 This day actually arrived last night. We had a preview start to the two-day conference by having a showing of the movie 13th and a panel discussion afterwards led by Patrick Smith. And the movie is jaw-dropping. If you haven't seen it, I encourage you to have a look. The discussion was equally hard-hitting and jaw-dropping. And if that prelim from last night is any indication of what we expect, it's going to be a great two days. The genesis of this conference really started the day after the election last year, the presidential election, when Christine Mitchell, at the Center for Bioethics, wrote me and said, do you know that the stock value for for-profit prisons has just shot through the roof? We need to have a conference about prisons. So that's been the genesis. And this has literally been a year in the making to get here. I confess that I am a bit of a novice in a lot of the things that we're talking about. So I, with some of you, are going to be learning a lot over the next couple of days. We're going to try to allow as much time as possible for dialogue after presentations so that there's time for questions and answers. A lot of these topics are somewhat heated, as you might imagine. People might have very strong opinions. I encourage people to, diverse opinions are great. Just be respectful in the way that we speak with one another. I think that that sets a tone both locally and perhaps nationally if we're lucky. The purpose of this conference, from our perspective, the planning committee, and I'm speaking on behalf of the planning committee, I guess I didn't introduce myself. I'm Wes Boyd. I'm a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist at Cambridge Health Alliance that I'm on faculty at the Bioethics Center and the chair of the planning committee, which is why I'm standing in front of you now. We do not see this as an academic exercise. The issues that we're talking about affect real people and really speak to the heart of our culture. You can tell the humanity of a culture, really, by how it takes care of its most vulnerable citizens. And if that's the case, our country needs to do a little better to put it mildly. In terms of your participation, there are two ways we're really, in addition to asking questions as we go, there are notepads out in the atrium. And if you have thoughts about any of the issues that we're talking about, you're encouraged to write them down, and we're going to be collating those and collecting them and then discussing them at various points along the way. Additionally, tomorrow afternoon, starting at 2.45, there's a two-hour session that is really wide open. I'm a bit anxious about that as a teacher, but also excited. The purpose of that is really for us to brainstorm, because there is a lot of collective wisdom here. There are people who themselves have been incarcerated and people who are intimately connected with the jail and prison system otherwise, or have had family members, I'm a psychiatrist, I've had a number of patients who've been in jail or prisons, but to put our heads together. And so between now and tomorrow afternoon, I would like everyone to be thinking about what they might want to see happen and how we might use the power of this conference, the power of the ethics centers who are sponsoring this talk to effect change for the better. Before I transition into welcoming our keynote speaker, Professor Danielle Allen, I want to thank the cosponsors of our conference, which include the Center for Bioethics at the Med School, the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, the SAFRA Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and the Petrie-Flum Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. And also, we got funding from the Cayman Fund. And finally, in terms of thanks, I want to thank the members of the staff at the Bioethics Center, Paula Atkinson, Blair Kahn, Angela Alberti, Lisa Bastille, and Laura Galant. They have really made the nuts and bolts of this conference happen from registration to getting the rooms together. I was getting anxious last night, and I'm sorry, getting anxious last week, and they're like, yes, we got this. We've been around this 100 times. They told me how to dress last night. They told me I had to wear a tie today. But really, they've held our hands and made this conference possible. So thank you, Blair, and I see Blair. I don't see anyone else right at the moment. But thank you all. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Professor Danielle Allen, who's our keynote speaker. Professor Allen is the James Bryan Kohnett University professor at Harvard University, and also director of Harvard's SAFRA Center, which I just mentioned, one of the sponsors of our conference. She's a political theorist who has just published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. She is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America. She is the author of The World of Prometheus, The Politics of Punishing, and Democratic Athens. She's also written a number of other books, including one called Our Declaration, which is about the writing and conceiving of the Declaration of Independence, and was nice enough to be a speaker on that book. And one of the classes we teach in the Bioethics Center last year. And more recently, she wrote, Cuz, The Life and Times of Michael A. She's not speaking. I understand her say about the book, but a lot of the issues that are raised in that book, Professor Allen will be addressing in her speech. So without further ado, I would like to offer a warm thank you and welcome to Professor Allen. Great. Let's see. Is that on? Am I amplifying? Thank you, Wes. Thank you so much to everybody affiliated with the Center for Bioethics for sponsoring this conference. It couldn't be more important. And thank you to all of you for being here. It is incredibly encouraging to see a room full of people who want to think seriously about the problem of mass incarceration in this country and the problem of the treatment of people who are incarcerated. So I'm just so happy, grateful that you're all here. I am, as Wes said, a political philosopher. I appreciate the frame you gave for the conversation of the next day and a half as being one that's about brainstorming. And so I'm going to take the invitation to brainstorm and invite you into a brainstorming conversation. So I hope you'll work with me over the course of the next 45 or so minutes as we engage in these topics. I'm a political philosopher. I think about democracy. I think about how democracies thrive and flourish, what it means to be a resident and or citizen in democracy, what the possibilities for human flourishing are within the structure of a democracy. I'm also a human being with a big family and family members who've been in prison. And the book that Wes referred to is about my baby cousin Michael, who went to prison in 1995 in Los Angeles from an attempted carjacking when he was 15. And I'll say more about that in a minute. But the point is simply that, as Wes said, this isn't an academic