 For this discussion of mass incarceration and its effect on the children of the incarcerated We're live streaming the event today, so you will be live-streamed when you Participate in the in the discussion And the video for the live streaming is available on our website Both live and later at EPI dot or g forward slash events EPI staffers are Live tweeting the event from at economic policy For those of you in the room will be encouraging you to ask questions after the presentation EPI staff will be circulating with microphones. Please wait for a microphone to be handed to you So before you ask your questions so that the web viewers will be able to hear your question bathrooms are out in the hall and Let me remind you that the next EPI event after this one is a discussion with Gordon Laffer about his new book The 1% solution how corporations are remaking America one state at a time and it will be on April 4th My name is Reese Richard Rothstein I'm a research associate here at the Economic Policy Institute and I now want to introduce our moderator Valerie Strauss Who is at the Washington Post and blogs at the answer sheet on a variety of issues affecting public education and Private education, so let me turn it over to Valerie. Thank you Thank You Richard. Thank you all for coming I would before we get started and I introduced the panel I would just like to make a comment about Richard Rothstein and the absolutely vital role that I think he plays in the world of education research and The debate about policy and how to really improve outcomes for students. I've been writing about education for longer than I want to say and His work has really informed me as much as anybody's about how to look at the cause of reform in a Really comprehensive way that goes beyond what happens in schools And even beyond what happens in homes and deals with government policy and housing in health care And as this report shows also in criminal justice so With that, let me tell you who our panelists are The first is Layla Morsi She is a senior lecturer in education at the School of Education at the University of New South Wales and a research associate at EPI She's the lead author on this paper and she will be talking to you about its conclusions and its methodology Then we'll hear from Ames Grerot Who is counsel in the Brennan Center's just program and the John L. New Justice Council His work estimates the cost of America's criminal justice system to defend its inmates and the nation and then he translates that information into legal change So let's start Layla. Would you like to come up or worse it whenever you're more comfortable doing? Sure, absolutely There we go, so the overall point that I That I'll make today and that Richard and I made in In our report is that criminal justice policy is education policy We have a mass incarceration problem in this country primarily of young African-American low-income men and this mass incarceration problem leads to Depressed outcomes for children. So children then suffer depressed physical physical health worse mental health and and worse school outcomes if we are to improve the academic achievement of low social class children one of the ways that we can do this is by Turning to criminal justice policy So I'll give you a bit of background about mass incarceration in the United States We Didn't always have a mass incarceration problem. So in 1970 we incarcerated at a rate of about a hundred and seventy prisoners to a hundred thousand per hundred thousand residents by 2008 this was This had climbed to 700 Prisoners per hundred thousand residents now, that's an average if you then disaggregate that by race the numbers are different again in 2008 it was about 400 white prisoners to per hundred thousand white residents, but it was 2,200 Black prisoners per hundred thousand black residents now If you look at the consequences for children that means that about One in ten African-American children Currently today have a parent who is incarcerated it means that For a teacher Sitting in the classroom one in four of her African-American students will have now or have had a Parent incarcerated African-American children are six times as likely as white children to have a parent behind bars This The the rate of incarceration for African-Americans is Disproportionate to the rate of crime compared to that of whites. So if you look at the Justice Department's Investigation into Ferguson they found that Blacks were stopped more often than whites and then but once they were stopped want whites were more likely to be carrying drugs African-Americans are no more likely than whites to buy To to sell or use drugs But they're three times as likely to be arrested once they're arrested They're more likely to be sentenced and once they're sentenced their sentences are about 50 percent longer than those of whites The the the underlying causes of this dramatic rise in incarceration is primarily due to our war on drugs policies from the 19 that started in the 1980s and and incentives for prosecutors to seek Maximum sentences and Maximum sentences for for defendants now I'll turn to the outcomes for children Which was the main part of our report and what we found is First let me say that You know that there are Negative outcomes for children of incarcerated parents now if we might be tempted to think that those Negative outcomes are due to the background characteristics of the children themselves that because children of incarcerated parents tend to be on average lower income that it has to do with Background characteristics of disadvantage in general instead of Due to parental incarceration itself and the studies that we looked at Actually carefully accounted for those background characteristics and if you look in our report our footnotes We have very detailed footnotes that That show all of the the controls We found that Children's GPA drops so their grade point average drops They're also more likely to drop out of school when they have a pair once they have a parent incarcerated Boys are more likely to drop out because they themselves have been incarcerated So there's a link to increase delinquency, which then leads to incarceration They're less likely to vote. They're less likely to trust the government They're also less likely to engage in community service There are a range of physical and mental health problems that Plague children of incarcerated parents and I'll encourage you to turn to figure five. I think you Got a single handout And Valerie could you just hit the key on the computer so that we can show it? Thank you And it's on page 11 of the report What What this figure shows is that the greater likelihood that children of incarcerated parents will suffer from from Specific morbidities so they're much more likely to have PTSD. They're also More likely to suffer from anxiety They're about a quarter to a third more likely to have high cholesterol To have asthma to suffer from migraines And this is for children with an incarcerated father for children with either parent incarcerated They have a higher a much higher likelihood of suffering from ADHD behavioral problems depression They're more likely to use marijuana. They're more likely to have developmental delays They're more likely to have language learning disabilities, and they're more likely to become delinquent And again, you know if you're interested in what these sources controlled for go to them go to the footnotes Now There are some pathways by which the the research can explain how parental incarceration can lead to outcomes like Increased an increased risk for asthma or depression or any of these so I'll try to explain what those pathways are so first When a when someone is incarcerated it usually means the loss of an income for a family So a prisoner prisoners earn a little money or or no money at all and then once they're released they are They can be formally or informally barred from employment. So continuing to Gain an income is difficult and usually that income is not quite as high as it was before their incarceration This loss of income leads a family to To a range of To a range of problems One of them is that there's an increase in housing stability so Homes are more likely to be noisy and crowded For children more residential in stability. So more moving around There can be