 Hello, everybody. Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildean here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And I'm delighted to have all of you here this afternoon for another in our series of policy talks at the Ford School. I'd like to extend a special welcome to our speaker, Professor Glenn Lowry, who I will introduce in just a few moments. Today's event is sponsored by the Ford School Center for Public Policy in Diverse Societies. And our diversity center, I'd just like to tell you a couple of things about it for those of you who may not know. It is intended as a first-of-its-kind initiative that is designed to shed light on how policy, how public policy, can most effectively navigate the opportunities and the challenges that arise as societies become increasingly diverse locally, nationally, and globally. There are a number of academic institutions that have addressed issues of diversity through a variety of different lenses. They focused on the social sciences, on education, on business, and on law. But the Center for Public Policy in Diverse Societies here is really the first university-based effort that we're aware of that focuses on the public policy perspective and issues associated with diversity. The Ford School and our diversity center will continue to host distinguished speakers. And I hope that you will visit our web page. We have a calendar which shows upcoming events. And we hope that you will continue to join us and spread the word about the things that we have coming up. And now, my pleasure to introduce our speaker. Glenn Lowry is a distinguished economist, a prominent social critic, and an advisor to business and political leaders across the country. A native of the south side of Chicago, Professor Lowry worked his way up from a job in a printing plant to a PhD at MIT in 1976. And he started his career at Northwestern University in the late 1970s as an assistant professor of economics. And during that time, he taught in a summer program that was sponsored by the American Economic Association. And that's actually where I first met him. I was a student in that summer program, which is still going on. It's intended to diversify the economics profession. And so I first learned about Glenn Lowry as my microeconomics professor. And I know there are a number of you in the room who are studying microeconomics. And so I have many, many fond memories about those equations and all of the things that I learned and have continued to use throughout my career. Glenn was also on the economics department faculty here at Michigan from 1979 to 1982 before becoming the first tenured African-American professor in Harvard's economics department. His academic career has taken him to Boston University, where he founded the Institute on Race and Social Division. And he's currently the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University. In addition to his scholarly works, Dr. Lowry is a regular commentator on public radio and television and a widely sought after public speaker. He's dedicated his career and his research to exploring issues of race inequality and the persistent lack of opportunities for African-Americans in many spheres of American society and recently has been branching out to look at a number of internationally related issues as well. Today he will focus on the massive incarceration rate in the US and address the important question of why racial minorities comprise such a disproportionate share of our prison population. Is it a result simply of rising crime rates or does it reflect American values in the post-civil rights era? Has our society created a pipeline to prison that disadvantages minority communities? Professor Lowry has graciously agreed to take questions after his talk. And so around 4.30, our staff will be circulating and I hope that if you're interested in sharing a question that you have received a card, there are cards that are available and our staff will collect your cards. Professor Elizabeth Gerber will select questions and they will be read by Ebony Wells, Executive Secretary of the Students of Color and Public Policy, one of the organizations here at the Ford School. So with no further ado, please join me in welcoming Professor Lowry to the podium. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here, be back here at the Ford School. I have a text, I'm gonna read a little bit of it. So this lecture is about human values. I'm gonna try without apology to reach beyond science with a capital S and given the limit of my abilities to address deeper questions. Anything less in my humble opinion would be to evade my responsibilities to my country and to my people. Of course, as an economist and an academic, I also have professional responsibilities. In occasions such as this is no place for sermonizing. This is a place for analysis. The coin of the realm here would be argument and evidence, not moral outrage or rhetorical fervor. This is hardly the time for me, quite obviously an African-American to play a race card, which is to say to claim some moral authority that derives from social identity or to trade on insider status or to appeal to such sympathies in this audience as my social identity might provoke. Still, I am a black American male standing before you to address the ethics of mass incarceration in this race conscious racially divided nation. As it happens, I have passed through the courtroom and the jailhouse on my way to this distinguished podium. I have sat in the visitor's room at a state prison. I have known personally and intimately men and women who live their entire lives at one foot to either side of the law. And in my mind's eye, I can envision voiceless and despairing people who would hope I might represent them on an occasion such as this. I know that these revelations may discredit me in some quarters. Some may even assume that I'm siding with the thug and not the victims of senseless violence. Truth be told, some would assume that no matter what I might say here, so deeply, sorry, I lost my place. Some would assume that no matter what I might say here, so deeply entrenched is this binary opposition in the American public mind. So I'll not even bother to try to refute the charge. For better or worse, my racial identity is not irrelevant here. Neither is it irrelevant to a consideration of the ethics of mass punishment that millions, the millions who now languish in custody and under state supervision are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of the black and the brown. There can be no need to justify injecting race into this discourse. Our prisons are the most race conscious public institutions that we have. No big city police officer is colorblind, nor arguably could any afford to be. Crime and punishment in America have a color. Just turn on a television or open a magazine or listen carefully to the rhetoric of a political campaign and you'll see what I mean. Some radical critics even liken today's prison boom to the slavery of yesteryear. But we don't have to go that far to see that race is an important aspect of what's going on. So given all of this, what is a self-respecting black social scientist to do? Science may be necessary, but it's certainly insufficient here. Consider what I take to be a first order point. No cost benefit analysis of our historic prison built up over the last 35 years is possible without specifying in the calculation how one is to reckon with the pain being imposed on the persons imprisoned, their families and their communities. This of course has not stopped many writers from pronouncing on the purported benefits and cost of incarceration without bothering to address this fundamental moral question. How to value this aspect of policy is to my mind a salient ethical issue. Punishment politics, it seems to me, invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and yes, of those whom we unceremoniously put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity of those people knitted together with offenders in networks of social and psychic affiliation. It should be clear that social science has no answer for the question of what weight to put on a thug's well-being or that of his wife or her husband or his daughter or her son. Nor can science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment in security of life and property or even in peace of mind for the rest of us. To illustrate, consider some recent discussion of the ethics of racial profiling. The obvious cost-benefit take on that problem goes more or less as follows. Screening resources are scarce. So an agent who seeks to detect an unobserved hazard can do so more efficiently by making use of any readily observable information that correlates with the presence of the hazard. If