Systemic Racism: Defining Terms & Evaluating Evidence | MLK Lecture

[00:00:00]is oh good evening and welcome to our school's annual martin luther king event this year it's part of our civic discourse project and it's the fifth event on our theme this academic year on renewing america's civic compact i'm paul karis i'm the director of the school of civic and economic thought and leadership here at arizona state university our larger series the civic discourse project is now in its fifth year and we have been delighted this year to return to in-person events and we're particularly grateful to those who have joined us here in person to help us rebuild civic discourse in arizona and beyond we are also happy to be collaborating again with arizona pbs on recording all the events in the series and we are live streaming tonight's event edited episodes will appear posted on the arizona pbs website also on our own schools website we encourage you to look at our video archive there we have a youtube page all of our speaker events including the webinars during the severe coveted period are archived there for the past five years everything in the civic discourse project individual lecture events these dialogue events as we're doing tonight and our website is at s c e t l asu.edu on the theme of civic discourse we're happy to have with us tonight several civic leaders from the arizona community also asu faculty and staff from other units i'm not sure if everybody's actually showed up in the room or just registered online but member of the state legislature senator martin quezada was going to be with us mike langley of the racial equity advancement project avery zola of the arizona clean elections commission and several leaders from the great hearts academy we're also happy to have adam chuttero the interim dean of asu's o'connor college of law with us and gla harris adeen from the thunderbird school of management at asu the school has worked hard now for five years to convene a high level conversation in the civic discourse project single speaker events dialogue events like tonight and an annual conference each february altogether we try to encompass a wide range of views and reasonable disagreements this practice of intellectual diversity and civil disagreement is a public extension of our academic program our courses our degrees our student experiences all together trying to reconnect liberal arts education with civic education in a major public university so for all the students out there or people who care about students that might be some of you we hope you will pick up some information at our table outside our academic programs our experiential learning and other programs also take a look at our website i think we have a new flyer out there about our philosophy politics economics ppe undergraduate certificate we're just launching this year tonight's dialogue event is the second of a third of a three-part series this year entitled can we talk honestly about race scattel's friend and partner from asu's o'connor college of law professor jim weinstein approached us with this idea we're grateful for support from the former dean of the law school doug sylvester and the current interim deans for making the series a reality just one covet note before uh i briefly introduce our two guests for this dialogue on the meaning and definition of systemic racism asu is asking everyone in the room to wear masks unless you're drinking and because of the coveted concerns we have only drink tonight and not uh beverages and not any food with a reception so to our two guests uh i'll introduce both of them and then i'll ask you to join me in welcoming welcoming them to arizona and to asu jason riley will speak first he's a senior fellow at the manhattan institute and a columnist for the wall street journal where he has written about politics economics education immigration and social inequality for more than 25 years he's also a frequent public speaker and he provides commentary for television and radio news outlets after joining the journal in 1994 mr riley was named the senior editorial page writer in 2000 and a member of the editorial board in 2005.

[00:05:40]he then joined the manhattan institute a public policy think tank focused on urban affairs in 2015.

[00:05:46]riley is the author of four books let them in the case for open borders that's 2008.

[00:05:53]please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed 2014 false black power question mark 2017 and most recently maverick a biography of thomas soule that's from 2021.

[00:06:08]mr riley earned his bachelor's degree in english from the state university of new york at buffalo here is for upstate new york and he has also worked for usa today and the buffalo news speaking in response tonight is professor lara bazelon of the university of san francisco school of law where she holds the barnett chair in trial advocacy she also directs two legal clinics at the law school on criminal and juvenile justice and on racial justice before that lara worked for seven years as a trial attorney in the office of the public the federal public defender and for three years as the director of the loyola law school project for the innocent a graduate of columbia university and nyu school of law laura clerked for the honorable harry pregerson on the u.s court of appeals for the ninth circuit she's also a contributing writer for slate and politico magazine including a long run running series in slate on wrongful convictions her essays and op-eds have been published in other venues ranging from the new york times in the washington post to the l.a times and her book rectify the power of restorative justice after wrongful conviction was published in 2018.

[00:07:21]so our format tonight jason will speak for about 20 minutes and then laura will respond for about 20 minutes in part two of the program i'll join them up here on stage to post some follow-up questions in an interview and then part three is for those of you in the room in the audience so think of brief questions you might like to pose to our two guests with that for this dialogue on systemic racism defining terms and evaluating evidence please join me in welcoming jason reilly and laura bazalon [Applause] well thank you for that uh that kind introduction and i want to thank all of you for giving me a excuse to get out of snowy uh new york city uh for a few hours anyways um and i also want to thank the asu for putting on these events and inviting me to participate i i think it's extremely important particularly for students out there to hear different points of view on the issues of the day and i think that's become a real problem um on our college campuses lately where students should be learning about different ways to look at public policy sharpen their critical thinking skills figure out where different people are coming from unfortunately on a lot of campuses that's not happening or at least it's not happening to the extent that it should be i think increasingly students are being taught what to think instead of how to think uh they're being taught that it's okay to silence people you disagree with disinvite them as speakers cancel them instead of grappling with their arguments so i'm glad that asu is pushing back at this trend and i'm glad of all of you decided to uh to join us this evening i was asked to say a few words about systemic racism but to be honest it's a term that i generally avoid in my own journalism precisely because it means different things to different people when i do use it i usually qualify it or put it in quotation marks but if i had to take a stab at what people who do use it are getting at i would say that they're getting at racially disparate outcomes in society systemic racism is used as a sort of all-purpose explanation for why there are black white gaps in educational achievement or criminal behavior income employment and so forth now i don't think it's useful to get into a semantic debate so let me stipulate that racism exists it may be less of it today than there used to be but it hasn't gone away entirely and i don't think it ever will any more than sexism or anti-semitism or homophobia will be going away anytime soon i guess i have more or less a tragic view of human nature unfortunately moreover i will stipulate that racism whether you want to call it systemic or unconscious or structural or hidden or whatever can contribute to disparities for me the issue is not whether racism exists it's always existed the more relevant issue is to what extent can black white disparities in the third decade the 21st century be attributed to racism and to what extent can they be attributed to other factors and my problem with the focus the laser focus on systemic racism is that it crowds out meaningful discussions of other factors which i would argue are playing a far larger role in racism and the disparities that we have today talking constantly about systemic racism is a rather intellectually lazy and unsophisticated way of explaining these group differences it's used to shut down a deeper discussion people cling to racism as an all-purpose explanation almost like a child clings to a security blanket there are many reasons for this and i hope we get to a chance to discuss some of them but it's most important it's also important to note that this is a relatively new phenomenon it's not how civil rights leaders and activists in an earlier era used to approach the discussion of racism and since we're honoring martin luther king this week i thought i'd say a few words about how his generation approached what's referred to as systemic racism and contrast it with the approach taken by a lot of activists today and i want to use a personal anecdote to illustrate the comparison a few years ago i wrote a column in the wall street journal about the prevalence of violent crime in poor black neighborhoods and in the column i used a quote from dr king who once told the black congregation do you know that negroes are 10 of the population in st louis and responsible for 58 of the crimes he said we've got to face that we've got to do something about our moral standards king said we know that there are many things wrong in the white world but there are many things wrong in the black world too we can't keep on blaming the