Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: My chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers, to
Speaker 1: hear their stories. What inspire their creations, what decisions change
Speaker 1: their careers, what relationships influence their work. Dietary fructos is
Speaker 1: completely irrelevant to life. People say, oh, you need sugar
Speaker 1: to live garbage. I would advize drugs across the board.
Speaker 1: We couldn't possibly do worse than we're doing now. My
Speaker 1: guests today didn't set out to become outspoken critics of
Speaker 1: powerful institutions. As experts in their fields. They found themselves
Speaker 1: confronting two issues that have an impact on our everyday
Speaker 1: lives and our futures, obesity and the criminal justice system,
Speaker 1: and they haven't been afraid to speak their minds. You'd
Speaker 1: have the government dispensing cocaine and heroin, I would sell
Speaker 1: it in the liquor stores. Martin Horned was head of
Speaker 1: both the New York City Department of Corrections and Probation.
Speaker 1: New York City processes nearly one hundred thousand inmates every year,
Speaker 1: more than many state systems. But first, before we talk
Speaker 1: about prisons, we consider another problem that has been getting
Speaker 1: worse over the last decade. One of every three American
Speaker 1: adults is obese. The epidemic is arguably the most important
Speaker 1: health issue of our time. Children today may have a
Speaker 1: shorter life expectancy than their parents, in large part due
Speaker 1: to obesity, which has been linked to diabetes, heart disease,
Speaker 1: and even cancer. My guest today, doctor Robert Lustig, makes
Speaker 1: a strong case that our addiction to sugar is at
Speaker 1: the root of the obesity epidemic. Americans consume an average
Speaker 1: of one thirty pounds of sugar a year. Two years ago,
Speaker 1: this issue became a personal one when my doctor told
Speaker 1: me I was pre diabetic. So when I read about
Speaker 1: Dr Lusting and his popular anti sugar lecture streaming online,
Speaker 1: I paid attention. So why do I at the Coca
Speaker 1: Cola conspiracy? And next I gave up sugar? What else
Speaker 1: is in coke? We'll get to the sugar in a minute.
Speaker 1: What else salt? Milligrams of sodium per can. It's like
Speaker 1: drinking a pizza. So what happens if you take on
Speaker 1: sodium and lose free water? You get thirstier? Right? So
Speaker 1: why is there so much sugar and coke to hide
Speaker 1: the salt except. Dr Lusting is a pediatric endochronologist and
Speaker 1: you see San Francisco back in the nineties. He became
Speaker 1: interested in diet and obesity while working at St. Jude
Speaker 1: Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. Now a bit of biochemistry
Speaker 1: to explain some of Lustig's research. Leptin is a protein
Speaker 1: that works like a thermostat for your body's energy levels.
Speaker 1: If leptin levels are low, your brain senses starvation and
Speaker 1: you feel hungry. If levels are high, you feel full.
Speaker 1: Lusting asserts there was an epidemic of people who have
Speaker 1: developed leptin resistance, people whose brains can't register when they
Speaker 1: are full. Lustig has studied leptin and its effect on
Speaker 1: pediatric patients. In the nineteen nineties, he was treating children
Speaker 1: recovering from brain tumor surgery. I had a stable of
Speaker 1: kids who were enormously obese. And the thing was, they
Speaker 1: were an obese before the tumor, but they started gaining
Speaker 1: weight at thirty to forty pounds a year after per
Speaker 1: two year, per year, with no cessation, NonStop, and they
Speaker 1: were constantly hungry and worse yet, they were the world's
Speaker 1: biggest couch potatoes. They lost interest in every single thing
Speaker 1: around them. They would sit in the couch, eat doritos,
Speaker 1: and sleep. This was their life. And the parents would
Speaker 1: come to me and say, this is double jeopardy. My
Speaker 1: child has survived the tumor only to succumb to a
Speaker 1: complication of the treatment. Why did they become couch potatoes?
Speaker 1: What was the link there? Because when your brain sees lepton,
Speaker 1: you want to burn energy. You want to exercise, you
Speaker 1: want to be physically active, you want to concentrate, you
Speaker 1: want to go do things. Leptin signals the body to exercise.
Speaker 1: Leptin signals the body that you have enough energy on
Speaker 1: board to exercise. When your brain can't see it, your
Speaker 1: brain thinks you're starting. My job was to figure out
Speaker 1: a way to take care of these kids, so my
Speaker 1: research and obosity started back. We said, okay, these kids brains,
Speaker 1: that area of the brain is dead. I can't bring
Speaker 1: it back. I'm not a neurosurgeon. I can't transplant the hypothalamus.
Speaker 1: What can I do? So I, after doing some research,
Speaker 1: realized we could work down stream of the brain. The
Speaker 1: brain was signaling the pancrease to make extra insulin. Insulin
Speaker 1: makes you store energy. So these kids are known to
Speaker 1: have enormously high insulin levels. So I said, all right,
Speaker 1: let's give these kids a medicine that will block the
Speaker 1: release of insulin. We did a study and Lo and Behold,
Speaker 1: patients started losing weight, but more importantly, they started exercising.
Speaker 1: One kid started competitive swimming, two kids started lifting weights
Speaker 1: at home. One kid became the manager of his high
Speaker 1: school basketball team, running around collecting all the basketballs. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, parents were calling me up within a week saying,
Speaker 1: I've got my kid back. Right. We were interfering with
Speaker 1: insulin release, and these kids changed their behavior, and that
Speaker 1: was the first key to what I think is the
Speaker 1: entire enchilada in terms of the obesity epidemic. And then
Speaker 1: what happened for you wanted to do next? So then
Speaker 1: we said, maybe there are adults out there who have
Speaker 1: the same problem, they just don't have a brain tumor.
Speaker 1: Let's look for it. So we did a whole study,
Speaker 1: pilot study with forty four obese adults, and we gave
Speaker 1: him the same drug to do the same thing, and
Speaker 1: Lo and Behold, eight out of the forty four, not
Speaker 1: all of them by any means, but it out of
Speaker 1: four lost a lot of weight. A pound a week
Speaker 1: over twenty four weeks without doing anything. And what was
Speaker 1: even more amazing was their fat intake didn't change, their
Speaker 1: protein intake didn't change. Their carbohydrate intake dropped on a dime.
Speaker 1: They went from nine hundred calories at day to calories
Speaker 1: a day and carbohydrate they stopped snacking between meals and
Speaker 1: most important bugles. You know, absolutely, and these kids needed
Speaker 1: to get their insulin down, and the medicine did it.
Speaker 1: And these adults needed to get their insulin down, and
Speaker 1: the medicine did it for them too. And most importantly,
Speaker 1: when we got there insulinde down, guess what they started exercising.
