 Chapter 16 crime policy. Protecting people from crime is one of government's main responsibilities. However, we're a constitutional republic. We have a constitution that gives people rights, so therefore a balance must be struck between being tough on crime and respecting people's constitutional rights. So the government can't just do whatever it wants in the name of being tough on crime. The government also has to respect our constitutional rights, the kind of rights that I talked about in my lecture on civil liberties. So when it comes to discussing where this balance between being tough on crime and respecting people's constitutional rights is, Republican and Democrats tend to disagree over how to strike that balance. Republicans tend to want to be tough on crime with more aggressive policing than Democrats as I explained in the last lecture on political ideologies. So for example, when we talk about how Republicans and Democrats disagree over how to strike that balance, one good example is the question of stop and frisk. Is stop and frisk a legitimate crime fighting tactic? Is stop and frisk something that government should be doing in the name of policing and protecting us from crime? Republicans tend to agree with stop and frisk, whereas Democrats disagree with stop and frisk. Now for those of you who may have never heard of stop and frisk, what stop and frisk is it's a policing tactic where the police very aggressively stop and frisk anyone that they believe is suspicious. And that could mean four young men, four teenage men standing on the street corner at 10 o'clock at night on a summer night. Now just because you and your friends are standing on street corner at 10 o'clock at night on a hot summer night doesn't necessarily mean you're suspicious, doesn't necessarily mean that you look like four people who are about to commit a crime. But in the name of stop and frisk, the idea is that well anybody who's suspicious should be stopped and frisked as a way to prevent crime before it happens. What the police are prior looking for is illegal substances like a gun that could be used to commit a crime or illegal drugs. So the police favor stop and frisk. It's been a tactic of New York City's government for several years now. Republicans tend to support it because it's an act of being tough on crime and aggressive policing. Democrats and liberals tend to oppose stop and frisk and civil libertarians, people who want the most expansive protections for civil liberties also oppose it because they argue that stop and frisk is a violation of people's constitutional rights. And I'll explain why in a little bit in more detail in a few minutes but the idea is that while you can't just stop anybody who the police might think is suspicious because the police can say well they think everybody's suspicious and so they can stop everyone. And as we've seen from the data, most of the people who've been subjected to stop and frisk in New York City over the course of its history tend to be black and Hispanic males. So it's mostly non-whites that have been stopped for stop and frisk. So it's a question of whether it's even a racist tactic many people believe it is and is therefore not a good tactic, not a good way of fighting crime. So another big question that Democrats and liberals, Republicans and Democrats debate over is the very question of what causes crime, the very basic question of what causes crime and experts in criminology, people who study crime behavior and crime, finding for a living, also debate what causes crime. For example, are some people born with a genetic propensity to commit crime? In other words, being a criminal, partly a function of biology is in the criminal's DNA to tend to commit crime, to have a propensity to have a leaning toward becoming criminal. So is it biology? Some people say yes, some people say there is such a thing as a crime gene that people have that leads them to become criminals just in the same way that some people have a biology DNA that will make them more likely to contract cancer or some other disease. Or is crime primarily result of social factors? Is crime related to these social factors? Poverty, drugs, unemployment, lack of educational opportunities and systemic racism. Systemic racism is racism that is born within the systems that we live in so that people who live in certain neighborhoods are more likely to encounter racism in their school systems, in the way that police police in their neighborhoods and so on and so forth. So that these social problems, poverty, drugs, unemployment, lack of educational opportunities, systemic racism tend to exist more often in lower-class neighborhoods in cities like New York and who typically lives in these lower-class neighborhoods, non-white peoples. And so if we look at the the prison population today, one-third of all the people who are in prison today are African American and there are also a lot of Hispanic people in prison. So the majority of people in prison today are not white, but the majority of people living in the United States are white. So what that means is that there's a greater proportion of non-white people in the prison system compared to the amount of non-white people overall and there are less white people in prison than there is relative to the amount of white people living in the whole country. So that raises an interesting question that people debate are non-white people mostly in jail because of biology, genetics, or is it the social factors like systemic racism and so for example non- poor and non-white people who get arrested and accused of crime are less likely to be able to hire their own lawyers, good lawyers, lawyers who have more time and a greater ability to focus on their case whereas white as