 everyone it is a pleasure to see all of you here today and I know that you've got people visiting with us virtually so welcome. Welcome to tonight's policy talks at the Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy to those of you in the room and to those visiting us virtually. I'm Celeste Watkins Hayes I'm the Interim Dean of the Ford School and I'm also the founding director of the Center for Racial Justice. I'm excited to get into this very important conversation at the intersection of social policy and criminal justice with my friend and colleague Judge Laurel Beatty Blunt. What a moment for us to be in conversation together. So to give you a brief snapshot of the judge's very impressive resume Judge Laurel Beatty Blunt is a distinguished litigator legal expert and public servant. After serving many years as a litigator and judge in 2018 Judge Beatty Blunt became the first black woman to serve on the 10th District Court of Appeals in Columbus Ohio. She is a Towsley Foundation policymaker in residence here at the Ford School teaching a graduate course on the Supreme Court that examines the court's place in the American legal system and I know many members of that class are here today. Yes the the class also looks at the processes and influences by which a case reaches the Supreme Court and the court's impact on public policy. Tonight's event is part of our Towsley Foundation lecture series and I'd like to thank the Towsley Foundation for their continued support of this program that enhances our curriculum and strengthens our ties to the policy community. A reminder that there will be time at the end of the conversation for you to ask questions and I encourage you to be thinking about questions that you'd like to ask. Those in the room can just raise your hands during Q&A and we have staff members with microphones who will come to you and those watching virtually can tweet your questions to hashtag policy talks. I know we have an interdisciplinary audience today across policy, law, social work and beyond and I'm sure I'm excited to say our questions definitely reflect that. There are questions I've already received. So with that please join me in welcoming Judge Beatty Blunt to dive into what policymakers need to know about the criminal justice system. Thank you for having me. So, uh, Judge, you've had a really impressive career and just to help people level set and walking us through, you've been a plaintiff's attorney, you've been a defense attorney, so you've been on both sides of the table, you've been a state lobbyist, you've been a common please judge and now you serve on the 10th District Court of Appeals in Columbus, Ohio and I'd love to kick off our discussion by asking about your initial impressions of the criminal justice system when you were first charting your career as we have so many students in the audience that are imagining the institutions that they're going to be coming into. What were the assumptions and perceptions that initially influenced and guided your thinking about the criminal justice system and did those evolve over time? I think when I first started, well, thank you for having me. Um, when I first started, I think I looked at crime, um, way more black and white, uh, very right, wrong, boom, it's over. Um, and that absolutely evolved over time because I think as a judge, what shaped me the most was those 10 years in the trial court. It's called common police court in Ohio. Here in Michigan, it's called circuit court. And so my jurisdiction was felony criminal cases in civil cases over $15,000. So, um, the first thing I did realizing that while I had been on the plaintiff's side and the defense side, it was all civil law. And so the first thing I did as a judge was to go to all the places that I thought touched criminal law. Um, so I went to a prison. I went to a jail. I went to a mental health facility. I went to, um, in Ohio, we call them community based correction facilities, but they're most popularly known as halfway houses. Um, so and it was incredibly helpful for me to not only go there and see the places, but also to meet the people. So then you fast forward to I start sentencing defendants. I even have a picture in my head of where I'm sending someone. Um, and then as far as the evolution of looking at things as black and white, you know, you come to realize that oftentimes like in a context of like a revenge, something done out of revenge, while that person might be doing something horrific, they think they're right. Do you see what? Because they feel like they're getting retribution or whatever. Um, so it isn't necessarily so black and white. Um, I had always had a good awareness that people grew up differently than I did. But as I was during my judicial career, even that changed because first of all, I I recognized how fortunate I was to have the parents that I had because when you start realizing little things like even the fact that I woke up and I saw parents going to work every day, um, influenced me and that's a very small thing. Um, and so I think a really big part of being a judge is seeing what's happening in your community. Um, because even if you have good intentions, if you don't know what is going on in your community and with different people and recognize the million ways people wind up in front of you, even with good intentions, you might not get it right. Mm hmm. What's so interesting about what you said from what you said about going to the different institutions to also thinking about the influences within people's lives and what you would perhaps taken for granted is social context matters. Oh 100% and this idea of adjudicating, um, the law or thinking about public policy, the importance of social context. So from an institutional perspective is so interesting that the first thing you wanted to do was go look at institutions because many of the students in our class, racial foundations and public policy, we've talked about a guiding theme in our course was micro interactions, micro level, interpersonal interactions, individual experiences are embedded within institutions and those institutions are embedded in larger structures. So what did you gain? Walk us through. Take us on a brief tour of the different institutions that end up being key to your work within the criminal justice system. What was it like when you went to the prison? What was it? What did you learn differently from when you went to the jail? What did you learn differently from when you went to the halfway house? The rehab facility and how did that framework help you as you were thinking about where people needed to go? Um, first, I want to share something that might be radical now, although I don't, I think it's only