it is known that dangerous people are drawn disproportionately from a group whose members look a certain way, designing a screening process in light of that knowledge eases the monitoring problem. Some have even argued that it's morally acceptable to do this when the stakes are sufficiently great and the alternatives limited even if the cost may fall disproportionately on a disadvantaged group. A social scientist sees easily how that analysis might go and yet I find such arguments deeply unsatisfactory because when we undertake to classify people categorically or to treat them differently based on this categorization, we're doing more than simply solving a resource allocation problem. We are also committing an expressive act in effect declaring how we are to look upon and relate to one another in the society. It seems to me that the decision as to whether and not one wants to make such a statement is often the whole ball game and yet how would the cost and benefits in quotes associated with such constitutive expressive public action be reckoned? Institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted collectively as a society to send a message through our policies and have done so with a vengeance. In the process we have created facts. We have constituted certain social relations between certain elements in our polity. We have in effect answered the question who is to blame for the maladies which be set our troubled civilization. We have constructed a national narrative creating scapegoats along the way. We've indulged our need to feel virtuous about ourselves to assuage our fears. We have met the enemy and the enemy is them. In the midst of this dramaturgy unavoidably so in America lurks a potent racial subplot. Deciding how citizens are varied social rank within a common polity ought to relate to one another is a more fundamental consideration than is deciding which course of action is most efficient. The question of relationship, the issue of solidarity, the challenge of deciding who belongs to the body politic and who deserves civic excommunication. These are philosophical concerns of the highest order. It makes about as much sense to speak of the benefits and cost of citizens relating to one another this way or that as it does to speak of the benefits and cost of dying for one's country. Again, I regret to report, this has not stopped some social scientists from speaking imprecisely this way. Still, in my humble opinion, when the question becomes what manner of people are we Americans, it is utterly foolish whereas it is morally dangerous to look to science for an answer or put differently, a decent society will on occasion elect to eschew the efficient course of action for the simple reason that to follow it would be to act as though we are not the people we have determined ourselves to be. Echoing Kant to act in a way that is contrary to calculated interest may be the only way to give evidence of our decency. In any event, the cost-benefit calculus is surely insufficient to the prescriptive task here. Now a critic is gonna come along and say, ah, but you have simply failed fully to account for all the cost and benefits. Doing so allows value commitments to be taken into account. I understand that argument, but I reject it. Occasions will arise where in the nature of the case such a modified accounting is impossible in principle. It strikes me that asserting the propriety of creating a racially defined pariah class in the middle of our great cities at the start of the 21st century presents us with just such a case. But then if social science is insufficient here, where ought we look for guidance? My answer has been that we ought to look to social philosophy and to history. We ought to be guided by a reasoned assessment of our first principles, such as that undertaken by philosophers like John Rawls and his lifelong project, and grounded in a narrative interpretation of our essential national character, such as that has been exemplified by Michael Walzer and his work on interpretation and social criticism. And we ought to be asking ourselves two questions. Just what manner of people are we Americans and what then must we do? That's all well and good, Professor Lowry, but what has race got to do with any of this? I can almost hear this perennial American question coming in from my right with toe-tapping impatience. My answer is that only someone is willfully blind to our history as was the United States Supreme Court in its 1987 decision in the case, McCleskey versus Kemp, which upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in the face of overwhelming evidence that its application in the state of Georgia reflected blatant racial bias could even ask such a question in the first place. Let me remind you of what the court did in this case. McCleskey drew on a statistical study performed by Professor David C. Baldus and his colleagues at Northeastern University that demonstrated disparities in the imposition of the death sentence in Georgia based primarily on the race of the murder victim. Focusing on more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases during the 1970s, the Baldus study demonstrated that the death sentence was imposed in 22% of the cases involving black defendants and white victims, 8% of the cases involving white defendants and white victims, 1% of the cases involving black defendants and black victims, and 3% of the cases involving white defendants and black victims. Even after accounting for some 39 non-racial variables in a multi-variable regression analysis, the study found that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times as likely to receive a death sentence as defendants charged with killing blacks. Now, Randall Kennedy has argued in his impressive study, Race, Crime, and the Law that, and I quote him here just briefly, despite the systematic evidence, the U.S. Supreme Court voted five to four to uphold McCleskey's death sentence. In its majority opinion, the court dismissed the Baldus study as indicating a discrepancy that only appeared to correlate with race, quoting the court's decision. Apparent disparities and sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system. Where the discretion that is fundamental to our criminal process is involved, we decline to assume that what is unexplained is invidious. We hold that the Baldus study does not demonstrate a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias affecting the Georgia's capital sentencing process. And Justice Scalia added in his own opinion this, and I quote him, the unconscious operation of irrational sympathies and antipathies, including racial upon jury decisions, and hence prosecutorial discretion decisions is real, acknowledged in the decisions of this court and ineradicable. Close quote. Our racial history in this country casts a long shadow even to this day influencing the deliberation of jurors and capital cases, but are its effects genuinely ineradicable? As Justice Scalia would have it, are they really of no contemporary ethical significance? In his influential study, Slavery and Social Death, historical sociologist Orlando Patterson argues that one cannot understand slavery without grasping the importance of honor. More than an institution allowing property and people, slavery was for Patterson, the quote permanent violent domination of natively alienated and generally dishonored persons, close quote. He argued in that 1982 book that the hierarchy of social standing, master over slave reinforced by ritual and culture is what distinguishes slavery from any other system of forced labor. In the American context, obviously, the rituals and customs that supported this hierarchical order, the system of taken for granted meanings that made possible an adherence to high enlightenment ideals in the midst of widespread human bondage, came to be closely intertwined in both the popular and elite culture with ideas about race. As such, dishonor, shown by Patterson to be a generally defining feature of slavery became in the American case at hand inseparable from the social meaning of race. So my historical interpretive syllogism hears this. In general, slaves are always profoundly dishonored persons. In the experience of the United States, slavery was a thoroughly racial institution and so the social meaning of race emerging in American political culture in mid-19th century was closely connected to the slave's dishonorable status. Now that was a long time ago, I grant the point. Yet I hope that remnants of this ignoble history are discernible in the nation's present day public culture. Moreover, I simply note here that the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad in his masterful book, The Condemnation of Blackness, Harvard Press, 2010. Khalil