 All right. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining me, and we're going to be talking about your amazing book, Rectify. But real quick, for those who have yet to have the pleasure to meet you, can you just kind of introduce yourself, your background, and kind of the work you do? Sure. So my name is Lara Bazalan. I'm a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, and I direct two clinics, a criminal and juvenile justice clinic and a racial justice clinic. Before that, I was a federal public defender in Los Angeles trying felony cases, and I was also the head of a small innocence project called the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent at Loyola Law School. Cool. So yeah, it is something that I'm super interested in, like I'm a recovering drug addict. I'm always looking at like justice reform and stuff like that. And Rectify, I'm curious, what kind of inspired it? I know it has most likely has a lot to do with your work, but with wrongful convictions and the incarceration rates, what are some of the main issues with the justice system that you're trying to tackle in the book? I'm trying to tackle not just the causes and the consequences of wrongful conviction for the people who have been wrongfully convicted, but also the consequences, the collateral damage to victims, the original crime victims and their families and then other actors in the system who either willingly or unwittingly participated. So judges, jurors, prosecutors, defense attorneys, there's just a lot of ripple effects coming outward from a single wrongful conviction. So I really wanted to do that. And I also just wanted to challenge the myth that the system, quote unquote, works when somebody is exonerated and then they go off and live happily ever after. Yeah. Yeah. That was something I definitely found interesting about the book. I've been reading more and more just about issues with the justice system, but this one really tackled different angles of like the victims, right? Who like wrongfully accused someone, you know, and we could, you know, we'll touch on some of the reasons that happens, but some of, you know, some of the traumas that they go through, some of the psychological issues, right? Like wrongfully accusing somebody and they go to jail for a while, but also, you know, the other person is free. So what would you say, like, what is, like this was, you released in like 2018, I believe, like, have we made any progress? Because like some of it was like the victims being totally caught off guard, not even knowing that the person was exonerated. Like, like there were so many things that I don't even have time to dive into, but have we made any progress? Like when it comes to the victims or solutions? Some jurisdictions have made a lot of progress and they have put the victims in a different posture than they have been in the past. So in the past, essentially, victims are really props, I think for the prosecution and they were away for the prosecution to say, this person's really evil and look at what they did to this person and to this family. And then once they participated to that limited degree in the criminal process and got the conviction, they weren't that interested in them anymore. And you're right, like oftentimes didn't communicate with them, et cetera. And I think now, at least with progressive DAs, they run on these platforms of really trying to be very victim centered. Of course, there are laws now, including along California that requires that they be notified at certain points along the way. So there's the legal imperative to comply with the law. But then there's also just the understanding that before you take any significant action, in the case, pretrial or importantly, post-conviction, you notify the victim. And I know that that's absolutely a practice here in San Francisco and in some other jurisdictions as well. Yeah, well, that's definitely good. And yeah, it's interesting too, because it happens like county by county or even state by state. And it's not like a federal thing. But one of the things that I've been dying to ask someone with your expertise, Lara, is this. So I originally, before I dove into justice reform, I read a lot about false memories and issues with witness identification and all that. There's so many things. I've read entire books about how screwed up our memories can be. But on the other side of it, like, I'm always just like appalled at how many women I know who have been the victim of sexual assault, sexual abuse and all that. So where do we find that balance? I don't know if you discuss this with your students or if there's anything being worked on. Where do we find that balance where we don't want, after someone goes through such a traumatic event of being raped or something like that, you can't just walk up to them and be like, hey, let me tell you about the science of memory might not be too accurate. You know what I mean? So like, how do, where do we find that middle ground? Like I just don't know a solution for that. It's interesting that you asked me that question because in my wrongful conviction seminar, we just last Wednesday spent two hours talking about how eyewitness misidentifications happen. And we talked about it in the context of exactly the crimes that you're talking about these unbelievably traumatic, frightening near death experiences where the person is just victimized in a way that's probably almost impossible for many people to imagine. And you're right. That's not the first thing you say to them when they're getting a rape exam at the hospital. Hey, you're mentally faulty. In fact, you don't say anything like that to them at all. But what you really want to do is make sure for the sake of justice, for the sake of their own feeling like they meaningfully participated and not revictimizing them, making sure that the process by which they make the ID is as reliable and scientifically validated as possible. You don't need to explain that to them. What you need to do is make sure that the process you're setting up for them is a legitimate reliable process. And the problem in the past is that so many of these women who were violently assaulted were basically told using these very faulty pictures to pick somebody. And then they picked the wrong person, not because they were bad people, but because the procedures were bad. So just to give you an example, if you tell a victim, hey, we have a suspect in custody and we want to see if you can pick them out and you show them five people, the victim is going to be thinking that person's in there. I just have to find them. It's like a multiple choice. So you're setting them up to pick the wrong person. If the suspect is not in there, what will end up happening is their mind engages in something called relative judgment where they pick the person who's most like the person in the lineup. The better practice is to say basically upfront, you issue this cautionary instruction, which