 This afternoon, we're going to begin with a session, an hour-long session, on criminal justice policy and housing policy. I will introduce the moderator. The moderator will introduce the speakers along with other comments that he will make. So Dr. Michael Jeffries, our moderator, is associate professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. His work focuses on the politics of race, class, and gender. My wife was here somewhere. Our daughter is a junior at Wellesley now, and we are lobbying her sternly to take Dr. Jeffries' course. He has a PhD from Harvard and is author of several books, including Paint, the White House, Black, Barack Obama, and the Meaning of Race in America. His chapter in Healing, Our Divided Society, is brilliant, and I encourage you to read it. Dr. Jeffries, introduction, and thanks to each of you for being here. I'm not going to wait too much longer before providing introductions for folks who really need none, but I'll do it anyway. The first speaker for this panel will be Laurie Robinson. She is the Clarence J. Robinson professor of criminology, law, and society at George Mason University, and she arrived at that position after more than three decades of engagement in national criminal justice policy. She served as director of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association and director of the master of science program at University of Pennsylvania's Department of Criminology. She also served in both the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, where she was assistant attorney general, heading the US Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs. She was co-chair of President Obama's task force on 21st century policing. Michael, thank you so much for that introduction. It's always a little challenging to be the first speaker after lunch, but I'm delighted to be here for this very important forum. And I want to talk to you this afternoon about policing. An issue that I think is of great public concern, as much public concern today as it was 50 years ago when the current law came out. And the role of police was, as we know, a central focus for the Kerner Commission. The report criticized law enforcement not only for how it responded to the riots, but also, more importantly, for the fact of its being a key trigger for the disorders themselves. The commission actually surveyed residents in 23 cities where the riots occurred to assess root causes of the disorders. And when it asked about factors that had contributed to the riots, the most frequently cited grievance it found was police practices. And I want to read you a brief quote from the commission report, which I think sums it up pretty well. And here I am quoting. It said, the police are not merely a spark factor. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among minorities in the existence of police brutality and in a double standard of justice and protection, one for Negroes and one for whites. Close quote. So in response, the commission embraced a number of recommendations aimed specifically at the police. For example, they called for steps to create a mechanism for grievances against police, to eliminate abrasive police practices, to recruit more minorities onto police forces, and also to look at policies for fair promotion for minority officers, to adopt policy guidelines to help officers make decisions in areas where conduct can create tensions, and to create community service officer positions for young black youth to interest them in police work. It also looked to recommendations that had come out the year before from the Johnson Crime Commission, and which had addressed in depth issues like citizen grievance procedures. And it followed the lead of the Johnson Crime Commission also in calling on the federal government to help local and state governments with monetary support in bearing the burden of implementing reform measures to improve the overall criminal justice system. So jumping ahead 50 years, you know, policing in the United States has obviously changed dramatically. We've seen significant progress in policing as opposed to some of the other areas that we've talked about over the course of the morning. We know that the law enforcement profession today is far more professional, by and large. It's more data-driven. And we've also seen the growth of what I'd call a substantial research industry around policing that's helped us to develop measures to track and evaluate law enforcement performance. Yet it's also clear that there are numerous challenges that remain for policing in America. I would say most fundamentally, those centered around building trust between law enforcement and communities. And as we know, these issues really crystallized three years ago with Michael Brown's death in Ferguson and the national attention which that and subsequent police shootings have drawn. Now in the aftermath of Ferguson, as you'll recall, President Obama appointed a White House task force on 21st century policing. And as Michael Jeffries alluded to, I was privileged to co-chair that task force appointed by the president. I co-chaired it along with Philadelphia's then police commissioner, Chuck Ramsey. Our task force included law enforcement, civil rights leaders, young youth activists, and academics. And we were charged with developing recommendations about how to bridge that gap between law enforcement and communities. We held hearings around the country and we