Speaker 1: So this all of a sudden became very clear. What's
Speaker 1: going on for these kids with the brain tumors. They
Speaker 1: couldn't see their lepton. Their insolence were sky high because
Speaker 1: their brain was starving. And because their brain was starving,
Speaker 1: they would eat everything on of the sun and it
Speaker 1: still wouldn't be enough because they could never see their leapton.
Speaker 1: And what we realized was this is adult ob city too.
Speaker 1: They can't see their LEPTONI that's where sugar came in.
Speaker 1: So sugar was a culporate that also triggered other it
Speaker 1: enabled other bad eating exactly. And we've learned that the
Speaker 1: higher insulin goes, the hungrier you get, hunger you are.
Speaker 1: So the sugar is an appetite stimulant in a sense,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call you can call it that. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: We know that because David Ludwig, my opposite number at
Speaker 1: Boston Children's, he prepped a bunch of kids with a soda,
Speaker 1: a can of soda, a hundred fifty calories, and then
Speaker 1: he let him loose at the fast food restaurant. So
Speaker 1: the question is did they eat more? Did they eat less?
Speaker 1: Do you think more? Ate more? Their insulind was high,
Speaker 1: and also there's high insulin makes you hungry, that's right,
Speaker 1: High insulam makes you hungry. And also there's a hormone
Speaker 1: in your stomach that signals hunger called grellin, And when
Speaker 1: grellan's high, you're hungry, and sugar doesn't knock it down.
Speaker 1: When I gave up sugar, it was amazing. It was
Speaker 1: like pushing a toboggan along a track to eventually get
Speaker 1: down the slope. The first couple of weeks, the first
Speaker 1: couple of months, that part in early May through June
Speaker 1: By the time we get to July and August, we're
Speaker 1: going downhill and the weights just coming off. I cut
Speaker 1: out carbs, and I gave up pasta because that was
Speaker 1: the mega dose of carbohydrate, right. I mean, I would eat,
Speaker 1: you know, the fish tank sized bowl of pasta, and
Speaker 1: it's easy to do. A lot of people think that
Speaker 1: the Italian diet is the Mediterranean diet. Not at all.
Speaker 1: There is no pasta in the Mediterranean diet. We started
Speaker 1: the pasta craze because of all the immigrant Italians who
Speaker 1: couldn't afford to eat meat and vegetables here. That's what
Speaker 1: they fell back on, and it actually got exported from
Speaker 1: here back to Italy sam as Chop Suey did to China.
Speaker 1: You know, these are all American inventions. The Italian diet
Speaker 1: is not the de deterranean diet, never was, never will be.
Speaker 1: But I would say to people, I cut back on bread.
Speaker 1: They say, okay, great. Then I'd say to them I
Speaker 1: gave up pasta. They'd say, whoa that. I'd say, I
Speaker 1: gave up sugar, and they go and they're insane, exactly right.
Speaker 1: It was as if I said to them, let's go
Speaker 1: learn to play the classical piano. Now let's begin. Now,
Speaker 1: how did sugar become They were consuming a hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty pounds of sugar per person per year. Was it
Speaker 1: always that way? No? No, this is very What do
Speaker 1: you think change that? Money and marketing and you know,
Speaker 1: the food industry. So there are a couple of sort
Speaker 1: of milestones in this story. The first is the nascent
Speaker 1: candy and soft drink and sugar industry in America, which
Speaker 1: dates back to the early nineteen hundreds, but that didn't
Speaker 1: really get things started because sugar was still kind of expensive,
Speaker 1: and sugar had been expensive all throughout history. In nifty nine,
Speaker 1: we lost our sugar fix because Castro took over Cuba
Speaker 1: and that actually started the Florida sugar industry because the
Speaker 1: sugar had come from Cuba prior to that's a lot
Speaker 1: of it. So that started the American sugar industry really
Speaker 1: in top notch gear. Then high fuctose cornsyrup, camel high
Speaker 1: fuctose corn syrup shows up and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's in everything. Why, well, it actually took It is sweeter,
Speaker 1: but most important, it's cheaper. But do you find that also,
Speaker 1: this is what's happening over the last I don't know
Speaker 1: how many years. I mean, I'm not somebody who knows
Speaker 1: the history of this, but certainly in my lifetime, which
Speaker 1: is the goal is to make everything sweeter. The point
Speaker 1: is that this is actually evolutionary. This isn't our DNA,
Speaker 1: because there is no food stuff anywhere in the world
Speaker 1: that is both sweet and acutely poisonous. So it was
Speaker 1: a signal to us. It was a signal to us
Speaker 1: that it was safe to eat, even Jamaican hockey fruit,
Speaker 1: which has a substance in nicolled hypoglycin, which causes Jamaican
Speaker 1: vomiting sickness and can kill you. It's only in the
Speaker 1: immature fruit. As soon as the fruit falls from the
Speaker 1: tree to the ground. Jamaican's no, it's a ky to
Speaker 1: eat because it's now ripe and the toxin is gone.
Speaker 1: We are programmed to like sweet, and what has happened
Speaker 1: is the food industry figured it out and they hijacked
Speaker 1: our taste buds for their own purposes. When you think
Speaker 1: about this epidemic, and it is an epidemic because it's
Speaker 1: a pandemic, I don't say this with any smugness or satisfaction.
Speaker 1: I say this with a lot of sadness because I
Speaker 1: had always been thin, and for somebody who didn't eat
Speaker 1: meat and didn't eat I thought I thought I was
Speaker 1: doing the right thing health wise. I'm a vegetarian, I'm
Speaker 1: a pesketarian, if you will, And I'm beginning to really
Speaker 1: really blow up here. You know, Listen, we've got vegan
Speaker 1: type two's who are massively obese. And just because you're vegan,
Speaker 1: doesn't that from what do you think they getting from soda? Vegan?
Speaker 1: Especially South Asians Indians, they can't carry as much subcutaneous fat.
Speaker 1: And once you basically fill your subcutains your love handle
Speaker 1: fat stores, it starts building up in your liver and
Speaker 1: when that happens, it's all downhill after that. But other
Speaker 1: people have worked towards this prior to you. You're not
Speaker 1: the first person sugar is bad. Look, this has been
Speaker 1: going on since the seventies, this discussion. The chief anti
Speaker 1: sugar campaigner was a guy by the name of John Yudkin,
Speaker 1: and he was a British physiologist, nutritionist, and he wrote
Speaker 1: a book back in seventy two called Pure White and Deadly.
Speaker 1: You read this book, it's just astounding. Everything came to
Speaker 1: pass on the other side, we had this guy, ansel
Speaker 1: Keys and he had done a sabbatical at the University
Speaker 1: of Cambridge in nifty two and he saw what, you know,
Speaker 1: the Brits were eating, and it was pretty horrible, and
Speaker 1: he came to the conclusion that saturated fat had to
Speaker 1: be the cause of heart disease. We didn't know at
Speaker 1: that point what happened to sugar in the liver. We
Speaker 1: didn't know that it got turned into fat. What we
Speaker 1: knew was that saturated fat correlated with LDL levels in
Speaker 1: l d L correlated with cardiovascular disease. So the thought was,
Speaker 1: let's get rid of the saturated fat and cardiovascular disease
Speaker 1: will disappear. The whole country went low fat back in
Speaker 1: Here's the problem. When you go low fat, the food
Speaker 1: tastes like cardboard. And the food industry knew it. What
Speaker 1: were they gonna do? How are they gonna sell food?