white man there are things we must do for ourselves now after the column ran a number of readers contacted the paper and accused me of making up the quote which comes from a 1961 profile of king written by the famous black author james baldwin for harper's magazine now i was a little surprised by this reaction because these days all you have to do is google a quote to find the source but what really struck me about the accusation is that the people making it apparently just couldn't believe that the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders used to speak this way about problems in the black community and the role of personal responsibility now king was obviously a uniquely gifted and capable leader and i'm not suggesting that black people today need another king they don't what i'm suggesting is that king represented a type of leadership a type of thinking a good faith approach to closing racial divisions that politicians and social activists today barely even give lip service to king and his generation of leaders people like thurgood marshall and roy wilkins who was the head of the nycp during those crucial years in the 1950s and 60s they believed that whites obviously had a role to play in changing a fundamentally racist system but they also understood that blacks had a role to play and they were willing to hold blacks accountable despite the white racism the legal and rampant white racism that existed at the time they operated under the belief and tried to instill in young people the belief that blacks must succeed notwithstanding these racial barriers that blacks can't sit around waiting for whites to get their act together first that there's no time for that now contrast that with the activists and politicians today who spend much more time making excuses for the kind of anti-social behavior that prominent black leaders of the king era would regularly condemn this contemporary leadership doesn't really want to discuss black behavior they want to discuss white behavior and of course systemic racism the assumption is that black behavior is almost irrelevant because after all racism still exists so they send young black kids out into the world with a chip on their shoulder they tell them the cops are gunning for them the teachers are racist the tests are racist the employers are racist the judges and prosecutors an entire judicial system is stacked against them and they tell them that the world owes them and if they don't make it they don't succeed it's really not their fault so at a time when young blacks today are much more likely to experience racial preferences than racial slights at a time when you have a generation of blacks who came of age with a twice-elected black president black attorneys general blacks running the nation's largest cities and police forces and school systems we have people in institutions in in positions of influence and authority insisting that blacks can't be held in any way responsible for these persistent racial gaps until white racism has been essentially vanquished from america in many cases today you're dealing with black leaders and activists who consider any focus on black responsibility or accountability to be itself a form of racism and you're dealing with an academic and political and media establishment that for the most part takes the same view i would also caution against assuming that the activists the academics and the media elites sounding off on cable news and speaking for blacks as a whole actually represent most black people in this country since the king era there's been a growing disconnect between the priorities of these elites and the wants and the needs of everyday blacks to cite just one example groups like black lives matter are focused on what they consider systemic racism and policing in the criminal justice system that is a debate that of course reached the fever pitch the george floyd protests the entire nation or so it seemed came to agree that policing was a major problem in our inner cities and that it was exacerbating racial inequality but as i watched this play out the narrative didn't seem right to me i've lived in low-income black neighborhoods gone to school in these neighborhoods worked in these communities and i can't recall the police ever being perceived as a bigger problem than the criminals which made me skeptical were the people sounding off on television and twitter really representative of the people who live in these communities let me offer you some data in a gallup poll released in 2020 81 percent of black americans said they wanted the police presence in their neighborhood to remain the same or to increase 81 just 19 said they wanted it to decrease another gallup poll released a year earlier asked black and hispanic residents of poor income neighborhoods specifically of low-income neighborhoods specifically about policing 59 of both black and hispanic respondents said quote they would like the police to spend more time in their area than they currently do unquote in 2015 which is after michael brown was killed in ferguson missouri a poll found that a majority of black respondents said please treat them fairly and far more blacks than whites by a two-to-one margin in fact said that they quote want a greater police presence in their local communities nor is this a recent phenomenon crime control has been a priority of blacks for a long time in 1993 a gallup poll found that 82 percent of black respondents said that the criminal justice system doesn't treat criminals harshly enough 75 percent of blacks wanted more cops on the street to combat crime and 68 said we ought to build more prisons so that longer sentences can be given so just to be clear it's fine to advocate for fewer police for spending less money on policing and so forth but let's not pretend that this is anything close to the view of most black people and especially most black people who live in high crime areas this is the view of black elites in the media and politics and academia and among activists and they are for the most part speaking for themselves this is not to say that blacks are indifferent to racist cops or police brutality both of which exist they're not but they also understand that the bigger problem in violent communities is criminality not policing however imperfect law enforcement is given a choice the law-abiding blacks in these communities who of course are the overwhelming majority of blacks in these communities have consistently chosen more policing over less policing you'd never know that listening to most media commentators present company excluded of course i just mentioned that as a cautionary tale of how we should be careful about complete conflating the views of what we hear in the media on behalf of people in these communities with the actual views of people in these communities i'll stop there and i look forward to the discussion thank you [Applause] good evening my name is laura bazlon thank you so much dr chris for the introduction i am so happy to be here with all of you in person and i thank you for coming and sitting together in this room and engaging in this conversation and i have to say it's really nice to be able to talk to students and faculty without wearing masks and i want to especially thank in addition to dr crease i want to thank carol mcnamara marlene reedus and of course jason reilly who is a very difficult act to follow but i'm going to do my best we are here as jason said to talk about this term systemic racism and my feeling is that if you spend any time on twitter or social media or in the classroom or in journalism or in academia you are either being told that systemic racism is everywhere and that racism itself is the cause and the reason of everything that ails society or you're being told that systemic racism is essentially nowhere and then it's being by some i think dismissed as a vestige of the distant past i want to be clear that it is not my position that systemic racism which i define and i think terms are important and i agree with jason this term is so malleable and i think that's part of what makes it so polarizing confusing and dangerous but from my perspective the way that i define it is that there are certain racial biases whether they're explicit or they're implicit that are baked into american institutions so that's the way that i define it and in my opinion it does exist and it is prevalent in institutions and the one that i'm going to talk about specifically is the one that i feel based on my scholarship and my advocacy and my teaching and my career i can which is how it plays out or how i have seen it play out in the criminal justice system which some have taken to calling the criminal legal system because they don't believe that the system as design actually dispenses justice so what is the basis for me having this opinion or being up here and talking to you at all as dr kriese said i i started off my career after i clerked as a federal public defender and so i spent seven years representing people who were charged with very serious felonies up against the the united states attorney's office in federal court and in that position i represented hundreds of people and then after that i transitioned to academia but what i do is i train my students how to be lawyers which means that we have actual clients so i continue to represent people and at loyola in los angeles we ran a very small innocence project and we represented wrongfully convicted people since 2017 i've been at the university of san francisco and my students and i do a variety of things in the clinical setting including continuing to represent wrongfully convicted people but also we have this sort of unique partnership with i should back up and say we now represent wrongfully convicted people not in the state of california or specifically in the in the jurisdiction of san francisco because we have a unique partnership with the san francisco da's office where we do two things we uh have a commission he has a commission that is designed to investigate claims of wrongful conviction and then we work with the sentencing unit and what they're doing is implementing a law in california that allows local district attorneys to recall excessive sentences in other words if they believe quote in the interest of justice that the person