developed recommendations in a very brief 90 days. That task force report which came out in the spring of 2015 contains core recommendations on how to really bridge that gap that echo a lot of the recommendations from the Kerner report. But it goes well beyond that and sets out what some have called a blueprint for police moving forward. And in my remaining time, I know we're on a short time span here, but I wanna set out some of those key principles for you. We urge, most fundamentally, that law enforcement agencies should build community trust through fair, impartial, and respectful policing. And a foundational element here we said is for police to embrace a guardian rather than solely a warrior mindset. Now there are clearly times when the warrior mindset is needed. For example, when police are dealing with a hostage situation. But police should ordinarily be not an occupying force in a community, but they should be its protectors and its guardians. And this, by the way, is a concept that goes back to Plato. Second point, procedural justice should be a guiding principle in how police interact with citizens. Procedural justice consists of four key principles. A treating individuals with dignity and respect, giving them voice during encounters so that they get to tell their side of the story. And being neutral and transparent during any encounters and conveying trustworthy motives. Now we know from research that individuals treated in procedurally just ways are much more likely to be cooperative with authorities and that helps to build trust across police community divides. A third point, police agencies should think about the potential damage to public trust when they're contemplating crime fighting strategies. Now this is a real lesson learned from what we've seen in many jurisdictions. An exhibit A here is New York City and what's happened with stop and frisk. It's true that crime numbers may have been reduced though that's a question, but the issue is at what cost? A crime reduction alone is not self-justifying. We also said police agencies should create a culture of transparency and accountability, collecting data and sharing it with citizens. A SO for example, agencies should post on their websites information on use of force, generally officer involved shootings, specifically stop and frisk and agency demographics and they should annually survey their communities for community customer feedback. Agencies should also adopt policies and implement training on use of force that emphasizes de-escalation and alternatives to arrest. Now in the last several years national law enforcement leadership and union groups have taken some important steps to adopt policies in this area including an emphasis on de-escalation. This is helpful, but we still have a long way to go. In the case of officer involved shootings, obviously a very fraught subject, we recommended that police agency policies should mandate independent and external criminal investigations. You can't investigate yourself and the restoring trust and credibility in the justice system is really critical in these cases. It's like a judge having to recuse themselves when he or she has a conflict. In the area of community policing, we said that agencies primary approach to addressing crime should be based on engagement with citizens to co-produce public safety, that departments should jointly identify problems with the community and collaborate on implementing solutions. And in the area of training, we urge that officers receive training in a host of areas including procedural justice, de-escalation and interpersonal skills. And a key priority should be training on handling individuals with mental illness. According to experts, people with untreated serious mental illness are 16 times more likely than others to be involved in fatal law enforcement encounters. So this issue is obviously very critical. And we said that every officer, not just special units, should receive the highly regarded crisis intervention training, CIT. So that's a very, very quick run through of just a few of our 59 recommendations. So where are we now with the movement toward policing reform 50 years after Kerner? And at a time when there's a lot of pessimism about where the police reform movement is going, at the end of past administration there was an aggressive backer of this work. Well, despite those facts, I remain cautiously optimistic of why is that? Well, first of all, there are many, many forward-looking chiefs of police around the country who are quietly embracing and acting on these recommendations. Second, virtually all of the major leadership organizations in the policing field, like the International Association of Chiefs of Police have embraced the task force proposals. Third, there are a host of states and local jurisdictions, states like Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia, Texas, that have adopted numerous of these training recommendations as an example as the task force had urged. Yet despite this bit of optimism, I certainly would note that there is tremendous work still ahead to solidify reform and change like this obviously does not happen overnight. Many line officers and unions have not bought into the need for change and much of this is of course about culture change, which of course does not happen through legislation and does not happen quickly, particularly since we need to note the highly decentralized structure of 18,000 police