radical because our society is so polarized and we are talking to each other with our backs to each other. Um, I believe that there are people with a little help can be put on the right track. And I also believe that there are people from whom we need protection. And I think that both of those things are true. Depending on what political side of the spectrum, you might not agree with me. But I would ask and note to you that I spent 10 years, you know, I was the one on the bench. I had the witnesses couple feet away from me. I had the victims crying in front of me. I read the reports about, you know, how people started and how they wound up in front of me. So I wanted to go every place because, you know, if I was going to take someone's liberty, I wanted to know not just in an abstract way, where I was sending them. And then, um, like one thing that people don't consider is that when you're sentencing someone, one thing you can do is that, you know, if you think of prison is, you know, your state institution where you can be sent anywhere in the state, whereas jail is more your county institution, right? So like some options that you have, you can send someone to prison or you can put them on probation and have jail as a condition of the probation. Do you see where to keep them local to keep them local to get their attention lots of different reasons, right? But you have to know what the institutions are. And then very importantly, when I went to the community based corrections facility, the biggest thing I realized was that largely what they were trying to do was teach people what I had parents and experiences to teach me. So say, for example, um, I played T-ball. And in T ball, I learned that when you get frustrated, you can't hit somebody upside a head with a bat, right? But everyone didn't grow up like me. And there are some people that grew up in an environment where how you resolve conflict is to hit somebody upside the head with a bat. And that's how they come to that's what they know, that's what they have seen. And so we have institutions that can help with that. And I was I'm always encouraged by that, because it's that side where I think with the right help, you know, we could put that person that learned as a small child, you know, some some bad things, maybe change their thinking. And they don't they don't even make it to prison, hopefully. And so one of the things that I also hear you talk about is this idea of nuance and this idea of a spectrum when we think about criminal justice. And, you know, your point that we're talking with our backs against each other. And we definitely in our policy conversations have people who really believe in those punitive tools. And we have a lot of policy discourse around that. And then we have policy discourse around dismantling the tools, abolishing the to those kinds of tools, etc. Because of the fundamental argument that the criminal justice system is so fraught and so problematic that it's that it's really beyond repair. And in in a just society, we really need to kind of dismantle this infrastructure that has been built and built and built. So help us understand where we can find common ground, help us understand the frameworks that you use to operate in a space of nuance on this particular issue. First is treating everyone as an individual. And not saying, for example, oh, you know, if you commit a property crime, I'm going to throw you under the jail, you know, every case is different. Every person is different. And I think that you have to consider consider everything that got them in front of you. And you know, so the example that I used in a talk earlier today was, you know, during the the opiate crisis, you know, Haya was hit very hard with the opiate crisis. And so, you know, the stories that you read in the news, where, you know, someone had lived a law abiding life, they get in an accident, they get prescribed a certain drug and they like it. And, you know, it just goes from the prescription to the heroin then possibly to crack. And, and so, you know, I have to look at and say to myself, even wow, like this this person, particularly ones with licenses, because, you know, all of us who have to get a license and then keep that license, like we protect that license. So to say like, wow, like, this person went to school, got this license and sacrificed, like sacrificed it, you know, you can look at that as, you know, nurse, you abused your ability to have access to this drug, or you can look at it as addiction is so strong, that you are willing to sacrifice everything you worked for. Because that is that is how strong this addiction is. You know, and so I have to look at that person one way. And following my example from earlier, you know, I have to look at the person who received a vial of heroin for their ninth birthday from their parents. I have to look at them a different way. I can't, it's hard to even have one policy even that's going to address both of those people. And I know that I have a lot of extreme stories, right? But it's very important, I think that, you know, if you think that everyone should go to prison, I want you to hear my story about the person who said I saved their life by putting them in drug treatment. If you don't think anybody should go to prison, I want you to hear some of my more graphic stories that would very much shock you about murder and about rape. And I'm not talking about these in the abstract. When you are in a courtroom, whether you're involved in the system or not, these are people, you know, a rape victim. I hated that she even had to ask. She had a dog for protection. After she had been horribly raped everywhere she could be raped in front of her boyfriend. And I hated that she felt like she had to ask because she'd bring her dog in my courtroom. Because I'm like, you bring whatever you need to get through this. And so I think it's important to share the stories. And it's important not to talk about this topic like this. Yeah, because you're you're ignoring what you don't want to see. And it's also very important that we distinguish, especially in criminal justice area, it's so important that we distinguish between uncomfortable facts and opinion. Because especially when you're talking about crime, it's almost always uncomfortable facts. It's facts that make you adjust in your chair. And you know, and I also don't want to leave out civil law because I will also never forget having a medical malpractice trial. And what happened was a woman was saying that her OBGYN did not give her a C section fast enough. And so the baby was the baby had, I think, I think some type of palsy, I'm not sure what the what it was, but he that the child could not see, could