fellowship former president of the prison fellowship when he was there he liked to talk about the fact that today we lock people up because we are mad at them when we should be reserving prison and jail space for people who we are afraid of. there are obviously people who have committed crimes and who are dangerous enough that they need to be kept away from rest of society. they built the prisons and the prosecutors build them up. i have to say one thing in trying to get real prison reform through and we have done most of our work at the state level as i'm sure doug knows, we have had great success working with democrats, republicans conservatives and liberals than with governors who are concerned about two things. one, the way their systems are working or not working in the cost of the systems in many states across the prison system is greater than the cost of a public education system and they both work just about as well but maybe a reallocation of resources might be in order. i have to say that historic constituencies still exist. it's incredible to me that this is a great group of u.s. attorneys that you have an prosecutors on the first panel but i hesitate to thank they are representative. in every state and dealing with federal form or prosecutorial committee is one of the greatest resistance to doing anything for a friday of reasons. one they believe in their mission but secondly they are managing to try to force people through a system that doesn't work, so they want all of these sentences so they can force people not to go to trial. as you know most people don't go to trial and lord knows how many of those people have accepted deals because of the consequences would be an adequate defense available to them because of the sentencing rules that we have or that they can be subjected to. so we got involved because we wanted to make sure that the question of what works and what doesn't work and was humane and wise and humane had to be discussed in terms of that rather than in terms of where one stands on the political spectrum or what one can do to advance his or her career as a prosecutor or politician or whatever. i'm going to quit because he can see me getting warm on the subject and is dangerous. somebody referred this morning to ed meese former attorney general and he's been very concerned about over criminalization as we call it in the federal system. there are thousands of ways you can have it up in a federal prison if someone wants to play there. i remember our first meeting and there was a former congressman there and i said you know everything has become a federal crime. iis used to say the poster child for that is carjacking. carjacking is illegal anyway and i said why did that need to be a separate federal crime? the poor guy lowered his head and shook and he said -- and that's why they make great press releases for congressman and senators and something happens. so we need to look, everybody from all sides of the spectrum, those involved in law enforcement and those in the prosecutorial community and those interested in the issue need to look not at punishing people for free and people are this or that but need to look at what works and the fact is that over incarceration does not work. >> thank you. commissioner keene you can actually pick up that theme. >> actually i'm a gun guy. >> this is what we would call a battlefield promotion. if you could pick up the same about what works in the field. >> that's very interesting to think -- i'd like to thank bill my good friend for allowing me to come into his territory without a visa so i appreciate that on his part and my good friend left me as the only police officials answer questions so i'm going to reach out to both of them. very quickly i think the theme is extremely correct is what works? when i was thinking about coming on this panel i wonder what i could offer. i've been doing this job and policing was almost 35 years and i started in the 1980s and early 1980s and saw a lot of different things happen. i always ask the question why and how does that why project is into the future? what i can guarantee you is when crime increases right now we are seeing a decrease overall in cities throughout the united states. when crime increases much like we have terrorism that took place in this great and wonderful city to the public says respond. i'm going to talk about that and how those two things are going to play together because as we walk forward as a civilized nation we have these conversations i'm going to get pressure one day when the crime rate goes up and someone will say do something about it, do something about it now. if you don't i will replace you and somebody else will step in the deposition to find out how to resolve that issue and to address that issue. and when things calm down we become civil and we have deep-rooted intelligent academic conversations. in the city of baltimore we continue to focus and i'm pushing, i've been in baltimore for two years and this is the third city had been in charge of. i come from the west coast and i was born in d.c. but family moved at an early age to the west coast. the only reason i'm sharing that with you is because i grew up in south-central los angeles. a very poor kid, came from a neighborhood where traditional game started in my neighborhoods. gainesville -- gangs like the crips and the bloods and all these types of thing started in the neighborhood where i grew up. i share with people to see if they can connect with me because i share with the communities many times what we 1-800-was fried bologna sandwiches. anybody a fried bologna sandwiches in this room? so that was my time that i grew up. i ask people and i asked my mother at that young age of eight years old does anybody give a dam whether i lived or died when asked if anybody care if i survived is a little black kid growing up in south-central los angeles and did anybody understand my hopes are my dreams or aspirations? with that and i take from that what we are doing in baltimore in the cities i have been and as i try to push organizations to be progressive. i try to push organizations towards having academic information comment and focusing on what works. not the flavor of the day. not what mythology is that based on empirical data based on the best practices in those things that work for police agencies. as i say that with some baltimore today we have programs like cease-fire. i had dave -- dinner with david kennedy and we were talking about the progress of cease-fire within the city of baltimore. if you are not familiar with cease-fire oversimplify. what we do is focus on groups. we focus on group