departments in this country. But I would suggest that we'll look back on this period as the time when change began to occur. Thank you. Thank you, Laurie. It's my pleasure to introduce our second speaker, Mark Maurer, the Executive Director of the Sentencing Project and has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years. He is also the author of some of the most widely cited reports and publications in the field including Race to Incarcerate, a groundbreaking book on how sentencing policies led to the explosive expansion of the U.S. prison system. It was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1999. A second edition was published in 2006 and a graphic novel was published in 2013. Since joining the Sentencing Project, Mark has testified before Congress and state legislatures and it's regularly interviewed by the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and many other outlets. Please join me in welcoming Mark. Well, good afternoon. Thanks for that kind introduction. I've come to appreciate the importance of getting the introduction right. Michael mentioned my book Race to Incarcerate. When the book was first published, I was giving a talk in one of the bookstores here in Washington. A newsletter went out promoting the talk, said Mark Marrow will speak about his new book, Race to Incinerate. So we'll talk about those issues later, but for now I want to talk about prisons today. So this is a historic moment. This is a really rich event here. As we look back on the Kerner Commission Report 50 years ago, it was a very sophisticated, very strategic report put together by a lot of smart people who knew a lot about domestic policy. And yet as we look back, I think there's one glaring omission in what the commission was talking about, what they projected moving forward. And that was a development of mass incarceration, which was about to begin just a few years after the report. Now to be fair, the commission members were hardly the only ones to not predict this. At the time, there was not a single academic corrections official policymaker who projected that the prison population would explode at an unprecedented rate. And in fact, many smart people thought we would see declines in the prison population for a variety of reasons. So no one knew about this, but it took off in 1973. And just to give a sense of the scale of what that change has been, we had, at the time of the Kerner Commission Report, 1968, there were a little over 300,000 people in prison and jail in the United States. Today we have seven times that number, more than two million people behind bars. The United States has become a world leader in its use of incarceration. If you look at the racial ethnic dynamics of incarceration report back in 2001 from the Justice Department, looked at lifetime prospects of incarceration and basically concluded that if current trends at the time continued, that one of every three black males born that year could expect to do time in prison as lifetime, one of every six Latino males. The figures for women overall were lower, but we see racial ethnic disparities there as well. So the challenge, I think, is how do we understand this unprecedented development over these last several decades? Because here we were in the late 60s, early 70s, the Civil Rights Movement was in full bloom over the course of these decades. We've had the opening up of social and economic opportunity for many people who had been previously denied. If we look in the criminal justice system, it's not at all unusual to see people of color in leadership positions as police chiefs, corrections commissioners, judges, and others. So we as a society have made much progress during this time. So how did we come to have seen explosion in the prison population? Well, while all this was going on, in the early 70s, we started to go through some rough economic changes in the United States as well. We had the decline of the manufacturing economy and the impact of globalization. We saw the beginnings of what's now become historic inequality in the United States. Talk about having two societies, one rich, one poor. We're doing that at a great speed these days. Many of these changes affected urban communities of color in particular. We also had around that time the coming of age of the baby boom generation and all things being equal. Young men between the ages of 15 and 24 are much more likely to be involved in crime than other groups. It's cuts across race and class differences. We also know those rates start to go down quickly too, so there was a surge in crime in the 60s and early 70s. There was a real problem of crime. It wasn't just invented by policymakers, but I think to the extent that this problem was identified and perceived as a, quote, black crime than very rapidly policymakers and much of the public came to embrace criminal justice as the primary way to address this fundamental problem that has very complex roots and needs very complex solutions. So criminal justice became the policy of choice. What came to be known as the tough on crime movement, which took many forms across the country and policy and practice, but at its essence basically means sending more people to prison and keeping them there for longer periods of time. A very conscious strategy at all levels of government, more people to prison, longer periods of time. And this was accomplished through mandatory sensing policies, three strikes in your route, cutbacks