Muhammad, currently the director of the Schomburg Center for African American Culture in New York City and previously a professor of history at Indiana University. Indiana University traces carefully the impact of racial stigma and ideas that come out of the mid-19th century on conceptualizing and reacting to criminal offending by lower class persons, blacks migrating to American cities from the rural South, whites migrating to American cities at the turn of the 20th century from South and Eastern Europe and establishes there, to my satisfaction in any case, the long shadow cast by slavery and the reconciliation of American elites after in the postbellum period on the racial thinking about crime and criminal offending. That's Khalil Muhammad. Now by racial dishonor, I mean something specific, an entrenched inchoate presumption of inferiority, of moral inadequacy, of unfitness for intimacy, of intellectual incapacity, harbored by observing agents when they regard at least some of the racially marked subjects. So we've come from a history of racial slavery and institutionalized racial subordination and the principal venue in which the legacy of that history remains vividly apparent in our public life is in the realm of punishment. We are becoming a nation of jailers, and if I may say, racist jailers at that. We must ask in light of our history whether this is the nation we wanna be and deciding not, then we must do something about it. Now, true enough, attitudes have shifted over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st century. We have an African-American president, that's not nothing. Although with respect to this problem, it's not much. In any case, neither is black marginalization nearly as severe as it had once been. The jury segregation is dead. The open violence which was used to once enforce it has disappeared. We made great progress. Even so, as work over the years of many, the social psychologist, sociologist Larry Bobo comes to mind and his colleagues. More subtle forms of racial bias are discernible in the attitudes of white Americans. New sources of social and political marginalization of black people have emerged since the end of the civil rights era. State sanctioned violence continues to ravage the lives of the black poor, of some among the black poor and to impede their participation in our common national life. Contempt for young black men remains abroad in the land and a new enthusiasm for their debasement has gripped us. I refer here to the devastating impact on the lives of millions of poor black Americans that is due to the rise of the mass incarceration state. But this is different. My critic is going to say, toe-tapping impatience in all. Equality before the law was never meant to imply freedom from the constraint of law. So long as laws are enforced without racial bias, the mere fact of some disparity in the incidents of incarceration is in no way indicative of a new anti-black animus. My hypothetical critic might continue. As I see it, an argument more or less of that form underlies the passivity, even the enthusiasm with which so many informed Americans have greeted these new developments. Many Americans who profess to love liberty, who are most proud of the progress we have made on the civil rights front, upon learning about the rising tide of black imprisonment must console themselves with just such an argument as this. A distinguished philosopher friend of mine, an ethicist no less, who shall remain nameless here, once said to me, Glenn, I don't understand why you continue to complain about there being so many black men in prison. When more people fall sick, more hospitals are built. Yet nobody thinks that the mere fact of an increase in hospitalization signals some kind of social failure. So too with blacks in prisons, do a crime, whatever your race, and you are justly required to do the time. All of this is a piece with an increasingly common view, not only on the right, about the woeful tragedy now playing itself out amongst the black poor, which might be paraphrased as follows. Blacks may languish, but this is their own fault. There is work available in the inner cities. If the immigrants can find it, why not the blacks? If the blacks would marry, if they would embrace the responsibilities of their own freedom, if they would cease to see themselves as victims, if they would just stop their law-breaking, then their prospects would brighten. I find this line of argumentation to be a shockingly ahistorical, short-sighted, and ethically challenged in response to what is one of the great social transformations of our time. Yet arguments of this kind emerge naturally from ideas about personal responsibility, personal morality, and social causation that are now abroad in the land. I know how seductive this worldview can be. I once made a fine public career using quite similar arguments myself. My intent here is to correct this record and set forth and defend an alternative view of the matter. So permit me to offer a summary of what I wanna try to get across. I wanna suggest, with as much passion as I can muster, for which I offer no apology. Somebody has to speak for those juveniles locked in a Florida penitentiary for life without the possibility of parole. For nonviolent drug offenders serving in terminable sentences in a federal prison with no human contact for years on end, for AIDS victims cuffed to their bunks and dying of medical neglect in a quarantine Alabama prison. If not me, and if not now, then who, when? I wanna suggest that the racially disparate incidents of this massive punishment structure is when viewed in historical context patently unjust and that this situation weakens the legitimacy of the American political project. Appropriately so, in the eyes of many of its own citizens and in the view of a great many people throughout the world who see our social practice in light of our racial history as barbaric. In fact, that some of those people are European doesn't make them wrong. And what follows, I wanna present a cursory overview of the history of the rise of race and class of the race class punishment nexus since the 1960s, covering the basic facts concerning incarceration rates and how the incidence of punishment varies by social location. The social and epidemiological harm that punishment can inflict on the communities from which offenders come and to which they return. And the connection of this development to the rhetoric of social discipline writ large in our political culture of today. Rhetoric about dependency, personal responsibility, social hygiene and punishment as the reclamation of public order. I wish also to suggest that history, not theory, not abstract debates about human values that live only within the academy. History is presenting us with a nightmare scenario, one that goes to the heart of the contradictions of a liberal democratic society that has been poisoned by race. Now, I have a problem here. My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today's America may sound to some like a primal scream of rage at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And as I have already indicated, these facts do incline me to cry out in despair. But I wish not to be dismissed as merely venting anger at the consequences of the failures of my co-racialist. I very much wish to be taken seriously and analytical and not only in existential terms. So I want you to know that I bear a burden here of trying to make an argument and not only of effecting a certain outrage. And I'll try to live up to that burden. We will not have solved our historic moral problem of the unequal citizenship for the descendants of slaves which has existed over a century and a half after the end of emancipation. And which is built into the social, economic and political structures of our country. Civil rights reforms to the contrary, notwithstanding, unless and until we come far closer than we are now to achieving equality of life chances, honor and public standing for blacks. I will be talking about substantive racial justice, not about procedural race neutrality. Substantive racial justice was not achieved in 1954 with Brown nor in 6465 with the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Act. I wanna suggest that the rise of the mass imprisonment state opens a new front in this struggle for historic justice. It reflects both explicit and tacit racism by which I mean to say this policy has sometimes been popular because and sometimes despite it having a disproportionately adverse impact on blacks and others. I know that it is not only blacks who are affected. I will suggest that all of this has occurred when feasible alternative policies existed and were known to exist that might have produced much less harm. I will