exercise. This issue of incarceration, both the scale of it and the treatment of people who are in prison, go to the heart of questions about who we are individually with regard to how we think about justice in our own lives, what we think of as our own personal commitments to people around us. They go to the heart of who we are as a society, what we want to be, what kind of statement we want to make to the world about human rights, about human dignity, and so forth. So this is one of those issue areas where we need all hearts and minds fully engaged. We need academic expertise, but we need that expertise harnessed to a recognition that the stakes could not be more profound. Every society on this earth throughout history has always taken its core sense of self and purpose from its basic definitions of justice. Wrongdoing and punishment, and how societies think about those make societies what they are. So to engage in this question is for all of us to work on the very fundament of who we are. Core question of what, as human beings, we do in this world. So anyway, with that somber start, let me get back to my cousin, Michael. And I'm going to invite you into a little participatory scenario. So Michael, as I said, was arrested for an attempted carjacking September 1995. It was his first arrest. The good news about the carjacking, which is it's no fun to talk about somebody you love doing something like that. And neither is it any fun to say, though it's true, that the good news was that the only person who was hurt was Michael. So his victim got his gun, wrestled his gun away, shot him through the neck, and on his way to the hospital in the ambulance, without any other adults around, other than the police, Michael confessed, not only to that incident, but also that he had robbed two people, three people, I'm sorry, three people the previous day, and one person a week earlier. So there was a spree of violence. There's no question about that. There had been nothing like that in his past previously. So 15-year-old attempted carjacking, three robberies, four robberies he confessed to, two of which there was no record of in the police records, whatever that's worth. So anyway, so you've got a 15-year-old. It's their first arrest. It's a clear outburst of violence. When the bail proceedings come, his mother wants to bail him out. And he tells her he doesn't want her to because he'd rather stay in the LA juvenile center where he is at that time because he thinks he'll either get into more trouble or be in danger if he's back out. So he explicitly rejects the possibility of bail. All right, so now we come to the part where I'd like to engage you in a little brainstorming. You don't have to do this if you don't want to. So it's an invitation to participate, but you're also free to take a couple minutes just for personal meditation or reflection. But if you're willing to participate, I'd like you to introduce yourself to your neighbor in one direction or four minutes of two or three and ask, there are two questions I want you to think about. So the first is, so imagine that you're a prosecutor, all right? And we don't care about the laws that actually exist. We're not worried about the actual current legal configuration, OK? But you're a prosecutor. You have been presented by the police with this 15-year-old who has done these things and he's confessed to them, all right? How should he be punished? What should his punishment be? That's the first question for you, OK? And then after I'm going to give you two minutes to think about that and then talk to your neighbor about it a little bit, and then I'm going to ask you to consider the question of, what would you need to know to answer that question and feel comfortable answering it, OK? So let's take two minutes to think and then talk with them and introduce yourself. Don't forget to share your name, et cetera, first. Excuse me. I just, oops. I just want to make sure we appreciate the engagement and I want to make sure we transition to the second question, what would you want to know? So I just want to make sure you've gotten to that question. So let's take one more minute to make sure you've addressed that question, OK? What would you want to know to address this, OK? Thank you so much. Let's just take the time to hear a couple of pockets of thoughts from each of the three sections of this theater. So which little conversational pod might I invite to jump in over here? This one. All right. Yeah. So my name is AJ Brown. And you'll correct me. I know you will, Florcie. That we said we can't get to punish until we get to this what we need to know. Good. 14 years in change of nothing, huge spike. We've got to find out what caused the spike. Then Johnny and Florcie said, in this instance, let's look away from the word punishment to get to help. And let's have that help determined by youth court, a court of his peers. Thank you. We're not playing over here. Yeah, no, that's some serious contribution. Thank you so much. That was great. Where is my conversational pod here? All righty, OK. Hello, my name is Whitney, and I'm a trauma social worker. So I had the same conversation with my colleague is before we can answer how should he be punished, we need to see what triggered his behavior. Because something traumatic had to happen to this young child for him to go on this type of spree. So I said to do a full psychosocial assessment. And then from there to see what type of treatment should be implemented. And yeah, if you do something wrong, there should be a consequence to it. But not necessarily, it has to be a punishment. Thank you very much. Great. Over here, brave soul. There we go, right here. Somebody here, right here. Thank you. Hi, my name is Dave Rini. The three of us work at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. Similar thoughts as the other two groups that you've got to know what's going on first before there can be any kind of measure of what should happen afterwards, whether it's family situation, neighborhood situation, community. As far as what the consequence should be, we started thinking restitution. If there was someone who was victimized and lost something as a result of Michael's actions, what would those folks need to become whole without necessarily punishing him or being overly punitive on his actions? How can we make sure that folks are whole and recover from what's happened to them, while also making sure that whatever's taking place to Michael is addressed appropriately? Thank you. Thank you so much for engaging. So I'll tell you what happened. 