gangs and individuals that make those crews, we make them up. we called him into a room and bring them from behind a curtain and we say we know who you are. in our room we have all my federal partners and we have basically, the hammer angle of approach. we tell them we know who you are. if anyone in this game group crew becomes violence we are going to crush the entire group. what we really wanted to do was step over to a site where we have wrap around services to get your life and help you move on have a fruitful environment. that's oversimplified with what cease-fire is. it's working in 65 cities and locations from new orleans to chicago to camden to newark so it's in different places. we brought it to baltimore and have had it in oakland also. we are also focusing on violent repeat offenders. we are not arresting neighborhoods and the good thing about cease-fire but also the people who are exacerbating problems with violence out there in our community. our repeat offender program focuses on eventual spot the community not the mass of minority kids out there but focusing on those people we know for a fact or killing other human beings and trying to take them out of our communities. we also focus on groups, we focus on gangs and refocus on cruise. those are a lot of different things. gangs can be the bloods and the crips etc. and that you have groups that come together from neighborhoods to come together to do criminal acts and then you have crews. those can be drug crews who are coming together to sell drugs as a whole so we focus on all these pieces and not on stopping young people as a whole. however baltimore has had a history of mass incarceration and i withdrawn the table that probably most police departments in the united states have histories, recent histories of mass incarceration and i'm going to that next. we are also focusing on legitimacy which is how i describe it for city is that we jump up and down by the fact that we have had some the lowest homicide rates in the history of the city and recent times, 197 because baltimore used to be closer to 400. it is a significant drop and i applaud and that was before i walked in. not that i had an impact on that but i just say that. i applaud that i applaud the way of a down to 197 but if that community is no better than what it was before the 197 what do you have to cheer about? if you still have the poverty levels, if you still have the same vacant homes, if you still have the same impact that 18-year-old kid their life is no better than what it was before the 197 what do you have to celebrate when you pat yourself on the back? we are shifting and what we are doing and what i want to move our team from is away from enforcement because people tell me tony stay in your lane. your job is doing policing which is enforcement. i'm trying to teach the city and not only the city but also my police officers that her job is to prevent harm and harm comes in a lot of different forms. it's not just enforcement because if you focus on just enforcement your only told to address the problem is arresting people, mass incarceration. when you are looking at addressing an issue by prevention of harm you are dealing with a lot of different things and it crosses the line so you don't stay in your lane. you cross a line of economic development, you cross a line of poverty. you have a responsibility because many of these areas you are the only kind of government that these residents ever get to see. we also address re-entry and we have a re-entry program. we are also internal but the police police department addressing behavioral issues with their police officers. then i want to jump back and i want to finish because i get that body language so i want to be very short. so we have all these progressive issues that we are taking on and i have drafted a number of papers out of harvard. alas one deals with double-blind sequential lineups with a project innocence in new york and carol stephens and addressing how politics pushes sometimes and that's just one phase of the paper that we wrote. the politicians -- which pushes prosecutors to push through and we end up arresting the wrong people in 30 years later we find out we are arresting the wrong person. if you have a chance to pull that up is out of harvard. i'm not doing that is marketing but we are trying to answer and push difficult questions. the point i raise with this is when i was a straight police officer in the 1980s rock cocaine hit southern california and it hit hit hit hard. we had african-american young men dying left and right every single day brutal shootings taking place. people like me killing ourselves off left and right. in the communities that do something about it. we don't want to hear talk and we don't want to hear rhetoric, do something about it. the only thing we knew how to do because there wasn't a lot of theories out there to do community policing with starting the people said this is not a time for community policing. do something about so it so we did. we arrested everyone that we could because we knew a silly thing we could do at the time. there was no empirical data for us to do anything differently. what drives us today whether talking about legitimacy cease-fire hotspot policing and on and on are based on theories coming out of academia. in the 1980s we didn't have the body of knowledge. in the 1980s we did what we could do to solve a problem which led to mass incarceration. that has tripled in communities that i came from. as i close what we are going to do in the future needs to be based on peer for beta. we need to research that is done that we know works and works well that we focus on the right thing to do. [applause] >> there's nothing to control a moderator better than up police commissioner saying i'm watching your body language. [laughter] when i grew up that was a matter of concern. seide. >> thanks jim. good morning everyone and good morning panel members. it's a pleasure to sit here and to listen to you. this panel is speaking directly to the group that deals with the largest number of people in our criminal justice system. my office alone handles 100,000 cases a year. not all of those are large financial fraud cases although many arpad we handle more criminal cases in a year than the department of justice handles nationwide. when we are talking about where the fourth, fifth and sixth amendment meets the road it's in our state courthouses with the help of our police department and attorneys general. this attorney general has a unique perspective on how to deal with criminal justice in the broadest sense and how our country is adapting to it. we are