says very clearly the suspect may or may not be in here. The lineup is constructed such that you have people who actually look like each other in the past. For example, if they describe the attacker as 6-1, you're not going to have someone in there who's 5-6. Everybody basically being 6-1. If the victim says the person was like complexed, you're not going to have dark, complexed black men in that lineup. So there are things that you can do to ratchet down the chances that the idea will be wrong, including having the person who administers it, the detective who's standing there, have no idea whether the suspect is there or not. And that's all double-blind because what happens when the detective knows is that the chances that they'll signal something consciously is extremely high. And they also might do something like give confirmatory feedback and say like, good job, that's who we thought it was. And then that just reinforces the idea in the victim's mind that they got the right person. So there's things that you can absolutely do on the law enforcement side to make it as legitimate as possible. And just like for example, if it's a photo array, not just showing them one, showing them multiple photo arrays, showing them the picture sequentially rather than all at the same time. Again, because if you do it one at a time, they can't engage in that relative judgment problem that I was talking about. So there are a lot of things that we can do to make sure or to, I guess I should say, reduce the chances that the idea is going to be mistaken. Because of course, it's horrific to find out years later that you misidentified the person and then that the actual person sometimes went on to harm other people. Yeah, that's really interesting. Like I'm really into like, my background is like in mental health. When I learned about double blinds with medications, I didn't even think about that for something like this, like bringing in a detective who has no idea either because of those, you know, unconscious movements or signals or something they might say or they might smile or you know what I mean, like when you get like excited, like, oh, you're going to get the right one, you know, and, and yeah, like, I don't, I don't know. I, I really respect the work that you and so many others do because when I, when I learn about this stuff, I get so hopeless. I'm like, what, what are we going to do? So like a minute ago, we were talking about, you know, how it might be like county by county, state by state, you know, and stuff like that. And it seems, it seems, and you touch on this in the book that so many police departments are just like, or, or even, you know, district attorneys are just like, we need to close this case, we need to have high conviction rates, like, like what, what is something that should be, you know, in your opinion being worked on, like, are the incentives screwed up? Because even with policing, just normal policing, right? Like, you know, like you hear about the issues like in New York, where they're, you know, like trying to make like overtime pay, so they'll, you know, arrest somebody for something stupid at the end of their shift or whatever, like, like, our incentives, do you think incentives are the issue? Or is it, I don't know, like, is it a structural thing? Like, where, where are the problems? Like, what's something that they could start at? They could start with a little, a little section. The incentives, I think, can often be truly perverse, both for police and prosecutors. For example, in a lot of prosecutors, office is the way that you get promoted is that you get convictions. And people who get acquittals are seen as weak or bad at their job, rather than, hey, the system worked, there was reasonable doubt. And so that's why there was this not guilty verdict. And I think for police, you know, there's just tremendous pressure, particularly in these high profile cases, to solve it as quickly as possible. And so what that means is they tend to focus on someone right away and then develop tunnel vision where when there's evidence that comes up that tends to challenge their idea that it's not that person, they basically sort of wave it away or explain it away, they delegitimize it because their focus is, as you said, on clearing their cases and getting that solved. And so until we change those incentives, and we really, most places have not, there's going to continue to be this problem. And in the cases that I litigate with my students in the clinic, we just see it again and again, this focus on one person to the exclusion of all others very early on, and then just an absolute refusal to adjust to the fact that evidence comes out, strongly suggesting it's not them, and maybe even at someone else. Yeah. And that's interesting too, like with incentives, I'm always trying to see where similarities are in different disciplines and stuff like that. And this is something in the scientific community as well, where I've talked with authors about how they don't publish studies that don't find anything. So it's almost like not having convictions or in the scientific community. Sometimes no result teaches us a ton, what I mean. For example, something I was talking with somebody about the other day, low arrest or like arrest dropping in a city. That's not a bad thing. Maybe that means that they're doing more due diligence and not arresting people for really dumb, minor things. So with the incentive structures, I'm curious, like something I often think about, like we were talking about things to reduce the likelihood of wrongful convictions by treating the victim in a certain way and things like that. I'm always thinking about like the jury too, right? I'm curious because if it was up to me and you tell me if I'm crazy, I would want like jury members with such an important job to have to go through like some kind of training, right? They would have to learn about false memories. They would have to learn about biases. They would have to learn about some of the issues with, you know, promotions based on convictions, you know, just so they have like a broader view of potential like motivational reasoning or bad testimonies. You know what I mean? So is that like too much? Is that impossible to do? I feel like you somehow have looked seven days backward in time and attended class because we went through this exact exact discussion after we finished talking about wrongful convictions, which is what's the solution when it comes to juries and how do you educate them? And so there is a movement to basically take the Supreme Court precedent, which hasn't changed at all since the 1970s, which seems that juries completely understand how memory works. Basically, the Supreme Court says jurors get it. They know how to identify people. They have two eyes in their head. They can see, they understand how memory works. You don't need an expert to explain this. You don't really need any cautionary instructions. This is not