1995, Southern California, 18 months after California passed its three strikes year out law. So since he confessed to four felonies, he was told that if he went to trial and was convicted on the things he'd confessed to, he'd received 25 years to life. So he was offered a plea deal, which he took, of course, right, 12 years and eight months. So he went in at 15. The judge that sentenced him wrote to the California Department of Corrections and recommended that he be kept in juvenile until the maximum point possible in California at the time, which was 25. For reasons that are completely inaccessible, I have not been able to secure any records on this at all. He was transferred to adult prison when he was 17, sent from Los Angeles to Susanville, one of the toughest prisons in the California system on the Oregon border. His mother, a single working mother in Los Angeles, could not get there for the first six months of his incarceration in adult prison. He was a bright and curious young man. Sorry, it's so hard to talk about. He's doing a lot of talking about it. You think I could handle it by now, but anyway. He had been in a kind of advanced high school, early college program. He finished his GED between his arrest and his sentencing. So he got into the California prison system. He wanted more education. There were some vocational offerings. He did a carpentry, certification, electrician certification, so forth, but there wasn't anything intellectual for which he was quite hungry. We spent a lot of time on the phone together and we found a way of getting him into a correspondence course through Indiana University. So he began pursuing a bachelor's degree in liberal arts. You know, the sort of small details, like at that time at any rate you couldn't, if you were taking a course, you couldn't, sorry. You couldn't have any hardback books, which meant, so I had to call all the instructors of potential courses for first year students and figure out what kind of books they assigned. Were they hardcover or softcover? Which left two courses, Philosophy 101 and Lit 101. So that's what was available to him in the entire collegiate program from Indiana. Anyway, the teachers were terrific. He signed up, he got going on Lit 101. He also was a firefighter. So we've all been reading about the incarcerated people who fought the most recent batch of California wildfires. My book came out a few weeks before those fires. So my book says that Michael fought the biggest wildfires in California history, which was true until September. And so that was something that brought him great joy and growth and the combination of fighting fires and doing college courses brought him what was ultimately the best year of his life. He also fell in love while he was in prison with a fellow incarcerated person, a fellow inmate. I call the book Free, A Transgender Woman who was imprisoned in the men's prison. And Michael got out when he was 26. I could talk about the re-entry process and so forth. I helped. I was the sort of cousin on duty, working on job, school, housing and so forth. And it looked as if we were gonna put the pieces and parts of the puzzle together, but one of the things that I didn't know how to think about and nobody around me knew how to think about was the relationship piece of what it means to be in prison for 11 years from the age of 15 and come out and try to build a world of different relationships. So Michael had a really tough choice. And the toughest choice that he had was how to think about the relationship with the love of his life, Free. And he made a critical decision to reconnect with her and that meant various choices that destabilized the sort of work, school, housing situation that we were trying to put in place. And ultimately, he got into a fight with another lover of Bree's a year after he first got out. That sent him back to prison on a parole violation. And he got out again a year later and then in that last year was fully involved with Bree, who as it happened came from a world too that was more densely connected to criminality and the drug trade and so forth. And Michael began living with Bree, participating in her world. And when he was 29, so about a year after his second release and just a month after he was finally cleared of all of his sentence obligations, she shot him in her kitchen. And that was the end of his life. So anyway, that's what happened. I appreciate the proposals that you all had as alternatives and I wanted to start by asking you to engage in that participatory exercise because I think one of the big problems that we all face is thinking the unthinkable. We've let this system of incarceration grow around us for decades now and become all pervasive. Two million people in prisons and jails in the country this year, two million last year. That means all two million people, each of those people connected to six to 20, other people at least consider it. So that's 12 to 40 million people being directly impacted right now in a very closely proximate way and over a decade think of what that amounts to. We've let this grow up in our midst without, I mean obviously people have been taking notice. Angela Davis has been taking notice for 25 years. People have been taking notice but as a society we haven't taken notice, we haven't come to grips with it and for that reason it's become completely entangled with all of our basic ordinary expectations. Like the question that I started off by asking you, how should we punish this young man? And so I'm so grateful that you said, well actually maybe that's not the first question we should ask, right? That's an example of thinking the unthinkable, changing some of the basic ways in which we think about wrongdoing. I very much appreciated your invoking the concept of wholeness because this is something that I learned about punishment by studying punishment in other times and places. That a concept of wholeness has in other contexts guided how people think about the problem of wrongdoing. One recognizes yes that there is a victim, the victim has suffered something, their world has been made wrong, it needs to be made whole. The community needs to be made whole, the community that has a sense of danger but also same with the perpetrator. And the word whole actually, it's old English etymology is health, which is part of what makes it so beautiful that this Center for Bioethics is hosting this conference that at the end of the day the problem of wrongdoing and punishment is a problem of making whole and that's a problem of making healthy, making communities, individuals, victims and perpetrators healthy. How on earth do we begin to rethink a criminal justice system if we put those concepts at their foundation? That's the question that we're asking here. So I want to pull out a few more just analytical features of Michael's experience. They think there'll be things that you already know about our criminal justice system but in order to help us reflect on how you would even think about an alternative. And so what I'm doing here, you'll hear is I'm trying to connect two questions. The conference was framed about being the ethics and rights of how we treat people behind bars but I'm wanting to put a frame around the question of the ethics and rights of using bars also. I think that's an important part of the conversation and those two things need to be glued together. So there is a question about how we treat people in prison but there's also a question about why and when we use prison in the first place and we want to