Speaker 1: And now we had high fructose corn syrup too, When
Speaker 1: does that get introduced into the food market the early seventies,
Speaker 1: seventy three, seventy five, actually I don't know. American corporations
Speaker 1: in the second worst hurricane in American history, Hurricane Allen,
Speaker 1: it wiped out the entire Caribbean sugar crop, and the
Speaker 1: food industry, especially the beverage industry, ran scared. They said,
Speaker 1: where are we going to get the sugar for all
Speaker 1: the soft drinks? And that's when reliable market exactly, And
Speaker 1: they started introducing it, and they started upping the dose,
Speaker 1: and the transformation was complete. Is the process of getting
Speaker 1: table sugar from cane sugar more labor intensive and more
Speaker 1: expensive than the high fructose corncerp process by a lot.
Speaker 1: High fructose corn syrup comes from corn, and the corn
Speaker 1: market and the corn supply in this country is far
Speaker 1: more plentiful and far more reliable than the cane sugar.
Speaker 1: Correct of all of the corn grown in America today
Speaker 1: ends up as high fructose corn syrup. So we have
Speaker 1: boatloads of it, and it's cheap. And because it's cheap,
Speaker 1: it started finding its way into things that never had
Speaker 1: sugar before, like hamburger buns, hamburger meat, barbecue, sauce, catchup, salad, dressing,
Speaker 1: I mean pretty much everything you can imagine in the store. Indeed,
Speaker 1: Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina has just
Speaker 1: done a study that shows that eight of the food
Speaker 1: items there are six thousand food items in America them
Speaker 1: are laced with sugar. Add a sugar. Do you think
Speaker 1: that they understood back then that sweetening the bond was
Speaker 1: just about taste. They knew that when they put it in,
Speaker 1: we bought more that they knew when this was in there,
Speaker 1: people ate more of it. Palatability equals sales. It did then,
Speaker 1: it does now, and we love sugar, and that's why
Speaker 1: the entire food supply of America is now sweeter than
Speaker 1: you can imagine. Here's the problem. There's an area of
Speaker 1: your brain called the reward center. Everybody's heard of it
Speaker 1: because you know drug addiction. You know that cocaine, morphine, heroin, nicotine,
Speaker 1: They all work in the same place. And the neurotransmitter
Speaker 1: that signals pleasures called dopamine. You probably heard of it.
Speaker 1: Of course, when you get a dopamine rush, you get pleasure,
Speaker 1: and sugar does it the same way as all of
Speaker 1: those drugs of abuse. The problem is, when you get
Speaker 1: that pleasure, you downregulate the little proteins that catch the dopamine,
Speaker 1: called dopamine receptors, and the more you downregulate them, the
Speaker 1: more dopamine you need to get the same effect, and
Speaker 1: that's called tolerance. And then when you take the stuff away,
Speaker 1: then there's no dopamine to interact with these few proteins left,
Speaker 1: and that's called withdrawal. Tolerance and withdrawal that's called addiction.
Speaker 1: So we know how that works for all of these
Speaker 1: other drugs of abuse. Turns out sugar does the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's the same as cocaine. The difference is that for
Speaker 1: cocaine you gotta go find it, whereas for sugar we
Speaker 1: have what we call system saturation. It's everywhere, you can't
Speaker 1: escape it. Coming up more with Dr Robert Lustig, who
Speaker 1: says that cutting out sugar is not the single most
Speaker 1: important thing you can do for your quality of life.
Speaker 1: You're going to want to sit down for this, or
Speaker 1: actually you won't want to sit The single best thing
Speaker 1: you can do for yourself quality of life wise exercise,
Speaker 1: by far and away. Nothing else comes close. I'm Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin and here's the thing. Take a listen to our
Speaker 1: archive more unexpected conversations with artists, policymakers and performers like
Speaker 1: the amazing Dick Kevin. Amazing. We all are saying amazing
Speaker 1: all the time. Now, I got five amazings and watching
Speaker 1: morning television amazing guests we have. It's an amazing script.
Speaker 1: It's just amazing. I was amazed. But your career amazesn't
Speaker 1: there Go to Here's the Thing, Dot Org. I'm Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. America's obesity
Speaker 1: epidemic is complicated by issues of education, poverty, and personal freedom.
Speaker 1: In July two thousand thirteen, an appeals court struck down
Speaker 1: in New York City ban on the sale of supersized
Speaker 1: sugary drinks. Mayor Bloomberg was disappointed, but maybe not so prized.
Speaker 1: Two years earlier, as my guest Dr Robert Lustig recalls,
Speaker 1: the mayor had tried to change things on the federal level.
Speaker 1: Bloomberg petition the U. S d A to take soft
Speaker 1: drinks off food stamps, and the U. S d A
Speaker 1: rebuffed it. Why do you think they did? Why do
Speaker 1: you think that other than the straight up political influence
Speaker 1: of the soda indus, isn't that enough? How does the U.
Speaker 1: S d A do that? No one's saying that the
Speaker 1: people who are on food stamps you can't have soda.
Speaker 1: I doesn't want the government to pay for it. The
Speaker 1: U s d a's job is to sell food. That
Speaker 1: means sell whoever is going to buy it. So it's
Speaker 1: about commerce, it's about absolutely and who controls the U
Speaker 1: s d A. The U s d A is basically
Speaker 1: the governmental arm of the food industry and the job
Speaker 1: of the us D. You don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: faith in the us D not a whole lot. Now,
Speaker 1: the job of the U s d A is to
Speaker 1: protect the food supply, and that includes protecting from people
Speaker 1: like me in terms of threats to public health. Would
Speaker 1: you equate other products and other substances that are commonly
Speaker 1: used as being equally threatening as sugar, Maybe not, not
Speaker 1: not equally, maybe not as much. But I think there's
Speaker 1: a caffeine epidemic in this country. There is a caffeine epidemic.
Speaker 1: I believe there is, and and it's being stoked by
Speaker 1: all the coffee companies. But it's a less concern to
Speaker 1: you than sugar, oh way, because there's no toxic downside
Speaker 1: with sugar. Type two diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, gastric bypasses a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty seven billion dollars a year down a
Speaker 1: rat hole for taking care of chronic diseases which don't
Speaker 1: need to be We wouldn't need healthcare reform if we
Speaker 1: had obesity reform, and we can't have OBEs reform until
Speaker 1: we have some sort of sugar policy. You you mentioned
Speaker 1: pretty regularly the food industry, this, the food industry that.
