, the apology that dante had written and also his confession because he had apologized to the police that night. I wanted mr. Thomas to see have done thahaddone that before he t his lawyer. He pulled out these papers and said mr. Foreman, you asked me to forgive your client. He said i cant do that, but im trying. He said i will go along with that program. We went into court. The prosecutor was his view that the judge was surprised that the judge went along with it. You see the people that dont make it. I looked up and i was a downtown at the construction site ive looked up and it was dante. He came down to talk to me. I wanted to sit down and have a meal. This was a great moment for me. He wanted to keep it brief. [laughter] because as a lawyer we are so excited that im reminded of this terrible time in his life but he quickly gave me the story and told me that he struggled, he had eventually got him a fulltime construction job. He hadnt been rearrested and he had a son of his own. I thought about something i think about all the time which is what our criminal Justice System was more like mr. Thomas that they, what if we were oriented towards mercy and redemption, and i think it is possible. Thank you. [applause] [applause] this is book tv on cspan2. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to barnes noble upper west side. I have the pleasure of introducing Jonathan Allen and amy barnes
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