glue those two issues together. So in the story that I told you about, Michael, you heard a few features about our contemporary criminal justice system. The first is that its first and foremost purpose for the last three decades has been deterrence or what's also called incapacitation. Taking people out of circulation and deterring other people from conducting similar acts. And for decades, philosophers have made the point that the problem with deterrence is that it completely instrumentalizes the wrongdoer. That is to say, if your only purpose is to make sure they never do another bad thing and make sure other people don't do bad things, there's no limit to what you might do to the individual. Deterrence brings no limits with it. Even though, I mean, the paradox is you can do empirical studies and show the ways in which excessive punishments don't deter, what deters is swift responses to things. That is actually more effective deterrence. But analytically speaking, people don't put limits on deterrence. This actually stands in contrast to retribution. We have a habit of thinking that our penal system is just really amazingly retributive, but that actually misses the core meaning of retribution. The core meaning of retribution goes back to the ancient idea of an eye for an eye. Proportionality, that's actually what retribution is about, and we've lost the constant proportionality in our criminal justice system. So paradoxically, inappropriate way of thinking about retribution would involve proportionality. That was the point about, yes, Michael was responsible. There should be a consequence. There are consequences for bad actions. Those consequences should be proportional to what the action actually was. Okay, so Michael was the only person who was physically hurt, thank heavens, in what he did. The punishment that he got was a total punishment. And so that comes to the second feature. Our punishments currently are total punishments. I mean, this is a fact that we just don't face squarely enough. People have prison sentences, but then when they come out, in Michael's case, there were family members outside of Los Angeles willing to take him in and to support his work and education in a new location, separate from his previous relationships. But the parole system required that he go back to the place where he'd committed his offense. All right, okay, that's really smart, anyway. So, and then as you all know, once you have a felony on your record, it's harder to get a job. It's harder to get funding for education. So these are total punishments. They're total, not just in the control exercise in prison, but total in the sense of the duration of them. And so the notion that they are limited in any sense is it's ludicrous. I mean, we just have to face the fact that we are actually lying about that. All right, so that's another feature of our current criminal justice system. Alongside the focus on deterrence, of course, has been a sort of stripping out of rehabilitative, restorative approaches to punishment or approaches that focus on socialization, the connection of people who have done wrong to communities in healthy ways. Last point I wanna call attention to, and again, I'm sure you all know this already, but the routine use of what we in Orwellian language call administrative segregation. Also known as solitary confinement, known in truth by people in prison as the whole. Okay, that's what, the whole, right? Routine use of the whole. That's an important metaphor, right? Because what it refers to is the disappearance of everything, contextual. An empty space, a dark space. What happens to human beings when you strip them completely of human relationships? Oops, sorry. Aristotle, Angel Foster, Aristotle, this is a very powerful line where he says, a human being that can live alone is either a beast or a god. Right? So we treat people like beasts by putting them in this context for extended periods of time. All right, that is another, it's just a basic feature of our criminal justice system. We have, as a society, decided routinely to treat people like beasts. That's who we are. As Americans, all right? All right, so it's pretty easy to say that it's clear that prison needs to be a different kind of tool. We have to think about it differently. How do we get to do that? There are alternatives. It's actually not as hard to think of alternatives as you might suspect, right? There are alternatives in places like Germany and the Netherlands, okay? And I would recommend an article to everybody. My sort of required reading after you leave here, if you haven't read it, is an article from the Vera Institute of Justice called Sentencing and Prison Practices in Germany and the Netherlands, okay? From 2013, go find it. It's important to read it because again, it helps us begin to think the unthinkable, what currently feels unthinkable. Sure, sorry. It's Sentencing and Prison Practices in Germany and the Netherlands. It's Vera, V-E-R-A Institute. From 2013, the authors are Ram Subramanian. Subramanian, just the way it sounds. Subramanian, okay, my apologies, thank you. And Alison, Alison Shames. Thank you. Good, here, I'll hand this over. Okay. So, a couple of features of what they do, all right? Just to call your attention to them. So in the Netherlands, their sentencing law, which was reformed within the last two decades, is built around a principle of association. Okay, that's the governing principle for it. And what they mean by this is this point I just made from Aristotle about human beings and social relationships. Help for individuals and society depends on the health of our associational and relational fabric. By virtue of starting from this position, they recognize that incarceration in itself, separation from society, is a consequence, a punishment. In fact, directly responsive to a mistake in relationship to responsibilities of association and relationships, all right? In other words, separation itself is already a punishment. Prison doesn't have to be hell to be punishment. Just being separate from society is already a punishment, right? Now that for us is sort of unthinkable. It's crazy that that should be unthinkable, but that's where they start. And so as a consequence of that, their goal in using a sanction, rather than punishment, right? Using a sanction of separation is socialization, return, and preparing people to be positive contributors with regard to the principle of association, okay? And so this means that they have, they focus on the dignity of incarcerated people and prisoners. They protect free expression. They let people wear their own clothes. They sometimes let people cook their own meals. In other words, they're supporting the continued growth and development of autonomy. They have a strong focus on work and education required work and education, but also remunerated work and education. They do not use solitary confinement in general, and when they do use it in the very rare cases, the maximum in Germany is four weeks. We have people in solitary confinement for, you all