opposed to white people who are arrested and accused of crime who do have the ability more often than not better ability to hire private lawyers. And so as a result of that more non-white defendants in the criminal justice system end up either pleading guilty rather than going to trial or they are found guilty at trial sometimes not always but a lot of times because of a lack of a good lawyer whereas white defendants might be able to or better off or better able to cut a deal that gives them probation or in the case of a drug charge the ability to go to rehab rather than jail. So black and Hispanic defendants, non-white defendants usually end up going to jail more within the criminal justice system as opposed to white defendants usually for the same crime or the same charge. So that's what I mean by system of racism that the system itself is designed such a way that it is racist toward non-white people not because the people who run the system judges lawyers uh police necessarily or or individually racist but the system itself is set up against people who are non-white so the system itself is racist and within that you can also have a big problem of the the individual lawyers judges and police actually themselves being racist uh so uh is crime and incarceration uh of people who are charged with crimes the function of genetics uh is it is it the primary result of social factors or what is it and so that's an important question to uh decide uh and figure out because how you answer the question of what causes crime will determine how you think about crime policy and what you think the government should do about crime how you think the government should go about fighting crime uh now what we know for sure is that in the past 40 years crime in cities has decreased crime across the whole country has decreased but particularly in inner cities where crime was a big problem in the late 1960s early 1970s through the 1980s and even has decreased uh but that also brings up another debate between the experts and between democrats and liberals republicans and democrats over exactly why crime has decreased in the past 40 years has crime decreased because of social factors well maybe because we do know that in the past 40 years the male teenage population has decreased people have had less children uh within the past 40 years and so as a result of that today there are fewer teenage boys in the united states in big cities and we know that uh this is a group male teenage boys that has that typically commits the most crime especially uh very low level crime like possession of marijuana uh fighting uh minor assaults graffiti things like that those kinds of crimes and we also know that during the same period the past 40 years hard drug use especially crack cocaine has decreased crack cocaine was an especially addictive uh drug that was introduced into american cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s and it wreaked havoc in inner cities especially in black neighborhoods in inner cities uh and as a result it led to high rates of crime because of people fighting over uh the right to sell crack gangs uh drug dealers fighting each other over territory to sell crack and also uh people who were addicted to crack turned to criminal activity to get money to buy more crack and to keep their habit going uh so as crack as the use of crack cocaine decreased and the and the the selling of crack cocaine decreased so too did uh crime decrease so uh that's one argument for why crime in cities has decreased in the past 40 years that social factors caused this decrease uh another school of thought another uh feeling another belief is that crime decreased not so much because of social factors but because of more aggressive policing uh especially two uh very particular types of crime fighting uh two crime fighting tactics that were used in cities like new york and these these two tactics were heavily used uh by the NIPD the broken windows strategy and stop and frisk the one that I talked about uh just a few minutes ago so what is broken windows broken windows was a strategy that was first employed uh in uh the early 1990s when Rudolph Giuliani became mayor of new york in 1993 he brought in a new police commissioner a guy by the name of William Bratton and Bratton introduced this uh strategy of broken windows into the NIPD's uh strategy of fighting crime broken windows is a strategy whereby the police try to prevent crime by focusing on low level crime and not being tolerant of low level crime the idea is that if you focus on uh arresting people and harshly prosecuting people for every single small act of crime like breaking a window or uh jumping a subway turnstile or stealing a pack of cigarettes uh gauging and graffiti if the NYPD cracks down on these types of low level crimes and arrests every single person who's caught engaging in this kind of low level crime then one of two possible things could happen that are that could help you uh prevent higher loves of crime and prevent these people mostly younger people teenagers or even even younger 10 11 12 year olds from engaging in uh greater crime so the idea is that well if you arrest uh these kids especially young kid who's engaging criminal activities for the first time by uh tagging a store with graffiti you might scare that kid so much that the kid never again engages in crime the other way that you might prevent a greater amount of crime in the future is if you arrest somebody for for jumping a turnstile for example and you run their name through the system you might find out that they are they have a warrant out on them for some other crime and so you might end up uh solving other crimes putting that person in jail uh you might find a gun on them and so by focusing on