who is sentenced to a very long time often life or some equivalent is sufficiently rehabilitated and no longer dangerous they can petition the court together with the petitioner's lawyer to have that sentence commuted to time served in all of these roles over what is now a 20-year period the vast majority of my clients have been people of color and there are a number of reasons for that and i think it's important to be honest about those reasons in the way that jason talked about that we are not living in a land of zero accountability and we are not attributing everything to structural racism and i want to be clear that i am not doing that i don't think that calculus is racist or admissions tests are racist and i think when structural racism is used in that kind of elasticized way or as a catch-all for every single failing including failings in the criminal justice system it really is a term that is leeched of meaning but i want to tell you two different stories if you'll bear with me that are one borne out of a direct piece of advocacy that my students and i did and one based on a case that i followed very closely that i think illuminate certain issues that go to my argument that systemic racism in the criminal legal or criminal justice system continues to be prevalent and i hope that those stories illustrate the problem that i'm getting at so i'm going to begin by saying a couple of data driven points although i'm going to keep them short because i'm not an empiricist but i want to make it clear that i'm not arguing that every single person of color who is accused of a crime is innocent however when you look at the national registry of exonerations and this is an organization that has tracked every known exoneration dating back to 1989 and we're now up to almost three thousand fifty percent of those exonerated are our black petitioners black defendants people who have been wrongfully convicted and even when you look at the percentage of the whole prison jail population this country the percentage that is african-american is roughly 30 percent so it's still staggeringly disproportionate why is it that so many more people statistically speaking who are black are being wrongfully convicted similarly when we are talking about police violence is it true that most people who are con not convicted excuse me when we're talking about most people who are killed at the hands of police or vigilantes are most of those people black no when you look at the numbers they're not but statistically speaking if you are black you're 2.5 times as likely to die in that violent way and so it's these statistics too that we need to pay attention to and ask ourselves why is this what is going on here that we have this kind of a disparity from 2019 to 2021 my law students and i represented a young man in louisiana named utico briley jr and utico at the time that we started representing him had been convicted in the recent past he was convicted in 2013. of an armed robbery utigo is black the victim was white the crime occurred at around two o'clock in the morning on a dark residential street it took about 90 seconds the man was held up at gunpoint 102 was taken and when he called 9-1-1 what he said was it happened kind of fast and it was pretty dark and the best that he could do was say that the gunman was someone who was wearing a gray sweatshirt and blue jeans and was dark complected carrying a pistol and that was pretty much the description that he was able to give because of the circumstances of what happened and how quickly it happened and the lighting etc 18 hours later utica was walking down the street in like i think a couple of blocks away with some friends and the police stopped him they stopped him because he was black he was wearing a gray hoodie and he was wearing jeans they weren't actually blue they were black and because they said he was acting suspicious and they asked him to stop and he ran and they ran after him and they tackled him and when they tackled him he had a gun and i want to put a pin in that because i think that the gun part is important but not jermaine to this specific part of the story once they had him they decided that he matched the description even though utico is light complected the victim had said that the gunman was slim built utico is five eight and at the time he weighed 185 pounds and he had a mustache and a beard so really he didn't bear very much resemblance to this person at all as badly as they'd been described and what the police did next at this point it's night time they call the victim and they tell him that they want him to come down to the station to make an identification and the victim does not want to go but they nonetheless pick him up and when they get him to the station he won't get out of the car because he's too afraid and so what they do is they bring you to go out into the parking lot it's dark and they shine a spotlight on his face and he's handcuffed and surrounded by police officers and the victim who's literally described as cowering in the seat of the patrol car is looking out through the windshield at 20 feet at this guy and he literally has no one else to pick and he makes an identification and that was the state's whole case and what's remarkable about this case is that what i just described to you a single witness cross-racial show-up identification is the most unreliable error-prone kind of identification that exists and yet it's perfectly legal and deployed routinely mainly against people of color where the case gets really interesting is that the prosecution did something else they listened to utico's calls from the jail to his lawyer which is a no-no but nonetheless they listened to them and actually this proved to be very helpful for us and on the calls from the beginning utica is saying the same thing over and over again that he's terrified but also that he was at a hotel eight miles away with a woman and he gives her first name and her last name and he says i'm on the footage get the footage it will clear me get the footage it will clear me and the prosecutors listened to these calls and they didn't go get the footage and he said get my cell phone out of evidence and you will see that it was pinging off these towers eight miles away and they didn't do that either and he's talking about this woman that he's with and they don't find her okay well then you would think that maybe his defense lawyers would have done that they did nothing they didn't find this woman they didn't get his they subpoenaed the footage for the wrong time so then when it came it was wrong and then they tried again and been erased when they got to trial they stood up and said we have no obligation to put on a case and we're not putting one on which is true you don't have an obligation but if your client was eight miles away and can be alibi then you do have an obligation you have an obligation to do something and they did nothing and the trial took about an hour and 45 minutes and then utica was convicted and then it came time for the sentencing so in louisiana his mandatory minimum was 10 years but that wasn't what the prosecution wanted they wanted to use something called a habitual offender law what is that you ask it's a law that allows the prosecution to quintuple a mandatory minimum sentence if the person has one single prior conviction you would think that these laws are so-called race neutral but in fact in orleans parish new orleans where utica was convicted the law was used by that local d.a leon canazero who was in office from 2009 to 2020 over 3 000 times overwhelmingly against black defendants most of them teenagers well you would say utica committed a crime so he probably did deserve to be habitually offended this is someone with like a serious violent past in fact no at 17 he had been arrested and had pled guilty to selling a small amount of raw cocaine so we're not talking about a violent person and in fact in most states something like that would be treated as a juvenile offense so they employ this law which the supreme court the sole african-american member of the louisiana supreme court pointed out and it is sent in another case is straight out of reconstruction it's called a pig law and these laws were designed essentially as she said in her own words to re-enslave the african-american population following the end of slavery by ratcheting up penalties for low-level offenses to put people away for as long as possible and that's exactly what happened the judge sentenced judico who was 19 to 60 years with no possibility of parole when i would tell people in california this story their jaws would drop open that you would give a teenager in a 90-second cross-racial id robbery essentially a life sentence that he was going to come out of there basically in a box and when you told people in louisiana they just shrugged because those sentences were getting handed out like candy and what i want to leave you with are two things i mean first mercifully all these years later we were able to prove to a different judge under a different d.a that utica was eight miles away and that he did not do this and utico is out but i will tell you what his life was like between then and 2021 which is the life of most people who are convicted and sent away to these prisons at least in louisiana many of them are actually converted slave plantations and what happens to the people who who are incarcerated there is that they have to go out into the fields every day who the people who are able-bodied and pick crops including cotton and you can get written up for not picking cotton fast enough and the people who oversee them are overwhelmingly white guards on horseback with guns and they form a line and if you cross the line they shoot you utico told me every day that i was out there i would think about running the gun line before i let these people break me and just get it over with and i really challenge anybody in this audience hearing that story and thinking about that tableau to say that systemic racism is truly a vestige of the past when it comes to our criminal legal system because when i look at what happened to you to go beginning with the stop and ending with that death in prison sentence i don't see a criminal legal system that was operating very differently in 2013 than it was in 1813.