an area that requires anything outside of a lay person's knowledge and life experience. That is fundamentally not true. And we now have decades and decades of evidence showing, like you said, that memories can be contaminated. Memories can be false. Memories can be corrupted that the mind is not a camera. And so what's happened is that in some states, for example, New Jersey, they have added greater protection. So just to back up for a second, like the Supreme Court law is the floor. It's the basement. You can't go below the basement, but you can add floors. And so some states have been adding and they've been saying, you know what, this isn't enough. It's not good enough to assume that jurors are going to get it. They don't. And so they need to be instructed. They need to be told, hey, this was suggestive in this way. This was a cross-racial identification. And we know that there's this thing called own race bias where you're just not good people outside your own race. Hey, there was poor lighting. There was weapon focus. There was stress. And so they're allowing more and more, the defense attorneys to litigate that. In some states, they were barred from introducing eyewitness identification experts well into the aughts 2010, 2015, not allowed. Wait, they wouldn't let people come in and educate them about it? They would not let an expert testify. It was banned because the state courts would say, we don't need that. We don't need that. That's not an area of expertise, but it 100% is. And so now people, not people, I would say the justices in various states, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, where previously you hadn't been able to talk about it, are saying, okay, in some cases, you can bring in an expert. And okay, in New Jersey, if you can show that there's an issue, we're going to get a jury instruction. And so what I like about that, what I was talking to my students about is that even if it's just a jury instruction, you can have a field day with a jury instruction. You can build your whole case around a jury instruction. And I was joking to my students, anyone who's ever been a trial attorney, which I have, and they've sat through the judge reading the instructions, they're very long, the judge just read them in a monotone, nobody listens to them. When it's your turn to stand up and give your closing argument, you can say, okay, let's talk about jury instruction number 63, when the judge talked about cross-racial identification. What does that mean? What does that mean for this case? And then you just hammer it. And I do think now there are more ways to litigate this and to educate jurors because it's just simply a farce to believe that they come in with that kind of background and knowledge. They don't. Yeah, yeah, it's nuts. So something, something I wrestle with a ton, like I read an insane amount of books for no other reason to be curious. And I get that curse of knowledge where I assume people know, right? And that sounds kind of like the judge, well, yeah, people, people know about this, people know, like we have, we have, we're living at a time where we have so many conspiracy theorists, people are arguing about wearing masks or vaccines. You know what I mean? And I'm like, and you expect them to understand that memory is sometimes flawed, like that, that seems bonkers to me because there's so many things that are contaminating our judgment on a daily basis. And I, you know, maybe it's an unrealistic expectation of myself or unrealistic like goal. But I'm always like looking at the like trying to get down to like the root layer, like, you know, okay, maybe we educate the jurors, but everybody has the potential of being a juror. So how do we educate people, like people as a whole to knowing this? Because for example, we have so many people who just love true crime, like for example, like true crime podcasts are some of the biggest ones. So you would feel like a lot of people are educated in this. So I don't know, like, so you're teaching your students, right? And I love that because like, I have a 12 year old son, I try to teach him as much as possible, so he can do something when he's older, right? But like, is there, are there any like realistic widespread solutions, you know, like you're teaching your students, are there anything like, would it be realistic to educate people like pre-trial or should we start teaching it somewhere else? Do you think like, how do we get this message out there that we all suck and have a bunch of cognitive errors that can potentially screw someone's life up? You know what I mean? I think you're right to indicate that some of the best ways is actually through media, is through whatever people are going to pay attention to and listen to, whether it's a book like Picking Cotton, which came out, I think God almost 20 years ago, and it was the story of a rape victim picking the wrong person and goes delves deeply into how, how her memory became contaminated by the procedures that were used. And it was a best seller and they went all over the world talking about that story. And I think it really did educate a lot of people. Something like making a murderer that podcast, I think moved the ball forward so much when it came to something like false confessions, which people just didn't really think was a thing. And then you watch Brendan Dassy be manipulated and you realize, oh my God, this is real. This is, this is an actual phenomenon. And I also think that the statistics themselves, people focus on wrongful convictions. They have been able to move the needle on a number of issues. And I honestly believe, for example, that any movement we've seen in terms of people not being in favor of the death penalty anymore, how many innocent people have been freed from death row. So that even if you do think that that is an ultimate punishment that some people deserve, I think a lot of Americans are horrified to think that we've killed innocent people, but the state has done that. So I think the combination of kind of the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and the innocence movement plus, as you were saying, true crime and memoirs and autobiographies and books that are really targeted and media that's targeted and films to reach a mass audience do an incredible amount of educating far more sadly than I do 20, 30, 80 students at a time, right? Yeah. Yeah. So overall, overall, are you, are you optimistic in the direction that we're heading? Like, like, are you like, Hey, things, things should be getting better. Oh, you know, hopefully soon with media, you know, more people listening to podcasts watching, you know, all these things, you can lie to me to go for it. I mean, it's funny. I am optimistic. And I'll tell you why I, I started practicing law in 2001, when, when I was a federal public defender. And in 2001, the innocence movement was in its infancy. Being a public defender was widely considered to be a road to nowhere. The idea of a