Speaker 1: And you know, most Americans I think who are smart,
Speaker 1: realize that we have more than enough food to feed
Speaker 1: three quote unquote square meals a day to everybody in
Speaker 1: this country and those that aren't getting it. It's because
Speaker 1: of the distribution of food in our society. However, we
Speaker 1: have to cut a lot of corners to get there.
Speaker 1: In the way we produce beef, and the way we
Speaker 1: produce livestock, and the way we produce pesticides, fungicides, herbicides,
Speaker 1: all of this stuff, we need a new food model.
Speaker 1: We need a new food growing model. By we're gonna
Speaker 1: need four California Central Valleys in order to feed our population.
Speaker 1: We won't even have one because of the runoff in
Speaker 1: the sierra that changes in soil erosion. So you know what,
Speaker 1: the obesity epidemic might even take care of itself because
Speaker 1: we'll have a famine because we are misusing our food system.
Speaker 1: And until we fix it, we will continue to be sick.
Speaker 1: We will continue to die of things like diabetes and
Speaker 1: heart disease. Medicare will be broke by because there won't
Speaker 1: be any money to pay for it. You won't be
Speaker 1: able to see a doctor because they will be too
Speaker 1: busy taking care of all the other fat people in
Speaker 1: the emergency room we're having their heart attacks, and there
Speaker 1: won't be enough food. Anyway, as I'm listening to you,
Speaker 1: I'm getting really depressed and I want to go have
Speaker 1: ice cream. Now you're really bumber me. I want to know.
Speaker 1: I'm enjoy bar really badly. The bottom line is, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of reason to be positive. And I'll tell
Speaker 1: you why. Give me an example. People are getting it.
Speaker 1: People are starting to recognize that there's an obesity epidemic,
Speaker 1: not just obesity, noncommunical disease epidemic, diabetes, yeah, exactly. Breast
Speaker 1: cancer in particular is famous for having insulin receptors and
Speaker 1: growing in response to insulin. Prostate insulin receptors. Yes, they do.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of reason to be concerned, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of reason to keep your insulin down.
Speaker 1: Number one, it doesn't fuel any tumors. Number two, it
Speaker 1: lets your left and work. Number three, it doesn't increase
Speaker 1: the smooth muscle of your coronary arteries so that you
Speaker 1: might end up getting a heart attack. There's a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of reasons to keep your insulin down and the
Speaker 1: thing that makes your insulin go up most sure. You
Speaker 1: know people, a lot of people are terrified when they
Speaker 1: it down in the restaurant. A lot of people that
Speaker 1: are trying to stay fit and trying to stay healthy.
Speaker 1: They can go through periods. So I've been through this
Speaker 1: myself where I have like a mild panic attack when
Speaker 1: I sit down at the restaurant because I say to myself,
Speaker 1: there's an enemy lurking in everything. Here. There's a mercury
Speaker 1: and the fish, and there's hormones in the chicken. I
Speaker 1: don't eat beef and poultry, and there's too much sodium here,
Speaker 1: there's too much fat here I don't need. It's true.
Speaker 1: The single best thing you can do for yourself quality
Speaker 1: of life wise, exercise by far and away. Nothing else
Speaker 1: comes close. The next thing that's most important is when
Speaker 1: you're eating, make sure you have some fiber. When people
Speaker 1: want to go eat fiber that you recommend they eat.
Speaker 1: Now where do they go? Very simple? Brown food, brown
Speaker 1: and green. Okay, if it's brown and green, it's got fiber,
Speaker 1: because fiber is brown. Wheat comes out of the ground.
Speaker 1: What color is it. It's brown, You send it to
Speaker 1: the mill, you make bread out of it. Now, what
Speaker 1: color is it? It's white? Where'd the brown go? Got
Speaker 1: milled off? God made carbohydrate with inherent fiber. So we
Speaker 1: have brown rice, whole grains, beans, we have nuts. They're
Speaker 1: all just great. But as soon as you remove the fiber,
Speaker 1: which is called processing, now you've got a problem because
Speaker 1: now when you eat it, the sugar gets absorbed so
Speaker 1: fast that your liver gets overloaded, your mitochondria basically get sick,
Speaker 1: and now you've got insulin resistance, and now you've got
Speaker 1: all the diseases going downstream from People need to have
Speaker 1: an elevated level of consciousness and discipline about eating pasta,
Speaker 1: rice and potatoes as well at the moment they do.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping that the food industry will pick up on
Speaker 1: this and do the right thing. But well, the right
Speaker 1: thing would be to actually sell real food so that
Speaker 1: we can eat real not processed. If you we can
Speaker 1: do it, now, you know, years ago we couldn't because
Speaker 1: we didn't have the distribution system to be able to
Speaker 1: do it. We have it now, we could do it.
Speaker 1: We have the technological capability to serve and eat real food.
Speaker 1: But the food industry is making any hand over fist.
Speaker 1: If you could pick one or two things that you
Speaker 1: would change in public policy, if it was like getting
Speaker 1: the soda machines out of schools, it would be like
Speaker 1: no food stamps for soda. What would be a change
Speaker 1: in public policy? You'd make one thing? What is it?
Speaker 1: The FDA currently has fructose, the sweet part of sugar,
Speaker 1: on what it's called the grass list g R as
Speaker 1: generally regarded as safe, also has transfats on it at
Speaker 1: the moment as well. It needs to be reevaluated. It
Speaker 1: needs to be revised. The last time this was looked at,
Speaker 1: and this was before the hints corn syrup blood, this
Speaker 1: was before the excess sugar order of a century ago exactly,
Speaker 1: and they have no plans on doing so. If I
Speaker 1: could do one thing in this entire thing, it would
Speaker 1: be that what would be one more um? I would
Speaker 1: think very strongly about limiting access of sugar beverages to
Speaker 1: infants and children like zero there no reason for it.
Speaker 1: There's not one biochemical reaction in your body, not one
Speaker 1: that requires dietary fructos, not one that requires sugar. Dietary
Speaker 1: fructos is completely irrelevant to life. People say, oh, you
Speaker 1: need sugar to live garbage. Dr Robert Lustig's book about
Speaker 1: the dangers of sugar is called Fat Chance, Beating the
Speaker 1: Odds against Sugar, processed food, obesity, and disease. Knowing what
Speaker 1: you know? What are things you don't eat? What's your
Speaker 1: diet become since you've been doing this work. I carry
Speaker 1: a few extra pounds and I'm not happy about it.
