Mass Incarceration is Solvable

streets demanding action. Now, we have to maintain our confidence that even the hardest problems related to racial justice can be solved. How do you break this problem down into solvable pieces. Decide to prosecuting and charging low level crimes, don't criminalize those behaviors. Justice isn't blind. We have to be far more critical and thoughtful and have that lens up. Today we're going to talk about how to solve mass incarceration. This is such a solvable problem. Inscho Rockman used to

work as a public defender in the Bronx. That job illuminated for her the variety of state, national level problems with the criminal justice system. The US has five percent of the world's population, but currently holds twenty five percent of the world's incarcerated people. Rockman is a director of Strategy and New Initiatives at the Vera Institute, an organization devoted to improving the criminal justice system in the United States.

Rockman thinks those extremely disproportionate numbers represent a problem we can solve. Inch I'm so excited to talk to you today about this because mass incarceration is something I think a lot about it, and I know a lot of our listeners are super interested in. I wonder how you define the problem as something we can solve. Yep, we

have two point three million people behind bars today. That's seven hundred and fifty thousand people in jails and another one point five million in prisons, and it's actually solvable. So what's your plausible goal to get it down from two point three million you said in jails in prison to what number? If we just look at the average incarceration rate across the rest of the world, and if America were to incarcerate at that rate, we would get down from two point three million to three hundred and

sixty thousand. That's something like doing the math my head. A factor of seven. Yep. That's a remarkable number when you think about it, and that's what we could and should and can actually do if we decide to do business differently from the beginning of the system to the end. Just since George Floyd's killing, we've been in the midst of a national even international movement against police violence and for racial justice. Does that change the opportunity around the incarceration?

It does, but only if we make enough of this moment. And one thing that I want to point out is that for many of us it feels like a moment of opportunity to make sure that the path we walk to get here with the criminal justice system that we have, the path moving forward isn't the same. But we have to also stop and acknowledge the moment of incredible pain

and hurt and harm that has happened. That it took the senseless and ruthless killing of a black man by a police officer with his need to his neck for the country to actually realize what actually happens with impunity each and every day in this country. And it's not just a crisis of now, but it's a crisis that's

been here literally since slavery. So yes, there is opportunity, but we actually won't make enough of the opportunity if we don't recognize the long history and roots that got us to this place where we all feel like it's not only crisis but a moment of hope. But it really is a moment of crisis, and we have to lean into that first before we think about the opportunity in the moment. These two issues of police violence and mass incarspiration are obviously so closely related. They're two sides

of the same coin. They're part of the same system. Are you concerned that we may be pointed towards improving the one without addressing the other. What we have seen since the video went viral of George Floyd's murder is states, in cities and even the federal government has moved to ban chokeholds, to spend less money on policing and more in communities, and all of that is a great start.

But if that's where we start and that's where we end, yes, we've missed the larger opportunity to say, what do we do about two point three million and behind bars? Two points three million people behind bars, It's just shocking number. It's one of those numbers you almost don't process. You just you hear it. It's so many, it's got so many digits. Has the United States ever had a normal level of incarceration? When were we ever like other countries?

If we were ever like other countries, we weren't always this way. In the nineteen seventies, we actually had the same rate of incarceration as other countries that we think of as our peers, as England and France and Germany. But what changed is that in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, as the whole world went through a crisis of recession economic setbacks, countries like Western European countries invested in the social services that they invested in responses that

weren't just punitive. And what America did was take a different trajectory. We went to truth and sentencing, tough on crime, the war on drugs, and that led us to the outlier that we are today. Of course, for anyone who hasn't seen at the Avadverney documentary, Thirteenth gives an amazing sense of the continuity between slavery, policing and mass incarceration. This is a four hundred year history, but it also

does have these big landmarks. One of them that comes up a lot is the Crime Bill in nineteen ninety four that Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed, which was kind of a consensus bill, was supported by Republicans and Democrats, and there were billions of dollars in that bill for building jails in prison as well as for increasing police and arming police. I mean, do you think of that

as the real modern watershed in mass incarceration. It was certainly the accelerant on a system that was already on fire. In The nineteen ninety four Crime Bill, by the way, enjoyed broad support from Democrats and Republicans, including many black members of Congress at the time, because that was all that was on offer to in theory, help communities from

crime and from violence. What the difference has been from now twenty five years on from when the Crime Bill was passed, was we recognize that there are other options, and there are cheaper options. There are options that don't result in the wanton killing of black and brown people in this country that we can invest in and that will actually deliver true public safety. I mean, there seems to be a certain kind of consensus now about some

kinds of reform. There was the First Step Act that Donald Trump signed, and even now post George Floyd, you Donald Trump is supported a bill that would ban I guess some but not all, chokeholds. But I mean, first of all, you see the opportunity for real reform at the moment, and are you worried that when you do have these moments of consensus like in ninety four, you sort of go with the lowest common denominator and don't

think through the potential consequences of what you're doing. When the First Step Act passed a couple of years ago, for some it was hailed as a remarkable watershed moment and that it was the first time in decades that the federal government had really stepped in on a criminal justice issue, and that was led by a Republican administration,

no less. But if you actually look at what the First Step Act did, which it released a couple thousand people from prison, which actually touches only a fraction of our overall one point five million people in prison and doesn't even touch people in state prisons, you really sort of get a sense of just how much of a first step, and a tiny first step at that it was.