in parole, a whole range of things doing that. So if we ask ourselves, well, what have we gained from mass incarceration? Presumably the goal of these policies was to have a constructive effect on public safety. There's been a great deal of research on this. I won't go into all of it, but I think there are really two basic findings that leading scholars have come to, and they're very simple. First, yes, incarceration has some impact on crime. It's generally much more modest than many policymakers, much of the public believe. And secondly, at the scale of incarceration today, we are well past the point of diminishing returns for public safety gains for a whole set of reasons. So mass incarceration, in addition to the moral questions it raises and the questions about what kind of society we want, even on basic function or goal, presumed goal of public safety, has had minimal effect at best. But after four decades now, we're beginning to be at a bipartisan moment of criminal justice reform. Part of this is because crime rates have generally been declining for about 20 years or so, and leaving a little past year aside, in general this issue has been less emotional, less politicized than it was in the 80s and the 90s. We've had a growing critique of the war on drugs and the ineffectiveness of that as a drug strategy and the harm it's done to so many families and communities. We've seen the impact of Black Lives Matter and many of the grassroots movements around the country in demanding change in mass incarceration policies, changes in policing, really bringing to full consciousness what these policies have done and where we need to go. So we're seeing this opportunity now for some type of reform and indeed many states and the federal government to some extent have enacted various reforms over the last decade or so. A very common one is to say, can we start to reverse the war on drugs? So particularly for low level drug users and sellers, we now have various kinds of treatment drug courts. We have other kinds of diversion programs in many states. Legislators at different levels of government are beginning to recognize the problems of mandatory sentencing which take discretion away from judges and we've been chipping away at that across the country. The whole area of the collateral consequences of felony conviction that you may get out of prison eventually but your conviction you never leave behind. So restrictions on access to employment, housing, the right to vote, public benefits, chipping away at those restrictions too which have been unsafe and unnecessary and unjustified. So while we're encouraged about this new moment of reform, we have to be very sober I think about looking at the scale of incarceration, how much we've accomplished. At my office at the sentencing project a few years ago, we were looking at the decline in the prison population over the last couple of years which people were feeling pretty good about after nearly four decades of steady increases and we asked the question at this rate of change, how long would it take to get back to the prison figure of 1980? What would it take to achieve that? And the answer was 88 years. I don't know about you, I don't have that much time to wait for that to happen. So clearly we need to pick up the pace, clearly the scale of what's been happening is good but it's not up to the test. So what do we do about this, where do we go? Let me just leave you with three broad thoughts on how we advocate for change and what we advocate for. The first I would call we need to level the playing field. In far too many cases we still have a two tiered system of justice. When my middle class friends find out that their teenagers have been picked up for shoplifting or burglary or drinking or drug use, they race around and they throw money at the problem. They get counselors involved, they get lawyers involved, they do all kinds of things and more often than not it works and I fully support their being able to do that. When low income kids get in trouble and their parents don't have those resources, then we use the criminal justice system and we keep processing them there. So whether it's access to attorneys, whether it's money bail and disadvantages that come there, access to treatment programs, we need, if it's good enough for my middle class friends, it should be good enough for everyone. Secondly is we need to dig much deeper in the reform agenda. As I said, it's very good and of course very appropriate to divert lower level drug offenders into treatment rather than incarceration, but far too many policy makers have said and people in the public, that's fine but the violent offenders will keep them locked up forever. And we're not gonna get rid of mass incarceration with that kind of attitude and it fundamentally misreads crime patterns too. The 25 year old who gets locked up in prison for a robbery seems like a dangerous person who's committed a violent crime. By the time he's 30, 35, 40, in most cases he's much less of a threat to the community than that 25 year old was. So each successive year in prison costs us more in tax dollars, produces less in public safety benefits for us. So we need to rethink our very punitive structure, far more punitive in individual cases than incomparable nations looking at the same crimes. And finally, I think it's a question of what do we mean by community? You know in the mid 90s there was a small group of high profile