not hear, could not even swallow on his own. And so I will never forget the moment when that child came in the courtroom. And I realized there is nothing I can do to fix this child. And I had to have that realization. My job there was, there was a dispute as to whether the doctor was wrong or not. And I was the referee to get the situation resolved. But it couldn't really be resolved. Because like I said, nothing was going to fix that little boy. What had happened in that moment, right? And what decisions got made, right? That moment, right? In that moment, right? Yeah. Let me ask you about even not just nuance, but putting things in more kind of bite sized pieces in our policy conversations around criminal justice. And I can think of it in kind of kind of three streams, this question of, should we be building more facilities to incarcerate? Or should we have more investment in other kinds of institutions? The second question of what do you do about the folks who are already incarcerated? And what do you think about, for example, people who were incarcerated on marijuana, marijuana possession charges who are still in prison, even though, you know, as you drive through Ann Arbor, there's several reasons. But the people from the Clinton era are still in prison. They don't get to, there's this one billboard right when you cross the state border. It's like, it's called the House of Dank. And they're really excited that they deliver. You know, it's coming from Ohio, where, you know, it's not illegal, right? It's really like, Oh, wow. Right. But Yeah, so where do we think about? Where's our future investments go in terms of building facilities? What do we do about the people who are already incarcerated? And then what do we do about the individuals who may find themselves institutionally involved? Because I think that when you think about the discussion, part of it is about the philosophy around building more institutions. And you know, many of us have heard the stat of they determine how many jails to build based on test scores, grade test scores. And then we think about the people who are currently incarcerated. And then you think about the people who will need to cross your threshold. And what do you think about in terms of preventative? So I just wonder if you can kind of walk through all three of those, the conversation and how you think about them. First, I'm going to say that these are my personal opinions. You know, at the end of the day, any judge has to follow the law. So it's not like I can just, you know, throw statutes to the wind and do what I want. Obviously, my personal opinion is very much in the middle. So I do, I'm not a big fan of private prisons, because just seems like a slippery slope when a for-profit entity is internal prison, you know, because there's incentive to send people to prison. But so I do think we need prisons, because I do think, no, I know that I have seen with my own eyes and experienced people that I don't want to send back into anyone's neighborhood. I also think that there are money as well spent in those alternative sentencing spaces. So I'm, you know, squarely in the middle. And I also think that we need to think, you can almost look at this, and we're here, they're economists here, even if you come at this issue from an allocation of resources and spending money perspective, because so I was a trial court judge in an urban county, and I would go to judicial conferences and the resources, the options that I had for sentencing were infinitely more than in a rural county. Of where you could send people. Oh, yeah, because in a rural county, sometimes it's prison, prison or probation, and those are, there's no nothing in the middle. And so, you know, that could be a hard choice. And so, but even with it, I could only give people so many chances, because I couldn't create more beds. And so at some point, I had to say, I can't give you any more chances, because there's somebody else that needs that bed in the mental health hospital, or someone, yes, that treatment facility, or someone who needs that space at the community based corrections facility. So it's about how we allocate not only our people, but also our money. You know, at one time to, and I'm not sure I haven't checked the numbers recently, but at one time, it was more expensive to house someone in a prison than it was tuition at Ohio State. And doesn't that sound backwards? Right? You know, so I think that we need to make up our minds, you know, do we want to be rehabilitative or do we want to be punitive? And then we allocate our resources accordingly. What about people who are currently incarcerated? And what do you think about should we be revisiting sentences for people on say marijuana charges? Should we be looking at reduced sentences? Should we, you know, during COVID a number of people were released? Are there ways that we should be thinking about the current prison population in jail population? Well, let me ask you a question. Yeah. Do you want to be judged for something that you did at 20? Given that we went to college together, that's why yeah, yeah. You know, you know, you don't ask questions. You don't know the answer. So yeah, give it that night at the World Bar on my 21st birthday. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. My 21st birthday. Yes. Yeah. My 21st birthday left marks on the ball. Anyway. But you see what I'm saying? So like, you know, from that era, you had people with a little bit of weed that's still, you know, that are still incarcerated and they had a little bit of weed at 20 and they're still in there at 40. Oh, my gosh. And you know, certain certain crimes are bad enough that somebody should do something at 20 and still be there at 40, in my opinion. But there are others that I don't think that they they should. Because I know personally, well, I look back at myself and I was one person at 18, another at 25, another at 30, another at 35. And, you know, now, honestly, at 48, you know, I know my strengths and weaknesses and I know what's going to change and what isn't. And the thought of, you know, you had a dime bag three times in your 20s and now you're still in your 40s in prison. That's kind of tough to swallow. It doesn't it doesn't make a lot of sense. And it's not necessarily how I want my tax dollars spent. What about for that third group? And this is when we think about preventative mechanisms. And you and I have had a lot of discussions where you get this sentencing report that I I akin to like a sociological exact examination of a defendant's life. Yeah. And it's so much information. There's a whole report compiled before sentencing of a person's life history and the extenuating circumstances. You also look