uh very low level crime uh you will uh hopefully uh prevent higher loves of crime so if you get tough from the very beginning that has a deterrent effect that's the idea uh and uh the other part of the Burke window strategy is that if you raid a certain neighborhoods of low level crime of young kids who are committing crime maybe simply because they're acting stupid then you're going to make that neighborhood safer and the people who live in that neighborhood will uh take more pride in their neighborhood uh they will feel more secure uh and they will also hopefully trust the police more so that when serious crimes happen uh they will help uh the police solve those crimes and so that's the that's the two ideas of broken windows how broken windows strategy is supposed to work to focus on aggressive policing of low level crimes so that you can prevent higher level crimes the other attack to stop and frisk as i just said is the idea of being a very aggressive uh allowing the police to stop anyone they think is suspicious in order to search them frisk them and uh hopefully uh prevent them from committing uh greater crimes because you might find a gun or drugs on them or you might scare them uh so that's the idea and so some uh experts believe that one of the reasons why uh New York City is safer today than it was say 40 years ago there's a lot there's less crime today especially violent crimes like homicide murders is because of this more aggressive policing because of the broken windows policy and because of the stop and frisk policy but as i said before the this kind of aggressive policing uh has consequences one of the consequences uh is uh the uh murders that we've seen the killings of unarmed uh men uh permanently black men at the hands of uh police uh for example uh eric garter uh who was uh killed uh by police on statin island uh several years ago uh because the police uh tried to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes which is a crime to sell uh loose untaxed cigarettes uh or even uh loose tax cigarettes is a crime you can't uh sell individual cigarettes from a pack of cigarettes that you bought so that's what he was doing and when the police went to arrest him uh eric garter uh resisted uh and was put in a chokehold and as a result of that chokehold he was uh suffocated uh to death by the police uh and there've been uh many more incidents going way back to the 90s going back to uh rudu juliani's time and the mayor brought broken windows and stop and frisk uh into the city there was uh the case of ablohima uh who was uh uh mistakenly arrested in brooklyn in the 1990s uh he was uh trying to stop a fight that broke out outside of a uh outside of a of a club in flat bush uh during this fight that he was trying to break up somebody punched a police officer the cops thought that it was ablohima who had punched the officer they arrested him uh when they took him to the uh to the police precinct before putting them in a cell they took him into uh the the bathroom in the uh in the precinct and they essentially tortured him they beat him up they broke a uh uh they broke off the uh the the handle of a plunger of a of a toilet plunger and they used it to rape him uh they stick it they they they uh they stuck him with it they stuck it inside him uh and there were many other incidents of uh police brutality and police killings that many people blame on this more aggressive policing that was instituted by rudu juliani which essentially gave the police permission to act aggressively and uh in many cases this aggression got out of hand uh stop and fresco also had the uh had the had a problem uh which was that it was basically unconstitutional that you the constitution does not allow the police to simply stop you and search you simply because a cop thinks that you look suspicious uh the nypd stubborn fisk policy led to a federal lawsuit floyd a l versus city of new york in 2013 uh and uh the lawsuit was uh lawsuit floyd was uh a uh a young man who had been stopped and frisked several times uh and he uh and a group of other uh young men who had been stopped multiple times decided to sue the city new york uh saying that the city uh with its stopping fisk policy was violating the constitutional rights of the people who were stopped the constitutional right cited by the judge in the case uh is the fourth amendment's prohibition of unlawful certain seizure according to the fourth amendment to the u.s constitution and you might remember that i talked about this in my lecture on civil liberties states that the police cannot simply uh stop and search someone's person or property without a good reason without a warrant or something called probable cause so as a result of this uh lawsuit the judge in the case ruled that the way that the nypd was engaging in stubborn frisk resulted in the constitutional violation of the rights of the people who are being stopped okay uh the government according to the constitution according to the fourth amendment cannot search you or your property without your consent so if the police knock on your door and knock on your on the door of your home and say we'd like to come in and search your home or we'd like to search you if you say yes then that's fine uh if you you have a right to waive your constitutional rights and you can give the government permission the police permission to search your property so the government needs your consent and or judicial warrant and i talked about that you remember in my lecture on civil liberties where the government uh the police or the district attorney will have to go to a judge and convince the judge that they have a good enough reason to search you and then the judge will give them a warrant which is a piece of paper that uh that allows