Speaker 1: I don't eat sugar. You don't know. I have dessert
Speaker 1: twice a year when I'm in New York, I have
Speaker 1: a piece of Juniors cheesecake, and when I'm in New
Speaker 1: Orleans that have bread, pudding, whiskey sauce. Those are my
Speaker 1: too uh deserved twice a year. Well, other than that, no,
Speaker 1: I really don't. What are you eating that you think
Speaker 1: you should be eating? Well, I have a half a
Speaker 1: bagel in the morning with cheese. That's sort of my
Speaker 1: standard breakfast, and my wife gets on me for that
Speaker 1: for lunch. Unfortunately, because I'm running between you know, patients,
Speaker 1: it often ends up being something very processed, and it's
Speaker 1: a real problem for dinner though it's a very standard dinner,
Speaker 1: and I don't snack between meals, and I still can't
Speaker 1: lose it. So I understand. I'm there. I'm part of
Speaker 1: the Sere Lupton. Probably not. Dessert is a luxury many
Speaker 1: of us take for granted, but many people in America
Speaker 1: go decades without the privilege of selecting what to eat,
Speaker 1: or for that matter, what to wear, when to shower,
Speaker 1: or any other meaningful life decision. I went to Rahway
Speaker 1: Prison in New Jersey now called East Jersey State Prison
Speaker 1: to do research for a film. Over the course of
Speaker 1: two weeks, I interviewed several inmates. I met armed robbers, rapists, dealers,
Speaker 1: and murderers, and I'll never forget my experiences there. As
Speaker 1: my next guest, Martin Horn will tell you, prisons are memorable.
Speaker 1: The first prison he set foot in was sing Sing
Speaker 1: in upstate New York. That's the Kensian, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's uh. It was built in eighteen nineteen or thereabouts.
Speaker 1: The prisoners hewed the stone off the palisades. The walls
Speaker 1: of the original cell blocks still stand For over forty years,
Speaker 1: martin Horn's career has focused on prisons and the men
Speaker 1: and women who live there. He's held every imaginable job
Speaker 1: in corrections, from debating the fairness of states sentencing guidelines
Speaker 1: to fixing leaky water pipes in aging facilities. In two
Speaker 1: thousand two, Mayor Bloomberg appointed Horn Commissioner of the New
Speaker 1: York City Department of Probation. A year later, in an
Speaker 1: unprecedented move, Bloomberg gave Horn an additional job, Commissioner of Corrections.
Speaker 1: Horn held both positions until he left in two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: Leaving public office has allowed martin Horn to be more
Speaker 1: vocal about his opinions on prisons, sentencing, and how to
Speaker 1: deal with our nation's drug problem. I would legalize drugs
Speaker 1: across the board. You would really legalize all of them.
Speaker 1: You would legalize old Yes, that's a pretty well stunned well.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that while I
Speaker 1: worked for a governor or a mayor who was an
Speaker 1: elected offense. Why wouldn't you say that then? As opposed
Speaker 1: to know because I had a mortgage debay. Martin Horne's
Speaker 1: career in corrections started right out of college in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixte My first job was as a New York State
Speaker 1: parole officer. And how did you what was it that
Speaker 1: led you down that path? Um? I graduated college, I
Speaker 1: was twenty one years old. I needed a job, and
Speaker 1: I took a civil service test. New York State at
Speaker 1: that time had a test called the Professional Careers Test,
Speaker 1: and it was sort of a generalist examination, and if
Speaker 1: you passed it, it qualified you for a variety of positions.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Brooklyn, uh in Flappish, my father
Speaker 1: from fourth All right, well you took this as what
Speaker 1: did you want to be a police officer? Was that first?
Speaker 1: I wanted a job the family and civil service and
Speaker 1: police and not at all, I said. When I took
Speaker 1: the job, I didn't know there was such a thing
Speaker 1: as a parole officer. I had never thought of it.
Speaker 1: The first thing they did was they assigned me to
Speaker 1: a unit they had then which they no longer have,
Speaker 1: called the employment unit. We would get a paperwork on
Speaker 1: individuals who were coming home from New York State prisons
Speaker 1: who needed jobs, and we literally pounded the pavement in
Speaker 1: New York City, walked all over. Each had sort of
Speaker 1: a neighborhood. I had Long Island City, and each day
Speaker 1: I got five or ten guys names and their backgrounds
Speaker 1: on little five by eight cards, and I'd have to
Speaker 1: go out and find them jobs. What was people's attitudes
Speaker 1: toward employing those people back the Well, they actually we
Speaker 1: had a very sophisticated system. We knew employers who had
Speaker 1: previously hired employees and they were disposed, and they were disposed,
Speaker 1: and many of them said, look, I hired a guy
Speaker 1: from Clinton and he was the best guy to trusted
Speaker 1: up with. That was that was. So we did that
Speaker 1: for about six weeks. Then they actually sent me to
Speaker 1: sing sing for I think two months, where I had
Speaker 1: to meet with inmates who were becoming eligible for release
Speaker 1: on parole and helped them to prepare for their appearance
Speaker 1: before the Board of Parole. So you were interacting and
Speaker 1: during this time with yes, but I wasn't responsibly supervising.
Speaker 1: I was. I was interacted with families. I was learning
Speaker 1: how to do investigations. So the guy that took this
Speaker 1: test in nineteen sixty nine, who didn't have an eye
Speaker 1: toward this kind of work, When you were interacting with
Speaker 1: these people, what did you take from it. It was fascinating.
Speaker 1: Where else do you see the varieties of human behavior.
Speaker 1: I had grown up in a middle class home in Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: on the edge of Brownsville. I was familiar with Brown's
Speaker 1: villainies New York. There were adjacent neighborhoods. Yes, not as
Speaker 1: tough as now, not as desperate as now, but Oceanville, Brownsville,
Speaker 1: Ocean While I was as a and and the desperation
Speaker 1: of the families, and more importantly to me, the dignity
Speaker 1: of the families that we're making it. I used to
Speaker 1: come home and say, what's remarkable is not how much
Speaker 1: crime there is, but how little crime there is when
Speaker 1: you see how people are living right and so to
Speaker 1: this day, when between poverty and crime, and said, listen,
Speaker 1: there are more people who grow up and live in
Speaker 1: poverty who don't commit crimes. Yeah. And you know, before
Speaker 1: I turned around, it just turned into a career and
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it and I did well at it. Did
Speaker 1: your attitude and this is a very broad question, but
Speaker 1: did your overall attitude toward paroled inmates evolve over the
Speaker 1: years where you were more at eye level with them
Speaker 1: and hands on with them, and that it changed you
Speaker 1: became more of an administrator, and you became head of
Speaker 1: the department. I really think that my attitude towards imprisoned
Speaker 1: and formally imprisoned people was formed during those early years
Speaker 1: as a parole officer. How would it was one of
Speaker 1: recognizing that every one of them was just a normal,
Speaker 1: ordinary guy. They were all guys back then who had
Speaker 1: made bad judgments. I made very few, really very few
Speaker 1: who would downright evil and mean. They were pushed loves.