progressive prosecutor didn't even exist. If you told me my 27 year old self that in 2021, there would be not one, not two, but almost a dozen progressive prosecutors with jurisdiction over millions of Americans who are implementing any number of policies all along the lines that we're talking about, including my own city, I would have told you that you were insane. It was so much darker in 2001. And I'm not trying to suggest remotely that everything is perfect, but I do think there's been somewhat of a corrective to this merciless, pulverizing, tough on crime, mass incarceration, pummeling, which is what my clients experienced every single day. And I guess because I grew up in that system, I didn't even have the imagination to envision the place we are in now. Okay. Okay. That, that, that's enough optimism to get me, keep me going because, yeah, looking back at the, at the past and talking with people like yourself, we've been doing this for so long. So, so yeah, because I try to like, you know, focus on those things and educating people. And, you know, I hope that, you know, even my podcast, you know, people pick up your book and, you know, learn about these things. And like I said, I've read books that are specifically about like just bad memories and stuff. And, you know, false confessions to like, Oh, don't even get me started on false convictions before confessions. But since I have you here, I've had a question forever. And I know you're not a scientist, but you probably have the answer to this. Okay. I've, I've, I've enjoyed watching true crime forever. But like in like, I don't know, 70s, 80s, or maybe you can correct me, they started collecting DNA. All right. Like, like cases being turned over didn't start happening until like late 90s 2000s, if I'm correct. Did they know were they like, Hey, we're just going to keep this piece of hair, this blood, this semen, because we know in like 20 years, this will be bulletproof. Like, how did they know? Can you, can you explain that to me? I've always been curious. Okay. So this is challenging because I'm definitely not a scientist, but I'm not a historian of science. But my understanding is this. So when you're talking about things like blood and hair, and semen and other bodily fluids, there was testing in the 70s and the 80s. And I grant you, it was, I think by today's standards, what we would say is relatively primitive, but it was still worth keeping because you could blood type. And so, for example, in the 80s, they would say, Oh, okay, well, this blood is type O and the perpetrator is type O. I mean, obviously that doesn't narrow it down very far. If you knew how many people had typo blood, but it was better than nothing. And it was a piece of evidence or a little bit of proof. And so they collected it for that reason. I'm not sure how many people were super far reaching, but there was this one criminologist in Virginia who, who kept all of her evidence. She kept these tiny pieces of cotton ball swabs. She kept it all and it ended up just being this treasure trove because she worked in that crime lab for so many years. And when they exhumed her files out of cold cases, she had kept it in her file and they were able to test all kinds of things using DNA and exonerate a number of people in the state of Virginia because of her, I guess, far sightedness. Well, maybe it was just, I don't know. It's hard to, it's hard to explain why some people are super meticulous and holding on to things that you're like, well, does that really have that much significance? But I think it had a limited significance in the 70s. And then it became a far greater value as our testing methods became more sophisticated and involved. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's interesting. And maybe I'll, I'll get curious enough to like dive into some book on, you know, the history of this stuff because, because from what I've seen, we're, we're terrible at like predicting like future technology. Like for example, you know, a lot of us are fans of like back to the future and we're supposed to have hoverboards and hover, like all sorts of cool stuff. We got none of it. But somebody was like, you know what, I bet DNA testing will, you know what I mean? Like, we're, you know, and technology, it's advanced in so many places, but not in others and stuff. So I've been super, super curious about that. It's really interesting. And yeah, maybe, maybe she was just a hoarder and it got, you know, we got lucky. Like, I don't know. So, so I, I discovered you in your work when I watched you talking with Glenn Laurie. All right. And, and I love Glenn. I respect his work a ton. But it was one of the first times where I saw, you know, kind of a debate where you brought up the, you know, the the statistics around African Americans being arrested, right? Because when it comes to these like discussions around like Black Lives Matter or systemic racism and stuff like that, it doesn't seem like people are really grasping these statistics, right? Like, so for example, let me just throw out a chain of events that I don't feel like people put together, right? Like, so you have Black communities, right? And they're like, oh, well, well, they're not, it's educated or there's higher crime rates because they're, they're being raised in these single family households, right? I'm like, okay, like, I'm a huge psychology nerd, I can get that. But are you taking into account that Black men are arrested at insanely high rates, which is removing them from the households? You know what I mean? So how do we, you know, or even if you could speak to that and explain it a lot better than I just did, like some of these systemic issues, because it seems like when these debates happen, these conversations, like even Glenn was like, oh, I'll have to look into that, right? Like, are people, you know, willfully ignorant not looking at it and, you know, not ignorant in a terrible way, just they don't know, like, where, where does this issue come from? Because it seems like, and maybe it's because I'm half Black and I have a whole half of my family, you know what I mean? But like, how do we educate people like, hey, this is a chain reaction of things that are happening. And that's why they call it systemic, because it's affecting entire systems. Right. And I think part of the problem is that it's really easy to be incredibly reductive. And on the one side say, there's no such thing as systemic racism. And kind of, I hate to call it the Bill Cosby mantra, because the whole pull up your pants, Black people kind of thing. Pull it together. You have the Civil Rights Act. You have Brown v Board of Education. We're done. It's fine. Be happy. There's sort of that extreme end. And then at the other extreme, there's sort of every single problem that that afflicts the Black community or the Latinx community name your community can be reduced to racism. And there's no other explanation way at the other end of the