commentators, academics who coined this new term super predators. You probably remember that. And what they were saying was that there was this new generation of, they didn't always say it was clear they meant young black boys and in 10 years they were gonna unleash a crime wave unlike anything we'd ever seen before. And they got a lot of attention and they had op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and they were influential on Capitol Hill. Well turned out they weren't very good social scientists because not long after they made these predictions crime rates started to go down. They went down for adults and juveniles. They went down for black, white Latino kids across the board. So they didn't really have much sense of what they were talking about but imagine that we had a situation where we had credible evidence that a group of five year old boys would be real problems 10 years from now. So what would we do about that? I think there are two choices. The first would be to say let's build as many prisons as we can so we'll be ready to lock them up 10 years from now. We'll take care of the problem that way. The second choice would be to say this is a problem but we have a window of opportunity. So what can we do over the next 10 years in terms of investing in their families and communities to at least reduce the scale of the problem to provide some constructive opportunities in their lives. Now if it's one of our kids I think the choice is clear which of those options we would take. But for far too many people if it's somebody else's kid particularly if they don't look like us or live in our neighborhood they're far too ready to just say let's take the first choice and build prisons. So we need to have a dialogue we need to have political movements that say everybody's kid is our kid. I think if we can do that then we get much more effective much more compassionate public policy. Thank you. Thanks so much for that Mark. It's my turn now. Got you right where I want you. I'm gonna say a few things that I think are connected to what Lori and Mark talked about but aren't directly in the same research tradition. But I hope the connections will be clear for everyone and then we can move on to sort of broader discussion of some of the themes and issues that we heard up here. My chapter in the book is on Black Citizenship and Suffering. And I think one of the places to start is to recognize the importance of continuing to talk about blackness and black American history when we wanna understand contemporary racial politics. Our contemporary racial politics and demographics do not look like they did when the Kerner report was first published. The largest non-white racial ethnic group is Hispanics. The fastest growing group is Asians. The most vilified group in the contemporary public discourse are people from Arab countries and people who are Muslim. So on its face, things look wildly different. Why are we looking to black history for the answers and the explanations to some of these questions and problems that we're confronted with? And the answer is that the racist logic and discourse of criminality that was applied to black American people and specifically protestors in the middle of the 20th century is the exact same logic of racist discourse and criminalization that's being applied without any addendums or evolution almost to these new groups. The notion that white public safety or white safety comes at the expense of black or other safety, that's the fundamental logic or black or other advancement. That's the fundamental logic of the tough on crime rule of law discourse. Now we know rule of law means different things to different people. It's supposed to mean that everyone is subject to the same laws, the same benefits, the same penalties in the eyes of the judge and what's written on our books. But nevertheless, that's the logic that we're working with now and it's the exact same logic as before. And if we don't start to interrupt that way of thinking about things, that sort of zero sum racial gain of safety versus quote unquote progress or advancement or handouts, we're never going to get anywhere. That's the first piece of this, right? We need to be able to center blackness even though our demographic story and our political story is changing. Secondly, we heard a great deal about policing and incarceration and another part of this story that's connected to that and the discourse of crime are the actual living conditions in high crime neighborhoods or high poverty neighborhoods. And I think for too long, there was a reluctance on the left to even acknowledge what was going on in these neighborhoods, right? And that reluctance to acknowledge the lived day-to-day experiences of people who were living in areas of concentrated poverty, who were dealing with questions of threats to their personal safety from their neighbors on a day-to-day basis and who were black and brown people. The unwillingness to deal with that reality ceded the conversation to folks like Bennett and others who just called young folks super predators and started building prisons as a response. But we've got to acknowledge that those conditions are real for far too many citizens and residents of our country. And once we acknowledge them, we can start to figure out why. And the good news is we know why. We know why. The answer is segregation and concentrated poverty. That is the first mover in these cultural and behavioral