Transcript
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Introduces the overlooked actors in criminal justice reform: prosecutors, people convicted of violence, and public officials running prisons. Explains why focusing only on policing or low-level drug offenses misses the biggest sources of power and harm.
Speaker A
When we talk about criminal justice reform and prison reform in particular, I think there are three who's that we tend to ignore the prosecutor.We talk a lot about policing and parole.We almost never talk about the DA in the district Attorney.The DA and the DA really controls a tremendous amount of power in the system, probably more than any other person.The second, who is the person convicted of violence?
Almost all of our reforms focus on sort of the low level nonviolent drug offender.And while those people shouldn't be in prison, over half of all people in prison are there for violence.And we have to really talk about how we handle crimes of violence.And the third, who we tend to ignore is sort of the public sector official, the prison guard, the politician.We talk a lot about private prisons, but they hold about 8% of all people in prison.Most are held in public prisons.And those people have tremendous power that we tend to tend to ignore.I think one reason why we struggle to change how we think about sort of change how we want to punish people convicted of violence is that we tend to have a very faulty sense of how violence operates.Just think about how we talk about the people.
We tend to talk about people as violent offenders.This is a violent person.And that grossly misstates how violence operates, that violence is much more a phase in the state.A person isn't violent.People age into and then age out of violence.No, a 10 year old isn't that violent.A 14 year old starts to become a little bit greater risk of violence in 18, 20, 25, early 30s.That's where people's proclivity towards violence tends to peak.And then for all sorts of reasons, some biological, some physical, some social, like getting a and getting married and having kids, these things all cause violence to go down.But we tend to sort of view this person as irredeemably violent.It's why we're the only country in the world that's willing to take a 15, 16 year old and until recently lock them up in prison forever.
We just would write them off, which is a gross mischaracterization of violence.I think also we tend to overstate the extent which is driven entirely by the person.The violence is very situational and environmental and it's driven by lots of like outside factors acting on a person.We tend to blame the person far more than their environment and then to focus our resources on sort of punishing the person rather than changing sort of the underlying stressors that can lead to violence in many situations.
Describes the structure of district attorney offices, from small counties to large urban systems. Emphasizes the major role of assistant district attorneys and the lack of oversight and data about their decisions.
Speaker A
To the extent that we've Been talking about sort of prosecutors and district attorneys.
In criminal justice reform, we tend to talk about the actual person we call the district attorney, the person at the top of the office, person who runs it.And There are about 2,500 district attorneys nationwide.Pretty much every county has their own elected da and they tend to run the office, but they never run the office alone.They always have these things, people called ADAs, assistant district attorneys or different places, different acronyms, but we'll call them ADAs who sort of help run the office.And in most small counties, there's not many, there'll be the elected DA and maybe two or three assistant DAs, like the four or five of them.They try all the cases though the elected da, he's in the courtroom.Some days the ADA is there.Other days, when you get to the bigger counties, sort of the 100, 200 or so counties that have a majority of the population, the majority of the crimes, and to be fair, majority of the cases, they look much different.
You'll have one elected district attorney, and then in some counties you might have 4, 5, 6, 700 ADAs who actually try the cases.So the district attorney for Philadelphia or for New York or for Manhattan or Brooklyn or Boston, they never see the inside of a courtroom.
And we don't want them to see the inside of the courtroom.They're administering a giant bureaucracy and this is adas who play a much bigger role in making day to day decisions.But unfortunately we know very much less even about what these ADAs are like, sort of what the demographics of them are, sort of their decision making.And we tend to sort of leave them to sort of make their own decisions with all this little oversight and little guidance.
Challenges the usual $50 billion prison cost figure by distinguishing wages from broader social harms. Covers assault, family separation, long-distance visitation burdens, disease, and overdose risk after release.
Speaker A
Whenever we talk about the costs of prison, the number of people tend to cite is this $50 billion number, which is the amount that the state governments spend to actually run and manage the prison's actual budget line in their state budget.
But that's not really the social cost of prison.First of all, 2/3 of that $50 billion goes to wages, you know, wages of the guards and staff.And those aren't really fully costs, right?There are social benefits to paying people.And it's a jobs program.It's a problematic jobs program, but a jobs program.There's a much different, broader set of social costs that we actually know almost nothing about.We've taken very little effort to measure them, to count them, to study them.And these are like the real, actual true costs of prison that no one's benefiting from.So for example, People are physically and sexually assaulted and raped in prison.Like that's a cost that no one benefits from.Families are pulled apart.Children grow up without parents, wives grew up without husbands, girlfriends without boyfriends.Families encouragement is cost to stay in contact with their family members in prison.
You know, in New York State, half of all prisoners come from New York City.
But most of our maximum security prisons are at least 2, 3, 400 miles away from New York.So we were spending money on phone calls, on losing days from work to go visit their family members, on, on taking buses and planes and taxis hundreds of miles to visit people.People who go to prison come out with higher rates of STDs and HIV and tuberculosis.There's a greater risk of dying from a drug overdose from going to prison upon release.Now, in prison, drugs don't go away, but they're less pure, they're more expensive, you use less.When you get released from prison, drugs are purer, they're more available, they're cheaper.And so your tolerance is shot.You take drugs and you die from the resulting exposure to pure drugs.This is true in the United States and it's true in Europe.And these costs collectively probably dwarf that 50 billion that we spend.