spectrum. And I feel like that's that ends up kind of people fall on those extreme ends in large part because as you said, I think that they don't think that carefully about how complicated it is. And also because the subject is so charged. And I think actually quite frankly, a lot of white people are even afraid to engage in it, which is which is incredibly unfortunate. But to go to what you were saying about about these disproportionate arrest rates, you're absolutely right. So we can just take drugs, for example, drug crimes. White people and Black people use drugs at almost exactly the same rates. And that's true for all drugs. And yet, war on drugs, the so-called war on drugs, overwhelmingly targeted Black and Brown people, mainly young Black men. Why? White men use cocaine and deal cocaine at the same rates, but it's you look at who's incarcerated and who's doing these unbelievably high sentences. And overwhelmingly, it's Black men. And that's because there's a bias in the system towards, as you say, stopping Black men. And this is really based on, you know, whatever reasonable suspicion, what does that mean? I'm a police officer and I look at you and I think the way that you're behaving signals that a crime might be afoot. What does that mean? You're looking over your shoulder, you're reaching for something in your waist. Things that are just that everybody does. But when Black people do them, I guess are somehow more suspicious and more likely to get them arrested than white people. And so that has been going on really for decades. It's going on today in cities. They're just much more likely to be stopped. They're much more likely to be arrested. Once they're arrested, they're much less likely to get out on bail. So they're more likely to plead guilty, etc. And so we have this whole baked in bias, bias in policing, bias in charging, bias in outcomes in terms of the war on drugs. Then you get into this much more complicated area. And this is, I think, where Glenn Lowry really wants to have a debate, which is, okay, that's true. And it is also true that in marginalized communities, which tend to be communities of color, there are higher rates of violent crime. So statistically speaking, you're more likely to either be a victim or a perpetrator of violent crime when you look at the stats. And so how do you explain that? How do you explain that higher statistical rate within, especially the Black community? And that's what Glenn keeps asking. Why is it that Black men, for example, commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes? And his whole point is, you can't reduce that down to systemic racism. You have to look at these other things that are going on in these communities. What I object to, and this actually kind of caught my attention when he had Charles Murray on the author of the bell curve, is he said to Charles Murray, something like, is this a genetic problem in your view? And Charles Murray said, I don't really take a position on that. And my mouth just dropped open. How could it be genetic? That's insane. It's insane to think that there's a criminogenic gene unique to Black people. And so that's where that argument, to me, just starts to go off the rails and become alarming and angering. So it's a combination of things. It's not a gene. It's not genetic. But a lot of it is about poverty. A lot of it is about having your family torn apart. As you say, single parent households, the kids tend to have worse outcomes. Okay, right. And that's true if your dad was taken out of your home for whatever, selling cocaine and put in prison for 20 years, and you didn't have any money growing up. And so, you know what I mean? You can kind of see these cycles perpetuating themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I can't remember if you touched on in your book, but there's a lot of misconceptions, myths, and bad science around the warrior gene, right? Where they're like, oh, the MAOA gene, it makes people more aggressive. And, you know, because they link it to like killers or violent people and stuff like that. But there's a lot of debate around it and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, environment plays a huge role. But and your talk about that, you know, the perpetual kind of issue and, you know, coming from a drug background, right? Like, you know, something that was very fortunate for me, well, a few things, right? Actually, releasing an episode today about success and luck with Robert Frank. But like, lucky for me, I look very white, even though I'm half black, right? But when I was drinking and using drugs, I never got in trouble with the police, right? Living here in Las Vegas, I drove drunk too many times, never got a DUI, just so many things I didn't have to worry about. But for the people who go in and you talk about this, you know, quite a bit in the book is, is our punishment, right? So you get punished by going to jail, right? And then you get released and you might be on probation, parole, whatever. And you have this mark, you have this mark on your, on your, you know, on you. So places don't hire felons. You can only get a certain amount of jobs. You spent a lot of time for something stupid that you've got arrested for, like having a little weed, which is being legalized in a bunch of ways. So now it's harder to get a job. You go back to your crappy community. What are you going to do? What are you going to do to support your family and make money? Are you just going to keep trying and be broke and, you know, whatever? Or are you going to go back to the crime that got you there in the first place, which then leads you back to jail, right? So it's keeping people in this system. And I guess it's a good segue. Can you kind of explain the idea behind like restorative justice, right? Or even rehabilitation, like what, what can we be doing better? Like, okay, police, there are resting too many people. What can we be doing better in jails and prisons and stuff like that when releasing people or even post-release, do you think, to help keep people out of that system? So let's talk about reentry and rehabilitation. I think you're absolutely right that we're a very vengeful, like stigmatized people. So we don't think, okay, you did a terrible thing, you stole, it's you're a thief, or you committed a terrible act, you took someone's life, you're a murderer. And then we put these labels on people and that's their entire identity. And for the rest of their lives, they'll never, they'll never get past it, right? Because we, especially for example, in the federal system, there's no way to expunge your convictions, literally no way. And I think one, one very important thing that needs to happen at the federal level and at many state and local levels is the ability to let people expunge their records and incentivize them. If you can get on the right track, you cannot reoffend for X number of years, you can go back to the court and wipe out your convictions so