Speaker 1: I said to one guy at one time, this was
Speaker 1: a guy this is when you could smoke on the
Speaker 1: on the subway. He had a cigarette lighter that was
Speaker 1: in the shape of a derringer. He took it out
Speaker 1: and a cop was looking at him, and he held
Speaker 1: his arm out and aimed it at the cop. And
Speaker 1: he got arrested. And I said to him, if stupidity
Speaker 1: was a crime, you would get the death penalty. A
Speaker 1: lot of them were addicted to drugs, and I met
Speaker 1: their families and they were just folks. And you know, there,
Speaker 1: but for the grace of God could go anyone of them.
Speaker 1: I agree with you. I often think to myself, my God,
Speaker 1: how many moments in my life could something have gone wrong?
Speaker 1: Or I could be in a docket, and I could
Speaker 1: be in a courtroom, and I could be facing prison
Speaker 1: time and probably had the benefit of far better circumstances
Speaker 1: than most of these guys, Right they didn't, You know?
Speaker 1: They had difficulty frighten John, when you see people who
Speaker 1: do have the benefit of the circumstances and still commit
Speaker 1: crimes more harshly, Yeah, I always think to myself, we've
Speaker 1: got it wrong. We need to be having longer sentences
Speaker 1: for white collar and then we do forrect I've always felt,
Speaker 1: and I said this even in my last years as
Speaker 1: the head of a large corrections agency. This is what
Speaker 1: I said to my staff. I said, this is our
Speaker 1: standard of care. It is that every person in our
Speaker 1: custody is to be treated as we would want our
Speaker 1: own child treated if they were in that circumstance. You
Speaker 1: felt that, I absolutely felt because for most people, you know,
Speaker 1: you think about prison and imprisonment in our society, you know,
Speaker 1: prison is divided into a dual function. There's to protect
Speaker 1: the public and to take away these predatory people and
Speaker 1: put them away, and then the rehabilitative aspect of it.
Speaker 1: And most people have accept that dichotomy. I don't tell me, well,
Speaker 1: I don't buy rehabilitation by that way. You mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think that prisons do a very good job. I
Speaker 1: think it is a valid social purpose two punish people
Speaker 1: to reinforce our social norms. That's why we punish people.
Speaker 1: It is a valid social purpose to punish people, to
Speaker 1: extract vengeance in the name of society on behalf of
Speaker 1: aggrieved victims. It's a valid social purpose to incapacitate people
Speaker 1: who endanger us. You see, that's the more important to me.
Speaker 1: And the prison system does those three things pretty well.
Speaker 1: There was a sociologist, Hans Motok, who once said, you
Speaker 1: can't train an aviator in a submarine. You can't train
Speaker 1: a man to live in the community in prison. And
Speaker 1: if a person needs rehabilitation and they're not dangerous, the
Speaker 1: best place to rehabilitate, whatever the hell that means, is
Speaker 1: in the community where they're gonna have to live. And
Speaker 1: let me ask you that someone said something to me
Speaker 1: on this visit to Rahway, and this is probably the
Speaker 1: most significant thing someone said to me. And I said,
Speaker 1: the problem with this system is the sentencing relative to
Speaker 1: the classification of the crime, relative to the record of
Speaker 1: the individual inmate because they said, some guys come in here,
Speaker 1: and the following thing takes place. They come in here
Speaker 1: and they're sorry, and then three months go by and
Speaker 1: they're really really sorry, and six months go by and
Speaker 1: they're really, really really sorry and are ready to get out,
Speaker 1: and they're sorry, and then you keep them in there
Speaker 1: another couple of months and they're not sorry. Now they're angry.
Speaker 1: Flip and now they're angry, and now they've switched sides.
Speaker 1: And I'm wondering what your opinion is. My opinion is
Speaker 1: New York, Well, the United States generally incarcerates people longer
Speaker 1: than any other country. I think we have over lengthy prisons,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely. I mean if for victims crimes, and even
Speaker 1: for crimes with victims. Ever since m Richard Nixon and
Speaker 1: the War on Crime, which was really just a way
Speaker 1: to capture the Southern vote because he really meant a
Speaker 1: war on black people, ever since Willie Horton, which was
Speaker 1: just an extension of that same thing, no politician has
Speaker 1: been willing to reduce criminal sentences. And I think this
Speaker 1: has been the politics and the media have driven it
Speaker 1: in this country to a terrible extent. So you were
Speaker 1: a parole officer for how many years? I was a
Speaker 1: parole officer for about seven years, and then what happened? Uh? Then? Actually, well,
Speaker 1: I got a graduate degree and I moved to upstate
Speaker 1: New York to teach in the State University of New York.
Speaker 1: I got a teaching appointment as an assistant professor, but
Speaker 1: that didn't last long. Martin Horn left to become Director
Speaker 1: of work Release Programs for New York State. This was
Speaker 1: seven and New York was investing in halfway houses. The
Speaker 1: idea is simple, reduce an inmates time and maximum security
Speaker 1: to get that person a job. This saves a lot
Speaker 1: of money and reduces recidivism, but is obviously no easy task. Look,
Speaker 1: this business of corrections and and releasing people from prison
Speaker 1: is essentially nothing more than a risk management exercise. Right,
Speaker 1: We can never eliminate risk. The only way to have
Speaker 1: no risk is to never let anybody out of their cell.
Speaker 1: If you have six thousand guys in halfway houses, some
Speaker 1: of them are going to screw up. The story about
Speaker 1: New York that that we should feel good about is
Speaker 1: that where in five New York State had seventy thou
Speaker 1: people in prison. And mind you, when I started in
Speaker 1: there were ten thousand people in prison, so were seventy
Speaker 1: thousand today it's down to fifty the reform of the
Speaker 1: Rockefellow drug laws. So it's there's no question in my
Speaker 1: mind the number of people that are in prison is
Speaker 1: a function of policy decisions made by elected officials. Who
Speaker 1: do you think was ultimately responsible for bringing down those
Speaker 1: laws because a lot of people that was just insane. Well, look,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that there was an advocacy organization
Speaker 1: dropped the rock in New York. I think that then
Speaker 1: Governor Patterson deserves credit. I'm not sure any other governor
Speaker 1: would have accepted that. And then also I think you
Speaker 1: cannot ignore the cost issue. The cost of imprisonment in
Speaker 1: New York State today even is still two billion dollars
Speaker 1: a year in UM. Just about every state of the country,
Speaker 1: over the last twenty years, the cost of imprisonment has
Speaker 1: been the fastest growing item in state budgets. In California,
Speaker 1: which for years UH was so proud of it's public
Speaker 1: university system, reached the point where it was spending more
Speaker 1: on its state prisons, which now hold a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty people, than it was on its state universities. So
Speaker 1: I think that it was a perfect storm. All the
Speaker 1: factors came together. The fiscal conservatives were driven by the
Speaker 1: price issues, and concern is that it's driven by cost
Speaker 1: and that it does not reflect a genuine rethinking of
Speaker 1: our approach to crime and imprisonment. When I was a
Speaker 1: parole officer, we had an expression trail um, nail him
Speaker 1: and jael um, and the idea was that it was
Speaker 1: up to the parole to do all the work and
Speaker 1: if he screwed up, we would catch him and lock
Speaker 1: him up. And we had this belief that if we
Speaker 1: locked him up before he committed a more serious crime,
Speaker 1: we were performing a public service. Martin Horne's years of
Speaker 1: hands on experience changed his opinions. He grew to believe
Speaker 1: that the prison system wasn't doing enough for ex inmates.