the police to search your property even without your consent and or probable cause so even if uh there might be some cases where some instances where the police don't have time to go get a judicial warrant and emergency situation they can stop or search someone or arrest someone without a warrant if they have what's called probable cause and probable cause is a a good common-sense reason to think that someone is engaged is either engaging in or is riskily engaged in the illegal activity so for example let's say i'm a police officer i'm walking down Atlantic Avenue in the middle of July in broad daylight and it's 95 degrees out and i'm walking past the bank and as soon as i walk past past this bank the bank alarm goes off and i see someone run out the door wearing a ski mask and holding two bags that seem to be full of something i don't have a warrant to stop that person if i think that person may have just robbed that bank but i do a probable cause i do have a a good reason to probably believe that this person is engaged in a crime so i don't need their consent to stop them or search those bags or search that person's pockets i don't need to do judicial warrant because it's it's by the time i go to a judge and get a warrant that probable robber is gone but i do have probable cause so i can stop that person and arrest them right away and search the bags and why do i probable cause because it's 95 degrees out the guy's wearing a mask what is he doing wearing a mask in middle of July 95 degrees he's holding two bags and he's running out of a bank where the the bank alarm has just gone off so you know 99 percent of people would say yeah that guy just robbed that bank most people would say that and so i have a good common sense reason as a cop to stop that person because i've got probable cause here's another instance uh and your textbook talks about this let's say uh i'm driving down the highway and i'm speeding the a cop pulls me over comes up to my window to get my license and registration insurance and uh he says uh i'd like to search your trunk the trunk of your car does the uh officer does the police officer have a right to search your trunk no not without your consent if you consent to allowing the officer to search your trunk that's fine but if you say no he cannot he or she cannot search your trunk why because they don't have probable cause why because the reason they stopped you was speeding and they have no reason to search your car in relation to the speeding all they can do is stop you and issue you a ticket for speeding and that's it now what if though what if it's this scenario the cop pulls you over speeding they go up to your window knock on your knock on your window uh and ask you for your license registration and insurance but as the cop looks into the window to talk to you he sees a bag of cocaine or what he thinks is cocaine sitting there on the passenger seat in plain view meaning that he doesn't really have to do anything special to see that bag of cane he just sees it it's right in his plain sight can he search that bag and if he determines that it's a bag of cane can he arrest you yes that is what's called a plain sight search he can search anything that's in plain sight he can act on anything he sees in plain sight meaning he meaning the cop if the cop were to ask you to get out of your car because you're speeding and then if he were to go into your car and then look under the seat and if he pulled out a bag of cane that would not be a okay search because that's not a plain sight search plain sight search is what he can see simply by talking to you he can't see under your seat so if he can't see under your seat he can't search under your seat without a good reason without a probable cause without a warrant or without your consent so anything in plain sight he can see anything not in this plain sight he can't see now what if the cop pulls you over speeding and he goes up to your window and he starts to ask you for your license insurance and registration and all of a sudden he hears banging on your from within your trunk and he hears somebody yelling please let me out i've been kidnapped can the cop forcibly open your trunk and search it yes again that's an example of probable cause hearing somebody knocking from within and yelling help me i've been kidnapped gives the cop the right to bust open your trunk to see if there's somebody in there and if there is he can arrest you but if he doesn't hear anything in the trunk and he's got no reason to believe that there's anything else involved but you speeding he cannot open your trunk without your permission without your consent all he can do is give you a speeding ticket okay now what if the police conduct an illegal search and find something illegal can they arrest you well yeah they probably are going to arrest you but uh that illegal material cannot be used against you as evidence in a trial and that's because of something called the exclusionary rule which says that the government has to exclude from trial any evidence that was obtained illegally so a judge in your trial will have to exclude that evidence so let's say for example that a cop pulls you over for speeding and for no reason really makes you get out of the car and searches the car and finds illegal drugs or illegal weapon or something illegal and they arrest you for that before you go to trial your lawyer will if he's a good if he or she is a good lawyer your lawyer will go to the judge and argue that the police had no right to search your car that all they did was pull you over speeding and that they had absolutely no probable cause no good reason to search your car so therefore anything they found in the car cannot be used against you so even though they found something