that you don't have to check the felon box. Speaking of the felon box, why are we having people check it for things like I was arrested for weed or a DUI? I mean, five, 10 years ago, when it's going to say, okay, well, if you're identical to this other person, but they don't have your record, I'm going to hire the other person. So there's also this whole concept of what's called banning the box, which is not making people 10, 12, 20 years later say like, oh yeah, this, this thing happened. And therefore, I probably know that you're going to disqualify me for this job. And it's also true for licensing, like you can't get licenses in a lot of states to be a barber or an electrician or what have you because you have something on your record. So I think it's been doing all of that. Maybe it's important to have it there for a certain number of years in certain cases, but for every single criminal conviction, misdemeanor and felony to have people walking around dragging that around like a chain of tin cans just rattling doesn't make any sense. And it makes it very, very, very difficult to climb out and go the right way as you said. So there's that part of it. And then the other part of it of course is you're right, you need to release people with some kind of support that's not just okay, go back to the same dysfunctional environment with this conviction, good luck, right? I think getting sober as you know better than anyone else is extremely difficult. You need a lot of support. You need support. You need programs. And you know, we're all too happy to build the next prison and the next jail. We love doing that. But then it's, well, where's the Drug Rehabilitation Center? Where's the Community Center where people can go and play sports and get job training. We need to just emphasize investing in people once they get out rather than spending college level tuitions incarcerating them. You're after. Yeah. Yeah. Something I think about a lot. And it's in a variety of areas. Like, for example, like, you know, it took me a while to understand why there are some criticisms of someone like Robin D'Angelo, right? And when I read a new book, it almost seems like, hey, no matter what you do, if you're white, you're still going to be somewhat racist. I'm like, okay, like coming from my addiction background, like I worked in the treatment center for years, right? And if you if you tell a drug addict, like, hey, you're a drug addict, you're always going to be a drug addict, no matter what you do, you're a drug addict. Like they're going to look like if you told me that when I got sober, I'd be like, well, guess I might as well use drugs, right? So, you know, with this, with this, you know, I like that, you know, this, this chain of tin cans rattling with you, like, if you're always going to be labeled a felon, right? Why? Why? Why are you going to try to change if this, because people adopt that identity? And like, I don't think you need a PhD in psychology to know what that does to somebody on a psychological level, right? Saying you cannot change this is who you are. This is part of your identity. It's going to follow you everywhere you go. Like, it's not necessarily incentivizing people. So, quick question, like, as you were talking about that, and I don't know if this is like, you know, are these laws in the state, like where a felon cannot work in certain places, or is it more employers? Like, how much, how much room, because I know working with addicts, there were certain places that hired ex-felons, right? So, can you explain that? Because I'm curious, like, maybe there's business owners listening. Do they have to worry about state laws? Or what can they do if they wanted to hire former felons? So, it really, it's a state by state, county by county thing. Of course, private businesses have to obey state and local laws. And some state and local laws are stricter than others. But they also have more leeway than, say, a public employer, and they can decide, okay, I'm going to make an exception for this person. I mean, just because somebody checks the box, because they have to, let's say you have, you have to ask that question, state and local law requires you to ask that. You can still educate yourself and say, okay, and I met this person and I think they deserve a second chance. Then there are states where you don't have to ask that. So, don't ask, right? You don't have to add some extra hoop for someone if you're not being required to do that. And I think particularly private employers, they have, they have a lot of leeway and they should be thinking really carefully about who they want to help, especially people who have the capacity to employ a number of people and really just give them a leg up and believe in them as kind of an act of faith. And so, I think that if there are people who are listening who are small business owners or big business owners, public and private, they should be asking themselves, do I really need to just out of hand reject somebody because they have something in their past? Or can I say to myself, okay, but I'm looking at the whole person and I'm looking at the past five years of their life and I'm looking at what they told me in the interview and the packs they put together and I'm going to give them a chance. And I feel like more and more we need to convince people to do that. Yeah, yeah. And just, you know, quick, quick little side rant, like, like the, and maybe it's because of all the Sackler news that have been out lately, like, there's so many white color crimes where like the Sacklers, in my opinion, they have helped kill tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, right? And they're like, Hey, it's cool. You guys can still be billionaires, even though we're going to like find you a little bit like that's like nothing to them. You know what I mean? But like someone who, you know, got arrested, like I have friends who, you know, they got caught with drugs on them. And, you know, one of my best friends, he actually had his, his felony like removed, right? And he's a teacher now and so many things, right? But yeah, like when you compare these white collar crimes, like, if I had to like make a graph like scale of one to 10, how bad was this thing? There are people who have done, in my opinion, way worse things who have way more opportunities just because they have the money for, you know, good attorneys or, you know, the system doesn't punish it as bad or it's not as stigmatized or, you know, whatever. And, oh, that, that gives me a great question for you. All right. You, your background is in, you were a public defender for a little while. Okay. So, and we've talked about like the innocent project. I love some defense attorneys. I love them. I see what they do and some people are like, no, this isn't right. This person's innocent or this, you know, they'll spend years. Some people are doing pro bono work, right? Just to get some justice. But Laura, on the other hand, you