at the victim impact statement. I mean, there's all of this kind of information that is contextualizing information, both about the the crime in question and the victims, but also the defendant. And you have said to me as I as you've read those reports, there were so many different points of intervention that could have happened. And as you read the report, it's like no intervention there, no intervention there. So talk to us about the interventions that you the kinds of interventions you wish you would see that can inform our policy thinking about what could be from preventative now. Because part of the issue when you're sentencing adults, sometimes you feel like you're starting at the wrong end. You know, so like people at least in Ohio, when you're sentencing, you get an amazing amount of information. You get education history, military history, mental health history, substance abuse history, and you even get history about the defendant's parents. You know, had they ever been convicted of a crime? People that the the defendant have children with or associate with, do they have criminal records? Just the defendant's children even have criminal records. And you know, there are certain points. You know, the most difficult to deal with quite honestly are, you know, where you see mother was prostituting to support her drug habit to mask her mental health issues. And so she doesn't know who dad was. And you just can't help but feel that that that person was going to have an uphill battle literally when the sperm at the egg, literally because of the circuit. I mean, even if you think about the circumstances in the mom's body, you know, if she was taking drugs while she was pregnant or if the father was taking drugs when the baby was conceived. And so it's hard to think of it that way because it just seems like that person was just going to have an uphill climb before they even came here. But then you also see things like, you know, people dropping out of school and middle school. You know, I think, you know, we hear more often of people dropping out of school in high school. But it seems like if someone's dropping out of school in middle school, like it's almost like no one must be watching either at home or at school. You know, so that's a point of, you know, it were intervention. If somebody had even noticed that somebody wasn't coming to school and lots of things like, you know, I would say parents who, you know, go to on vacation because I also think that a lot of people have this misconception of that crime is something that happens to poor people. And rich people commit crimes too. What oftentimes makes the difference are the resources to deal with it. Because, you know, your parents might have the money to pay the defense attorney that charges $10,000 to walk in the door. So you just, you have to look at each person individually, but also recognize crime, domestic violence, things like that do not see class. And the difference a lot of times is the access. And it really goes into social determinants of health. Because, you know, you see, you know, zip codes where the life expectancy of someone is like 10, 15 years less than the zip code right next to them. And they have different access to education and they have different access to healthcare and different access to even healthy food. And so all of that comes into play, possibly even in a different intervention point. So I think that we have to take all of that into consideration, because I really convinced that if we did, it would land us in the middle where I am. And it would create a radically different experience for judges. So are there times where you were sitting in the courtroom and you would feel yourself between a rock and a hard place and you would say, I wish policymakers understood x before they did y because now I've got to navigate the reality of the situation. I wish every policymaker would understand that you can go not to federal court. You can go to your state court and learn so much about the health of your community. Because and I wish every policymaker would spend a day in court because again we're talking about people. And you know it's very easy in the policy space to kind of crunch numbers or you know sit and be smart write a really good article. But you really going someplace and seeing it, you know, seeing what happens in a courtroom, seeing having the experience of a sentencing where a defendant speaks for himself and the victims speak for themselves. Going to a prison and seeing a prison in jail is really an assault on every sent you got. Oh, it's cold. It's staying. So I mean, it's it's everything. It's ugly. Just, you know, everything's cold to the touch even, you know, and understand, go to the places and meet the people about the policy that you're making. And again, like it helped me so much. Like so here's an example. I had one case where it was a case where the in Ohio's Twin Valley Behavioral Health is what I'm dealing with. So Twin Valley filed a motion so that they could forcefully medicate someone. And so this man, I mean, he was probably about six, four, two, 50, he was a big guy. And he had schizophrenia. And what happened, though, was that he firmly believed that they were taking his blood not to monitor his medication, but he firmly believed that they were taking his blood and giving it to vampires. Now that might make some people chuckle, but when you take a minute and realize if you really thought that was happening, how terrifying that must be. I had never come across that before. You know, I mean, I was doing a whole lot of big company A versus big company B. So, you know, it was so helpful. The first that was my first case like that. So it was so helpful to be able to say, Okay, I've been to Twin Valley and I remember Dr. Cook or explaining how this works. And I remember Dr. Cook or who was like the head psychiatrist at the time. I remember him showing me the different wings at Twin Valley. So I know that this person would probably go over in this way and deal with these people. You see what I'm so I had just not an abstract view of what I was doing. I actually could picture in my head what I was doing and where I was sending somebody. And that was so helpful to me as a judge. And I'm convinced that it will be helpful to policymakers to I mean, I think it's such great advice in terms of really making the investment and caring enough about what you're doing to make the investment to really understand the context and the consequences of the choices you're going to be making. Yes, right. So part of what I hear you saying is you really absorbed the gravity of what you were doing in that process and really wanting to know as much as you could about the the