outcomes. People like William Julius Wilson and Robert Sampson and a host of others have already demonstrated this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Patrick Sharkey is another one who's written two very recent books, if you're looking for some further reading on this, right? If we invest in education and we invest in employment in these communities, these behavioral and cultural outcomes that we see will be pushed down, stamped down, virtually eliminated. We're in an incredible era right now of public safety. The story of New York City is a remarkable success story that was really hard to imagine three decades ago, four decades ago. And that story is a mixed one because in part we know that it coincided with these repressive police practices. But it's also thanks to the tireless efforts of community activists and organizers in those communities and more sensible policing policy. As we discussed, data-driven policing policy. However, all of those interventions that address neighborhoods the way they are is not going to make up for the history that made the neighborhoods the way they are. So Richard Rothstein's book, The Color of Law, explains how and why it is we arrived at our contemporary moment of segregation. And Rothstein dispels, I think, what's a pretty foundational myth to our segregation story, right? And that myth is that if we just got rid of de facto segregation, the choices of private citizens, and we got rid of private discrimination, we wouldn't have segregation the way that it is today. But what Rothstein shows are that de facto segregation, the choices of private citizens, and private discrimination, like the discrimination undertaken by banks, discriminatory lending practices, those things are vital in explaining where we are. But the first mover, the primary factor according to Rothstein and others who have written about this, like Ira Katz Nelson, is that the federal government wrote segregation into place through the Federal Housing Authority, Homeowners Loan Association, and all kinds of policies and practices that ensured, in fact, mandated that freeing up these funds and ensuring mortgages was predicated upon the maintenance of white-only communities, in particular white-only suburbs. So if we don't get that piece of it, right, that government played a very specific and damaging role, we can't understand why we need to continue to apply pressure to government today. We're not going to get past it just by penalizing the banks or just by urging private citizens to rethink notions of community, which is vital, rethink notions of community and neighborliness. We must pressure the government to act. How do we pressure the government to act? This is where I sort of wind up my chapter and what I want to kind of leave you with before I open up the Q&A for our panelists. I think one of the things that makes this a hopeful moment for so many of us, regardless of generation, is that we've seen a group of young people, primarily young people, but people of all ages, who are understanding citizenship for what it is, really, for the first time in their lives. And citizenship is not merely something you possess. It is not something granted to you via a passport or some other piece of paper or your financial standing. Citizenship is about practice. The rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution are only valid to the extent that we practice them. And the generation of Black Lives Matter, the generation of the folks who organized the Women's March, which was a multi-generational effort, the Dreamers and DACA activists, and yes, the students in Parkland, those are the people who are carrying the mantle of citizenship forward and revealing it for what it truly is to the rest of us. Having the evidence and having a history of policy success and putting it in front of our government officials is not going to get the job done. We have to use every tool at our disposal as citizens. The right to public assembly and the right to the ballot included to actively put pressure on our government, government of the people, right? Our government to make these changes. And that's what I want to close with today before we get to the questions. Thanks. So I'm going to very selfishly, before I open it up to the rest, because I'm the moderator, I'm going to very selfishly ask each of you a question and then I'll sit down, I guess. And I hope you'll mind if I start with you, Lori. One of the things that you mentioned that struck me was your comment about changing the culture of police departments and policing. And I think when some folks hear these calls for cultural change, they're yearning for another piece which is not just a cultural change within the department, but structures of accountability that go along with or spur or incentivize the kinds of cultural changes that you're hoping for. Yet the mechanisms we have for accountability seem to be quite weak when it comes to policing, right? Civilian oversight. Inditing police officers seems like an impossible, even when we know there's been some wrongdoing, seems like an impossible mountain to climb. Can you talk about that difficulty in producing adequate accountability in partnership with the cultural change when it comes to policing? Right, well we know more broadly beyond policing just from organizational studies, from research on organizations, that culture change is both very important in bringing about change broadly, but also