Here's the fascinating thing about this moment, Jacob, is that the calls right now, in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the murder of so many other black people at the hands of the police, it's not just for things that are a minuscule first step. It's actually calls like defund the police and to dismantle the police, as

we saw the Minneapolis City Council vote to do. And so that's the opportunity of now, is that where consensus is is so much further I would say, it's not even so much further to the left, it's so much further towards looking for a real transformative solution and not just tinkering around the edges. And so there's so many different components to this problem, from bail reform to sentencing reform, to police reform to what happens to prisoners post release.

How do you break this problem down into solvable pieces and how do you prioritize which are the most important pieces. Yeah, so I think if this problem as having three components, and you know, how do we get from the two point three million to three hundred and sixty thousand. The first is the reckoning an acknowledgement of the racial disparities

and making policy choices and practice choices differently. So one concrete example is I was once sitting in a prosecutor's office and I saw on his desk a map of the city and he actually had literally circles around neighborhoods, And I asked, what are those and he said, well, those are the neighborhoods where they're predominantly black and brown

communities that live there. And so when we get a case that comes from the police from those neighborhoods, we actually sort of double check it, triple check it to make sure that we are thinking carefully about whether or not to prosecute this traffic stop or this drug arrest. We know that these are the communities where the vast majority of cases in the city are coming from, and so we're making an active decision to look carefully and make a choice of whether we're going to move forward

or not. It's basically saying justice isn't blind. We have to be far more critical and thoughtful and have that lens on. The second part is to do everything we can do to choose not to put people in jail, in prison to quote unquote decarsorate and so bail reform is a really obvious way to limit the number of

people who go to jail. Moreover, we can make different decisions on sentencing actually addressing the underlying harms that led to that person doing that harmful act in the first place, or addressing what can change the circumstances of your life so that actually never happens again. And then the third part is for when we do incarcerate, we need to do it radically differently than how we currently do it.

And what that looks like is my organization VIA partnered with the Department of Correction in Connecticut to actually transform some of the prison units there are maximum security units. They look much more like life on the outside. The young men who are there go to school or they work every day. They are quote unquote paid in sort of rewards and points where they get more privileges and

free time and things like that. If they are able to be more productive members of that community, and they actually talk through conflict in what are called restorative circles, where you talk it through as opposed to using punishment and discipline as the first reaction. And what we've seen is that radically different way of actually doing incarceration has tremendous impact officers who work They say, this is the most relaxed place in prison I have ever been. It

feels comfortable. I actually feel safe. And so let's talk about COVID nineteen for a minute. The pandemic is creating a kind of natural experiment in decarceration. People are being let out. A lot of people have a visceral reaction that there's going to be more crime if you let more people out of prison. The decline in crime did correlate with mass incarceration. Why are people wrong to think that de incarceration will lead to an increasing crime. That's

actually not true. It's not statistically true from the research, and it's also not true what we've seen in concrete examples around the country today. In New York City, our jail population is down to less than four thousand people in jail from a high of twenty two thousand back in the early nineteen nineties. Back then in the city we had over three thousand homicides a year, and last year we had about three hundred homicides. That's a radical

change in the level of crime and public safety. And that's actually the statistics that are true when we incarcerate less. Who are the people we really shouldn't let out? Even if we let out six out of seven, who's the one out of seven? And I hear even reform advocates making a lot of exceptions. We shouldn't let people out who are convicted of domestic violence, We shouldn't let out violent offenders, we shouldn't let out sex offenders, we shouldn't

let out white collar criminals. You know, should we let Bernie Madoff out of prison? Who are the people that you think, in the end we shouldn't let out of prison? So I think that framing of the question is the wrong one, and so I'm going to push back on it. The question is who can we let out? And the answer is folks who are safe and ready to walk among us, who are actually the vast majority of people who are currently behind bars? And how do we know that it's not based on the crime that you are