illegal they cannot put you on trial for possession of illegal weapon or possession of illegal drugs or anything like that you won't get the you won't get the drugs or the gun back but according to the exclusionary rule that judge will not let the trial use evidence use that evidence and if that's the only evidence they have against you then the district attorney will probably drop the charge against you because he or she knows that without that weapon or without that drugs that will be would be presented to the jury the jury will never find you guilty so according to the exclusionary rule material that is illegally obtained cannot be used as evidence in our trial okay so this the any search has to be based on consent a judicial warrant or probable cause and anything obtained from a search without one of these three things can be thrown out according to the exclusionary rule can be cannot be used as evidence okay so that's the fourth amendment the fourth amendment deals with search and seizure the fifth amendment as i said in my lecture on constitutional civil liberties affords to constitutional protections the right to do process which means that before the government can take either your freedom away by putting you in jail or your life away through capital punishment through execution the government has to prove that you that you're guilty in a court of law according to a fair process which gives you the right to defend yourself to have a lawyer and all of that because the idea is and i'm sure you've all heard this before somebody who's charged with the crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty so even if you've been arrested even if you've been charged with the crime you are constitutionally innocent until you are proven guilty and until you're proven guilty in a fair process in a due process dues in other words fair you cannot be put in jail you cannot be executed and the other thing that the fifth amendment does is protect you from self-incrimination meaning that you do not have to answer any questions in a situation where the police are asking questions you and in a trial you don't have to answer a question you don't have to testify in a trial you cannot be forced to testify against yourself you cannot be forced to self-incrowning incrowning means to get yourself in trouble and i i remember i also talked about the very famous supreme court case from 1966 United States vs. Miranda which was a case where the police in Arizona arrested this guy Miranda and during questioning Miranda confessed to a crime and his after he was convicted of the the crime based on his self-incrimination his lawyer appealed all the way up to supreme court and said that by by interrogating him without letting him know that what his fifth amendment rights were the police had violated his fifth amendment rights by forcing him to self-incrowning and the supreme court agreed and said that in that it's not just enough for people to have fifth amendment rights that the police are required the government is required to tell people what their rights are because not everybody may know what their rights are and so that's why today before the police either interrogate someone or arrest someone or just after they've arrested someone before but before they talk and ask questions of somebody who's been arrested they always inform them of their Miranda rights their right to remain silent their right to have a lawyer or so on and so forth their constitutional rights is explained to them before any questioning commences by the police the sixth amendment is the rate to a speedy and public trial so if you are charged with a crime and you're going to go to trial the government cannot delay that trial forever because you are presumed innocent you have a right to have the situation dealt with quickly and so therefore you have a right to a speedy and public trial that trial is also right you also have a right to a trial by jury so that a jury of your peers people like you will decide whether you're whether you're guilty or not whether you committed the crime or not and the eighth amendment has two parts to it it's the eighth amendment says that the government cannot subject you to excessive bail so if a judge agrees to let you out of jail while you're waiting trial or during trial if you pay if you agree to pay a certain amount that amount cannot be excessive it cannot be say five billion dollars something that's so much more than any reasonable person could pay and the eighth amendment also protects you against cruel or unusual punishment so that if you're arrested and you're being interrogated the police cannot beat a confession at you if you're in jail the the prison guard cannot subject you to any type of torture or unusual punishment anything that would be considered cruel or unusual punishment so for the past several years a debate over criminal justice reform has begun people discussing ways to make their criminal justice system more fair less systemic systemically racist what there are a couple of things that have been talked about in terms of conducting criminal justice justice reform one is bail and sentence reform bail and sentencing is often unfair and the data suggests that there is systemic racism involved if not actual individual racism from judges who decide bail and sentence reform there's at least institutional racism because the way the system works is against people who are poor people who don't have the money to pay bail or get good lawyers tend to suffer more than people who do get good lawyers so that's part economics but also part race as well because more of the people who are poor defendants who can't afford good lawyers who can't afford bail tend to be non-white so not every white defendant is rich