Speaker 1: For Horn, there are three elements to successful re entry
Speaker 1: from prison. Ex Offenders need help finding a job, a
Speaker 1: place to live, and staying sober. Coming up, Horn on
Speaker 1: his decision to leave public service. To this day, I'm
Speaker 1: not entirely sure what happened. I will tell you this
Speaker 1: is something you think can happen anywhere, absolutely and it
Speaker 1: is I will say, what caused me to decide to
Speaker 1: retire because I felt that I could not trust my
Speaker 1: workforce any longer. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening
Speaker 1: to Here's the thing. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're
Speaker 1: listening to Here's the Thing. In October two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: and eighteen year old boy was killed at Rikers Island,
Speaker 1: New York City's largest jail, by fellow inmates. The Village
Speaker 1: Voice had been reporting for the past year about violence
Speaker 1: among prisoners at Riker's guards were said to be looking
Speaker 1: the other way. In two thousand twelve, the Voice obtained
Speaker 1: and published graphic pictures of knife wounds and other injuries
Speaker 1: from inside the jail walls. The largest jail system in
Speaker 1: the country had a fight club that was condoned and
Speaker 1: even promoted by jail officials. The program, as it was called,
Speaker 1: delivered the most challenging moments of Martin Horne's career. The
Speaker 1: story is that a young man by the Christopher Robinson
Speaker 1: was put into a particular housing unit, in the adolescent
Speaker 1: housing unit, and he had been transferred there because in
Speaker 1: the unit that he had been in previously, he had
Speaker 1: actually been extorting from a weaker inmate, and he was
Speaker 1: caught so his classification was increased and he was put
Speaker 1: into this higher classification unit, so you know, the sort
Speaker 1: of pecking ortist. So now he gets there and these
Speaker 1: guys who had been there for a while, who were
Speaker 1: this clique, they step up to him and they said,
Speaker 1: we're going to extort from you, and he says to
Speaker 1: them on the extorter here, you don't extort from me.
Speaker 1: So they tune them up, they beat them up. Come
Speaker 1: to find out that they had been extorting from other
Speaker 1: inmates and that this has been going on for some
Speaker 1: time with the prior knowledge and arguably the connivance of
Speaker 1: the officers, and basically the officers had made a devil's
Speaker 1: bargain with the image, look, you don't beat us up,
Speaker 1: you don't attack us, and we'll let you run the
Speaker 1: show exactly, which, by the way, you know, most officers,
Speaker 1: perhaps all officers, are scared out of their minds. The
Speaker 1: job that we ask corrections officers to do are terrifying.
Speaker 1: We asked them to supervise fifty often angry, sometimes mentally
Speaker 1: ill young men in during the worst period of their life,
Speaker 1: during the worst period of their lives, who are craving
Speaker 1: some addictive substance in an open dormitory, and they're in
Speaker 1: that dormitory by themselves. So how does this one individual
Speaker 1: assert himself. He does not carry a weapon, he does
Speaker 1: not carry a baton. There may be another officer in
Speaker 1: a controlled room some ten twt away who can sound
Speaker 1: the alarm and ask for help, but by the time
Speaker 1: help arrives, he can be beaten to a bloody pulp.
Speaker 1: So it's two in the morning, you're making a rounds
Speaker 1: walking around this dormitory of fifty year old guys. In
Speaker 1: the back corner, you stumble across two of them smoking weed.
Speaker 1: You have a decision to make. You can turn your
Speaker 1: back and walk the other way. You can try and
Speaker 1: bust them and run the risk that their friends will
Speaker 1: pounce on you and pummel you. So which happens, which
Speaker 1: certainly happens, how frequently more frequently than we'd like it to.
Speaker 1: And that's another reason that I left, because I feel
Speaker 1: the prisons are understaffed. I think it's is wrong to
Speaker 1: ask one man. And by the way, today more than
Speaker 1: fifty of the correction officers in the city of New
Speaker 1: York are women. So when you say that the two
Speaker 1: guys smoke weed, the corrections officer comes, he sees you
Speaker 1: got a decision to make, and someone's gonna pummel you.
Speaker 1: Do you have a system in place where you know
Speaker 1: who's more disposed towards violent behavior inside the facility when
Speaker 1: they come in, and why can't you separate them before
Speaker 1: in an anticipatory way. Well, we have what assystem we
Speaker 1: refer to a classification, and you basically separate the most
Speaker 1: serious inmates and put them in maximum security. But at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, somebody has to supervise those
Speaker 1: maximum security inmates. What reforms do you think could be
Speaker 1: made in supervising maximum security inmates? Generally? I don't like
Speaker 1: to open dormitories. I think every inmate should have his
Speaker 1: own cell. Cells do not have to be oppressive, They
Speaker 1: do not have to be depressing. They can be bright
Speaker 1: and airy, they don't have to be oppressive. Everybody in
Speaker 1: their own room. Everybody should have their own room. I don't,
Speaker 1: you don't selling, I don't, and I don't. Well, well,
Speaker 1: I think that I don't think that's cruel and unusual people.
Speaker 1: I think, well, I don't like to use those terms
Speaker 1: cruel and usual. And in fact, the Supreme Court has
Speaker 1: said that there is no one man, one sell rule
Speaker 1: living in the constitution. But I think that we all
Speaker 1: have privacy needs to your knowledge, and I would trust
Speaker 1: your opinion. Do the inmates do they want their own sell?
Speaker 1: They do? They prefer it. Some like company, some like
Speaker 1: company for the wrong reasons, But most people, I think
Speaker 1: want their privacy. This is your safety zone, right, Nobody
Speaker 1: can get you if you want to come out. You know,
Speaker 1: different people go to prisons and and they're terrified to
Speaker 1: be out in the prison yard with all these other inmates.
Speaker 1: Is there a constant pulsing sense of fear for people
Speaker 1: who were in the prison yard not in a well
Speaker 1: run prison. Look, it's the job of the officers to
Speaker 1: keep the inmates safe. And if we don't keep the
Speaker 1: inmates safe, they'll find ways to keep themselves safe. How
Speaker 1: will they do that. They'll do that by joining gangs.