suggest that this punishment policy complex has become a principal way in which racial hierarchy is reproduced in our society. And I will insist that this matter requires and deserves a concerted attention of the nation's policy makers. In a rush to declare ourselves healed of the disease of racism which had festered for a century after the emancipation. And a hurry to celebrate our having solved Gunnar Meridal's American Dilemma. We have embraced what criminologist Michael Tonery calls a policy of malign neglect. And in doing so, we as a society have stumbled more or less wittingly into a God awful cul-de-sac. I will claim that the connection of this apparatus to the history of racial degradation and subordination in our country, lynching, minstrelsy, segregation, ghettoization is virtually self-evident. And that the racial subtext of our law and order political discourses over the last three decades has been palpable. So let's take a look at some of the facts. Trends in U.S. imprisonment over the last 40 years have three features that I think are worth calling to your attention. They are wildly disparate to what one finds in other countries in the West. They are completely out of line with anything here to for observed in our own history in this country. And they are wildly disparate by race and social class. So here taking some numbers from Bruce Western's book Punishment and Inequality in America, Russell Sage Foundation 2008, if I'm not mistaken, maybe a little bit earlier than that, are some early 21st century comparative data showing the per 100,000 rates of incarceration in a variety of countries. You can see the U.S. as a far outlier relative to the UK, which leads the pack of West European nations that are depicted there. And here is the trend over the course of the last three quarters of the 20th century and into the 21st century and the incarceration rate within the United States. And as you can see, the scale of incarceration in the country, this is per 100,000, was relatively stable, rising somewhat during the Depression, but relatively stable at about low 100s per 100,000 until we get to the early 1970s when a regime shift is evident in the data there with the rapid increase thereafter. These are the raw numbers of children 14 or under estimated to have a parent incarcerated by race. And you can see there that African Americans are children. There are roughly twice as many of them. These are absolute numbers. Blacks, of course, are a minority in the population. The impact of incarcerated parenting, parents who are incarcerated, the incidents of that phenomenon amongst African Americans is substantial. I'm merely only trying to illustrate the racial disparity in the scale of this phenomenon. I wanna make the observation that the trends in incarceration rates and in crime rates are not paralleling one another and that in fact the rise that you see here in incarceration after 1970 continues on after 1990, although at a somewhat reduced rate, notwithstanding the fact that crime rates fall dramatically after 1990 phenomenon that has drawn the attention of many scholars. You can see they're superimposed on a graph showing the dark circles, the incarceration rate per 100,000, the incidence of index crimes per 100,000, the open circles which takes a downturn after 1990, although incarceration continues to rise. Likewise here, you can see a somewhat finer depiction of various kinds of crime, property and violent crime and again this decline after 1990 is discernible in those data. It is worth noting however that, and this is Loïc Vecant, the sociologist at Berkeley who stresses this point, I think he's right, he doesn't like the term mass incarceration though that's kind of entered into the lexicon now, prefers to say hyperincarceration because the phenomenon we're talking about is heavily concentrated amongst non-white and poorly educated men. That's indicated here in this chart which again I borrow from the work of Bruce Western, the sociologist at Harvard, where he has estimated the incidence of incarceration for two different cohorts of young men, those who were 20 to 34 years old in 1980 and those who were 20 to 34 years old in 2008, the pink and blue bars respectively. He breaks it out by race and by whether or not persons have completed high school and you can see what the data are showing you there. That's a 37% chance that a 20 to 34 year old high school dropout will be incarcerated in that cohort of persons who were 20 to 34 years old in 2008. And this is similar data depicting an estimate of the lifetime risk of incarceration for people in those same cohorts. This is now the idea that you're estimating the chance that by the time they reach the age of 35, they will have been imprisoned at some point during their lives for at least a year for a felony offense. That's a 69% lifetime incarceration risk for black male high school dropouts born in that later cohort. I just have some data here on characteristics of prison population. I'm not gonna dwell on this but I just wanna sort of paint the picture here. These are educational attainment, broken out state and federal prisons but what you can see there is two thirds of state prisoners as of 2004 had less than a high school education. You can see that 18% of them were Hispanic. You can see that 43% of them were black. Of course, those categories overlap black and Hispanic. You can see that this is I'm looking at state prisoners now, federal prisoners are a little bit older but a quarter of them are 27 or younger, the median age is 34 and 2004 of state prisoners. They were quite young when they were first arrested. 9% presented heart problems among state prisoners, 14% presented asthma, 9.5% hepatitis, mental health issues, any diagnosed mental health problem, 25% of state prisoners. Some one in eight had attempted suicide at one point in their life, according to the survey. So I guess I've said this but I'm gonna say it again. I feel like the town crier given the basic facts, I have to ask myself, what's the role of the social scientist here? It's not just being counting. I have to take note of the fact that serious ethical and policy concerns are raised and one has to ask about such a circumstance, how did it come to pass? Were were the motives of key decision makers? Are we looking merely at unintended consequences or is something else? So let me return to my text here if I may. Because it's not only the quantitative magnitude of the expansive incarceration that demands our attention, it's also the qualitative change in our thinking about the role of these institutions that wants to be remarked upon here. There has been a qualitative transformation of punishment in America. Indeed, the ideas underlying the doing of criminal justice, the superstructure of justifications and rationalizations have also undergone a sea change and a new institutional forms have emerged. Alongside bureaus of policing and imprisonment, what David Garland, the NYU sociologist calls in his fine book, The Culture of Control, a new apparatus of prevention and security has arisen. Expanding sector is made up of, and I quote Garland here, crime prevention organizations, public-private partnerships, community policing arrangements and multi-agency working practices that link together the different authorities whose activities bear upon the problem of crime and security. This sector consists mainly of networks and coordinating practices, local authority panels, working groups, multi-agency forums, so-called business improvement districts and various action committees whose primary task is to link up the activities of existing actors and agencies and direct their effort toward crime reduction, close quote from Garland. He's quite explicit about the function of these developments, to keep them away from us. He says, the prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety. It is, and I quote him, a string, it is a string of work camps and prisons strung across a vast country, housing millions of people drawn mainly from classes and racial groups that are seen as politically and economically problematic. The border between prison and community, Garland says is, and I quote again, heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent leaking out from one to the other, except there are many leakages. Those offenders who were released into the community are subject to ever tighter control and are often returned to custody for violation of the conditions of their release. Many of these parolees and ex-convicts are never really free in that they continue to be closely monitored and never really live a normal life. They suffer, as I say, a form of civic excommunication. Under this brave new security dispensation, relations between the media, the