going to get back with jim i hope to some more pointed issues about racial bias which i look forward to but let me share in a few minutes i have about how her philosophy and think my philosophy addresses the question of who goes to jail and how we handle that. first and foremost i think every prosecutor and every law enforcement official has come to understand that a crime prevented is better than one prosecuted. crime prevented is better than arrests made. as the roles of das today have evolved and you become smarter i think our office i look at for example i don't really measure our success and how many convictions we have although obviously i want our office to win its cases. i really look at the role of the d.a. to partner with the police and over the long-term driving crime down. that's how i measure our office of success. in an effort to achieve success as it's no longer just in the courtroom that we are going to be making an impact on driving crime down. increasingly that the tools of the das office in mind in particular enable us to affect crime prevention in ways that i think are absolutely consistent with crime-fighting. they're really one in the same. so i could talk at length about our enforcement actions whether it's in the white-collar area gangs domestic violence and the like that for this purpose i'm going to leave the hardcharging persecutor discussion turned to strategies who uses the das office and crime prevention. first and foremost i think we realize manhattan and a lot of new york communities has a youth gang and violence issue. part of that is going to be investigating break-in at gangs but i believe and we have come to believe that it's equally important for us to take our resources and our tools as a district attorney's office and invest them in the neighborhoods where we do our job. for example when i started months after starting we realize some of our gems not in some of the most high crime areas of manhattan were closed on friday and saturday nights because there was no funding for it. that was the case with the police athletic case in one of our blue ribbon organizations that deals with help tickets. what we did was we simply took money that we got from drug forfeitures and we started to hire world-class trainers in basketball to begin with and a high training operation and build teamwork and leadership among kids to provide boys and girls 12 to 18 years old, five to 9:00 p.m. friday and saturday nights and saturday nights the days our zen group that is most at risk and to provide for them there are office through hoops we hired world-class sports programs. we started with one gym in central harlem and now three weeks later we have nine sites in manhattan. we have service 3800 kids who have signed up for this. my point, my question is why is district attorney doing this kind of work? the reason we do it and i think the recent das do it all over the country in the recent police commissioners do it is because we know this is a crime-fighting strategy. supporting the communities and parents with what they want. they want their kids to be able to be somewhere safe and to do something productive in ways that city government sometimes can afford to do. our office is fortunate because we handle a large number of white-collar crimes and give substantial dollars for most cases that we could invest in our communities but that is where we are making our investment and that is how raw our office approaches this. similarly we have one of the few immigrants affairs programs in the country for a das office. our systems and our community affairs people are constantly out and at various communities talking about how immigrants can protect themselves from immigration fraud and colleges in school about how kids can keep themselves from getting in trouble with texting and on the internet, how seniors can protect themselves from being victims of elder abuse. again this is not what makes the headline. the d.a. convicts rapists who goes to jail for 40 years but what it is doing is when we start to work and mass and the five counties amend them start to work together with the police department and working with the police department up and down the coast what we are doing is crime-fighting. we are preventing crimes and a briton i think that's the direction we are going to keep going. the news in new york and closing on this is not that bad although there is always room for improvement. new york has dropped its state prison population from 71,000 to about 55,000 over the past 10 to 15 years. that's still a lot of people in jail and absolutely i think we can do more as prosecutors, as judges and police officers and being far more intelligent about who we sentenced to jail and then have a responsibility while they are in their to give them opportunities so when they come out they can be successful in their community as they re-enter. it makes no sense to send someone to jail and not provide some pathway for them to succeed when they get out. that 15,000 person drop in population indicates we have been more selective and new york state of the top 10 states by population sites is actually tenth in terms of number of people ascends to school -- to jail out of 100,000. the highest maybe california or texas and in new york 257. so i leave you with this. i think the game is changing and the strategies are becoming more broad and i think that's fantastic. i think it's giving the communities where it needs than i want. i think we are doing a lot of things right but quite clearly lay in state government are actually the people who are having to deal with this issue of over incarceration or incarceration my personal opinion. next week, next month we are bringing together 23 prosecutors for major cities in a coalition called prosecutors against gun violence because we want our voice is das to be heard in the debate about what's working to fight gun violence and what's not. what's happening is strategies are being shared office to office and crime prevention and how to make sure the strategies deal with preventing crime are being shared. i think it's making a difference and i look forward to what we can do together over the next couple of years. >> cy before you move over to just one quick question. the number that you cited that dropped from 71,251,000 is tremendous and hardening. it is as surprising or noteworthy to me is the numbers that michael gave in terms of the nation's ranking in the world in terms of the number of people that are incarcerated. could you talk just a little bit more about what you think are the factors in that decline before we go to joff? >> this is a decline