an increase in exposure to violence for that child and there can be a higher likelihood of Instability in parents's relationships Children are also taken to the doctor less often after incarceration, which can lead to some of these health sequelae but one of the one of the main reasons or important reasons for the link between incarceration and these depressed outcomes is stress So I'll go into a bit of the medical background on stress When when any person is in a challenging environmental environmental condition They release cortisol into their body and cortisol in acute Rare stressful situations can be protective. It sends our body a flight or fight signal Which tells us how to react to that event But when stress when when challenging environmental conditions are prolonged and acute like the environmental conditions of Of children of incarcerated parents then the cortisol doesn't have that same protective effect and Can can lead to something called toxic stress toxic stress Can increase children's sympathetic nervous activity in their bodies which can elevate their blood pressure it can increase their activity in their Hypothalamic pituitary axis which elevates their basal cortisol level, which is Which can lead to other things like it can disrupt their metabolic system, which can then lead to an increased risk risk in obesity It can also lead to an increased risk in obesity then also can lead to things like heart disease and diabetes It also Toxic stress also seems to disrupt children's Prefrontal cortex activity, and this is the area of the brain that's responsible for emotional regulation and Anxiety and memory which may be one of the pathways that lead children to children's GPA to drop stress Can also lead to Physical conditions, so I mentioned obesity, but it can also lead to asthma when when a When a child lives in challenging conditions or when a child's mother is stressed that can lead them to Be more sensitive to air pollution And it can prime their bodies for for for an increased risk for asthma now What we What we suggest in this report is that educators should join forces with criminal justice advocacy organizations because Improvements in our criminal justice policies will lead to improved outcomes for for children and will contribute to are very likely to contribute to narrowing the achievement gap It will make teachers jobs easier and And you know most certainly improve the outcomes for for African-American children on average Thank you Thank you for that for that summary of the report Before I ask a question or two. Why don't we have Ames comment? Hi, first of all, thank you all for having me It's an honor to be here and I think you all have made a remarkable contribution to the field In fact when I read this report for the first time I thought you know if I had to give one document to someone to convince them that mass incarceration is a problem in America One document that succinctly stated, you know problem problem problem It would be this because it documents the point that mass incarceration isn't a criminal justice issue It's an issue that affects the country as a whole And that's that I think is why I'm here at the Brennan Center are one of our are one of our animating goals in the justice program is to document how How mass incarceration is a is an economic issue and some just some statistics for you that are common I think to every criminal justice advocate like we all know them off the tip of our tongue But I think are still fairly remarkable So the one that you've probably heard is that America has 5% of the world's population But 25% of the world's prisoners fact check true It's but the number that the numbers have changed a little bit in recent years But it's it's around like 4% of the world's population and 22 23% of the world's prisoners So that's it's functionally the same that's still a staggering amount And if we look at just how many people are are associated with the criminal justice system It's a two million people are incarcerated today in America's prisons or jails There are estimates of people who have been to prison Are hover around five to six million our own research suggests it might be a little higher It might be eight to nine million People who have a felony conviction and face the you know effects of that in their lives going forward Could be as high as 20 million and we're looking into that as well, and it might even be higher than that That's a sizable percentage of the American workforce So just if you if you keep those numbers in mind It should be immediately apparent how you know criminal justice reform ending mass incarceration It at that scale it can't possibly be just just a criminal justice issue just a racial justice issue Although it is both of those things. It's an economic justice issue. It's an it's an education issue It's it's an issue that affects all of us in a myriad number an a myriad amount of ways so one of the things that struck me reading this report is just how many of the Negative effects that Happened to people who have cycled through the system who translate that translate down to children How many of them are mediated by stress mediated mediated along the way by poverty? and that's that That's that's a point. That's that's shouldn't be lost like when we What researchers consistently shown and this is something we're also looking into as well and hope to have some more detailed findings on in the next Year or so Is that people who leave the criminal justice system face diminished employment opportunities naturally they can't work while they're in prison while They're in jail and imagine how that would affect all of us I know if if I if I all of a sudden couldn't be working and earning a wage I don't think life would be particularly easy for my my own wife my own family and and we're Relatively well off like imagine for a person that's dealing with poverty what the loss of a wage earner does to that family and an interesting thing that we've found as well is that while we all know that We all know that the burden of a criminal record makes it harder to get a job Which means it's harder to support your family and it's it's which translates down to social effects to the children as well the the effects for that are most pronounced for people who are dealing with having served term in prison, so What we know so far is that Having spent time in prison is significantly worse for someone's prospects Going forwards for the prospects of someone's family going forwards Then just having been through say probation Community supervision and community service, etc And that shouldn't be surprising and reading the results of this report if you're a child who has to visit your parents in jail That's an environment that no one should really be exposed to I'm in New York City and we have Rikers Island, which I know you all they're probably familiar with and the stories that come out of there are just staggering imagine having to come from that and Work that into your life experience back at home or having to expose children to that for a visitation So what it suggests to me is that if we're if we're going to confront the various social ills that come from our criminal justice system on children on families in the economy Tackling over incarceration is really the silver bullet like we can we can have other sanctions that keep our community safe We can have probation, etc But we really need to pair back over incarceration with some of the solutions recommended in this report It's it's it's almost surprising how self-evident that should be and how it's still something that eludes policymakers that there are better ways we can handle crime in our society than incarceration I I have to I have to agree with a lot of the solutions that were put forward in the report that You know regardless of what the administration looks like in Washington regardless of what Congress looks like There's a lot that the state governments can do there's a lot that States can do to change how we punish crime change how we deal out these severe effects to families and communities And that that starts I think with prosecutors I'm a former prosecutor myself I was privileged to work for two district attorneys who were very committed to reform One of them's now a congresswoman Kathleen Rice the other Madeleine Singus is