have these defense attorneys who are defending complete assholes like the Sacklers, right? So help me because you have so much experience of this. What do you tell a guy like me that is torn because sometimes I'm like, I hate defense attorneys. You're defending awful people for the money. You want the win, you want the reputation, you know, like there are a lot of scummy defense attorneys. But then there's the others, the actualistic ones who are just doing phenomenal. Where do I find that balance? Help, help me out here. Okay. So I'm going to speak from the perspective of the, the scummy attorney, because I think you have to be, and I've actually never defended a wealthy person. So I'm projecting, I'm trying to put myself in this position. But I think the, what they would say, channeling them is that everybody has a Sixth Amendment right to an effective lawyer. Everybody has the right to challenge the state's evidence and hold the state to its burden. And the minute we let go of that and say there are certain people like the Sacklers who are just too terrible, or let's take it a step further, there are certain people like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, they're just too terrible and they don't deserve any due process. We should just move straight to the conviction and the sentencing and the public stoning we've given up on the Constitution. And so even though these people are, I mean distasteful as a word that comes to mind, that's maybe an understatement. And I think quite right about the Sacklers that they have probably inflicted mass death, right? It doesn't mean that they have any less right to their constitutional protection than anyone else. Then you get into a matter of discretionary choice. Okay, so all people accused of crimes have the exact same right, rich or poor. So I guess the question for me is you only have one life to live as a lawyer. Are you going to spend your life representing Sacklers? Are you going to spend your life representing Jeffrey Epstein? I mean, they have an absolute right and they should have people who are competent. I don't want to spend my life doing that. I just don't. I don't feel like I just don't. It's not that I don't believe in the principle. It's just I have a fine amount of time on this earth and I don't want to spend it doing that. I understand the constitutional principle that means that other people will do that and other people will make money from that and other people will maybe allow those people to get a result that the rest of us find horrific because that's a constitutional right. But I also feel like it then just comes down to a question of judgment, right? Like, how do you want to spend your day? Do you want to spend your day doing that or do you want to spend your day helping someone else? And I guess I'd rather help somebody else. Yeah, and I love that answer. And yeah, like I totally get it. Like I don't, you know, you know, everybody has this right to do process like even a couple, a couple years ago, which is something I've discussed on the podcast is I, you know, I got screwed by the court of public opinion, you know, just due to like kind of outrage culture. So I wouldn't want anybody to not have a fair trial. I think it gets into like kind of like what you're talking about, like, like when you see people just like, you know, when when it feels like the person you're defending isn't getting a fair punishment, right? And like, that's when I'm like, how do you how do you go to sleep tonight? Like, if you're spending, you know, your finite time on this planet, doing everything you can to find loopholes to get like Bill Cosby off, right? I'm like, like, does that does that kind of screw up your sleep at night? You know, but here's here's what I'll do. Here's I'll start looking at it as a person by person person basis, separate the individual, you know, and that's what I'll do for my own Saturday. You know, there's one other thing I will add to this, which is, and I don't want to sound like I feel like maybe I sounded too self-righteous in my in my last answer. And I say that because, you know, when I was a federal public defender, many of my clients were so called rightfully convicted or what the general public would say guilty. I spent two years representing somebody who was charged with some really unsavory crimes. This person had no money and was entitled to a public defender. That was two years in my life. It was it was two trials because the first trial hung and then we had a second trial and then we had a third trial, which was his sentencing. He was entitled to a bench trial and the sentencing because it was a life case. And you could argue, well, why did he get me? Why did he get this someone who was basically going to spend the next two years in and out of court trying and retrying this case and fighting to get him a lower sentence? And again, to me, it comes down to the Constitution and honest to God, he did get life. And I feel that that was an excessive sentence. And I every day I sort of think about that case and wonder what I what I could have done differently. And maybe you could argue that that the Sackler lawyers could point at me and say, well, we'll look at what she spent. You know what I mean. And so I, I guess I just again come back to this whole idea that there is this there is this constitutional principle at stake. And certainly for my client, I just didn't feel like, regardless of the evidence, this was someone who should never ever get a chance to ever get out of prison again. I feel that about very few people. So it is complicated. It's not as if like, I only represent stone cold innocent people who've never done anything wrong. I don't want to get that impression or like I'm completely self-righteous. Yeah, no, no, absolutely. And that's what I loved about just even starting this podcast and being able to have conversations is just seeing the nuances and the trickiness, you know, because, you know, just even in my opinion, like I'm not, you know, I'm not for the death penalty, but even sometimes life or you're in California where they got like this three strikes thing, which I think is a little excessive. But also we, there's something that I'm, you know, I'm always trying to figure out is just our, we love punishment. We love people being punished. And until it happens to you, then you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's kind of back off a little, you know, but yeah, I only have a little bit more of your time. And we didn't even cover half the stuff in rectify. So everybody needs to go get it. But one of the things that I loved about the book is that you're a great storyteller as well, which isn't something I read so many nonfiction books, not everybody has that skill. But recently, you actually have a newer book, which is a bit of a, which is not a bit, it is a novel. I heard you talk about it on Glenn's podcast as well. And I can kind of relate to it. You're a