conditions, the circumstances, the implications of the choices you'd be making every day. Right. And yeah, I would also add also understanding what it means to have a felony. It is a Scarlet Letter F. It absolutely is. And you can talk about that abstractly or you can go talk to somebody who has a felony and see what they're going through. You know, it's one thing for you to read about it. It's another thing for someone that you are looking at that you can touch to tell you I have a felony. So I'm having problems getting a job. I'm having a problems getting housing. I can't live with my mom because she lives in certain housing that won't allow a felony to a felon to live with her. You know, all these different things that people go through when they have a felony. You know, it's one thing to read it. It's another thing to either do it or talk to someone actually affected by it. Yeah, I want to shift gears and ask you about some of the other kind of policy issues you've been thinking about talking about during your time here as a Towsley. And I know that UN professor Anne Lynn did an amazing session on the Supreme Court and the affirmative action cases. You've been involved in conversations about the Dobs decision and all of the different policy hot topic voting rights, voting access. And at one point you you worked for the Ohio Secretary of State. I just wonder what policy issues are you following really closely right now and what perspective are you bringing to them as someone who's had the professional background that you've had? One policy issue that I'm very interested in is expungement because again, like I said, having those experiences where I didn't think somebody should be paying at 50 paying for it 50 with for something that they did at 20. So that is absolutely a policy interest of mine as well as those alternative sentencing options. Because I think that prison is strictly punitive at least the way that it's set up now. It is strictly punitive. It doesn't have anything else to offer because we're most places aren't putting their money into the programming in prisons. And so a lot of times with prisons, people are coming out the same way that they went in. But I still think there are people we need protection from. So I'm not getting rid of the prison, Celeste. We've had a lot of conversations about this. And I want to ask you about the Dobs decision. And I remember when it came down, I listened to Betsy Stevenson and professor from the medical school and they were talking about Professor Stevenson was talking about the implications of the job of the Dobs decision from an economic perspective in terms of women's economic mobility prospects and what this might mean for that. And then the the professor from the medical school was talking about some of the unintended consequences as it relates to providing healthcare services for women, how doctors are trained, can we train doctors around abortion access at the medical school and all of the things that the institution now had to think about in the Dobs decision. This was before the midterms when Michigan was trying to figure out if where our state would go. And you were just talking about the kind of unintended consequences or perhaps unintended consequences on the criminal justice system. And you were saying that the courts are not necessarily set up to implement a law like Texas's law, for example, where someone can be prosecuted for for seeking abortion, people can turn other people in, etc. And it just raises such an interesting question for me in terms of in these hot bed policy issues where the issue itself is a really important policy conversation. But then there are these ripple effects that also need to be talked about in terms of its impact potentially on institutions like the criminal justice system, the legal system, I mean the education system, the health care system, etc., labor markets. And I wonder if you can just talk about how a debate on say abortion access intersects with criminal justice in a way that people might be surprised to think about. Well, I hear, I think the most surprising thing stems from, you know, when you're a policymaker, not only do you have to think about the policy, you also have to think of the abuse of that policy. And so say for example, you know, is it is it going to be okay if one day someone walks out of the house and they're pregnant and their neighbor sees them. And then a week later, they walk out of their house and they're not pregnant. You know, can that neighbor call that neighbor then calls and some very personal circumstances are delved into because, okay, maybe that woman did have an abortion and maybe that is illegal where she was, or maybe she had a miscarriage and now you are adding insult to injury. Um, you know, is it going to be, you know, what we call discovery, the exchange of evidence? Is it going to be discoverable? Like how a lot of women now use apps to keep track of their menstruation cycles, you know, menstrual cycles rather, you know, is that fair game and discovery? You know, and then when you think about doctors, typically especially in a hospital setting, they're being advised by lawyers whose job is a lot of risk management, right? And so, and then you also have the conflict between legal terminology and medical terminology. So, you know, in the case of, you know, statutes that prosecute doctors, you know, what is that doctor going, you know, and we're also thinking about things that happen very quickly. So, you know, what is that doctor going to do? And how is that doctor going to be advised? If say, for example, the standard is abortion is illegal, except to save the life of the mother. You know, so as policymakers and legislators, you know, that line has to be drawn. But until then, you know, the hospital lawyers have a kind of a risk management view. And so they're going to say, you do nothing until it is very clear unequivocally that the mother's life is at risk. Or, you know, if there is no exceptions if the law is that there are no exceptions for rape or incest or life of the mother or whatever, you know, how is that conflicting with what doctors all promise to do, which is do no harm? And does that lead to lawsuits against like even civil lawsuits against doctors? You know, I mean, because my class was so awesomely set up, you know, what we did with Dobbs was, you know, of course, we talked about the opinion. We talked about the fact that it was sent to the states. We even talked about when that happened, you know, you have two states, Michigan and Ohio, you know, that went two very different ways on the issue. And so then what we did when we were talking about policy implications, we got policy implications from