very difficult, very challenging. And something, as I said, that does not happen overnight. And so this is something that has to be addressed on a whole variety of fronts. And I think we have seen this on a local level, just like Tip O'Neill said about politics, change of this kind in policing which is very local, locally run and controlled institution is all about local change. So that we have seen culture change in police departments at the local level when there is leadership, when there is leadership change and dynamic leadership at that local level. When you have a local police chief and he or she brings new ideas and vision and is willing to make change happen, who is willing to bring some of the kind of principles that I was articulating and is willing to, as necessary, get rid of people who are not willing to go with the program. And sometimes you need generational change. We have seen that in corporate changes at times or different kinds of organizations. We are trying to get more evidence-based policing into law enforcement. Training is going to be essential but this is not just training of recruits, this is in-service training so that folks who are already on board and it's a training of first line supervisors in middle management, so it's not just the top and the new guys or new young women, but it's the people in the middle. So it's a whole variety of things but it's also your local elected officials, mayors are the ones who hire the police chiefs. So this is a political process too and you talked about civilian oversight. This is one thing I didn't get to in my list of the 59 but we called for civilian oversight because police departments are not independent, they work for the people of that community. And civilian oversight is a critical thing. One thing we found, because we were looking at the research, there's no good research about what kind of civilian oversight really works and so we called for more research so that we really know what works in this area. So I could go on and on but I'll need to let you get to other questions. Yeah, thank you for that. Do you mind if I hit you with one, Sumart? It's an incredible moment as you mentioned because we've seen such bipartisan support for ending mass incarceration, at least rhetorically, right? Maybe not in the votes yet. And it actually, you know, that sort of dovetails with bipartisan support in many cases for police reform. I'm wondering what are the sort of, and maybe it's not talking points, maybe that's not the right way to talk about it, but what are the right frames or ways of messaging that can expand or that would appeal to folks who we might think wouldn't support these kinds of reforms? What is it that sort of got to conservatives somehow in the last 10 years, 15 years and tipped the scales toward a more sensible and bipartisan rejection of mass incarceration? What changed and how can we amplify that? Well, I ask myself that question every day, actually. So I think for conservatives, and I don't want to suggest all conservatives are on board with this nor are all liberals, but certainly the numbers are growing. Many people say, well, the conservatives, it's all about money. They don't like to spend money. They don't like to waste money and the like and all that and that's what it is. And I think there's something to that and there's nothing wrong with wanting to spend money wisely whether it's on incarceration or anything else. I think the drug war critique from any conservatives that looked like this was big government starting this big drug war and they don't like big government. So it must be bad and there's sort of a libertarian impulse that government shouldn't get involved in issues like this too. There is two, I've been on many panels with some of the conservative leadership. I think there is some compassion there too. Those who've taken the time to go into a prison or even a courtroom have been troubled as anyone should be by what they see. Many, many years ago when I started doing this work, I had a program where I brought people from the outside into a state prison on a Saturday afternoon and we spent two hours talking with a lifer's group. These are people sentenced usually for murder on robbery, had a life sentence and we spent the first hour one-on-one talking with prisoners and we had a group discussion and I think it's fair to say every single person who went through that came out with their minds changed, their stereotypes broken because all of a sudden these were not people defined by their crimes but they were people who had committed a bad crime but that didn't define their whole life and so we need to flesh out how and why people get involved in these things, how and why our kids might get involved, how other people's kids might be treated too. Thank you. So we've got time for a few from the audience. I'm gonna stand up just so I can hear the questions better but is anyone have questions for the panelists? Yes, go ahead. Did everyone hear those questions about access to legal services and the incentive structure of public defenders and district attorneys? That's what we're talking about here. I can start. Well, you're absolutely right about those too. When it comes to indigent defense, public defense, there may be no area of the justice system with this more variation in quality and quantity of services than there is in public defense services. Those of you in DC may know if you were charged with a felony