accused or convicted. Of those folks who were convicted of a murder when they were eighteen or nineteen and they've been behind bars for twenty years, they are no longer that same person who committed a violent act twenty years ago, and how do we know that superintendence and wardens saying I would have this guy's my neighbor, I would have this person as my family member. There are because it is mass incarceration. There are a huge number of people

whose jobs and livelihoods are working in prisons. Right, how do you get prison guards to support the incarceration workforce development? Where we've seen prisons is often in more rural parts of the country or more rural parts of a state, where they are the biggest employer in many of these small towns and cities that they're in. And so that is the key way to get them on quote unquote our side, because I actually don't know that it's a matter of sides. Give them skills that you put us

in the twenty first century that aren't necessarily factory work. Likewise, we have to get out of the twentieth century mentality of a prison guard job, which has passed down from generation to generation in a prison town, and the pandemic has really brought together I would say strange bedfellows, because who else really suffers when we don't decarceerate our jails and prisons and they are tinder boxes for this pandemic.

The staff, the corrections officers, and other medical staff and workers who work in jails and prisons, and not only are there and as susceptible to getting the virus as the people who are incarcerated there, but they go home to their families and to their communities and therefore are a much higher risk of transmitting the virus and spreading it in those local towns where the prisons and the

jails are. And so in this moment, we've actually seen prisons staff and corrections unions call for the same things that we are calling for, which is decarceration, making sure that we are letting out as many people as we can to manage the pandemic, and then for those who remain incarcerated to make sure that they have personal protective

equipment that they have access to hand sanitizer. And Congress, in this moment of stimulus bills can actually pass a Reverse mass Incarceration Act to give billions of dollars to cities and to states to actually reverse mass incarceration, to invest in workforce development, and to actually close jails and prisons and invest in the alternatives that actually will overall over time as new York City has shown us make

us safer. I always like to ask our guests on the show what listeners can do if they care about this problem. What are a couple of things that people can do to accelerate the decline of mass incarceration. There are some great books out there right now, more books than we've ever seen about mass incarceration. James Foreman's Locking Up Our Own, which is he's a former public defender

and now professor at Yale writing about Washington, DC. Great sort of inside look into the politics of law and order that sort of gave rise to what we have. Another great book that I recommend is Albert wood Fox, who spent many, many years behind bars. His book called Solitary,

which is a terrific and gripping read. And you mentioned Ava DuVernay's Thirteenth, which is an excellent documentary about the rise of mass incarceration, and I highly suggest for folks to have a movie night and watch Thirteenth with your friends,

your family and have a conversation about it. Second, you can get involved in very concrete ways, and it doesn't require you giving up your day job and becoming a full time advocate or activist in November, there will be hundreds of prosecutor races that are on the ballot, and get to know your prosecutor, get to know what their policies are, What are you going to do about charging, What are you going to do about bail? How are

you going to handle plea bargaining? And to make sure that when they say that they are progressive, because that is a moniker that many people are using when it comes to criminal justice reform right now, make sure that actually has meaning. Are they willing to make their data transparent of how they make decisions about charging? Are they willing to come to town halls and meet with community members and hear what do they want to see from

their local prosecutor. Those are all very concrete ways in which you, as a person can change the face of your local criminal justice system. For listeners who don't think of themselves as progressive, I think we might even have a few conservative listeners to the show. Is there something different that you would encourage them to do? Yes, absolutely so.

I would encourage them to think about what conservative means when it comes to the criminal justice system, because there's actually many conservative organizations and elected officials who agree with me and I am most definitely not somebody of the conservative ilk, but who agree with me that mass incarceration as we know it should change, and they agree that prosecutors should rely on incarceration less and consider alternatives to incarceration.

One other concrete thing that people can do, if they have the ability to do so, is you can contribute very concretely to getting people out of jail. There are community bail funds all across the country. There's over fifty of them, and people are raising money to bail people out of jail because oftentimes people are there on two hundred and fifty dollars five hundred dollars and they just

can't afford the price of their freedom. And especially in this moment where we have seen increased immigration detention and immigration enforcement despite the pandemic, there are several immigration bond funds across the country that are helping to bail people out of immigration detention. It's not necessarily systemic change, but it is a very obvious way to make a difference and to help in this moment to actually get us down from two point three million. And Ja, thanks so

much for joining us Unsolvable. Thanks so much for having me Jacob. Solvable is brought to you by Pushkin Industries, and as a reminder, we always include links to the suggestions our guests make about how you can get involved in the episode notes listed in your podcast player. Solvable is produced by Camille Baptista, Jocelyn Frank, and Catherine Girardo. Mia Lobell is our executive producer. We'll be back next week with another episode in our series about racial justice,

Malcolm Gladwell. We'll talk with Chirog Baines about how police impunity is solvable without compromising public safety. I hope you'll join us