the point of view of Planned Parenthood. And we got policy implications from the point of view of Ohio right to life. And you brought both conversations into the classroom in the same week, in the same week, and guest speakers, right? Yes, speakers, yeah, from from Planned Parenthood and Ohio right to life. And so I think it was very interesting and it was very intentional for my students to say to see this one case and like just how wide that ripple went. And then depending on what side you're on, what you think the policy implications are because when we talk to the person from Planned Parenthood, the policy implications were more of how do we get a referendum on the ballot? How do we help employers who want to help their employees get to Michigan or wherever else? Versus when we talk to Ohio right to life, those policy implications were more of how do we improve the foster care system? And it was they went to totally different routes. I would also note though, and I think the people in my class would agree, it was very obvious that those policymakers were very rarely in the same room together. They I don't I don't know if that ever really happened. Interesting, interesting. We are a few minutes out from ending. So it's time for us to make sure that we hear from your the audience and hear your questions. So I'm going to invite folks to raise their hand and we've got microphones and we've got a good bunch of time to hear from you all. Can I make another point while someone gets the nerve to get that microphone? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think that you know, when I was, you know, listening to the arguments, prepared for my talk with Dr. Lynn. When I was sentencing adults, I couldn't help but to often feel like I was starting at the wrong end, but also couldn't help but to wonder how how much would we even need any of this if we fixed K through 12 education in our country? Yes, you know, and when we talk about those intervention points, you know, how how many if we hit those intervention points and K through 12, how many of those people then don't wind up in my courtroom? You know, right, I speak a lot against my job security, but that's okay. But that's okay, right? You know, you'll find something else to do. Right. So, so, you know, you know, you we have to ask ourselves, you know, you know, crime is not an isolated thing. You know, I never came across someone that woke up and said, I'm going to be a criminal today, or I woke up and I'm going to get addicted to drugs today. And it really, I think, to fix things, or even when you start thinking about reform, you have to think about everything that goes in around it. Again, the social determinants of health, everything that goes in around that. And again, whether you're coming at it from the ethical thing to do or whatever, or you're coming at it from a money perspective, if you think about it, the pendulum just keeps swinging back and forth. Don't send anyone to prison, send everybody to prison. And it just keeps going back and forth. And it doesn't seem to have settled right here. And I think that someone really smart at University of Michigan, if they looked at it, you know, this side of the pendulum is very expensive. Because if you're not sending people to prison that need that the public needs protection from, you know, it's all the property crimes and everything that comes from that. And then if you're sending people to prison that don't necessarily need to be there, then that's that's or no, excuse me, if you're sending everyone to prison, that's expensive too. Because, you know, think about when you're sending someone to prison, you're dealing with health care, you're dealing with clothing them, you're dealing with feeding them and all of that. So it's very easy to say, let's send them to prison, and then just forget about them. But you have to think about all that that means, you have to think about the cost of that. You have to think about, you know, what happens after that, you know, and even can they get a job? You know, is definitely part of that. Right. Talking about jobs, it started me thinking about because you had just talked about criminals. What is the implication of jobs in the different states? In the criminal system, like women get pregnant in prison. What happens when they don't want to keep the baby? Like it has there been an effect on jobs from dogs in the criminal justice system. As far as pregnant women in prison, you know, that's a really good question because I don't really know whether abortion was available to women in prison or not. So I can't answer your question, unfortunately, because I'm not sure if that was ever an option for them. I know I know in Ohio there was a warden over the Ohio women's prison that was doing some really good work, but she was dealing mostly with people who were in prison who were pretty far into their pregnancies. And so it was all about parenting. So that's but that's a really good question, though. I don't know the answer. Hi, I'm Caroline. I'm a second year MPP student. Thank you so much for being here. I'm curious what you think because you talked a lot about like how judges need to to consider their context and the consequences of their decisions. And so I was wondering, do you what do you think is the best way, I guess, from a policy perspective of how to get judges to be more conscious of those contexts and consequences as well as biases. There's so many biases. And I don't remember the, you know, the source, but there was some kind of study that showed that judges are more likely to give harsher sentences an hour before lunch because they're hungry. There's there's genuine right. There's like genuine human biases. And so and then sort of one additional kind of part B question is if you have any thoughts on whether judges being appointed or voted in, like kind of what your thoughts are on the consequences of of of that on judges decisions. Girl, if you come up with a solution to that, you can run this school. You know, as far as appointed versus elected, I will I will tell you, I have been through an appointment process. I was appointed to my position first, and then I was elected. And then I was involved in an appointment process to be a federal district court judge. And I will say for me personally, election was very different because I could work my butt off. And, you know, go around Franklin County, Ohio, tell people what I thought what I stood for and hope that they voted for me. Now, the appointment process was felt like way more inside baseball. But, you know, one of the arguments for the appointment process is the fact that the electorate tends not to vote for judges. And so sometimes, you know, some