but there but if you compare white defendants and non-white defendants more white defendants are able to afford bail and more white defendants are able to afford good lawyers who make better deals for sentencing so and the data shows that wealthy defendants and if you compare wealthy defendants to poor defendants white defendants and non-white defendants wealthy and white defendants tend to get better sentences than non-white and poor defendants primarily because they because white and wealthy defendants get better lawyers who can argue for less less years in jail for the same type of crime that would get more years in jail for a black or Hispanic defendant or a poor white defendant and when it comes to bail white and wealthy defendants are more often able to raise the money to pay for bail and there have been several recent horrible horrific cases of people who spend lots of time in jail and who've been hurt or even died in jail as a result of the fact that they couldn't make bail so one of the most famous and recent New York City history is the story of a young black man called named Khalif Browder who was arrested and it turns out falsely arrested after he was accused of stealing a backpack and he was charged with theft and he couldn't make bail because his family was not able to raise the money for bail and so as a result he was sent to Rikers Island he was sent to Rikers Island to a trial and he was beaten he was picked on he was subjected to physical and emotional abuse while he was there and he ended up killing himself because of the the the the effect of all that abuse and so this is somebody who probably would not have been in that situation if he had been able to afford bail and so a debate has begun among criminal justice reformers should people be subjected to that kind of abuse when they haven't been accused when they haven't been found guilty of anything yet simply because they cannot make bail another ask another idea within this talk of criminal justice form is decriminalizing marijuana possession so not making marijuana legal but decriminalizing it which means not subjecting people who are arrested for marijuana possession to a very harsh prosecution so instead of arresting and putting people in jail for marijuana possession especially low amounts of marijuana possession and i'm not talking about people selling drugs but rather people who are simply using drugs recreationally then instead of subjecting them the harsh prosecution instead of arresting them cops giving them simple summonses which is not an arrest where the cop basically gives you a ticket you go home right away and then you have to show up some weeks later to either argue that you are not guilty or guilty but even if you're found guilty the most that will happen is you will pay a fine in these low level criminal courts where nobody goes to jail where the toughest sentences are monetary fines and where nobody is put in jail when they're arrested nobody's really arrested even you simply get what's called the summons a ticket from from a cop and then of course the biggest part of the biggest aspect of this discussion over criminal justice form is policing reform police reform of changing the way police are trained to prevent instances where police get out of hand like in the instance of George Floyd being arrested and then being killed as a result of a cop kneeling on his neck for 10 or 12 minutes for however how long that was or Eric Garner being put in chokeholds so one of the ideas is to ban chokeholds completely so that cops are not allowed to use chokeholds in any circumstances except when their life is really at danger and in another aspect of police reform is to keep better record keeping on police activities better records of police discipline records especially when it comes to police who've been fired so one typical one you know typical scenario is among cops who've been involved in the killing of unarmed black men in recent years is that some of these cops were cops who had been uh fired from another police force because they were deemed unfit but what happened is that they simply went to another town and were able to get uh hired by the new police force why because the record of their having fired for being considered unfit by the previous police force was not on the record did not uh get set to other police forces around the country to say you really shouldn't hire this person there's something wrong with this person and they shouldn't be a cop so that's the other thing that's uh been talked about in the process of discussing police reform is having a system whereby if a police officer is fired for misconduct or because of a feeling that the cop is an emotionally fit to be a cop then that news that record is sent to every other police force in the United States so that if that person goes to try to get a job as a cop somewhere else that police force they apply to will know all about it will be able to uh decide whether or not they want to hire this person based on a true knowing of their of their whole record uh so this debate over criminal justice reform is a response to several things uh recent police shootings uh george the and other killings george floyd timmy rice uh abdoul uh eric garner uh michael brown years ago in in uh Missouri which uh is what led to the emergence of the black lives matter movement uh which has put a lot of pressure on uh government uh to recognize that there's a problem here that needs to be addressed in our criminal justice system uh and one other thing that the black lives matter movement has uh has uh made people aware of uh and that's the increasing recognition of systemic racism that there is a problem in the way their system is set up that is designed to work against uh non-white