know, right? Decades, decades. Maximum in Germany, four weeks. Maximum in the Netherlands, two weeks. Illegal to use it for longer than that, okay? Illegal. They also pay attention to the quality of interactions between staff and incarcerated people, and staff are trained. Part of their job is about the quality of that interaction. Recognizing that the quality of that interaction is a part of what is having a developmental impact on incarcerated people and preparing them for their return. Okay? So we're not even talking about utopias. You can get a plane ticket and go to the place that's like this, okay? So, but there's another important point. Underlying all of those specific details that just described about their use of incarceration is another more fundamental idea, and that is that in Germany and Netherlands, incarceration is a punishment of last resort. Okay, that's where these two issues of the rights prisoners have behind bars connects to the ethics of using bars. Once you recognize that incarceration should be a last resort because of the damage it does to people and society, that then already affects how you're going to use it. Okay? In other words, if you see the way in which it needs to be a limited tool, you'll handle that tool carefully with caution. Take nuclear weapons as an example, okay? Strange example to use, I recognize, but the point is we recognize the magnitude of the danger of nuclear weapons and consequently we build amazing protocols of care around their potential use. That doesn't make us all feel safe, I recognize. Not in this. No, I recognize, I recognize. Nonetheless, that's the point, precisely because we recognize the magnitude of the tool, the weapon. We are self-conscious about designing protections around its use and that's where you get rights for people behind bars is by recognizing what kind of sanction bars are in the first place. So what does it mean for incarceration to be a punishment of last resort? So it means that both Germany and the Netherlands have a massive system of alternative sanctioning. Again, that's why I wanted you guys to go through the exercise of how should we respond to this 15-year-old? What alternatives do we have? And the fact of the matter is alternatives don't come to our minds very easily, right? Did you all feel that, like empty space in your brain? Like where do we go? So in Germany and the Netherlands, they use a lot of diversion techniques what we are starting in this country to call diversion techniques. That can mean what are called transactions where it's sort of like a negotiated settlement. You go from case to case, figuring out what's the thing that in this case counts as a consequence for this person, gives them something hard to do so that they learn and are required to develop. So it might be include a fine, it might include asset seizure, it might include training required, training required work without remuneration in this case, it might require mediation, it might require driving restrictions. There are a variety of ways in which you can sanction people that are direct consequence for what they've done and also support their development in pro-social ways. And that's the goal of that sort of things. They use suspended sentences and what they call task penalties which often involve work in the community in various kinds of ways, in nonprofits, in health organizations, in businesses and so forth. So it's a whole society effort to come up with a sanctioning system that is an alternative to incarceration. Well, what's the result? Who knows what percentage of sanctioning in Germany is incarceration? Anybody happen to know? Wanna guess? Six percent, okay? Six percent, for us it's 70 percent, okay? And of that six percent, six percent of sanctions are actually incarceration, of that six percent, three quarters of that, so five-ish percent forward between four or five percent, is for 12 months or less, all right? 12 months or less. And 92 percent for two years or less. You get a plane ticket, all right? Okay, you get a plane ticket. Netherlands, 10 percent of their sanctions are incarceration. So it is actually possible to do this completely differently from how we do this, completely possible. Okay, so that leads me back again into the how do we think the unthinkable? The problem is not how to understand rights and ethics in the use of incarceration, right? If that's not the problem, that's easy. Other people have already answered the question. Maybe we have a lot to learn, to get to a full understanding and to understand the philosophical bases for these alternatives. But people have already done this work. The hard part is how to make imaginative space in this country for an alternative, right? That's why I wanna spend my last few minutes thinking about with you a little bit and then open it up for conversation. So I want to draw a comparison to slavery. And I'm not doing this because I think incarceration is in any strict sense an analogy to slavery as an institution, okay? So in other words, I'm not actually gonna make the Michelle Alexander argument in this moment, all right? Our penal system is racialized, no question. But that's not the point. The point I wanna make instead is about any kind of injustice. It just happens to be that one is mass incarceration and one is slavery that has grown up so organically and woven its way so thoroughly through the fabric of a society that we take it for granted and can't think outside of it. That's what's relevant about the contrast to slavery, okay? So because slavery was worked into the entire economic fabric of this country, north as well as south. We forget that, we lose side of that, right? Northern shipping and trade and so forth in Providence we know about but also Boston in the 17th and 18th centuries were part of the triangular trade that was moving slaves around. As I have like slaves and rum, et cetera, all the way sort of around the Atlantic. And so a lot of wealth up here as well as in the south came out of that. And it was, again, it was just, it was taken for granted, a matter of course. That changed. So how exactly did it change? Well, it didn't change all at once, right? So you get into a point where this country was as Lincoln said, half slave, half free. That itself took about 40 years, okay? So how did it happen first? Three places, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Vermont, wasn't a state that it was its own country in the 1780s. It's still kind of its own country. Right? By 1780 reformers, courageous people, small bands of courageous people had managed to convince their state legislatures to abolish slavery. That was it. That's the beginning. Three states out of 13, okay? So if you think proportionally, I guess we have means we have to go, you know, in a higher number than three. But the point was that what happened, so in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, by 1780 they had abolished slavery. This did come out of arguments about equality that came out of the revolution, out of the Declaration of Independence. There