in DC you should race down to the public defender office and see if they'll represent you because you will get very high quality representation. They're much higher than many private attorneys would provide. If you're in rural Georgia, on the other hand, you have an appointed attorney who got out of law school two weeks ago and has never tried a criminal case, it's a very different story. So, yes, I mean, it's sorely needing a fund, even the good public defender offices just don't have the resources they really need. And prosecutors, many of you may be aware there's the beginnings of a movement to try to elect more progressive, more thoughtful prosecutors around the country, ones who are trying to be straight with their communities, not just tough on crime rhetoric, but what does public safety look like? And it doesn't always look like sending more people to prison. They had taken a much more balanced approach. So we can hope that that's starting to spread around the country. Well, there are many large firms will intervene with death penalty cases frequently and that's been an important source of support. I don't think it's a long-term solution, but yes, for certain kinds of situations it might be helpful. Is there another question that we can feel before we run out? I'm so sorry, yeah. No, but I'll listen as best I can, yeah. The question was about communities and people who have firsthand experience with policing and disparate criminal justice outcomes. How do we put those people at the forefront of the movement in ways that don't tokenize them or disempower them as we search for solutions? From the hearings that we held around the country, I think that people have a real ability in their own communities, whether in meetings with elected officials to Congress or even more with local elected officials with mayors and city councils, county councils and the like to, with neighborhood representatives and people from their own community to be very vocal about what's needed in their police chief and in their police representatives as an example and that that can carry a lot of weight. If I could just add, and you should know, Khalil Kambach, who asked the question, he and his colleagues at the Fortune Society in New York have been among leaders in trying to expand the leadership opportunities in this field and I think there's been a very healthy discussion in the criminal justice reform community at least in the last decade or so. Some of it is basic as the language that we use. People for many decades and hundreds of years have talked about convicts and felons and prisoners and inmates and the like and once we start to define people by their status in the justice system, then that's the problem. We only define them by the terrible crime with a low level crime that they committed rather than a full human being and all that. So I think the field is beginning to make more efforts to be understanding of that, not only language but inclusion in the work we do, which is our staffs, our boards, our coalitions and the like, but we need to hear those voices and understand what the experiences are like. I'm just gonna take one more because I have the sign to wrap up right in front of me but yes, Dan, did you wanna jump back in? Is the current Justice Department on board with the efforts you're describing? This could be a quick one. Not exactly. Well, I don't know if Laurie wants to say so. Let me just say. Yeah, I'll say. Yeah. You know, what's particularly discouraging in a world of discouraging developments is just the lack of interest and research and evidence that Mr. Sessions is giving speeches every week to police chiefs and line officers and the like and he talks about crime rates that have no relation to reality. He talks about policies that have no relation to reality and all that. You know, there is, we do know a lot about criminal justice policy and what works and what doesn't work and if we'd see some evidence to back up his claims, we could have an interesting discussion about it but it gets back to the alternative facts and all that sort of stuff. It's hard to have a reasonable debate if you don't have a reasonable understanding of how we view information. Well, I'll just give you one example. The task force report on policing that I talked about, they took it down off of the website. That's all I'll say. Yeah, I think just to wrap this perhaps on a more hopeful note, one of the things, I think one of the things that's in your chapter, Laurie, in the book is the relationship and the responsibility of the federal government specifically when it comes to addressing these issues and we can't ignore the role that the feds play. Having said that, some of the comments that we heard and some of the marks that we heard speak to the power of more local tools for addressing these issues. So from a tactical perspective, many of us would be wise to focus our energies where they will be received with the power and the respect that they deserves in this particular moment. Not because the federal government abdicates that responsibility or is barred from exercising their power but because tactically, it's not a very friendly moment for this kind of reform at the federal level. Yeah, can I just say, at the end of the day, criminal justice is a state and local enterprise in this country and the power is there. I agree with you, Michael. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks to each of you. Thank you.