[00:37:10]you may think this case is an anomaly it's actually not and i could talk to you at length about how what we know about wrongful convictions is actually the tip of the iceberg and if i had more time i would tell you the strange way in which utica's case even came to my attention but suffice it to say that there are many many many people like utica who are in prison wrongfully the second case i want to briefly touch on and i'm mindful of my time it's a case that you may be familiar with it's the case of ahmad arbury and as most folks know ahmad arbury was shot and killed this was in 2020 in suburban georgia when he was out for a jog he was shot and killed by a man named travis mcmichael who with his father gregory mcmichael and another man mr brian chased him down as he was running down the street in broad daylight unarmed and as the video surveillance that we're probably all familiar with shows you every time a montarbury tried to escape from these men they blocked his path when he tried to get around them the older mcmichael told him stop or i'll blow your head off he bragged to the police afterwards that he and his son had quote trapped him like a rat and that his son had used a racial slur when he stood over ahmad arbury's dead body now whether you believe that mcmichaels and mr brian were racist or not here's the truth it was undisputed that they felt that they were empowered to act why because georgia's citizens arrest law would protect them and that law says that you can detain anyone if you have quote immediate knowledge that the person committed a crime or reasonable and probable suspicion to believe that that person is a fleeing felon what is the citizens arrest law it is in fact a direct descendant of the slave patrols which existed started in the 1700s and they permitted white land owners to hunt down runaway slaves and quash uprisings and then when the south realized that they were losing the civil war in 1863 and the whole institution of slavery was imperiled they codified the slave patrols in the citizens arrest law in its original incarnation black people were not allowed to make citizens arrest of their own because they were not considered to be quote any person and the person who wrote and codified this law a man named thomas r r cobb was himself a noted white supremacist and this law the citizens arrest law that the mcmichaels mr brian relied upon it worked the way that it was designed to work because from 1877 to 1950 nearly 600 black people were lynched in georgia often chased down by armed white people who were purporting to make citizens arrests and no one prosecuted these cases and in the same way in this courtroom in 2021 these three defendants made the same argument which was that they had a state sanctioned these are their quotes duty and responsibility to safeguard our communities it didn't work but it very well could have why do i say that well first of all the outcome of this trial was in doubt and i i believe that the jury reached the right outcome but what's really interesting is the case almost never made it into the inside of a courtroom in the first place so for weeks the arboris and their advocates advocated for the prosecution of the mcmichaels and the prosecution of mr bryan in fact the police who arrived at the scene after arbory had been hunted down like an animal and left to bleed to death let the defendants go right there again the citizens arrest law it was really only after this video which mr brian took himself went viral that there was more pressure brought to bear and even then two different prosecutors in two different counties refused to prosecute this case one of them wrote quote under georgia law this is perfectly legal it wasn't until the state attorney general finally took over that the case was presented to a grand jury and it was as we know ultimately prosecuted but my point is this this is a law that existed starting in 1863 and it was designed for a very particular purpose and it operated in that manner and it wasn't until 2021 that it was finally repealed the cases that i've described do not stand for every case that passes through the system as i said i'm not up here to tell you that everyone is an innocent victim mowed down by vigilantes or everyone is an innocent person wrongfully convicted of a serious crime and sentenced to die in prison but what i am saying is that these cases are not actually anomalies and neither are the legal systems in georgia or louisiana or california or arizona there are citizens arrest laws everywhere the laws and practices that i described in utico's case these habitual offender laws they too are everywhere they exist in nearly every state in the country they are the cause of many wrongful convictions excessive sentences and yes mass incarceration i don't believe that these laws would be able to exist and continue to operate in the way that they have if the impact on the white population was anything like the impact on the black population again statistically speaking it's been my experience and again my experience based on 20 years litigating and advocating and writing and researching that these laws are propped up by practices that are either racist at the root or racist in application or both and that they turn on a willingness to be indifferent or even have animus toward the value of black lives thank you [Applause] i think you're here thank you thank you both jason and laura for those uh presentations and um i i do want to begin by reinforcing as both of you mentioned that our gratitude that you accepted our invitation on the premise that you would disagree pretty substantially on our topic tonight um me the meaning of systemic racism and does it exist and and what to do about it so so thank you for that uh i want to begin by asking each of you to talk having heard each other now to talk a little bit more about to what extent you disagree on the meaning of systemic racism obviously laura focused more on the specific part of american life that's the criminal justice but is is systemic racism possibly individual prejudice repeated on a large scale allowed to operate that way does it have to be entrenched in in law so what what having heard each other uh what is this term that we're we're debating well i think i have kind of two strains of thought about this i i think that there are so the laws that i described the habitual fender law in louisiana and the citizens restaurant georgia those laws are are structurally racist in the sense that when you look and dig down into their roots in their history they were designed to do a very very specific thing they over time became race neutral on their face but in their operation they still have a very strong disproportionate impact oh sorry that's right um hopefully i won't knock anything else over during this movie um so i think that i think that's sort of one kind of law i think though that many laws are you know race neutral on their face and then you just have to look and see at how they're applied so just you know there's a lot of ways and tranches parts of the criminal justice system we can talk about but one is for example that we know that that drug use and drug uh selling and distribution is pretty even among the black and white populations and yet the arrest and prosecution rates for people of color in that particular um type of crime is much much much higher so the law is raised neutral you can't sell drugs no matter what but then you look at who's getting arrested you look at who's getting detained you look at who's getting prosecuted and you see something that's um that's disproportionate but that said i feel like you can maybe take it too far i mean we just had a spirited discussion at the place that i teach where you know a position was put forward that um the person advocating for this position said you know i don't really believe that that any laws are race neutral and essentially all laws have to be abolished and we have to start all over again i i'm not all the way over there um and i and i don't really know how what the what even would take the place of of the things that structures and institutions that we have in this country and so i don't think that that's true i don't think that we have to sort of assume that every law is is rooted in racism but i think we have to look very carefully at the way that the laws are being applied and who is being is being arrested and charged and prosecuted um i i i guess my response is that even if if if laura got her way and and uh everyone who's in prison is wrongly wrongfully convicted uh or were were released if these habitual offender laws went away and the citizens arrest laws went away um i don't think you'd make a dent in the problem not a debt those things do not explain the racial disparities we have in our criminal justice system it is not full of wrongfully convicted people or people locked up because of uh habitual offender laws or citizens arrest that that is you talked about disparities and wrongful conviction laws you talked about disparities in police shootings unless i missed it you did not say anything about disparities and crime rates who is committing these crimes and what role does that play in the racial disparities in our criminal justice system these disparities are huge you cannot break down you anyone who wants to break down police shootings by race but not violent crime rates by race is not having a serious honest discussion about the problem these disparities are huge and they account for way more than uh you know these habitual offender laws or wrongful convictions in our system just to give you an example a typical example in new york city blacks are about 25 26 of the population new york city is the largest city by far in the united states blacks are about 25 percent of the population they commit around 75 percent of shootings in new york city whites are about 33 34 little more than a third of the population of new york they commit about 3 percent of the shootings in new york and that disparity is not atypical that breakdown would apply roughly to oakland to baltimore to st louis to to philadelphia to chicago to detroit and on and on and on if we are going to have an honest conversation about what is driving racial disparities