poor people that it's not a fair system that our criminal justice system is supposed to be fair it's supposed to treat everyone equally but the way that it's set up in the way we do bail sentencing the way that lawyers are hired and given to people who cannot afford them uh is a system that maybe is not designed purposefully to work against certain groups of people but it does and that's really what matters doesn't matter what whether this is uh whether this racism is intentional or not it's a fact of life and it's there and it needs to be dealt with uh it's also a response this criminal justice reform is also a response to the degrees in crime that we've seen over the past four years and a desire to reduce the cost of prosecution incarceration one of the interesting things about criminal justice reform is that it's actually something that conservatives and liberals republicans and democrats uh mostly agree on they don't agree on every part of it but they agree that we should do something to uh keep more people out of jail with sentencing reform and bail reform decriminalizing marijuana possession doing things that lead to less people going in jail not just non-white people but white people as well uh and the reason for that uh is twofold uh for liberals the focus is on systemic racism but for conservatives the focus for doing these things for having this type of reform is not exactly racism which most conservatives would probably deny that this racism exists or exists to the same level that liberals think it does but for conservatives it's it's a desire to save money if you put fewer people in jail if you incarcerate fewer people if you uh prosecute fewer people then you don't have to spend as much money uh housing people in jail and feeding people in jail uh so the desire for criminal justice reform uh is agreed to for the most part by republican democrats by conservatives and liberals but for different reasons conservatives and liberals republicans and democrats have different reasons for why they support criminal justice reform but regardless of why they do they for the most part agree that there's a need for some bail reform a need for some sentencing reform and a need for some decriminalization of low-level drug possession uh along with that there's also a debate now about uh the rights of people who have gone to jail and are now and have now been released one of one aspect of this has to do with voting rights so uh most states uh well actually all states take away your right to vote once you've been convicted of a crime so if you're convicted of a crime and you're sent to jail you don't have the right to vote right so people in jail don't get the right to vote they lose the right to vote as a result of being convicted of a crime what happens after you get into jail is a different story and that depends on state by state some states uh give people the right to vote back once they've been released from jail some states do not some states only give certain people the right to vote after they aren't in jail uh meaning only the only the only people who were convicted of non-violent non-violent offenses so some people will get their right to vote back after they've been in jail other people won't some states uh say that well really anybody can anybody theoretically can get their right to vote back but it's not automatic you have to go before a judge and get the judge to agree to let you vote again so part of the criminal justice reform debate is over whether states should be more open to letting more ex-convicts vote on the theory that on the reasoning that well once you're out of jail that means you've paid your price you you've done your time and now you're being let back into society and part of being let back into society should mean that you now have the right to vote again uh another aspect of this uh debate has to do with employment prospects for ex-convicts it's very hard for people who've been in prison and get out of prison to get a job and that's because uh most states and local governments uh require uh or allow uh a question on a job application have you ever been convicted of a crime and by law you have to answer that question uh truthfully and so if you've been to jail and you answer that question uh truthfully and you say yes i've been in jail uh it's going to be very hard to get a job uh when employers know that you've been been to jail and so uh many cities around the country now and new york is one of them have passed laws that uh prevent employers from asking whether people have been in jail especially if somebody's been in jail for a non-violent crime and new york's law only allows new york city's law only allows that question to be asked of a job applicant if the job is related to either law enforcement or the protection of children so if you're applying for a job uh as a teacher or you're applying for a job as a as a school bus driver or if you're applying for a job as a security guard you can be asked and you will be asked if you've ever been convicted of crime but if you're applying for a job at mcdonald's or target you won't be because those jobs don't uh involve law enforcement uh you don't have to carry a gun for or another weapon or some kind of like that for those kinds of jobs so this is all part of the criminal justice reform debate uh that has been going on recently uh and it's because of the idea that uh being put in jail is not only supposed to be a punishment but it's supposed to be about rehabilitation and so allowing people to vote and especially allowing people to be able to get a job after they get out will uh lead them to not uh hopefully will lead them to not go back to a criminal lifestyle so that's the end of this chapter i will see you for the next one