mother, I'm a father, we're both parents. I am a workaholic. And it sounds like that's kind of what it's about. So for all of the listeners who might be interested in some fiction, what's, what's this book about? Or what, what, what, what kind of inspired it? So the book is called A Good Mother and it is fiction, as you said, and it's a mystery. It's a, actually it's not a mystery. It's a thriller. Basically, it opens with this 911 call. And there's this 19 year old mother, she's just had a baby, and she's confessing to stabbing her husband to death. And the issue is whether she did it because he was extremely abusive and she was in fear for her life and in fear for her daughter's life, or whether in fact she planned it and she's a cold-blooded killer. And the person who's assigned to represent her, she doesn't have any money, is a federal public defender who is herself a new mom. And rather than take her maternity leave and hand the case off, this mother decides that she's going to cut her maternity leave extremely short and go back and basically throw herself headfirst into defending this woman. And so various things ensue from that. And I was looking at a lot of different, I was looking at a lot of different issues. I mean, one issue I was looking at is what does it mean to be guilty? What does it mean to be innocent? What does it mean to be a good mother? Because of course the whole defense is you would do anything for your child, you would do anything to survive as a mother. And then to present that defense, you have this other mother, the lawyer. Basically, you could argue not really taking care of her own child. And there's repercussions for that and her relationship falling apart with her partner because of the decisions she's making. And yes, I did feel like it came from this place of experience. There was a similar case that was tried when I was a federal public defender. I didn't try it, but similar and fascinated me. But also from my own experience, because I am a mom with two kids and I do find myself sometimes just thrown into my work in a way that that I think a lot of people have been have been critical of and me too, critical of myself up because there's this idea that you're always supposed to put your kids first and you're always supposed to be present in all five senses of the word. And of course, when you're really caught up in what you're doing, that's not true. Yeah, how old are your kids now? How old are they? They are now my son is 12 and my daughter is 10. But I remember when my son was was born and it was sort of it was similar to the protagonist in this book where it was kind of like this unexpected thing. And my life felt turned upside down. On the one hand, I felt like I was so in love with my son and I kind of couldn't believe how amazing and perfect he was. And at the same time, the rest of me hadn't really changed that much. I was still domestically challenged. I was still vicious, right? And it was just this sort of this interesting juxtaposition of this miraculous event in your life. And I think you probably know this. As a parent, you undergo a series of very profound transformations, including I don't think your heart exists inside of your body anymore, it really exists inside of their body. And for the rest of your existence on this planet, whatever happens to them is going to impact you in a way that makes everything else in your life pale by computer. And yet, you're still the same person who is still driven and focused and maybe a workaholic or maybe all these other things that you were before they came into your life. And it's this really strange juxtaposition. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Like, even though I don't really read fiction, after reading, you know, rectify, I'm like, I might be interested in reading this because, you know, my son is actually 12, two. And for example, him and or me and his mother, we split custody. So he's been here. He's actually here right now for a three day weekend they have today off of school or whatever. But he's at an age because I'm always like, oh man, am I not spending enough time with it? But he's at an age like, for example, the new fortnight update came out today. He doesn't want to hang out with me. You know what I mean? So I'm trying to balance this like workaholic where and then I also have this kid who's finding his own friends and his own thing. And you know what I mean? And I have to guilt him into hanging out with me and all that stuff. So it's interesting being a parent and all that self judgment that we have through all this and, you know, wanting to be a good example to them as well as, hey, work hard to do the right thing. You know, all these other things. So it's a tricky subject. I think parents, we really do beat ourselves up, right? When we were growing up, parenting wasn't a verb and now it is. I think you and I both being single parents. I mean, you have joined custody. I've joined custody. My ex-husband is a wonderful dad, but still you feel extra pressure because you're alone with the kids and you really want to sort of be this perfect parent, but there's no such thing. And the other thing is people have said, well, aren't you worried that your kids are going to end up in therapy? Everybody ends up in therapy. I don't know who your parents were. If you don't end up in therapy, you probably should go. I just think it's people, people have a lot of resilience and that includes kids. I have to tell myself this every day that those individual decisions that you and I are making are not going to be outcome determinative. And I have very positive hopes for your son and his fortnight obsession and all the other things that are going on with him. And I'm sure that you're doing a great job. Nobody does a perfect job. Yeah, absolutely. Like I always say, like, if I had a magic wand, everybody would get therapy. Everybody. We all need it. So yeah. So I definitely agree. But I appreciate your time so, so much. And where where can people find you and what you're working on? And yeah, you're like writing different types of books and everything. So I'm curious, like, are you working on a thing else? Like, where can people find you to stay up to date? Or you're taking a little break from the writing gig? So I'm on Twitter at Laura Bazalon and you can find my academic work through the University of San Francisco's website. And I'm actually finishing a book right now. It's a nonfiction book. Yeah, it's called ambitious like a mother. Why prioritizing your job is good for your kids. And it will be out from Little Brown in April, 2022. Awesome. So you're going to send me a review copy so I can check it out and we'll do this again, right? 100%. I love talking to you. It was super fun. This was super fun. So yeah, and I, you know, I, it sounds like I might need that book too. So, so yeah, so I'll be, we'll be, we'll be in touch and I appreciate your time and coming on. Thank you so much for having me.