I think a model in my district of how to Do prosecution in a way that respects people's rights and that respects community involvement But electing good prosecutors is a way that you can you can actually Start to pair back at the local level some of these problems In our criminal justice system a lot of districts have taken that first step you know many of us woke up to a surprise on November 9th, but Several or several communities like Houston and Denver also woke up to reform-minded chief prosecutors Who beat incumbents and promise to bring change to the criminal justice system? That's great news I also hope that there's some possibility of reform at the federal level. I'm not willing to give up on it yet I think one way that we can one way that education scholars and education advocates are starting to take note of What they can do to confront the problems with our justice system on both sides of the aisle Is helping people reacclimate to society once they exit prison when when they've become not prisoners but returning citizens There's some support among Republicans among Democrats for Ways that you can get people back into the job market and that wouldn't that wouldn't eliminate all of the problems in this report It wouldn't stop the stress It wouldn't stop the the the effect of Not having a parent during your critical development years. It wouldn't stop the effects of stress and Fight or flight reactions that one has when visiting a prison and visiting a loved one in prison But it might start to get people back to work So it's it's it's a first step and I really hope that that with events like these that Document the true scale of our problem of mass incarceration and its spillover effects on every part of society That we can start to enlist Not just civil rights advocates Like myself, and I'm sure many people here in this room But people in the business community people in the education community and so we can tackle this as a real society-wide problem Thank You Ames. Your optimism is appreciated about possible reform Glenn Lowry from Brown University was supposed to be here But the storm forced cancellation of the train so he is not but he has sent a Comment which I'm going to read and then Richard's going to respond to The scale of incarceration in this country remains stunning Despite the fact that the numbers seem to have been declining slightly in recent years and a huge disparity in the incidents of Imprisonment across racial groups continues to exist as a result at any given point in time many hundreds of thousands of African-American Children will have an incarcerated parent and looking over the entire life course Millions of African-Americans will have experienced having a parent imprisoned at some point in their childhood Accordingly the assessment which Morsi and Rothstein have undertaken in this report to examine social scientific evidence on associations between parental incarceration on the one hand and various developmental outcomes for children Including their educational achievements on the other is a vitally important task They're finding that parental incarceration is associated with various cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes that Significantly reduce achievement in school for the children is very much worth knowing about The evidence makes clear that the association to which they point is real But the evidence in my view fall short of establishing their claim that Quote the discriminatory incarceration of African-American parents makes an important contribution to the racial achievement gap I say this for two reasons First the description of high rates of black incarceration as Discriminatory ie is the result of racial bias in the criminal justice system is Tendentious and is not supported by the evidence reviewed in this report We do not need to presume that the racial disparity here is the result of wrongful treatment of the parents in order to be Concerned about its implications for the children These are two separate issues and I believe the strength of this report is undermined by a rhetorical strategy which conflates them But I also have doubts about this claim linking incarceration to the achievement gap because I'm a curmudgeon Lee Econometrition who recognizes that establishing an association between between these phenomena is not the same thing as Demonstrating a causal link between them that kids with incarcerated parents are observed to have a higher incidence of certain cognitive and non-cognitive Impairments doesn't prove that the incarceration caused the impairments and hence observing this association is not sufficient to establish the policy Conclusion that a lower African-American incarceration rate would produce cognitive benefits of sufficient magnitude to reduce the achievement gap It may be that the very same traits in parent and parents that led to his or her imprisonment patterns of behavior aspects of temperament and so forth Also via processes internal to the home environment lead to the impaired cognitive development of the child My sense is that the authors overstate their policy case here by presuming that the associations which they establish are causal And they may well not be Paranthetically one of my old teachers in graduate school used to cite the cause of a cholera epidemic in pre-revolutionary Russia It was of the observed that looking across Russian cities those with the most doctors present also had the most citizens suffering from the disease a Solution to the epidemic therefore suggested itself to some eliminate the docs But of course this is nonsense. It was the high disease prevalence in a city which caused there to be more doctors there Not the other way around So I wish to encourage the wide dissemination of Morsi and Rothstein's research in the hopes that better data and more rigorous examination of their hypotheses will be produced in the future But I would caution against over-interpreting their findings I for one remain to be convinced that they have in fact discovered the root causes of the African-American academic achievement gap Just let me give you a brief introduction of Glenn Lowry. He is the Merton P. Stoltz professor of the social sciences and professor of economics at Brown University Where he studies labor economics and the economics of discrimination So Richard, how would you like to take that on? You look you'll excuse me. I prefer to stand I'm grateful to Glenn for sending us this Comment even though his plane was canceled To get here this morning. He makes two points and I'd like to Respond to both of them having just seen this comment two minutes ago But I'd like to respond to both of them first Is it Tendentious to talk about or to suggest that mass incarceration of African-American youth is discriminatory and I'd say and I think I'm speaking for Layla and myself that it's necessary to talk about the discriminatory incarceration of African-American Men in particular young men because the reason that we wrote this paper and the point of this paper is that if educators want to Raise the achievement that disadvantaged children particularly African-American children they need to be engaged in criminal justice reform if in fact African-American youth are not being discriminatorily incarcerated if sentencing policies have not Exacerbated the length of sentences then of course there's no effect the criminal justice reform would have on The effect that we're talking about of children whose parents are incarcerated so It's necessary to discuss it a Glenn or somebody may feel that African-American youth are not being discriminatorily Incarcerated but if they are then it's necessary for the education community and educators to be familiar with this because as I said If they want to close the achievement gap and narrow the achievement gap They need to be engaged in criminal justice reform is a very important means of Improving achievement to disadvantage children now. I think in my view the evidence is overwhelming that African-American youth are being discriminatorily incarcerated Layla described Just a anecdotal evidence from the Justice Department's Ferguson report. We do know that African-Americans and whites are equally likely to use drugs but African-Americans are much more likely to be incarcerated as a result We do know that there was