would argue that you get some judges that don't need to be there because they were voted in. So this was my personal opinion from my experience. I'm a fan of the election process. And that's just for me, liking being a judge. What was the other part of your question? Yeah, right. How do we get judges to do all the work that you did? Call me, right? Right. Because it's so clear you went above and beyond. None of that was required, right? That you go and visit these institutions and build these relationships with the doctor at the hospital and etc. And get to know the prison warden and understand their programming. That's not required. But it should be, it sounds like. So how do we think about that? Should it be required? Here, I think so, because it was of such benefit to me. But, you know, here is the thing, you all. I don't know a judge that doesn't want to do a good job. And so perhaps. And let me just pause and say, you've dealt with some judges who have been jerks, who've been sexist and racist to me. Yeah, we we can have a whole judges, lawyers, set of conversations about how Laurel has been treated within the courtroom process by her colleagues and by other people in the courtroom. And yet you still believe that it's possible to align good performance with these kinds of required social context lessons and understandings. You think it would work because I I want judges to be out of their bubble. You know, to be on that bench, you know, potentially depriving people of their liberty, taking, taking a family member out of the home, sometimes taking an income out of the home, you know, it's a it's a huge responsibility. And so the more information we give judges, the better. Because again, I think either whether you're in the lock them up and throw the way the key camp or you're never send anyone to prison camp, everybody wants to do a good job. So do give them the information to do that. And then I think for policymakers and people in academia, study federal courts, but especially when you're talking about crime, most of that is in state courts, which I understand that makes it harder to study, you know. But, you know, if you are to come into contact with a court, it is way more likely to be a state court and it's most likely to either be criminal was particularly because traffic falls under criminal or as a victim. Maybe you didn't even commit a crime. You might be a victim or the other court that you are, unfortunately, most likely to come in contact with is domestic. Interesting. That sounds like a policy prescription to me in terms of thinking about how to how judges are trained and what's required. It's really interesting, really interesting. Yes, we have two questions in the back and I think those and then we've got I think I see a question here and those will be our last three. OK, good evening. Thank you so much for being here. I was hoping we could circle back to your comments about K through 12 interventions. I was a long time teacher and school leader in Detroit and on pretty intimately numerous occasions, the ways in which the entanglement of the education and criminal justice system and the ways that that had, you know, pretty life altering implications for many of my students. And so as someone who's interested in working in that policy arena in the future, I was wondering if you could talk about what reforms you think would be most impactful in subverting those injustices and racial inequities and like would you focus those within the education system, criminal justice system, a combination or elsewhere? I think it should be a combination but acknowledging that if you did some things in K through 12, you wouldn't have to deal with it in a criminal context. You know, one time someone asked me if I could change anything about the criminal justice system, like if I had like a magic wand kind of thing. And I told them, honestly, it's not even changing prisons or sentencing laws or anything like that. You know what I would do? I would give kids parents that loved them and that encouraged them to do the right thing and did not encourage them or praise them solely for sports or encourage them to be a drug dealer, things like that, because when you're in that courtroom, I promise you, you see parents that do that. And then if it's happening at home, sometimes if someone's lucky, they might come across a teacher or a coach though that can change that way of thinking or show them something different. And so, you know, I know this is tricky but again, in our K through 12 education, we have to talk about uncomfortable facts and we have to talk about consequences and there's lots of areas that you can do that. You know, you can even talk about consequences in the context of history because what I found even was a lot of people in the criminal system that had never been held to any type of consequence. So when I say that mom or dad had already always fixed things for them and then they might have just gotten passed through an education system, you know, even though they had low test scores or didn't do school or whatever. So they're still not even seeing consequences at school. Do you see what I mean? So like when I say K through 12 education, I'm not necessarily saying improved math courses but well, I guess I am a little bit because, you know, when you have a good education system that shows people career options versus the only way I can get out of my situation is to be a basketball player or a rapper, it can change their life, you know? I mean, I've even had an experience where there was a program through the John Glenn School of Public Affairs that brought a lot of college age women and I would host them at my court and have all the women judges come talk to them. And one of my friends, her name's Kim Brown, she's from like Eastern Ohio, a more rural area. And one of those women stood up and said, thank you, Judge Brown for being here because although I have made it into a master's program, I have never seen a woman judge from my area. And so just seeing, just seeing her and hearing what she had to say made an impact in that woman's life. There was a question in the back row. This morning in the smaller conversation, you had said, let's talk about conch and then you got to cut off. As you talked about like responses to the opioid epidemic, how do you think the police, do you believe the police are a good response when you have mental health and for our friends who are on the streets, do you think there should be a kind of response program? Like from the perspective of being a judge, how do you approach a situation from a law enforcement perspective and please, obviously, not to any other side? You know, another unpopular opinion, but based on my