was a recognition of the sort of hypocrisy of the political arguments people were making at that time in relationship to the ongoing maintenance of the institution of slavery. So the ideas mattered. The ideas helped people see that there was a problem and then there were people who were willing to experiment on an alternative, all right? And that's where the really hard part comes in, is how you get people willing to experiment on an alternative. Because they had to answer questions about, well, how are these people going to work and have jobs by these people? I mean, the enslaved people, all right? And what about marriage? Does this, are they gonna marry us? And they had to go through all these concrete things that they got lots of answers wrong as they were working through these things, but they did have to go through these small decisions about institutional changes all throughout their social structure. And that's why you really, they needed a cadre of brave people willing to push, push, push and put concrete ideas on the table. And I think that the same thing is ultimately gonna be what happens here, right? Is that there's not gonna be a sweeping national overhaul overnight. There are going to be states that step into the space of what feels unthinkable in other parts of the country and build something and prove that it can be done. And this state can do it, all right? So I'm so glad that these, you are all here in Massachusetts thinking about this, okay? And there is a big bill, criminal justice reform bill, moving through the state assembly right now. The Senate passed it, the House is about to pass it. It's pieces and parts, right? It's changes in juvenile justice, changing the age at which people can be sentenced for crimes, bringing it out from seven to 12, bringing adult sentencing up from 18 to 19, decriminalizing some features of drug offenses. There are other, I mean, it's a mixed and complicated thing. I'm not gonna say the whole picture of the bill is a good picture, okay? And it's not what some people would call comprehensive either, that has to be said. But it's important to dig into this conversation and try to understand where it's going, what it's doing, and to draw on these alternatives from places like Germany and Netherlands and get them on the table so that we can all begin to imagine something new, all right? So I'm coming round to the sort of nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty of politics around this because at the end of the day, I think these issues of ethics and rights behind bars and in our use of bars, again, the hard part of the conversation is actually not the conceptual one, not what's right, what's ethical, but how to transform a society. And again, that's hard because remember what I said at the start. How any society thinks about wrongdoing and justice makes it. It's the DNA of human social organization. And so we are asking ourselves to rewrite our basic genetic code as a society. Okay, and that needs visionaries like Angela Davis. And cadres of courageous people. Thanks. Over to you. What are your thoughts? Let's get the brainstorming going. Yeah, that was a good question. Thank you. Thanks for a terrific talk. Thanks for a terrific talk and especially those ideas about moving forward. I'm a psychiatrist and a writer and have been writing about some of these very issues and one of the stumbling blocks that I come up against repeatedly is exactly what you'll identify that is there are solutions out there but I think in particular ideas of vengeance are strong in our culture. And I think one of the major obstacles to enacting the kinds of changes you describe is addressing our societal ideas about revenge. And I'd just like to hear your thoughts about how best we might do that. Yeah, that's a great question. So some of you may know that Michelle Alexander quit her job in the law school in Ohio and moved to Union Theological Seminary. And the reason she did that was for basically exactly this issue that she's come to believe that actually changing this requires in effect changing our souls. And though she recognizes that she herself has no training in theology, no training in soul work, doesn't feel like she could do anything else other than begin to learn how to work on that. And that's not to say that religion is the only feature of that kind of soul work. Psychiatry, psychology, all our literature, art, all our, but all of the ways in which people come to understand what it cares about. I mean, those are the kinds of tools we need to put at our disposal. So that's why 13th is so important, right? Film, books, stories. And also I think most importantly the voices of people who have been in prison. And so for me, I mean, this is, last mentioned my book, Cuzz, and there are a lot of reasons that I wrote it, but one was simply, again, my cousin Michael is a beautiful person. He wrote beautifully, he was a very talented writer. And since he died in 2009, I've had this box of his writing in my closet beaming at me. Just beaming at me, you know, it's like a voice in a box. And I wanted to get that voice out there. And so his writing is in the center of the book, it's sort of the heart of the book. And there are projects growing up that are about getting the voices of people in prison out into the public. And it's just so important because again, I just, sometimes I sort of, I sit and I just think about, you know, again, the number of people in prison, like two million people, and all the people connected to them, all those stories, and we don't hear them. That's a huge silence. And I do believe if we could hear all those stories, actually hear them, it would change us. So, yeah, up in the way back, please, yeah. And I'll come up here next, okay, and then I'll come over here. My name is Tori Marte, and I do vocational rehabilitation services here in Massachusetts. And everything that people have been talking in here goes deep into, but I would like to take it a little bit deeper from the policy procedure is the ethics that contradicts with human rights and human's behavior. And I think we need to look at those because the consequences of the prison, the OP crisis, and the criminalization of regular behavior comes from the ethics that has been set up by people who has not been affected by those issues. And I'm struggling with that. And I would like to take to the next level your point of being the voices of those in prison. I would like to say that I'm the voices of the debt because I've been listening for 20 plus years about the injustices that's been happening and until psychiatrists, doctors, pharmaceutical company, white, black, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, come together to the table and we own our own biases. We will be here 25, 50, 100 years and nothing will change. So we need to close, I would like to say that we need to confront the ethics procedure, the law, the policy, humanity as a whole because we've been criminalizing people just because we cannot relate to them. One little, no, then there's a question