certainly a great deal of racial motivation in the war on drugs and the other aspect of this which is the greatly increased sentencing guidelines that have led to African-American youth serving much longer prison terms than they once did for similar crimes so without denying that Violent crime is higher in low-income communities We also have to Acknowledge I think based on the evidence that the length of incarceration and the extent of incarceration is discriminatory And it's something again. As I say to the educators need to be concerned about as the Glenn's second point about whether Correlation and causation are the same whether this association which we demonstrated between incarceration and outcomes poor outcomes for children of the incarcerated is simply an association like cholera in Russia or Something that's plausibly causal is an important point to raise and Layla referred to it, but I'm going to Discuss it in a little bit more detail because it's necessary in view of what Glenn has raised, you know for the last Well more than 20 years. We've been having a debate in this country about whether The low achievement of disadvantaged children and particularly African-American children was the result of poor school performance or whether it was the result of the social and economic conditions with which children Come to school or some combination of both and if so what the relative proportions of those are in 2001 as you all will recall well Maybe some of you are too young to recall but take it from me in 2001. We passed the law that said that if only teachers had high expectations and we held teachers accountable for the results of their students the achievement gap would disappear and I and others and now Layla have been Demonstrating that There are many many other causes of low achievement besides a low teachers expectations and simply Putting up banners in your classroom about the college you attended is not going to close the achievement gap So I think we've won that argument clearly We no longer hear people saying that if you simply have high expectations of teachers You can ignore poverty and the other social and economic conditions that children come to school with we've won the argument but we if the winning the argument hasn't translated into new policy and We still have even though it's been watered down in elementary and secondary Education Act the new ESSA Which wants to set accountability standards and the Obama? Administration Department of Education was pressing very hard on this set accountability standards for schools that acted as though schools alone could make Substantial progress in narrowing the achievement gap without addressing any of these external issues and Layla and I written other reports recently Dealing one by one with some of these issues. We did one a year or two ago about how the increase in contingent scheduling of low-income workers has removed parents from their homes on an irregular basis and that Contributes the achievement gap and we showed evidence that that's the case. Well, what about this parental incarceration business? it's true as Layla pointed out that Children of incarcerated are also likely to have other characteristics that may be producing these Greater propensities for negative outcomes that figure five describes that Are causing them rather than the parental incarceration children whose parents are incarcerated likely to be poorer They're likely to have parents who are less educated. They're likely to Have more health problems Even if their parents weren't incarcerated. So how do we know that incarceration is exacerbating? the achievement cap and that's why We want to call attention and I hope that those of you in this room who have the report and those of you who are watching online who can Click on it and get it. We'll pay attention to the footnotes to which Layla referred and I'm going to because Glenn raised that I want to just Read a couple of them the studies. We're looking at did not compare the children of the incarcerated With the children of non incarcerated It compared the children of the incarcerated with children of those non incarcerated who were as similar as possibly could be determined in the other background characteristics that the children of the incarcerated share so for example the health Disparities that we talk about in the paper compare children of similar race grade gender family structure the single parent divorce and so forth Foreign-born status fathers and mothers education fathers and mothers alcoholism family receipt of public assistance and physical emotional and sexual maltreatment So comparing children of the incarcerated with children who are similar to them in those respects the children of the incarcerated had greater negative outcomes and health other ratios in table five Compare children of similar race parental arrest record parental education Family structure and receipt of public assistance closeness to father history of physical abuse temperament and neighborhood poverty and population density The participants were studied from grade 7 to 12 through early adulthood So the study could also control for other stressful life events including whether the child of the incarcerated parent ever ran away from home Was expelled from school skipped needed health care and was diagnosed with such sexually transmitted disease and an unwanted pregnancy Miscarriage abortion or death of a baby gave up a baby for adoption, etc. Etc. I mean you can read these themselves So Glenn is absolutely right Correlation is not causation, but the kinds of econometric studies that we Looked at and that we reviewed in this report Try to control for as many of these factors as possible. There's certainly a residuals and If you study carefully, I hope you don't but if you study carefully the series of reports that the Layla and I are Presenting there's certainly going to be overdetermination We're certainly not the if you add up all of the effects that we we say Are associated with parental incarceration to those that were associated with lead poisoning to those that were associated with Parental work schedules that are regular with those that are associated with lack of access to physicians You'll find that we've explained 200% of the achievement gap Nonetheless, nonetheless, we've come as close as I think Policymakers can possibly come to identifying causal factors You have to make policy on the basis of the available data that you have and you we can't do controlled Experiments we can't assign some children to have their parents incarcerated and randomly aside other children not to have their parents Incarcerated, but what we try to do is look at studies that control children who are similar as possible in other respects And therefore and then see what the residuals are when we make those comparisons Thank you very much. I Have to say I was a little surprised To hear myself say as Glenn Lowry that that it's Tendentious that African-Americans are overrepresented in prisons. I thought that was pretty Established and if it hadn't been Layla and Richard certainly did it in in this piece in this study I know I've heard a former attorney general Eric Holder talk about it Although our current attorney general might not but Eric certainly did and it's I think I don't think that's actually Tendentious, I am interested in in this issue of over determination that that that Richard just talked about and I guess that helps explain Layla, maybe you can talk about you know why you didn't try to even estimate The impact on the achievement get that's just an impossible task I think that you know Richard and I are engaged in a larger project where we're looking at the mechanics by which poverty Contributes to the achievement gap and so we're looking at all these all these factors that are Usually functions of poverty like like parental incarceration, but also exposure to lead and you know exposure to lead in the blood and parent schedules and access to physicians and All of these things adjust for And especially you know in particular the research on mass incarceration in children's in children's outcomes really adjusted for all of these All of these control variables But you can't Adjust for everything if you're doing correlational studies you can get very very close, but you can't You you can't