Explains why the public often ignores prison's human costs and then highlights recent reform progress. Discusses changes in drug policy, prosecutor elections, and growing willingness to rethink punishment for violent crime.
Speaker A
But for a lot of, I think, very troubling reasons, we tend not to really focus on them.I think it's because these costs are borne by disproportionately poor people of color and the majority white voters.These are costs that don't really bother them.They're not feeling them.It's not their family members, it's not their friends, it's not people they see at church, not people they see at school, not people they see at work.
The 50 billion, that's taxes, they care about that.But the cost of just human misery and death.It's not a misery and death that they have any exposure to besides cheesy TV shows.And sadly they end up not caring.And I think it's sort of a great tragedy of our criminal justice system.
So I think over the past couple years there has been some genuine progress in criminal justice reform.There's definitely been some movement around sort of the issues I think are sort of secondary.Right.So, you know, we've seen efforts like decriminalize marijuana to reduce drug sentences, to reduce some other lower level sentences.And that's progress, although it's impactfully less than we hope for.
But I think we've seen some progress in some serious issues too.I think we started seeing much more attention to sort of who we elect as the top district attorney in counties, certainly in urban counties that handle the majority of the cases.These elections are getting attention.They're getting outside money to sort of advance progressive goals.And I think that's having some real benefit.
We've seen some effort in scattered effort to reduce how we punish certain crimes of violence.There has been a lot.But you've seen even, like deep red states like Mississippi have made some advances.And perhaps more important, I think we're seeing a shift in a slow and halting and always vulnerable shift, but a shift nonetheless in sort of the rhetoric around violent crimes.There's a growing willingness even on the part of some prosecutors to.
To say that maybe we need to think differently about how we punish violence and try to punish it in smarter, more creative kinds of ways, not even punished, to respond to it in smarter, more creative kinds of ways.
Argues that mass incarceration is ultimately a political and moral failure, not just a legal one. Uses the Willie Horton effect and historical furlough programs to show that public attitudes can change, and closes by calling for a less harsh national mindset.
Speaker A
Despite being a law professor and someone who believes like the law sort of drives things, in the end, mass incarceration, it's not a legal failing.It's a political failing and a values failing.In fact, Michelle Alexander Joss of the New Jim Crow has actually resigned as a law professor.She's out at divinity school on the grounds that she believes the law can't solve this.And my book hasn't sold as much as hers.I'm staying at a law school, but I'm sympathetic to where she's coming from.And if there's one thing I think we need to change, I guess it's us, right?And that's obviously a huge thing to say, but I frame it this way that probably one of the biggest problems that we face is that we are an electorate, a country that cares very much about criminal justice.It drives a lot of our voting decisions, but we pay very little attention.
And we sort of have this very punitive attitude where if a prosecutor or a judge makes one mistake, we will punish them for that one mistake.Create a program that lets people go home to see their families for the holidays.And one person messes up, the entire program is viewed as a failure.And the person who supported it is viewed as politically radioactive because that one failure.And it doesn't have to be like this.In fact, these days it's called the Willie Horton Effect from a very famous case from Massachusetts where that exact thing happened.A program where everyone was allowed to go home, people always came back.One guy didn't was a horrible crime, and it taints the whole program.And the program got abolished.What's amazing is the fact there's actually a case from Alabama in the 30s, where they let 500 people go home for the holidays.
That was about a third of the entire state's prison population.And 15 people didn't.And what's really telling is that in the New Jim Crow Alabama 30s, the media actually supported this furlough program.And when 15 didn't come back, said, wait, we don't have the condemna program just because 15 people failed.Which to me is an indication that we don't.
This attitude of like any single act of mercy or compassion is politically toxic.We don't have to be that way.We haven't been that way.New Jim Crow Alabama in the 30s and a furlough program released a disproportionate number of African American men who then didn't come back, didn't adopt an attitude that therefore this program is a failure.And so the fact that we feel that way in the 2010s now is tragic and unfortunate that I'm aspiring to be where we were in Alabama in the 30s.
But to me, it's a sign of hope that we don't have to be like this.And I think in the end, if we can change sort of our view on what is acceptable punishment, come to view these harms that we impose on people through the system as true harms being imposed on people and shift our values, you don't need to change the law.The politicians who run these programs have enough discretion.They can change with us.And we weren't always like this, which means we don't always have to be like this.
And I think change who we are.That's a huge thing to ask for.It's much easier to say change our marijuana laws.I wish that would be all it would take.But at the same time, changing who we are is not some preposterous thing.
We have been less harsh than we are today, and we can be less harsh again.And we just need to sort of figure out how to get there.My name is John Pfaff.I'm a professor of law at Fordham Law School and the author of Locked the True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.