politicians and the public have been transformed. High profile cases get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. Some predator does an awful thing to an innocent. The system has failed, yet again it is said, allowing a perpetrator, Willie Horton, out on furlough, releasing an apparently guilty defendant because the convicting evidence was gathered in violation of the defendant's rights, giving yet another example of revolving door, so-called revolving door justice, calling the mind the old Clint Eastwood dirty hairy films from the 1970s. Public attention to such cases was typically all out of proportion to the actual frequency of their occurrence, and yet laws, such as three strikes in your out or violent sexual predator laws and political careers can be made on the basis of the public's visceral, fear driven reaction to the publicity given to such events. In such a way as this, by accretion has the edifice of this system been built and despite signs that the horrid nature of this shift is being more widely recognized today, the slow moving behemoth of a system is unlikely now to be turned on a dime. Of course, this argument for which circumstantial evidence can be adduced as speculative to some degree, but something interesting has been going on in the connections between race and imprisonment. To put that in, I was taken by one, here I am, I have to skip past some of this stuff because there's just not enough time. I do wanna talk about the war on drugs, but I wanna find my chart first. Oh, here's my chart. So this is Martin Gillins, the political scientist at Princeton whose book Why Americans Hate Welfare is not at all, it's quite interesting, and not at all unrelated to the phenomenon that I'm talking about here. I think because the shift in thinking about social supports for poor people, for dependent families, for mothers who have children without husbands, and the shift in thinking about punishment are affecting similar populations, and again, it's speculative, but I think not implausible, driven by similar underlying political dynamics. And what this graph shows is answers to, in the general social survey, questions designed to elicit people's attitudes of approval or not for the welfare state and their liberalness with respect to racial attitudes, racial and welfare policy preferences over that period. And what you can see is that prior to the mid 1960s, there was a little correlation year to year in the movement in this survey, this annual survey of American attitudes, but after 1960, they tend to move fairly closely together, which doesn't prove anything, of course, but is at least suggestive of the fact that something is going on. Anyway, let me back up here, okay. And then there is the war on drugs. Extent massive incidents vastly unequal by race effectiveness dubious. There's a popular book out there by a woman called Michelle Alexander. The new Jim Crow, this book is called. It's a good read, it's sold a lot of copies, and it's gotten a lot of attention. Alexander is a law professor at Ohio State, an African-American woman who had been a prosecutor for the NAACC, I mean a prosecutor, civil rights lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund earlier in her career, and has issued this cry from the heart about the extent to which imprisonment has become what she calls the new Jim Crow. Now I'm somewhat dubious about the analogy to Jim Crow. I think those kind of analogies are more rhetorical than they are of analytic insight, but in any case, she fingers the war on drugs as a principal aspect of this new regime that we've entered into, and I think that that's something that deserves to be taken seriously, and let me just give you an indication of what it is that I'm talking about here. So this just shows you what the war on drugs is if you measure that by the federal budget spent on drug control policy of all kinds. And you have the numbers there in constant dollars from 1986 through the end of the 20th century, and you see a real takeoff, I mean that's $2 billion, those are thousands of millions of dollars down there, so that's $2 billion in 1986 on all forms of drug control efforts at the federal level, domestic and international and interdiction efforts, as well as money spent by the federal government on treatment and prevention. And that rises to $18 billion up by a factor of nine over a 15-year period in that data, and you can see that the bulk of the increase is associated with domestic law enforcement. But in any case, that's the war on drugs rendered in a single picture. And this is the survey results of American 12th graders reporting illicit drug use in the last 30 days by various substances. All illicit drugs is the top line marijuana and cocaine and then other illicit drugs are broken out separately. And what you can see there is that there is a secular decrease in drug use amongst 12th graders in the United States that, can I do this here? Looks like I can do this here that begins when? It begins in the late 1970s and has already decreased precipitately during the 80s. It begins before the war on drugs shown you by that expenditure chart had its onset. And then experiences an increase even though we're at the... Okay, again, I'm not arguing causality here, I'm just making the circumstantial observation that decline in drug use predates the war on drugs and drug use rises sharply even after the war has been initiated. Drug use in the United States is quite high compared with other countries notwithstanding the fact that we've been at war for a couple of decades. So this is early 21st century comparative data. I'm taking this from a paper by John Donahue at Yale Law School. But you can see here cannabis use in the United States in New Zealand and I don't know what's going on in New Zealand but are distinctly higher than what's reported at least in the other countries that are represented there. Likewise, cocaine usage in the United States is a dramatic outlier relative to other countries that are noted there. And Donahue and his colleagues make the point that if you wanna believe that our effort at containing drug use has been effective then you have to think the drug prevalence in the US would stand out even more globally if we hadn't followed these policies. I think there's good reason to doubt that. Likewise, the RAND Corporation does a survey in American cities to try to estimate the quality adjusted price of various illicit substances on the streets of American cities. Over this period, 20 year period, 1980 to 2000, the graph is somewhat difficult to read but I'll just tell you that the lines that you see sloping down there with one exception that spikes up in the late 80s, early 90s and then trends down again are the quality adjusted prices on the American streets for various substances, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines and they're all trending down sharply down. While the lines that you see going up there, the solid line is an index of incarceration for drug offenses over this period and the dashed line is an index of frequency with which emergency room treatments involve the mention of some drug abuses that cause for the person coming into the emergency room and they're trending up. Again, I'm not proving anything but drugs are cheaper over the 20 year period on American streets when we were supposed to be constricting supply through the policy and you might have expected prices to rise and likewise, problems of people are running into using drugs have increased over this period. Tobacco more addictive than other drugs by far and yet the war on marijuana in New York City's quality of life policing, stopping frisk and small offense broken windows motivated policing shows dramatic shifts in the policy. This is data from a freedom of information request that sociologist Levine and his colleague at one of the New York City colleges has gotten to be able to chart the frequency with which New York City police officers are detaining people for possession of marijuana and there's massive racial disparity. I take this from a Pew Foundation report on the incidents of imprisonment and racial disparities in it and they indicate there where the data have come from but in any case, what you see is that youth drug use reported by race, involvement in drug sales reported by race both showing slightly higher incidents of these phenomena amongst whites than amongst African Americans and yet looking at juveniles who were detained for drug offenses by race, you see a much higher rate of detention for African Americans than for whites. Similar data here, African Americans admitted to state prisons for drug offenses at almost 10 times the rates of whites. So let me think about how I'd like to move forward from here. I'm gonna