eliminate some of the residual effects you can You can just estimate what you what you believe the what you believe the contribution might be and given that we're you know We're doing we're doing many of these as Richard said we don't want to find that by the end of the project We add them all up and we've over explained the achievement gap You know many of these will overlap parental incarceration for example is linked with Decreased access to decreased Doctors visits So those those two pathways could overlap the access to physicians and the parental incarceration We have no clean way to separate those two. We don't We can't do randomized controlled trials as Richard said and so there's there's going to be some overlap in in in many of these issues but what we do know and What we can say confidently is It taken together all of these are likely to make a huge difference in children's achievement none of them individually are likely to Explain on their own the achievement gap between African-American and white children and low-income children and high-income children But taken together it can give us a pretty good idea of the policy levers We need to push in order to narrow the achievement gap beyond You know beyond telling teachers to just jump higher As an education journalist, she said a couple things that I very much appreciate one is you can't adjust for everything I've had my share of fights with economists who think that they actually can factor every little thing out and then determine for example How much a teacher? Had an effect on a test score I've you know if the child's hungry if the child's uncle was was murdered the night before if the child's sick If the child's in a bad mood, you can they think you can tease out for everything. So the fact that you didn't makes Impossible for you to you didn't estimate it so that's could be a frustration of somebody reading the report But I appreciate the fact that you didn't try to do something. That's impossible I also think that for in the world of education even though You have come up with 200% of the achievement gap that these kinds of Studies are very really important and I've always appreciated what Richard did and try in terms of trying to show and The work you two are doing together to show all the all the consequence all all the causes Excuse me of of why a student a group of students might not be doing well in school and I Don't think that educator. I mean, I think a lot of teachers know that There are all kinds of effects that kids come in with that impact their student achievement, but I Think this will help a lot of them focus more on some of the impacts of incarceration of their parents and Some of the other work that Richard's done about housing policy and the issue of health care policy Education reform has to be looked at in this broad contest. It's a cute. It's a it's like systems thinking it's all connected and It's really unfortunate that in for the last 15 16 years under a Democratic and Republican Administrations, we really haven't done that So this is a contribution to that before we open it for questions Do any of you have anything to say aims seems to have something to say? So you go Sure, so hearing hearing mr. Larry Hearing Glenn's comments. I was reminded of how easy it is sometimes to hide bias in data There's a there's a study that came out from a Harvard economist. I think it was Roland Fryer I hope I'm saying his name correctly. Yeah, excellent who who found that Use of force in police stops is not racially disparate So a police officer is as likely to use force against a person he stops who's black as he is against a person He stops who's white so reading that study you might think wow There's no police bias against Black suspects, however Take that finding factor in that People of color are disproportionately stopped by officers in the first place and now you get to explain why more people Are victims of use of force in police stops? So it's it's easy you can you can say there's no bias at a certain level, but then if you dig a little deeper You can find it's more obvious that there is some bias in especially in the criminal justice system That's not the only Roland Fryer study That has been questioned Some things in education that have had some of the same issues and I don't mean to disparage him I think it's an important contribute. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's an important contribution just to has to dig deeper there, too and and also while I don't want to detract from the Racially disparate impact on people of color that the criminal justice system has which which I do think has largely been proven by this point An interesting thing we've seen at the Brennan Center is that there are a lot of cities a lot of states that have taken real good steps to ameliorate ameliorate some of those effects like New York City has Done a better job at pairing back unnecessary incarceration of people of color over the past several decades They have by no means solved it, but they're doing they're making a good try of it Comparably there are some jurisdictions In poorer rural areas That are largely white were incarceration rates, especially for low-level drug crimes have started climbing so you see that You see that while The justice systems effects on people of color might be starting to diminish by no means am I saying they're solved It's going to take many many many years and a lot of concerted work for that to happen Criminal justice reform is starting to be an issue that should turn heads among white communities as well, especially as we as the country deals with increased opioid use especially in rural areas, so even if we We don't the racial impacts are real, but even if you don't even if you think they're not Criminal justice reform is an important cause that has broad-ranging effects for your communities as well So it's not just a black issue. It's not just a white issue. It's an American issue I'm gonna read this paragraph From the report which I found I found striking and I think speaks to some of this and then Think up some questions real quick because we're gonna open it up Of imprisoned fathers of African-American children only one-third are in prison because of a violent crime That's not really the the idea people get when they think of why African-Americans are imprisoned is it only one-third From a violent crime another third have been convicted of drug offenses The remainder have committed property crimes or technical violations such as failure to show up for a court date or probation office appointment Failure to meet other conditions of release like steady employment or failure usually from inability to pay traffic or similar fines. I Think that just helps Put some of this into Context all right Who's got a question? Yes, sir back there Mr. Richard, you know, I was born in 1992, but I do know I Do know that in 2000 over 1 million black children had a father in jail So my question to the panel is how do we get to this point where blacks are seen as criminals? Relative human beings and how do we get to a point where black children are Shuffled through a public school system for 12 years and only receiving six years worth of education. Where did we go wrong? I'm quoting Julian Bond there phenomenal And I'm asking how do we get here in this position in America right now in 2017 with the disparity facts are hurting black children and black men and women What Richard why don't why don't you respond to that because you've been he wrote for the New York Times on education He was an excellent wonderful education writer. He's been doing this for a long time How did we get here? I think This is the continuation of The legacy of slavery and of Racial disparities that we've had in this country for many centuries now. This is not an isolated Example of Of a policy that disparately affects African Americans We have many many of them I Do want to say that I think As I said a few minutes ago I think the fact that African-American children are to use your words getting six grades worth of education in 12 years is primarily not exclusively but primarily The result of the fact that we have not dealt with the social and economic conditions that bring children to school from disadvantaged communities less ready to take advantage of what schools can