in the criminal justice system we have to have an honest conversation about who is committing violent crimes in our society and break that down by race as well so could go ahead and i'll try and rephrase it sure well i mean i did refer to the fact that a disproportionate percentage of the black population is in prison in jail and i didn't say that every single person was wrongfully convicted i think i made a point of not saying that and i think i did use that statistic and we do have to grapple with that and that in itself poses all kinds of subordinate questions right like how did we get to this point and i mean it is absolutely a hard debate and debate worth having but i don't think that you can even separate all of that out from the root of the problem or at least going all the way back generations and generations to the fact that yes we have a history of horrific racism and depriving people of their rights and their property and their education and those have long lasting generational impacts i'll just give you an example and i said i would put a pin in it so i'll take the pin out when utigo was arrested he had a gun and he had a prior conviction so why why is that and i don't want to take away his agency he made his own choices and you also have to look at the choices that the limited choices the very very limited choices that he had he was one of 10 children he was the oldest he grew up in a house that was basically a drug house they they dealt and sold drugs in that house he was hungry the lights went out the kids were often dirty it was his job to basically go out and make money and feed his siblings and so he learned to do that by dealing drugs and that was the way that he made money he did a lot of other things too he was in the gifted and talented program he was a star athlete he had a ton of friends he also had cancer and several open heart surgeries i mean he had a lot going on but my point is when you look at someone like that and then you look at someone who's just born to a situation where they don't have anything like those challenges it's much easier for me to understand why he would feel like okay this is my option and now i need a gun to protect myself and now i'm gonna have this conviction and it's gonna spiral and it's gonna spiral and it's gonna spiral i don't think it's true that these excessive sentencing laws in all of their variety in shape and form are not responsible for a huge part of why we have so many people locked up they are we are meeting out sentences that are draconian that are far beyond what is called for by the harms that people commit and basically just don't even consider the fact that say we don't maybe need to keep a 65 year old with a disability incarcerated for the rest of that person's life or that 90 years plus no parole is an appropriate sentence i think that we have a big problem in this country it's a problem of violence and yes there is much much more violence within communities of color it's intra-violence just like white violence tends to be white on white violence and it's higher and we need to think about why but i think the why part of it also can't be divorced from systemic racism and other problems in our country that go back generations that don't just disappear because we had the voting rights act of 1965 and brown versus board of education and and and i think that we still have much of our history that we've grappled with well the the problem is that the violent crime rates we have today do not go back generations and generations and generations they are unique to modern day america if you go back to the 1930s and 40s and 50s you will not find violent crime rates in black communities anywhere near the level they are today nowhere near the level they are today in 1960 black men were murdered at a rate of 45 per 100 000 by 1990 that had climbed to 140. per 40 per 100 000 a three-fold increase does anyone believe that there was more racism in 1990 than in 1960 black communities were much poorer in the 1940s and 50s and much less violent in the 1940s and 50s to claim that poverty is driving this or that proximity to jim crow and slavery what explains why an earlier generation of blacks much closer to jim crow living through jim crow much closer to the institution of slavery had much lower violent crime rates this is not something that that you can just chalk up to systemic racism society was much much more racist back then and violent crime rates in black communities were much much lower so could i try and phrase a disagreement here professor basilan thinks that if there are structural differences in outcomes in this we're focusing on criminal justice um noticeable patterns of difference by race in in um prosecutions and convictions and um it's reasonable to look back and keep going back to say there there must be racism of some form whether it's cultural um implicit it's in the actual you know it's the fabric of the law and and jason your view is that it might not always be reasonable to look for that it's a matter of reason or not i i think the laws that lars described are are atrocious and she accurately describes uh based on everything i've known and read their origins correctly hideous origins no one is denying that any more than anyone's denying the continued existence of racism in america and racist people like the guys who killed a mod arbory the question is to what extent this racism explains the disparities we're talking about and to what extent are you nibbling at the edges we can talk about police reform we getting rid of racist cops making it easier to kill to uh to fire bad cops i'm all for that go for it do it i think one of the the activists are are acting uh uh they're doing a public service when they go after cops that are getting away with police brutality and the rest but let me just give you a statistic here in in 2019 in chicago this is a pre-coveted last pre-covered year of there was something like 492 homicides in the city you know how many involve police three three out of 492.

[00:57:11]you want to go after those three cops go out go get them but how much of the problem have you solved does chicago have a policing problem or a crime problem and and to let cops suck up all the oxygen in this conversation but they're responsible for three out of 492 uh what what are we doing okay you're nippling at the edges laura here well i don't think that cops have have sucked up most of this conversation i don't think we've we've talked very much about or i haven't about police national conversation oh sorry employee protests and all that and that was all about police policing so so a couple of i wanted to just go back for a second um you know one thing that is very different in this generation and really starting i think in the 90s although my statistics may be a little off is the unbelievable prevalence of guns in this culture and we are inundated with them they're more guns in this society than there are people and surprise surprise now people are armed and they're more violent it's a lot easier to kill someone when you have access to a firearm much easier and so there are many causes for why crime has gone up and crime has gone down you know recently there's been all of this agitation about the so-called spike in crime although it's actually if you look at the chart you know nothing like what we were seeing in the 90s but even so what a lot of experts are saying is yes well one coved and two guns and that is very different it is different now to live in this country today where there are more guns than people than it was in the 30s 40s 50s and 60s i think with respect to sort of you know can we blame systemic racism for everything no we can't and we need to really think too about like all of the different things that lead up to the statistics that we're seeing today to the kind of violence can we blame everything on guns no can we blame everything on jim crow no but it's a very complicated multifaceted problem that isn't reducible to um you know there's a particular culture that's morally reprehensible that's specific to a certain kind of community and we need to sort of focus on that to the exclusion of all of these other causal factors and so to me it's an analysis that's quite complicated and i worry that we end up in these echo chambers where it's just has to be one thing or it has to be another thing and we can just never allow for the fact that the reality is incredibly messy and complicated all these factors are tangled up with each other look again i think this is a misreading of history in the 1940s and 50s gun laws gun restrictions in these kind in this country loose to non-existent it was much easier to get a gun in 1950 much easier hardly any gun laws in this country and we had much lower violent crime rates in this country even today gun ownership is much more prevalent in rural areas than it is in urban areas yet urban areas are much more violent the gun explanation i don't think cuts it it doesn't hold up to the empirical data let me ask each of you a sort of uh devil's advocate question um let me start with with uh jason what what what would you think are the causes for the disparity in crimes being committed disproportionately in the in the african-american community um and and what would you what are two things that you would recommend uh racial disparities why are black violent crime rates so much higher yes proportional to population well i i would look back at a time when they were much lower than they are today and in fact were falling and and then look at what was going on among blacks back then what their situation was in this country uh and again racism is the constant here because the further you go back the more racism there is so you should be finding worse outcomes the further you go back yet the reverse seems to be happening so in the 1940s and 50s you had this migration out of the south blacks not just out of the south it was really a migration from rural areas to urban areas and you would have expected as i referenced earlier black violent crime rates to go up as more blacks went into the cities because cities are more violent than the countryside but in the 1940s the black homicide rate fell by something like 18 percentage points in the 1950s it