up here and then I'll hop up into the back there. So I spared you my sermon on the war on drugs, which is just a part of the criminalization story but I do believe that it's the beginning of it that is to say the reason we have become a society that criminalizes excessively across the board is because of the sin of criminalizing marijuana in the 1970s and extending a bunch of other kinds of criminalization beyond that. Just think about this piece of it. This is, I mean there's many ways to critique the war on drugs, many ways to show it's distorting effects on our society but people sort of forget this very basic one. Once you've got penalties, criminal penalties for simple use and possession of marijuana six months to a year, simple use and possession of things like crack and heroin a year to five years. In Massachusetts, one of the things that can come out in this bill, criminalization of being in the presence of heroin. Once you've got penalties like that on your books, everything has to shift longer and other stuff's gotta be criminal because if you're gonna keep it all making sense, you're gonna have to expand the whole thing. So that's one of the ways it's been very corrupting of us as a society. And yes, and if you read this article, the one about the Netherlands in Germany, you will see that underneath the whole thing is just a different approach to criminalization in the first place, all right? So you cannot get through this conversation without also getting to that issue. You're completely right, thank you. It's an honor to be sitting here listening to your story and having you share it with us. I wanted to ask about that article in terms of Germany and the Netherlands and relate it back to us and it just strikes me that those are very homogenous communities and countries and our biggest problem starts with racial injustice here. And so I would like to know and dig deeper into their data and understand who are being punished harshest in Germany and in the Netherlands. Is it the other that they've designated, the non-white, blonde, blue? So to me there's like that question that then relates back to how you talked about slavery, smoothly and organically transitioning. Thank you. There's an existential question there. I mean, so actually neither Germany nor the Netherlands is as homogenous any longer as we think of them as being. So they've all seen huge rates of immigration not as much as we have, but nonetheless within their own historical context they have. And they are managing to hold onto this approach to criminal justice despite diversification. I am sure that there is elements of stratification. I would be surprised if there weren't. I don't actually know, but my guess would be that there is. And so in some sense the existential struggle is and it's one that we actually see, we see more clearly in Britain. So Britain is sort of halfway between us and the Netherlands and Germany and their approaches and they are seeing a problem of expanding incarceration like ours and a problem of racialized incarceration like ours. And so the existential struggle is in some sense is like will our model disseminate to everybody else or could the Germany and Netherlands model disseminate? That's the existential struggle. And so we do have to, so in some sense they haven't been fully put to the test to your point but I think let's not worry about that, okay? We have the job of figuring out how in context of great racial ethnic diversity to get that approach growing here. That's just the only way forward. And so I think what's right about their approach is still right in a heterogeneous context. But so that means there's important work to be done making it happen in a heterogeneous context. Yeah, back row right here, please. Yeah, thanks. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Grover T. Reddy. I'm an Episcopal priest and I am the chaplain at a large correctional facility in the upstate New York, coaxically but precise, which holds over a thousand men with the RMU region medical unit as well as an infirmary. Thank you for your presentation, it was good to listen. Question is that people who are prisoners and criminals, it would seem to me are only those who have been caught and whom allege hard guilty people. We don't know who have not been caught and what are their roles in the ethics of human being and human rights. And how are they planning to change the system or do they want to change the system? Because somehow it seemed in our system here that without doubt, the matter of racism continues to be one of the most important point in incarcerating our people. Right. Where do we go from here? So if I understood your question correctly, you're saying something similar to what Professor Boyd said when you testified before the state legislature a year ago about the legalization of marijuana issue and you said the fact of the matter is we all know that if the police were breaking down doors on Beacon Hill in their drug busts, this would have changed two decades ago, right? So the disproportion in enforcement, we've got excessive criminalization but then we also have disparities in enforcement and it's the combination of the two things that has made the system sustainable, right? Because if the excessive criminalization were fully felt by everybody, whoof, you know. I mean, we already have the biggest prison system in the world. I mean, it would be like obviously, I mean, it is obviously insane already but everybody would know that it was obviously insane if it touched without disproportion. So I think that, I mean, for me, this is where, so one of the things I like to think about in thinking about reform and political change is the role of prophetic imagination and prophetic speech and we always point to King, Martin Luther King as an example, I mean, Cornel West is another great visionary of prophetic speech but you have to be able to show people the way in which things they take for granted are absurd and the way in which there are genuine alternatives and so I mean, sometimes I do go around like figuring out the numbers of like if Chicago enforces marijuana laws equally on white people as black people like how many white people would be in prison? Like, here's your number people, all right? And so, you know, there are ways of making this real and making it touch people. It also matters, people don't often know this that the demographic group that has seen the biggest increase of incarceration in the last decade, who knows the answer to this question? What's the demographic group that's seen the biggest increase in incarceration in the last decade? White women. And that is the opioid epidemic in part at work, okay? So, it is starting to touch in a way that I think we need to reformers work with. I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah, right against the wall back there and then I'll come over to this section, okay? It's starting from a low number, so. Thank you. We'll have something called out for white women that will not apply to the general disproportionate. Well, that's