offer them and the point that Layla and I continue to make and that I've made is that Not only criminal justice policy but health policy and Workplace policy labor market reforms our education policy and if we brought children to school from African-American communities where they're Disparately affected by Not only incarceration, but by parents having to work irregular work schedules by greater exposure to lead by Greater exposure to pollutants and and greater Expression of asthma if we brought children to school without those kinds of problems They would achieve at much much higher levels. Would we fully close the achievement gap? No, certainly what researchers have have said over the last 50 years is that Schools do make a difference and nothing that Layla and I have written Have suggested that schools are not important as a rule of thumb and there is no overall research that establishes this But my inference from the research That you put together is that schools quality the variance in school quality is Responsible for perhaps a third of the achievement gap and these other factors that we're talking about are responsible for the other two thirds so certainly improving schools can make a difference but We get much more banged for the buck if we would improve some of these other things and You know that take a look again at at a figure five Layla pointed out that one in four African-American children have a parent who is or has been incarcerated But that understates it because the African-American children whose Parents are or have been incarcerated are predominantly children in lower-income communities So future and we don't have data on this, but if you Want to know the share of African-American children in low-income communities who are Who have or have had a parent who's incarcerated? It's much more than one in four Well, imagine you're a teacher and some of you have been Layla has been a teacher in a school where May be a third or a half of the children in your classroom are More likely to be suffering from ADD More likely to be having behavior problems more likely to be suffering from depression more likely to Be using marijuana if you're in a school where and a classroom were you dealing with problems at that level of intensity the idea that Simply by being better trained and having higher expectations that you're going to close the achievement gap is absurd now, I guess I am supposed to On the bashedly self-promote by forthcoming book on Which is not about education, but it's about how did we get to the point where we're concentrating African-Americans in low-income neighborhoods where these problems are so overwhelming that teachers and the rest of the society find it difficult to deal with them and the book describes a history of State-sponsored policy federal state and local policy that Segregated our metropolitan areas every one of our metropolitan areas. We have a myth that we have de facto segregation in this country There's nothing de facto about it. It was a Racial segregation of our metropolitan areas was explicitly designed and implemented and promoted by government It's a jury system of racial segregation and we are have an obligation to remedy it. I Want to say just one more thing. I want to emphasize this this point that that Layla and I have made and and Ames just made and that is that a lot of people who are Interested in in reform of our racial Conflicts as well as our criminal justice system generally are depressed because the Trump administration is less enthusiastic about these things than Previous administrations may have been but the point that Layla and I make in this paper is that The Trump administration is pretty generally irrelevant to this issue. This is a state policy issue There are seven hundred thousand what we say in the in the report of seven hundred thousand Yeah, seven hundred thousand prisoners nationwide who are serving the sentences of a year or longer Six hundred thousand of them are in state prisons. This is not a federal issue primarily. It's a state issue and educators Have many opportunities Irrespective of the results of the 2016 election to press for criminal justice reform at their state at the state level and So there's nothing the Trump election is not an excuse for not Mobilizing educators to join with criminal justice reformers in this endeavor I'll also say to the gentleman who asked that question that the truth is we could talk for a week without taking a break to eat or sleep about You know the multiple reasons for that for that for what you're asking, but one of them also speaks to the the The refusal of school reformers over time to address school funding issues for schools get less money in a ridiculous Funding system that no other country does property taxes and the federal government doesn't really make up for it They pretend to with title one, but they don't and so That also contributes to some of what you're talking about. All right. Who's next? You Yeah, you Hi, thank you everyone. My name is Jenna Tomasella. I'm with the American Youth Policy Forum I had a question. This is kind of going back to a comment made earlier But I'm just sort of wondering if you guys were able to suss out How much is due to actually the incarceration or the period of incarceration versus the collateral consequences of incarceration so You know, it was brought up about the housing instability and and lack of access to well-paying jobs and and the like and so You know, I think it was also brought up around the sort of bipartisan support for some reentry programs You had mentioned and so I'm wondering, you know, of course, we should be worrying about prevention but how much of this might rest in remitting some of the Issues around reentry and the collateral consequences that come from that incarceration Thanks. So so we did not try here's another thing. We didn't try to quantify We didn't try to quantify the amount that was due to incarceration itself so separation from the parent and the amount that was due there was due the you know the how much the consequences were due to The poverty and the stress that ensues from from having one less income So but but both are important We know that when a when a parent is incarcerated and a child Visits that parent the conditions for visiting parents are not optimal children often often have to travel long distances Especially if parent is incarcerated within geographic proximity to the family Visiting times can be short Physical contact can be limited. There are often no places for children to play so that all of those things of You know separation from the parent and visiting the parent in jail are stressful to the child and likely to be traumatic and likely to contribute to Depressed outcomes, but then there's all the other side of what happens in the home once that Once that parent is gone Including you know housing mobility, but but you know part of housing mobility has been is also an increased risk of a child becoming homeless or a child Child becoming homeless if the father is imprisoned and a child entering foster care if the mother is imprisoned What was the second part of your question? Thinking more about like the the impact of collateral consequences primarily on on these factors here if If you are able to determine any of that. Yeah, so no we didn't we didn't parcel it out We we didn't attempt to parcel it out because I'm not sure it would be Precise enough to be believable Okay far back My name is Wendy purifoy and I want to thank Layland Richard for their research Because I think psychologically what you're saying is we know this to be true Looked at these factors. We've correlated them as best we can But what we all know sitting in this room is that we live in a culture that takes up the rest and in terms of the negativity of being poor or living in a disrupted neighborhood or being afraid for your Child to go out after a certain time because the police may grab that all adds to whether or not that kid that Family that community can pay attention to what's going on in school every day So I just wanted to stand up and thank you for this research because it is so critically important I just spent a year and a half at the Ford Foundation as The senior fellow really saying these external elements have everything to do With school reform and until