come to this map that you're looking at in a minute, it's a snapshot showing the intensity by New York City neighborhood of incarceration in two years, 1985 and 1996, meant to underscore the spatial concentration of the phenomenon of incarceration in this particular city and how over that 11 year period between 85 and 86, areas of concentrated high rates of incarceration have basically grown naturally more or less naturally from what they had been earlier. What all this comes to is that, with respect to the war on drugs, to save our middle class kids from the threat of their being engulfed by a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time the drug incarceration began rapidly to rise in the 1980s, we've criminalized our so-called underclass kids. Arrests went up and up, drug prices went down and public consumption seems not to have been much impacted by the policy. An interesting case in point is New York City. Criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues have analyzed data on arrest in New York City residential neighborhoods and police precincts. They report that 70% of state inmates in New York come from New York City and the state of New York come from the city. Between 1990 and 2003, the number of state prison inmates coming from the city rose from 55,000 to 70,000. The city also had an average daily jail population of nearly 18,000. Rates of incarceration in New York City have been largely unaffected by the city's dramatic declines in crime, they report. Moreover, the increase in incarceration is in part attributable to aggressive enforcement of drug laws, especially street-level enforcement resulting in large numbers of felony arrests for retail drug sellers. They note that drug-related offenses have accounted for an increasing proportion of prison admissions, up from 12% of state admissions in 1985 to 31% in 1990 to 38% by 1996. Some 11,600 residents of New York City entered the New York state prison system on drug-related offenses in 1996 compared to 9,345 in 1990. In the New York City of these years, incarceration was highest in the city's poorest neighborhoods, although these were not in every instance the neighborhoods where the crime rates were highest. Most interestingly, when these data were analyzed at the level of police precinct, the authors discovered a perverse positive feedback of incarceration on crime. Higher incarceration in a given neighborhood seemed to predict, and one, of course, wants to be careful with the econometrics here and the inferences about causality, higher crime rates one year later in the same neighborhoods. These authors concluded that the growth and persistence of incarceration over time were due primarily to drug enforcement and to sentencing laws that required imprisonment for repeat felons. Police scrutiny was more intensive and less forgiving in neighborhoods that had high incarceration rates, and parolees returning to such neighborhoods were being more closely monitored. This discretionary, spatially discriminatory police behavior led to a high and increasing rate of repeat prison admissions in the designated neighborhoods even as crime rates fell. Okay, that's the war on drugs. I want to talk a little bit now about social causation and social responsibility. Then I want to talk about social ethics, and then I'm going to conclude. I have five minutes. Thank you. Okay. The minimalist ethical principle that I wish to advance here is that historical racial injustice establishes a general presumption against indifference to contemporary racial inequality. Okay, so where's this coming from? I have to skip over some stuff. Some people will say, what has race got to do with any of this? Some people will say the ethical issues here involve human beings, regardless of their race. Okay, why are you harping on the racial disparities involved here, and what moral leverage do you think you get out of that? They will say to me. And it's in that context that I want to advance my minimalist ethical principle here, which is that the history that we have endured in the country around these questions establishes a general presumption against indifference to the racially disparate consequence of contemporary social policies. I don't need to find the smoking gun of a racist who has treated somebody differently because of their race to take on board the ethical significance and the imperative to action of the observation that this is something that is inconsistent with what American values are that we would purport to embrace. We are hypocrites to the extent that we don't take seriously the ethical imperative to mitigate this racial disparity, I want to argue. And that's not because I think that black people's welfare ought to count higher in any social calculus. It's because I see the present day circumstance as contiguous to and in part a consequence of a history that is nearly universally regarded as racially unjust. From this perspective, durable racial inequality can be understood as the outgrowth of a series of vicious circles of cumulative causation. In a political economy type model, one can write down with equations and all the rest with endogenous policy support for egalitarian reforms benefiting a stigmatized racial group depend on explanations that ordinary people give for observed racial disparities. The association of blackness in the public imagination with unworthiness distorts cognitive processes promoting essentialist causal misattributions. Translate it. They see the disparity among blacks but they don't think of it as saying anything about the structures in which people are embedded but they rather impute the outcomes to the deficiencies of the persons involved and they're more likely to do so as a psychological matter to the extent that it's African Americans given the history of racial stigma in the society. The sum of a million cases each one rightly judged on its marriage to be individually fair can still constitute a great historic wrong. A central reality of our time is the fact that there is open to wide racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, in the extent of law abidingness, in the stability of family relations, the attachment to the workforce and the like. And this is a disparity in human development which is as a historical matter rooted in political, economic, social and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history. That is the inequality of human development that is reflected in widely disparate rates of criminal offending by race in this country is a societal, not a communal or a personal achievement. I just wanna underscore this. It's a societal product. It's something in which we are all implicated. It doesn't merely tell us something about them, it also tells us something about us. At the level of the individual case, we must of course act as if this were not so. There could be no law and thus no civilization. Pardon the use of the word. Without the imputation to particular persons of responsibility for wrongful acts. This is an age old problem, autonomy versus heteronomy I'm told by the philosophers. But the state does not only deal in individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate. It decides how long sentences should be. It decides whether or not to prosecute wars on drugs. It deploys its police resources in particular ways and particular places. It is more or less forgiving. It deals with juveniles in this way or that depending upon the outcomes of social processes. It either does or does not have three strikes in your outlaws and so forth. These are choices that we're making in an ongoing way. The law is endogenous. We have lawbreakers and we also have lawmakers. The lawmakers have choices. Their choices have consequences. They can mitigate the impact of what we're doing in the pursuit of public safety to the extent that it produces the kind of cost and the differential incidents of those costs that I've called attention to here. To the extent that they elect not to. Those also will be choices that they've made. So I'm gonna conclude. What does all this tell us about our purportedly open in democratic society? What manner of people do our punishment policies reveal we Americans to be? Just look at what we've wrought. We've established what to many an outside observer looks like a system of social cast in the center of our great cities. I refer here to millions of stigmatized, feared and invisible people. The extent of disparity between the children of the middle class and the children of the disadvantaged to achieve their full human potential is virtually unrivaled elsewhere in the industrial, advanced, civilized, free world. And it is a disparity that is apparently taken for granted in America. We have a politics in which a politician dare not