fell by another 21 percentage points so the opposite was happening all while remaining relatively level among rights so you had a narrowing of violent crime rates in black america at least as measured by homicides during this period when you would have expected to find the the exact opposite of that so what was going on in black america back then well i think one thing you had going on were civil rights leaders like the ones like dr king and the others i quoted earlier and what their focus was on black responsibility personal behavior they talked about this when i quoted king in that church that was typical that wasn't some outlier speech that he gave he and his contemporaries talk like that all the time go back and read black newspapers in cities like chicago and new york and washington dc and what they focused on on the black community behavior personal behavior you also had much stronger black families the black nuclear family was in much better shape in fact between 1890 and 1940 black marriage rates in this country were higher than white marriage rates every census during that period shows that so what you've had subsequent to that is a severe breakdown of the black family as late as the early 1960s something like two out of three black children were being raised in a home with a mother and a father today more than 70 percent are not and in some of our urban areas it's as high as 80 85 these kids in chicago are running around shooting each other because they think that's what a man is supposed to be that's how you exhibit your manhood there are no fathers around uh policing so to speak these communities as what was happening before so i think that that breakdown the the lack of development of human capital i would argue has had a much larger role than racism per se has had and what we see uh going on in the second racism in terms of explicit laws and explicit illicit laws racist cops what have you okay um i i don't see that as as that that could clearly be contributing to the problem in ways that lara lara has said but whether it is driving the issue i find that hard to believe based on on black history in this country okay and then to final question for laura before we turn to the audience who are going to be thinking of very brief succinct questions to be posing to office laura what progress has been made in laws and you could focus on criminal justice uh you you have marked out nationwide areas of uh reform that would be needed and you could list others but what progress has been made since say the civil rights major settlements laws court cases from the 1960s onward and what what other kinds of institutional legal structural changes still need to be achieved sure i recently wrote a piece about a slew of exonerations coming out of baltimore many in the 80s and the 90s and a large number of them turned on coerced testimony by police and what was interesting about writing this was that the detectives who who did this and what they did was they separated these children 12 and 13 year old children who were witnesses to crime from their parents from their mothers and they told them cooperate or you'll never see your mother again they told them say it was this person or we're going to charge you and these children crumbled under the pressure of that and they implicated other people and testified against them wasn't an isolated case to happen over and over and over again which is why baltimore has exonerations kind of at a steady clip and is paying out i think in excess of 45 million dollars now in these settlements what's interesting about it is that the detectives who were doing this they were really proud of it and actually they were all not all but some of them became quite famous they became famous because what they did was documented by david simon in his book homicide which came out in 1991 which was on the basis for a series homicide life on the streets and was really the genesis for some of the characters in in the wire which is a beloved show when you read the book though it really doesn't age well it's horrifying what they're doing to these children much of it unspeakable and and shocking but when the book came out it was acclaimed as an ethnography as this incredible expose and no one really blinked of what was being done to these kids and no one really understood at the time that there were these downstream effects it was just well their clearance where it was 74 isn't that amazing well it's not that amazing if you're clearing things where you're basically sending innocent people off to prison and i guess to answer your question in kind of a roundabout way that doesn't really happen anymore that was also very prevalent in chicago where people were actually physically tortured to confess and implicate other people so the 80s and the 90s i think those kinds of practices have been exposed and part of that is because we now understand that wrongful convictions happen whereas at that time they were a fever dream they were like the thought of left-wing nut jobs like me no one actually thought they were real but now we know that they are in part because of dna but the majority of exonerations now have nothing to do with dna and so that movement has really uncovered a lot of these fundamental flaws and bad practices i mean i could talk endlessly about other things not having to do with police but the point is i do feel very optimistic if you had told me if you had told me when i started practicing in 2001 that i was going to be collaborating with the district attorney to try to exonerate people and get their sentences reduced i would have told you that you were insane and so the fact that that has actually happened in my lifetime i think really does speak to a remarkable amount of progress i guess the final thing i would say is just and this is not exactly a rejoinder but just my thought about this idea that you know if you look back things were so much worse race and was so much worse but things were less violent i don't really think that history moves in a linear way i mean what barack obama said was you know it moves in zigs and zags right when did gun buying and gun purchasing skyrocket it was when barack obama was elected what did we get after barack obama we got donald trump we aren't moving towards this like perfect linear line towards this place of like inequality in fact when you start taking away power from people held on to it for a long time they react and and it's a pretty terrible backlash in a wide variety of ways okay thank you for that exchange um and now we have time for questions from the audience again um brief questions means please do be brief and please pose a question for both of our guests if you want to specify one guest um or the other go ahead um there we go okay there we go um well my question is primarily for jason riley i love i guess both of you could weigh into this if you want to um you mentioned about how um the black violence is largely due to the breakdown of the family what do you think it counts for that over the decades like how the you said the black family has been breaking down over the decades oh there are several factors i think the i think what started it was was the migration uh out of the south it's it's much harder to you know man a farm uh as a single parent and then i think the stress on the family that the migration uh put on these families uh started it but later on and more probably more significantly i think it was um the welfare state expansions the well-intentioned welfare states expansions of the lyndon johnson's great society programs essentially saying that um we can replace a man in a home with a government check don't worry about it and and and the the consequences of that i think have been been devastating um uh paying people not to work um uh or or or paying them in such a way uh as to undermine a work ethic that would otherwise have developed um i i think there have been all kinds of negative consequences that have come out of well-meaning uh uh welfare state interventions that have exacerbated the problem um uh over the decades so that that's very largely thomas sol's view or at least part of what you said comes out of souls seoul's view i mean it was you know it predates souls writings though i mean um yeah but but soul is one of the more prominent scholars who's written about it yeah laura do you want to respond to that okay next question first i'd just like to thank you guys for coming and talking to us um and my question is for professor bazelon that right yeah sorry um if you were to like lead the reform of the criminal justice system what parameters or like identifiers would you use to single out specific laws to to know which ones to reform like how would you quantify which laws were unjust and rooted in bad things that sounds like a great project and i really hope someone puts me in charge of it um i think i teach criminal procedures so i teach my law students kind of the basics of the constitution the fourth amendment against unreasonable search and seizures the fifth against unlawful self-incrimination and the sixth your right to counsel and with all of those there are some real flaws but i think just going back to like eyewitness identification when i teach the doctrine of eyewitness identification to my students i always say i need to teach this to you this is the law this is going to be on the bar this is what the supreme court has said and i and i think that if this is trash i think this is wrong i don't think that the way that juries are told to evaluate eyewitness testimony the way it comes into court in this completely credulous manner is appropriate and we can see from the statistics how often people are wrong particularly when it's cross-racial you don't know the person i would definitely start by overhauling those laws it's not like you could never have eyewitness identification because then we couldn't have any prosecutions but what you can have are cautionary instructions you can have education around these issues because so often with a lot of these a lot of these practices just just focusing on this one although i mean i could think of others you know if you're sitting in the jury box and somebody is sitting on the stand and they're pointing to your client and