that started 15 years ago so i believe in that 15-year period new york has been innovative in the area of providing alternatives to incarceration, and creation of drug courts, creation of a number of specialized courts which focus on an offender who is given a to succeed in a resolution of a case and avoid significant prison. so i think that we are being smarter with our support of people who have been offending. we are smarter with who is going to jail. i think the rockefeller drug law reforms which are overdue in a good idea provide more discretion to judges and prosecutors and a wide array of charges and decisions. by the way new york state has among the broadest discretion given to judges in sentencing ranges than any state i know. i prosecuted on the west -- a practice on the west coast for a number of years and despite popular belief new york state judges actually compared to other states have a huge range of options to use in many of the cases. all those factors being smarter feeling we need to be smarter feeling way to be more judicious about to eating up resources that relate to incarceration, community engagement helping us do our job in terms of community sanctions i think those are some factors. >> thank you. that 15 year trend is important because of the opposite of what's been happening nationwide. jeff. >> thank you jim and thank you to the panels here today. it's a real pleasure to be with you all today. the brennan center really is doing some of the country's most amazing work on criminal justice reform issues and it's a testament to the brennan center that they were able to get us out of the bubble that is a state of california to come out and talk today so we are very happy to be here on behalf of attorney general harris. when you talk about issues related to criminal justice reform and problems and solutions in the criminal justice system california in many ways is the alpha and omega of these issues. we have been confronting these problems and these issues for years, actually decades now. they are our solutions we have been implementing that i was going to talk to about today because i think it really symbolizes both where we have been but where we can go and in many ways is emblematic of where the country has been and where it's going. as i mentioned a moment ago california in many ways is distinctive for many of its -- the great things it produces for the country with its innovation and agriculture. but we lead another distinctive ways as well in criminal justice and issues related to incarceration and that's unfortunately definitely the case. to give you some perspective on what is happening in the country and in california one statistic for us is particularly telling. one in 10 people who are incarcerated, he resides in the state of california. that should tell you something about the scope of the problem on a national level but also as it exists in the countries largest state which is california. we have the second highest prison population and i was listening to cy talk about the state of new york's prison population which i'm gratified to hear is continuing to get lowered and in the state of california we are doing the same that arched number still hover around 116,000. that i will tell you it's just the state prison population as i will talk to you all about in a minute. many of the state prisoners are now shifting to our county jail population. the problem is in one sense good and better shows us what the solutions are but also tells us how much more work we have to do. one other dimension to this and the commissioner or cy mentioned this there also are other issues more than just as it relates to who, how many people we have in our prison system today. again another telling statistic we have in california is in a state of california 6.5% of the population is african-american but 29% of the state's prison population is african-american. there are statistics like that now and that is just one example but it tells us again what more we have to do. we know from the 1970s leading up to 2006 by way of example a perspective on the problem in california are state prison population skyrocketed about 750% from 20,000 prisoners in the 1970s from 1975 to over 172,000 by 2006 and that is what led us to much of the prison litigation some of which is still ongoing today that by court order requires a state of california to reduce its prison population and that is what leads us to what the economist has described as probably one of the most significant experiments in criminal justice which is something in california recall public safety realignment. many of you here being experts in the field are familiar with it but public safety realignment is as john peter celia has described as a titanic shift in the criminal justice system. a law called a.d. 109 shifted the primary responsibility for incarceration in the state of california from the state prison system to the local counties. it localized essentially our criminal justice system. by doing so you did a couple of things. one, first and foremost is that had an immediate reduction in our prison population not because it opened the doors to these prisons. in fact public safety realignment did not do that but it change the issue of the source that went into the prison system. in other words it was essentially the law equivalent of the spigot to the faucet for the post. what is was a change to goes into the prison system and how. so whereas you have the vast majority of crimes are felonies that would lead to imprisonment in our state prison system which led to the overcrowding problem, we now have a system through public safety realignment for the vast majority of crimes specifically what we call the triple months, the nonserious and nonviolent and nonsexual crimes are now primarily going to be incarcerated and supervised among local counties. this is significant for a lot of reasons first and foremost because their local counties now have to bear the responsibility for what are we going to do with these that we have whereas before these offenders were the problem of the state prison system. their there are l.a. counties and stanislaus counties and everything in between. they now have the responsibility of thinking from the d.a. level who are we going to prosecute to the sheriff level the police department level and what are we going to do with these offenders once they are prosecuted and convicted? i will tell you that issue, that compression that has been caused to the system has forced in many ways counties to rethink how they approach criminal justice in the

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