even speak about the poor, about policy for the poor, about our failures vis-a-vis the poor. Certainly not about the black poor. I see the broader society, as I've said, as implicated in the creation and maintenance of these damaged, neglected, feared and despised communities. People who live in these places know that outsiders view them with suspicion and contempt. The plain historical fact is that North Philadelphia, the west side of Chicago or the east side of Detroit or South Central Los Angeles or a dozen other communities one could name did not come into being by accident or because of some natural processes. As again, the sociologist, Louis Vacant, has emphasized in his writings, these social formations are man-made structures that were created and have persisted because the concentration of their residents in such urban enclaves serves the interests of others. The desperate and vile behaviors of some of the people caught in these social structures reflect not merely their personal moral deviance but also the moral shortcomings of society as a whole. And yet, we Americans have concluded in effect that those languishing at the margins are just simply reaping what they've sown. They're suffering as seen as having nothing to do with us as having, as I've said, no, as presenting no evidence about broader systemic failures. Few summers ago, I took some time to read the non-fiction writings of the great 19th century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. And the only reason I'm telling you this is because I want you to know that I actually went and dug out Tolstoy's essays and read them. As you may know, he became an eccentric pacifist and radical Christian critic at the end of his life. I was stunned at the force of some of his arguments, though I confess I was not entirely persuaded by one of his key points, namely that a true Christian must be absolutely celibate. What struck me most about weird Tolstoy, though, was his provocative claim that the core Christianity lies in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is saying there, he says, you see that fellow over there committing some terrible sin? Well, if you've ever lusted or allowed jealousy or envy or hatred to enter your own heart, then you were to be equally condemned. And Tolstoy claims that this is the central teaching of the Christian faith, namely that we're all in the same fix. Now, don't worry that I'm about to launch into some sermon here. Still, it seems to me that this religious sentiment is entirely relevant to our contemporary secular lives while the behavioral pathologies and cultural threats that we see in society, the moral erosions out there, the crime and drug addiction, sexually transmitted disease, idleness, violence, and all manner of deviance. While these are worrisome, nevertheless, our moral crusade against these evils can take on a pathological dimension of its own. We can become self-righteous, legalistic, ungenerous, stiff-necked, and hypocritical. We can fail to see the mode in our own eye. We can neglect to raise questions of social justice. We can blind ourselves to the close relationship that actually exists between behavioral pathology and the underclass of our country, so-called, on the one hand, and society-wide factors on the other. No, I'm not a moral relativist. Still, when thinking about the lives of the disadvantaged, the fundamental premise that needs to be established, and has yet to be established in American political discourse is that, well, we're all in this together. Those people are our people, they're us, whatever their race, creed, country of origin, whether they be crack-addicted, AIDS-infected, mentally ill, homeless, juvenile delinquents, drug sellers are worse. Whatever the malady, whatever the offense, we're all in the same fix. This is the point that Tolstoy and Jesus, before him, were making, and this is the point I wish to urge upon your consideration at this moment, is it a point which, if taken seriously, has profound implications for how the privileged among us, and that's us in this room, should conduct our lives. I'll stop. Thank you very much. I'd just like to say thank you, Professor Lowry, for that wonderful talk. And I'd also like to say thank you for leaving time for audience questions. Did I? I'm so glad, I'm so glad. Yes, we have about 15 minutes or so, and I'll just get right into it. The first question is, where should policymakers focus in order to best address disproportionate minority contact? Law enforcement policy style, court system, the court systems, or corrections? Law enforcement courts are corrections, so that's a limited range of options. So what I would argue here is that our sentences are too long, and our policy is too punitive for people who are breaking our laws, and I think I could get a lot of company in that. I think, so the econometrician, Steven Derlof and Daniel Nagan, Derlof at Wisconsin, and Nagan at Carnegie Mellon have a paper recently on deterrents. This is a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that's not been published in a volume, in which they systematically assess the evidence on the behavioral consequences of the anticipation of criminal punishment. Do burglars commit fewer burglaries if they anticipate that the mean number of days in prison conditional on being apprehended is gone up by a certain amount. They try to pin that down. They come to the conclusion that certainty is much more important than the severity of punishment. They break up the expected, the calculation of the expected cost of committing the burglary into the two components, the probability that you get apprehended, and then conditional on apprehension the amount of time you expect to spend in prison. And they conclude that it's really the former, the likelihood of being caught and punished, whatever the length of the punishment that has most of the leverage in generating any elasticity from punishment to behavior and negative relationship. They note, for example, in this paper that three strikes laws are really deeply problematic, both for the straightforward demographic reason that they keep people in prison long past the time when their offending behavior would have gone down, but also for this causal behavioral reason that there's the evidence that they actually add much to the deterrent effect of law enforcement is essentially non-existent. So what's going on with these laws is symbolism. It's a way of the legislature expressing to the public its concern about these matters, but it's not necessarily effective policy. So sentences could be shorter. I didn't give the most comprehensive defense of that claim, but I think such a defense could be made. On the other hand, the burden of what I'm arguing here is that it's human development outside of the area of public safety and law enforcement where we're really failing and where to the extent that we were prepared to invest more of our resources and people are gonna say, yes, we've tried, the war on poverty, war on poverty failed. The war on cancer has also failed. People are still dying from diseases. We haven't stopped looking for cures to these diseases because people are still dying from them. Why would we stop looking for effective early childhood interventions that might have material effect on the life courses of the person who were at the margins of society because a cost-benefit study of this or that program suggested it hasn't been as effective as we might have hoped that it would be? I mean, anything that I say here in response to this question is gonna be something of a platitude. I'm not gonna pretend that I know how social policy should be redesigned so that we don't have these problems, but I think that our priorities are way out of whack and that the emphasis should be on human development, not on punitive policy. Thank you. The next question is in reference to the New York City stop and frisk policy. You referenced urban policing and profiling. How do you respond to Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly who argued that the weapons seized and lives saved as a result of stop and frisk disproportionately benefit minorities who sadly make up the bulk of homicide victims? My understanding of the data, this has been much discussed of late because there are public demonstrations against stop and frisk in New York City and there's really a real kind of movement that's getting going against stop and frisk is that the number of weapons seized per relative to the scale of the stop and frisk activity is really small. I wish that I could cite chapter inverse about that precisely, but I don't know those numbers off my head, but I mean, you're talking three or four orders of magnitude. I mean, most of what's happening in stop and frisk, they're