school people become advocates for this kind of work going on outside of schools We're not going to get the achievement gap to narrow and so There isn't enough there aren't enough places you can go There is not enough that can't be said about the issue that you have brought up today And I hope that there is an opportunity for you to keep on Saying this throughout the country because it is critically important. Thank you Yeah, you oh, I'm sorry you're gonna say something. I'll just just add one one response to Wendy's comment is that you know we there our report really argues for educators being and being advocates for criminal justice reform, but one of the other groups that We've been talking to recently has been groups of pediatric health care professionals because there's also a health gap which then contributes to a gap in in Cognitive achievement for children, but pediatric health care professionals can also play a role It is an unfortunate truth that educators aren't great advocates for even themselves So it's going to require all kinds of different communities advocating for this But you know the value of the report is is seeing the connections so that people in different communities know Yeah way back there Isn't morning still good morning Tiffany Dina Lofton I work in a lot of spaces but currently at the AFL CIO in the civil human women's rights department formerly at AFT and My question is well first of all, I also want to thank you all for your research and work No matter, you know what year it is I think this new revelation of the data helps organizers like myself do the advocacy work on the ground Which is always really important and I'm always been supportive of the Institute for focusing on communities of color So that's my thank you With that being said Richard you made a comment earlier around us being able to win the argument But still not seeing new economic policy and my question to the panel is for organizers who you know This is clear as a black woman for me why this work is important for our children But when the work happens in the States It is difficult to articulate the connection to you know The majority of our educators who are white males or white women To see the connection and why this is important for them as a policy priority, right when we talk about educators That's not always on the top of their list is criminal justice reform And so my question is in the research that you all have done or maybe in some exploring of Conversations that you all have had are there any helpful Um Ways of articulating this narrative to teachers on the ground who are in our states on why this would be an important policy for them to a White teacher or to a white professor when we're trying to advocate and tell them that police I mean criminal justice reform is important to them for black students, right? I heard the argument around making sure that the classroom is going to be improved because students Perform better when their parents aren't incarcerated or whatever But are there other I guess talking points that you would advise or that you would give to us That would be helpful for the organizing work. We we do on the ground I'll just have a couple of points. This is the recommendations that we're making are not primarily Recommendations for what teachers can do in their own classrooms their recommendations of what teachers should do through their organizations in terms of pressing their organizations to Understand and we're talking about teacher unions. We're talking about school boards school board associations superintendents associations Insisting that they understand that that we teachers can't do our job properly unless you align with Criminal justice reformers to get some of these policies changed at the state level there are some things that the Teachers could probably do at the classroom level Layla mentioned just now that one of the Effects of this report is that Pediatricians of the very large health care network have gotten interested in it and started a pilot project or developing a pilot project where when teachers know that a child's Parent has been incarcerated. They get in touch with the child's pediatrician So that the child's pediatrician can be especially attuned to the kinds of issues that figure five describes and so more collaboration between Healthcare providers and teachers is one possible effect of a greater awareness of these kinds of issues Sir you had your hand up You Sure, of course So I wanted to add just one thing quickly I think I think over the past year a lot of people across the country have started to agree that criminal justice is reform is a Coming up to the number one priority in this country But another thing that happened on November 9th. There was an exit poll that showed To the question. Do you think the criminal justice system treats all people fairly? White split about 45 45 10% I don't know People of color it was about 10% yes, it treats all people fairly about 90% know it does not So I think a really important thing that this paper does and a really important thing We should all be doing going forward is finding people who aren't convinced either Maybe they don't know that the problem exists and articulating to them in language They understand why it matters to them like the the case that black lives matter has done a great job of articulating why Criminal justice system is an issue for people of color why it's a social justice a racial justice issue But work like this I think is so critical so that it brings more people into the conversation So the more you all can do when you go back to your own work to raise this issue in terms that your allies might understand Even even that the business community can understand So I think that's that's a really important step going forward And I'll just add my two cents so when I I was a teacher in in the Bronx and in East Harlem And I I was not aware of these I Mean I was aware that that My students had Seemed to have parents who were incarcerated at a higher rate than say my friends My friends as parents But I think what would have persuaded me would have been figure five and also the the dropout rate facts and the GPA facts and and also specific ways for for me to engage as a teacher with Non-education Organizations or education organizations, but criminal justice organizations that we're working on this work Because as a teacher lesson planning and you know going into school and spending all day in school. I didn't have time to Really consider how to do any other work except if it was sort of if except if I was told how So I'm Jerry dancers. I'm a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland And I've been a fan of Richard Rothstein's since he gave a talk on my campus It's more than a decade ago, but that's I guess as well as a maybe as a retired math professor, I should ask some Questions about the graph because it's it's not clear how important say for example the 72% increase in PTSD is Does that mean it went from 1% of the population? Excuse me, it's not a 72% increase it's 72 children of incarcerated parents are 72% more likely Than children of non incarcerated parents to have that condition It's it's a likelihood. It's a it's a graph of likelihood not of percent increase There are two other important education gaps one one is boys and girls and I don't know how this fits into your data and One of the reasons for raising this is that currently at among college grad at college graduation these days, there are three women for every two men and So there's a significant education gap going on there And I don't know how it probably plays out in what what you've looked at but That I don't know another one is Comparing now to two decades ago and one well one of the side effects of the I will call it the Many economic mini depression for the 99% which is still going on Is that there's many more people who millions of more people who have given up looking for jobs? and this makes it doubly hard for for for For people who have finished their jail terms to find jobs Sure in terms of the gap in between men and women What I would you know what we found is that Men were incarcerated African-American fathers were incarcerated at a far greater rate than African-American mothers But both were incarcerated a far far greater rate than white