where we have to all have work to do. I mean, I think that is a possible pathway, but it's not the only possible pathway and that's where we have work to do to make sure that the appetite for reform that's growing gets educated, fostered and cultivated so that we can broaden our ambitions. And that also requires organizing, solidarity. I had a conversation yesterday with a man named Neil Hirsch in Western Massachusetts for anybody who's thinking about state laws here and so forth who is the chairman of the Reform Action Center for the Consortium of Reform Jewish Synagogues all across the country. They were very involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and one of the Civil Rights Act was drafted on a conference table in their offices and they wanna get involved in criminal justice reform. We can build solidarities and alliances, but that's the work, right? But I believe if we do this work, we can broaden the lens here. So there aren't just sort of carve-outs, just responses to opioids, et cetera. We need to get the equal protection concept into that conversation. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, is that better? I'm pleased to be here. I should say first, I'm here for a personal reason. My brother was murdered in Soledad in 1967 and I understand some of those issues that led to his death still exist in many, many prisons. And I think that although it's important to think about changing people's hearts, we have to also think about changing the laws. Yep. And as soon as possible and if we can get any information in this conference on something in Massachusetts that's important to support or question in what's going on in legislative procedure, this is a place to start the action. Yep, thank you. Here, here, thank you very much. Let's see, let me come all the way over here. Can we get a mic all the way over here? I've been all focused on this side of the room, so let's, um. Thank you so much. My name is Veronica. I do reentry work formally with Humboldt Industries in Los Angeles. You, I'm curious to learn, you've mentioned that you don't think the existing or the pending reform bill in Massachusetts is comprehensive enough, what gaps do you see? Fair question. I'm not gonna be able to answer that because I haven't actually studied it closely enough. In fact, I just have a meeting scheduled for December 14th to actually try to dig into that. So I was realizing and preparing for this meeting today that I haven't done my own homework adequately on the Massachusetts process and legislation. And so I think, you know, it was as much a message to myself as to all the rest of you that this is work we need to do. So I've taken a quick look and it's just sort of, you know, it's pieces and parts. And for me, to come back to the question over there, the issue of drug legalization and decriminalization is at the heart of all of this. The Massachusetts got started last year with the ballot initiative around marijuana legalization, but it was a half step and there's still a lot of problems connected to it. And so for me as I was reading everything, what I was asking myself was the question of, you know, what's the kind of package, like what's the full package of criminalizing laws that we think ought to be repealed? And I don't know that anybody's actually worked that out from Massachusetts as of yet. Like if you just like, because state laws have all kinds of weird particularities, right? I mean, you know, like one of the things that we're changing is they're increasing the penalty for corporate corporations that kill people. Anyway, I don't really, it's corporations that, what am I trying to say? Actually hire people to kill people, okay? Which is a law that's been on the books in Massachusetts since the early 19th century, 18, 19 or something. The penalty is $1,000. So the point is just like state law is made out of weird accretions that build up over time. And I'm not sure anybody actually has an answer to the question of, you know, if we were really focused on decriminalization, shrinking the zone of criminalization, like what's the actual package of stuff we would wanna see repealed. So that for me is something that I would wanna understand better. Hi, my name is Katie Cox. I was, I wanted to speak with regards to the opioid that was mentioned as far as how it affects white women. How can there be solidarity when, you know, like minorities or black people who are getting incarcerated for the crack addiction but the opioid they get like rehab, how can that bring solidarity if they cannot relate to the same situation as far as who's getting incarcerated for what crimes? Yeah, no, I mean, the problems are legion without any question, but the need to overcome them is even bigger, okay? So that's where whatever it takes for us to figure out how to walk arms with people who has made things be maybe going better for them, but nonetheless, this is a place where we could actually work together. We gotta do it. We just have to do it. Let me just give you a specific thing to think about in Massachusetts again, which I would welcome your brainstorming help on when you get to the brainstorming part of your conversation. There's a program called PARI, police assisted addiction recovery, which started in Gloucester. It was known as the Angels program initially, and this is where police departments advertise. If you come to us, you can get treatment help, you won't get arrested, all right? Now, some people feel more comfortable going to the police for help than other people. So you're gonna have a disparity right there, okay? Also, there's a tricky, it's great, great that police see that there's a health issue here, not a criminal justice issue, and that should be a kind of insight and intuition and commitment that we can all build on. But at the same time, if it's really a health issue, then what we really want would be some way of conveying within communities, here are the community service centers you can go to. You don't even have to go to the police first, right? Let's just get you to a community center of some kind health center, and yes, it will be funded, and yes, there will be subsidies, and that's obviously tied up with the huge complicated national conversation around healthcare and the Affordable Care Act and so forth. The Affordable Care Act has made it easier to provide support for addiction treatment through community health centers and so forth, right? And that is one of the things that's in jeopardy. People should be very aware of this in the current debate about healthcare policy, okay? But so the point is just that, so there's this thing happening, it's got some good intuitions in it, but it's got some problems connected to it, and that's where we need the brainstorming to figure out how to take that good intuition, that good commitment, that good motivation, and help us toward a pathway that's helping everybody. Yeah, thank you so much. That was extremely helpful, really appreciate it. And I would like to say thank you again to Professor Allen. Thank you.