they say and they say that's the person that is incredibly there's nothing more powerful than that there's nothing more damning than that and yet we know how often people are wrong just think about yourself how many times have you passed someone on the street thought it was your friend and been completely wrong now imagine that happening when a gun was pointed at you in the dark and so there's a lot of practices like that where we have jurisprudence from the supreme court from the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and it hasn't changed that much even though we know it really should thank you hi my question thank you my question is for uh mr riley i was wondering what role you believe masculinity plays in kind of this role of violence within black communities because i do not think it is as much a black violence issue as it is more a black man violence issue in the same way that domestic violence against whites is not as much like a white issue but more a white man issue and so i'd love to know kind of what your opinion is on like masculinity or if you agree with that at all well i think you're right statistically i mean we um there's even when we talk about the black crime rate in this country and people always say you know they point to figures like blacks are 12 or 13 of the population that are committing more than half of all homicides an absolute majority of all homicides in the country it's even worse than that because it's blacks are 12 of the population but it's really black men who are doing this who are not 12 of the population like six or seven percent population or less and then it's young black men so it's even smaller so you it is a very much a male driven phenomenon uh but in terms of masculinity you i think you'd have to ask an anthropologist about the role of uh of men and and aggression and and and so forth um but um but but i will make a small point there about uh men i mean we when people talk about um disparities uh and we quickly jump to uh to the racial disparity there are other disparities and we don't seem to question whether something nefarious is going on uh you know men are more likely to commit violent crimes than women is the criminal justice system sexist or does it reflect this male aggression you're talking about um you know younger people commit more violent crimes than older people is the system again biased in that way or that does that simply reflect differences in behavior uh within groups and and so i think there is there is something to that but i i'd have to leave the masculinity question to the anthropologists thank you so much mara do you want to contribute okay all right next question please hi my name is angel and i just i'm just going to read it um so this can anyone can answer uh so i just wrote i wonder what the role of mass incarceration has been on the increase in violent crime in black and brown poor communities does increased incarceration historically and the violence in prisons perpetuate a culture of violence when these people or individuals return to their communities is the question clear so i think i okay let me see if i understand are you so is the question uh just just locking people up for extended periods of time then perpetuate a cycle of violence in communities when when folks are let out and come back to their communities and then there's more violence because of that like but essentially that that prisons are cars or criminogenic uh i guess uh surrounding that kind of the role and culturalization of prison but also the role that um historic incarceration might have on a home not having certain family members or figures in the long term so both of those kind of without and when individuals come back from uh imprison it yeah it's a really interesting question i mean i think that as as probably everyone can imagine prison is an absolutely horrific place to be and there's absolutely nothing rehabilitative about it it's there to punish you and make your life as miserable as possible it's incredibly violent and a lot of people who are incarcerated if they didn't go in with violent tendencies or maybe had some but not a lot can come out very very hardened for no other reason than they're just trying to survive in there and that's particularly true for people who are younger who come in and that started happening in particular when we started locking up 16 and 17 and 18 year old children and putting them into adult prisons and so then you're asking well what happens at the end of that so you do your 10 years or your 15 years what happens when you come home what are you fit to do well you can't live anywhere because you have a felony conviction so it's very very hard for you to find housing nobody wants to hire you because you have this quote serious violent conviction on your record uh it's very hard to reintegrate into these family relationships a lot of times people have moved on whether it's a romantic partner or even you know close family members and friends so when you rip people out of their communities and lock them up for long periods of time and then put them back not surprisingly it's it's deeply problematic it's very very hard i think for people to reintegrate and part of that is the way that we incarcerate people the way that we treat them and part of that is the fact that we're very fond of defining people by the worst thing that they ever did so you know you didn't commit a robbery you're a robber you're a murderer and when you come out that's that's your identity that's that's that's why you can't vote that's why you can't serve on a jury that's why you can't live in public housing etc and so yes we have a cycle of locking people up for long periods of time to be punitive but eventually most people do get out and then it's very very hard to have any kind of a a normal law-abiding well-adjusted life because it's just the opportunities are so are so few next question please yes patrick is my name and uh my wife is not here because dr lowry last time kind of put her over the edge she would have been more over the edge tonight i think my question is uh we discuss systemic racism or just plain racism personal responsibility the new deal whatever we try to find reasons for the way things are the way they are and having married into a black family six decades ago and watching most of the things that our speakers addressed how they developed within families and so over the years trying to explain to people who haven't had that experience what goes on i was having trouble finding words for it until i read isabelle will christian's book cast and every page of that let me take this off every page of that book nailed it from my personal experience what happens to african americans african-american families over six decades and i don't have anything more to say than to ask our speakers to give if they're familiar with her work what you think about the idea that the relationship between white americans and black americans from the south not africans not jamaicans specifically and i've seen that over and over again okay so do they know isabelle wilkerson's book i don't ask them i'm uh i'm i'm familiar with her her first book warrant of i'm in the same boat as jason and then i'm familiar with her work but i've not read cast so i don't feel comfortable commenting okay right all right thank you next question i think we've got time for these three if we're if we're brief uh this is a question for both uh also i just want to say it was really cool you know seeing you guys talk and converse a really good experience oh thank you uh so question is do you think advocating for policy to help reverse the effects of systemic racism will in turn help uh deal with the effects of it so like what i mean the effects of systemic racism that could be subjective but to list some you know crime way uh and like wealth disparity like stuff like that so rephrase the question again it will uh do you think advocating for policy to help reverse the effects of systemic racism will help in turn deal you know with the effects that it created or like you know problems that it created i should say well sure i just think people are going to disagree on which policies will will move us toward those objectives i mean that's the whole that's the whole issue here um and that's i think that sort of gets to the the crux of the problem some people think certain policies are helping um and and i often think that those policies are having uh the opposite effect um uh so you know one thing we haven't touched on i mean we use the term systemic racism but one thing we haven't talked about is who's running the system these days and it's assumed that you know a bunch of white people are in charge and they're perpetrating systemic racism there's there's a very good book by a black law professor yale named james foreman who before becoming a law professor at yale was a public defender in washington dc for a number of years i guess a similar trajectory and whose politics are much closer to lars than mine um wrote a book called locking up our own and he talks about his experience as a pros as a public defender and he says you know one day i i i'm defending this guy the kid's black the cop who arrested him as black the judge we're arguing the case for is black we're in a a courthouse named after another black judge um we're in a city with a black police chief it's often forgotten the the the role to which blacks are part of the system today a big difference from what it used to be uh blacks have tremendous amount of political clout in in in in large black cities from everything from being the governor to being the mayor to running the police system to running the school system during the fire department to running the city council um uh to to being well represented on the police force on the bench and so forth so again to me this sort of undermines a lot of the systemic racism talk when you take a closer look at who's running the system or who has a lot of influence in the system today that is it is such a powerful point and um i i highly recommend locking up our own and it is really interesting that this whole idea of being tough on crime and locking people up this was something that everybody bought into democrats bought into it