not finding people with hot weapons that they can then take off the streets and thereby have some impact. So, I mean, I remain to be persuaded that the magnitude of the effect of violence reduction from stop and frisk is a benefit that warrants the cost in terms of the imposition on civil liberties of ordinary people just walking around. I mean, I can just tell you, I was stopped and frisked in New York City as a visiting professor at Columbia University, living in a little apartment on 113th Street in Harlem because I was riding my bicycle on the sidewalk. I had a bicycle, okay? I'm down in the flats, I wanna get up the hill to Morningside Heights so I can go to my office, okay? So, I'm trying to ride up the hill, I'm coming out of my apartment with my bicycle, it's like a block until you get to the end of the curb and you're going to the street. While I was on the sidewalk, police officers detained me. I'm not gonna dwell on this, it's not about me and it's not really a big deal, except this little anecdote is telling you something about what's going on. I was stopped, I was forced to produce identification and a citation was issued to me requiring my appearance in court, which I ignored out of just sheer fury that they were gonna take my time for something as trivial as that. I was trying to get to the street on the sidewalk, I'll stop, I'll stop. I wanna get to the second part of the question, which is important. What I didn't show you in these slides, I had all queued up but there's not enough time. Michelle Alexander makes this big argument in her book about how we're experiencing the new Jim Crow and then a fellow at Yale Law School called James Forman who happens to be the son of a famous civil rights leader from the 1960s, he's a law professor at Yale, wrote a piece in the NYU Law Review published April of 2012 in which he kind of pushes back against Michelle Alexander and the Jim Crow analogy and the main burden of his argument, he's an African-American as it happens and he is against mass incarceration and against stop and frisk and all the kind of stuff that a liberal black law professor is supposed to be against but his main point was you gotta reckon with the consequences of violence in these communities and the first order business of the state is to protect people and their person and their property and to keep them safe. Black people are more likely to be victimized if blacks are committing crimes because the social geography, the networking and the way in which people are interacting in cities and so you can't simply go from a high rate of black incarceration to claims about Jim Crow without going through or talk about what do you do about violence in these places? So what I'm saying to you is if I could be convinced that stop and frisk really had a huge impact on reducing the incidence of violence in these communities I'd have a different attitude about stop and frisk but I think that Mayor Bloomberg and the commissioner of police there in New York City bear a burden that they've yet to bear. They have a burden to meet that they've yet to meet demonstrating the causal connection between what they're doing which is this wholesale practice that is cast into its net huge numbers of people and is justified by something that I'm not persuaded this is actually happening. Thank you. The next question states, what's a socially conscious white intellectual activist to do about the mass incarceration of racial minorities? Nothing any different than what this socially conscious black intellectual is to do. What is a self-respecting intellectual to do? No, I'm serious about that. I mean, the sense of outrage might to some degree be influenced by my filial connection to the population okay but the responsibilities as an intellectual at least as I would see it to act in this circumstance aren't really any greater for me than they would be for anybody else I would say. I don't know, I mean, what do you think? Not just you personally, whoever asked that question what do you think? Is that outside the protocol? All right, nevermind. Hello, okay. Could you speak to what several authors consider to be the myth of racial progress due to the emission of significant numbers of imprisoned black men from demographic analysis of educational outcomes and wages and less inequality? Well, that's a real thing because the survey taker is these are non-institutionalized populations that are being looked at to generate these trend numbers and various measures of social status of African-Americans and so myth of black progress I wouldn't quite go there. I wouldn't say there's no black progress that black progress is a myth but an overstatement of black progress driven by the fact that you have such high rates of incarceration and that things like unemployment rates or whatever will be based on surveys of populations that exclude incarcerated persons who are definitely not employed. Bruce Western has explicitly, he and Becky Pettit have a paper in which this is exactly what they do. They chronicle how different trends and various measures of social status for African-American men would look if you included in the population persons who are institutionalized then they would look if you, as is the practice didn't include them and there would be less progress but noting that, I still wouldn't go to this language about myth of black progress. I don't think there's any denying that there's been black progress quote unquote since the civil rights era. It's just that there persists a very substantial problem. Thank you. In the consideration of time we'll make this the last question. What effect would extending voting rights to prisoners as some states currently do have on our current prison industrial complex? I can't know what the feedback effect of having to franchise amongst people who are incarcerated or who are formerly incarcerated persons. I mean, there was a lot to talk about. I didn't talk about this. Mansa, M-A-N-Z-A, and Uggens, U-G-E-N, these are scholars at Northwestern University. They have a book out there. I wish I could think of the name of it now but they actually go through and very systematically chronicle the extent to which the American electorate is being materially shaped by post-release policies. These are not just people who are in prison. I think Maine is the only state that allows people who are actually incarcerated to cast ballots. These are people who have been released from prison and who have served their time but are still not able to register to vote in whatever the jurisdiction is because of laws that disenfranchise them for whatever period of time. And Mansa and Uggens go through and make the case that this is not small, this is big. And one of the ways that they make that point is by calling attention to various electoral outcomes that plausibly would be quite different if formerly incarcerated persons had the franchise. So Mitch McConnell's first election to the Senate in Kentucky, they estimate, and you know what they're doing, they're gonna use some kind of demographic prediction model. They're gonna say age, race, sex, whatever, and then they're gonna say what's the likelihood that this person would have voted this way or that and then they're gonna forecast what the outcome of the election would be if those people were able to cast ballots. Not only would George W. Bush not have gotten elected because Florida wouldn't have been close. I mean, he would have lost it by tens of thousands of votes, not just by a few hundred, not only that. But the whole Senate wouldn't look different. Republicans don't get the Senate majority in whatever year they get. I mean, all kinds of huge stuff like this. Now, whether or not that would make our politics profoundly different and would have effects on incarceration policy, I have no way of knowing that. I mean, I have in fact reason to doubt it, frankly. Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States and there's an African-American attorney general and they face a political environment in which they have relatively little wiggle room, whatever their inclination might have been to run around talking about this. I don't think these issues are going to necessarily be touted anymore by national politicians who happen to be African-American because they got 5% more votes at the margin because people who had been in prison were able to vote. They still basically are dealing with the median voter and they're still gonna be constrained by a lot of these other things. So, I mean, this is way beyond my expertise. There should be political scientists speculating about this, but I doubt that it would change the policy very much, but it would have a big effect on the character of the electorate. Thank you. Okay, thanks very much.