experience and what I've seen, just like any other group, there are good cops and there are bad cops. I have had cases where I thought the police treated black people unfairly. I have had cases where the cops saved a black person's life. But again, depending on what side you're on, you don't want to hear the opposite, right? So that's where I'm starting from though. I also think that we ask a lot of the police and I think that there are some really good ideas out there about like say, for example, mental health professionals responding with the police because especially when you're dealing with mental health and substance abuse, sometimes things get dangerous. And so I'm not going to say mental health counselor, go out there by yourself. Oh, that's interesting. I also don't want to say police officer, go out there by yourself. I would prefer for them to go out together because the police officer knows how to deal with the danger ideally. The police officer knows how to deal with the danger and the mental health professional knows how to deal with the mental health issues. Because again, like, you know, my example of my forced medication example, you know, a mental health professional is going to approach that case differently. You know, if it's a mental health professional that can recognize, for example, the signs of schizophrenia or something like that versus him just being out there, you know, hitting people, you know? So I like the idea of both. And I think there are good cops and I think there are bad cops. And in my experience, my personal experience, the people that hate the bad cops the most are the good cops. This will be our last question. Josh Ferguson from the Ross School of Business. My question is more so back to the getting more judges to consider more context. And I'm interested to hear in what role do you think diversity plays in that? Getting people with different backgrounds, different identities to be a part of our criminal justice system. And then how do we improve that pipeline for people to actually have the opportunity to be in your seat? I think diversity is very valuable. And in my personal experience, here's why. Because I have been talking about the justice system to anybody who will listen for years. But after George Floyd, some people listened to me at all and some people listened to me differently as a black female judge. Not only as to the criminal justice system, but also to racism. Because there were a lot of people that again thought racism only happens to poor black people. And that is not the truth. One of the stories that Dean Watkins Hayes is alluding to was when I first took the bench and my chambermate that called, never to my face of course, but that called me a nappy headed girl to everybody. So even in educating people that racism sees no class, I think is effective. But also I think that even though I had been talking about it, like someone like me has a special place because I can come here and I can tell you actually what happens in the courtroom. So I think diverse judges are very, very, very, very, very important. And how do we build that pipeline? Well, particularly, and let me just interject, particularly when folks of color have had such a fraught relationship to the criminal justice system, how do we, like we had FBI Director Christopher Ray here and we had a career discussion for people who were interested in the FBI. And it, you know, one of the thoughts that I had was, how do we diversify the pipeline if there's been fraught relationships either individual who have experienced it or a historical legacy of a fraught relationship with an FBI or with law enforcement or with, you know, immigration enforcement, Office of Homeland Security, et cetera. All of these agencies that have been involved in policing, how do we think about diversifying that pipeline? How do we do that? I think that we have to remember, you know, when we look throughout history, in the, say for example, in the civil rights movement, we needed Martin Ann Malcolm. And so you, if you wanna create change, you need change with, you know, outside the system, but it also is helpful to have change inside the system. And so that not only comes into play with black judges or, you know, diverse judges period of any color, but it also comes into play because you also see black attorneys not wanting to go into prosecutor's offices. But like if I could show you, and I'm out of time so I can't, but if I could show you all the points throughout the life of a case that a prosecutor is making decisions, because the prosecutor is seeing a case a lot of times before even a judge is or before even a public defender is. And so for example, you have to have diverse people in prosecutor's offices presenting information to the grand jury because the grand jury is the one that decides what someone is going to be charged with. And then when you get down the line to trials and plea bargaining and stuff, the starting point, and I'm talking about this because you're from the business school, but the starting point for the negotiation comes back to what happened in the grand jury and the indictment. You see what I'm saying? So if someone is overindicted, their negotiation point is not where it should be when you start talking about plea bargains and trials and stuff. So I think we have to, again, remember, we needed Martin and Malcolm. And so that lends to you also need people inside the system. I wanna say Judge Beatty Blunt, how amazing it's been to have you as a Towsley policymaker in residence from your class, and I see many of the participants, your conversation with Ann Lynn, the conversation you did earlier in terms of careers. You have been everywhere. Your conversation with me, you have been everywhere and it has been so enriching and so illuminating. So thank you for bringing your brilliance. Thank you for bringing your passion. Thank you for bringing your empathy. Thank you for bringing your style. Thank you for bringing all of the things, the complete package that you bring to the Ford School and show us what it can look like to be a truly impactful policymaker. So thank you so, so much. Please join me. Thank you. And I wanna thank the Special Defense Team. I wanna thank Dr. Dominique Adams Santos. I wanna thank Katie Cole. I see Chris back there. Thank you so much. And all of the people that helped to make this happen. We have a reception outside, refreshments, so people can get a little snack, have an opportunity to talk more with Professor- Professor- Professor, that is a trip. That is a trip. Baby boy. Yeah, I've been judged for 13 years. I know. You know what I mean? You're a professor. Yeah. So thank you, everybody, and please join us outside.