republicans bought into it i mean it was just a race to see who could be the toughest black people bought into it white people bought into it and i think locking up our own does a masterful job of sort of explaining why and what people were after and how all of those policies really failed to achieve what they were designed to achieve but but jason is absolutely right and actually if schedule does another talk like this they should have james foreman come and talk about all of this because it's it's such an interesting discussion it's a discussion that needs its own event okay thank you thank you i just want to say i think you guys both did fantastic and i guess my questions for both of you um one of the one of the things i was talked about was crime rates so i wanted to ask to what extent do you believe that socioeconomic conditions play a role in crime rates and if you believe it's a driving factor do you believe that past racially motivated policies play a role in today's economic outlook the socio-economic conditions caused by earlier racist policies or laws or institutions okay who wants to who wants to go from well i think i spoke to this a little earlier when i pointed out that black communities are much safer when they were much poorer than they are today and we're not making a causal link here but one thing we often talk about is is it's assumed that poverty drives crime and i think the truth is closer to the reverse of that businesses flee crime-ridden neighborhoods jobs follow property values fall one reason those communities back in the 40s and 50s were much safer much less violent and you saw the the sort of upward mobility that we saw at the time that we haven't really talked about is because they were much less violent um ferguson missouri still has not recovered from the riots after michael brown baltimore still hasn't recovered from the riots after mlk's assassination newark is still i mean these it can take generations uh or longer for for for these communities to make it back and and and and and that's why when when i hear these defund the police rhetoric and all the rest and i go if you know upward mobility is much much more difficult when bullets are flying all around the neighborhood i mean if you want upward mobility it's compatible with tough on crime laws the two things go hand in hand and and and and so i would i would just make that point so yes there is a i think there is a connection there yeah all right i guess i would answer that question a little bit differently i think something that is often overlooked when we talk particularly about about crime is is class and that that's a huge part of it right that people who don't have any resources they don't have access to education they don't have uh supportive environments growing up they don't have water that isn't tainted to drink you know all of these things they're going to lead inevitably to bad outcomes to statistically statistically worse outcomes right so i do think that that as long as people are poor and deprived of opportunities they're more likely to be system involved they're more likely to turn to crime and i think that's true across race and so you know your question was really about socioeconomics and i am not an economist and i know you just had glenn lowery here so i feel like very unqualified to to say anything about economics other than it seems to me that yes poverty is a driver of crime and that to some degree this is all a vicious circle for the reasons that jason described and then until we have more economic equality and more opportunities and until we stop permanently tainting and branding people as criminals and giving them no opportunity for redemption we're going to continue to have these cycles thank you final question thank you um i initially didn't have a question but now i do uh i initially wanted to thank um jason for his masterful work on uh tomasul the maverick i enjoyed reading that book thank you for writing that sincerely um um so my question is i think i've just listened to voter view talk i've listened to the common denominator here is the government and for you dr um baseball i hope i got that correctly um it seems to me to be the case that i understand that a lot of uh cases never get to trial they almost always end up and there's a lot of flexibility and discretion around how um a a prosecutor can decide to first get a case of not prosecute a case or give a deal but this is not the case at all for sentencing where judges must give this specific amount and this is probably related to some law what are your thoughts on that especially about this huge idea that the state wants to punish you but the state now defends you with the idea of a public defender um it seems to me to give giving persecutors that much power they can decide just a racist persecutor could literally choose to punish more black people than white people what are your thoughts on that too and i also wanted to ask you uh jason about your thoughts on you mentioned something very very slightly in the 40s and 50s lyndon johnson's great society the welfare state has risen since then and seems to be the case that with the rise of the welfare state um it was supposed to make the lives of minorities better but that has not happened um why is that the case and what should we do to fix that problem okay so let's go first on the prosecutorial discretion i guess is that yeah thank you for your question there was so much packed into it you pronounced my name right but the doctor in my family is actually my mother dr eileen bazlon i am not a doctor couldn't make it through pre-med um so there's a lot to say about about the difference in outcomes you're absolutely right all the discretion is at the front end and it's the question is you know you have somebody who's arrested are you going to charge them and what are you if you charge them what are you going to charge them with and what kind of an offer are you going to make and there's something called the trial penalty which essentially is what happened to you to go what they offered you to go was i think something like six years and he got 60 right and that was the penalty that he paid for going to trial and getting convicted and getting sentenced under this habitual offender law so as long as that's happening and prosecutors are exercising discretion in that way fewer and fewer people are going to exercise their right to trial it's just too risky they're just going to take the deal whether they did it or not which is part of what i was saying when i feel like we're only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these wrongful convictions over 95 percent of cases plead out many people plead out after you know talking to their lawyer for five seconds because they're confronted with what i just confronted you with and they're just gonna take that deal whether they did it or not and then on the back end yeah prosecutors continue to have a lot of power because those charging decisions play into it so if a prosecutor charges a mandatory minimum the judge has no discretion they have to impose that mandatory minimum right so judges are somewhat handcuffed to the laws and the charges that prosecutors choose to bring and what's also actually i think really really fascinating about the sentencing process is that even if prosecutors lose and there is acquitted conduct so they maybe get a conviction on one charge but a coil is on the other they can argue the acquitted conduct to the judge at sentencing as a reason to ratchet up the sentence and so at every single step of the process you see prosecutors being the most powerful actors in the system and the drivers of almost everything that happens once an arrest is made jason um well the the period i was referencing earlier the mid 20th century is a i think really an underappreciated period in black history i understand why it's not talked about particularly on the left as much as it should be but i think we could learn a lot from what was going on back then between 1940 and 1960 the black poverty rate in this country fell by 40 percentage points that's we're talking about before a voting rights act of 1964 or 65 before civil rights act of 1964 before affirmative action which gets all this credit for creating a black middle class 40 point drop in the poverty rate among blacks when frankly the government didn't give a damn what was going on in black america um and you had all kinds of systemic racism going on legally you could put a sign in your window we don't hire black people perfectly legal poverty rate plummeting black incomes in the 1950s and 40s were growing at a faster rate among blacks than among whites again growing not just in absolute terms but growing relative to white incomes that's called a narrowing of income inequality it was happening these welfare state interventions i think interfered with progress that was going on i think they were well intentioned but they ultimately interfered when people talk about what should we do one of the books you mentioned earlier is called please stop helping us i'm of the opinion it's what we need to stop doing we don't need a new government program we need to stop doing things that we know don't work uh stop keeping kids trapped in schools that have been failing generation after generation after generation of poor minorities in this i think i'd say stop raising minimum wages that price young black kids out of jobs in our economy stop passing these occupational licensing requirements that that uh stifle budding entrepreneurs and minority communities from starting their own jitney service or or or hair braiding salon and so forth it's about what the government needs to stop doing to me not so much what they need to start doing well thank you for that we uh we have a few closing uh remarks to make but i think we're going to begin with a very important topic here in arizona having to do with water is that right yes so uh welcome both of you from other parts of the country where there's more water we have a water bottle giveaway here which is very very important thing thank you schedule has new water bottles and we are going to be able to give one away at different events and this one we just did a random draw is for sammy is it sammy wasabi you