parents and And so there is you know, there's a difference in the the percentage of Black men and black women who are incarcerated and that could have then an impact on the graduation rates of those same men and women Thank you. I'd like to give some other people a chance. Thank you. Yes, ma'am Yeah, you I'm one table of substance abuse mental health services administration and we've been funding since 1999 this safe schools healthy students grant program Which is a discretionary grant program. We all know that that is Subjective funding from the budget. However, what we do know from this program Which has been in 365 communities in seven states is that there are a lot of factors that we can do to get to your Question in the back and one of them I wanted to highlight is stead the ASIS study from the CDC Which does list incarceration as a factor that negatively impacts students over their life course Additionally looking at protective factors. I think in really promoting those protective factors in addition to limiting the risk factors that people face We also know that recognizing resilience at the individual family and community level is important as well as increasing self-care for mental health providers teachers and other educators in In addition ending the school to prison pipeline Which I know you did mention in the report is really important and also making sure that restorative practices are promoted and Lastly making sure that students have access to the appropriate levels of treatment and services when they are recognized to have a problem Making sure that prevention and promotion is part of the dialogue And this is something that we do at the systems level which I appreciate your comment by bringing together law enforcement Mental health juvenile justice and health care providers So if there are a lot of things that we could promote that go beyond your report And I just wanted to bring kind of a hopeful perspective because we do know that these are things that are happening across the country and they have worked That's really appreciated. Thank you. That's good to know second the man in this Right here Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mario Cristallo and I'm a DC resident and an immigrant and I Also want to thank you for for this eye-opening report and and the fact that at this time And and I want to hear your comment on this The immigrant population is pretty much part of the of the of the same environment of this children and and in in low-income communities as well and I and I can see that the Hispanic Latino men is also highly incarcerated as as as black And I wonder about your thoughts in terms of the immigrant community It would be the same effect of all these issues while their Parents are incarcerated as well and and and also So taking your experience aims on numbers and Knowing that the Trump administration is gonna it's gonna incarcerate at least three million Nondocumented immigrants at this point they went down from 11 million to three million the entire population the US is 2 million So then we we have three million more people within the system. What's your? Broadcasting on this one because it looks like we're they're gonna be very busy trying to to to have a negative impact in our community So appreciate your your thoughts on this. Thank you Sure, so yeah, we we I've heard those numbers that that the goal of the Trump administration is to find And incarcerate at least three million new people Before before I get to how staggering that is I just want to add one statistic for you all One point for you all to use and your conversations about this issue We we the Brennan Center do a lot of work on like crime research So we we try to debunk the myth that crime is out of control and across the country But a corollary of that is you you hear from a lot of policymakers these days that immigrants are Helping prompt some violent crime wave. It's just not true Just it's flat out. Not true There's there's an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from a couple years ago That makes the case really succinctly that research going back Almost a hundred years demonstrates that first-generation immigrants commit fewer crimes than the general population second generation a little more and by the third generation Everyone's sort of on par which I think is hilarious But that the the important point is that is that immigrants are not the driving force of crime in America If you hear someone say we need to incarcerate and deport all these people because they're committing crimes. They're just wrong Just just wrong. So a second point the we currently have about two point two million people behind bars in America 700,000 in jails 1.5 million prisons So the the notion of expanding to add three hundred three million on top of that I I maybe I'm an optimist, but I have doubts about the feasibility. I just said just the the notion that that's possible Just I hope it's not but if it is What it will manifest as is a massive growth in the private prison industry probably Because the the if you look back in the nineteen to four crime bill and how we built all these prisons to get into this problem in the first place You know that took time But if you wanted to ramp up enforcement very quickly if you wanted to ramp up incarceration very quickly You'd need to use private prisons which are demonstrably more hazardous worst places that don't even work that are more criminogenic than state-run prisons and to be sure the Trump administration has taken the first steps to do that by Repealing the DOJ guidance that they wouldn't use private prisons One gloss on that though is the Obama order ending private prisons for the Bureau of Prisons didn't touch immigration so The Obama administration I believe was prepared to continue using private prisons for immigration detention And that's going to now continue and theoretically ramp up under President Trump So I I hope it doesn't come to that. I know he has said that I hope it doesn't come to that But if it does it's going to look like a massive expansion of private prisons And you're gonna start throwing multipliers onto all the figures that we've given you today Like when when I say there there are like nine million former prisoners in the country just you know multiply by After a couple after a couple decades multiple it out by two or three. So I hope it doesn't come to that. Thank you Leila do you want to respond? Yeah, sure. So It's true so One of the things that I told you at the start was that we are you know our incarceration rate in 2008 Was 700 prisoners per hundred thousand Residents and then it was different by race and it was 400 white prisoners per hundred thousand white residents 2200 Black prisoners per hundred thousand black residents and it's 1000 Hispanic prisoners per hundred thousand Hispanic residents, but what we also found in the data is that for many of these though not all Hispanic children actually didn't have this quite the same outcomes as African-American children so African-American children seem to have Consequences of parental incarceration that were worse than those of Hispanic children especially in that in the health ones not all of them but but many and one of the reasons for that is because There's a much higher rate of multi-generational poverty amongst African-Americans and that's because of the history that Richard talked about and chronicles in his in his book the color of law this is a result of a history of of slavery and Discrimination and segregation and Jim Crow laws and all of this some of these things continuing today and so That ties back into Valerie's point that you can't adjust for everything So if you just if you just look at economic conditions that might not actually capture all of the A child's family's history of multi-generational poverty for example so So it you know, it's a it's a justice issue for for Immigrants and for people of color and it's particularly salient for African-Americans now I'm saying this now in 2017 if we look, you know down the track at years things might be really different so We're going to have to wrap up. I'm afraid but so I'm gonna ask Richard You want to have the last word include no no, okay, then then thank you all for coming for your great questions Delightful to be here go out and spread the word