Speaker 1: And they'll do that by creating in New York State
Speaker 1: now a lot of gangs. I can't come it on
Speaker 1: New York State prisons. I know that it's certainly a
Speaker 1: problem in New York City and in the city, and
Speaker 1: they do these gangs. I guess, like, if I got
Speaker 1: into prison tomorrow, is it just expect that I'm going
Speaker 1: to join a gang my own potential. You see, this
Speaker 1: gets to the program. You're the new guy. You come
Speaker 1: into this open dormitory of fifty inmates and there's a
Speaker 1: group of maybe ten or fifteen of them. Perhaps they
Speaker 1: know themselves from the street, perhaps they self identify as
Speaker 1: bloods or crips or Latin Kings or whatever. Not too
Speaker 1: many of those in New York. But if you're in California, sure,
Speaker 1: and they step to you and they say, here's the deal.
Speaker 1: Are you with us? And if if you're stupid enough
Speaker 1: to walk into a dormitory where there are twenty inmates
Speaker 1: who call themselves bloods and you say, hell, I'm a crip,
Speaker 1: Well they're gonna do the same thing they duty on
Speaker 1: the street. Get off our turf. Prison and jail is
Speaker 1: this artificial scarcity that we create, right, So there's by
Speaker 1: and large, little food, there's no drugs, there's no girls,
Speaker 1: there's no sex. You know, there's no money, and it's
Speaker 1: a black market. And so, as with any place else,
Speaker 1: a group of inmates emerges and they say, we control it,
Speaker 1: the simplest thing. And this is what was happening, certainly
Speaker 1: in the adolescent jail where that program occurred, there were
Speaker 1: never enough chairs for all the inmates, and a group
Speaker 1: of inmates would say, on Saturday mornings, when this program
Speaker 1: is on, or when this sporting event is on, there's
Speaker 1: one TV said it is for the black guys and
Speaker 1: you Spanish guys. You stay in yourselves, because that's our time. Now,
Speaker 1: an officer has a choice to make. First of all,
Speaker 1: he should see it going on, and if he sees
Speaker 1: it going on, he should take that away. Were there
Speaker 1: any prosecutions of any of the officers to officers actually
Speaker 1: were convicted of gang assault, and five or seven of
Speaker 1: the inmates ultimately were convicted. I don't know what the
Speaker 1: charge was, but it might have been manslaughter. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't think they intended to kill Christopher Robinson. The
Speaker 1: troubling thing was that there have been stories for some time. Uh,
Speaker 1: and this is what the voice documented, that this had
Speaker 1: been going on. There were bread crumbs, and that if
Speaker 1: we had done a better job of following those bread crumbs,
Speaker 1: we perhaps would have seen it earlier and prevented it
Speaker 1: to people. You know, I'd like to get back to
Speaker 1: another point. You make, you know, you make the point
Speaker 1: of it how we deal with white collar criminals or
Speaker 1: with everybody uses the made off example. You know Martha Stewart,
Speaker 1: you've met her many times. I'm sure she's a lovely person.
Speaker 1: So we know that some years ago she um lied
Speaker 1: to a federal officer investigating supposed inside her stock manipulation.
Speaker 1: She was not convicted of stock manipulation. She was convicted
Speaker 1: of line to a federal officer, and she got what
Speaker 1: four months in a federal prisoner Alderson. So today, but
Speaker 1: for her current troubles with Macy's and Pennies, she's better
Speaker 1: off than she was when she went to prison. What
Speaker 1: did society game by them? Let me suggest to you,
Speaker 1: what if instead we had erected a ten foot high
Speaker 1: platform in Times Square and we had climate control that
Speaker 1: we enclosed the plexiglass, we heated it, we air conditioned it,
Speaker 1: and we put a stool, you know, like a bar
Speaker 1: stool in it and stocks. Well I wouldn't put her
Speaker 1: in stocks, but I every day want to be here
Speaker 1: at nine o'clock in the morning, and you were to
Speaker 1: remain here until five in the afternoon. You know, we'll
Speaker 1: protect you from the elements, and you'll sit here with
Speaker 1: a sign around your neck that says I'm a liar.
Speaker 1: You can bathe, but you can't get all dressed up.
Speaker 1: You can't wear jewelry, you can't wear makeup. You know,
Speaker 1: you can attend to all your personality that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: We're not looking to harm you, but you can't do
Speaker 1: all that stuff. And after you've sat in Times Square
Speaker 1: for some period of time where the world could see
Speaker 1: that you are a liar, you are to perform community
Speaker 1: service for a year where you're to go out to
Speaker 1: East New York and teach young women about nutrition, about
Speaker 1: dressing for success, about all of the things that you
Speaker 1: do so well. And in addition, you have to pay
Speaker 1: back trouble or quadruple what you made on this financial fraud.
Speaker 1: And that's it. But we're not going to imprison you.
Speaker 1: Would we have had as great a deterrent effect? Would
Speaker 1: we have punished her? Would we have convinced turn not
Speaker 1: to try to do it again? Would we have deterred others?
Speaker 1: I would argue yes, And yet we don't do those things.
Speaker 1: We don't use shape in our society. But but I
Speaker 1: agree with you in terms of what you're suggesting. Whoever,
Speaker 1: we do have that now we have the internet. As
Speaker 1: my friend one said, the internet represents the death of forgetting.
Speaker 1: Martha Stewart is forever going to be referred to as
Speaker 1: you know, formerly incarcerated, blah blah blah, that that's going
Speaker 1: to stay with the rest of her life. But was
Speaker 1: she punished? My point is simply this, as a society,
Speaker 1: our primary response to crime is prison. It's the only tool.
Speaker 1: I don't understand. You know the aphorism that if the
Speaker 1: only tool on your belt is a hammer, everything looks
Speaker 1: like an app Well, that's that's true with respect to
Speaker 1: our approach to imprisonment. If you had um three things
Speaker 1: that you were going to change about the federal, state, city,
Speaker 1: what would you change about the way we deal with convicted. Well,
Speaker 1: so that's that. That excludes the city. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: federal and federal. The first thing I do is I
Speaker 1: legalized drugs. Right when you say that, though, I mean
Speaker 1: obviously there are people who inside that argument talk about
Speaker 1: cocaine and heroin. You don't care you'd legalize. I would
Speaker 1: legalized drugs. We couldn't possibly do worse than we're doing now, right,
Speaker 1: But what would you do to take it even further?
Speaker 1: I mean, you've been involved with the system for a
Speaker 1: long one time, you'd have the government dispensing cocaine and heroin.
Speaker 1: I would sell it in the liquor stores, right, and
Speaker 1: I would tax the hell out of it. You just
Speaker 1: license it and sell it. I mean, I agree with you.
Speaker 1: And then I would take all the money we're spending
Speaker 1: and all the money we're going to make, and I
Speaker 1: would reinvest it in prevention. You know, I grew up
Speaker 1: never using a seatbelt, and to this day I'll drive
Speaker 1: around without a seatbelt. My kids who are now prison
Speaker 1: for that. You know. I suppose my son when he
Speaker 1: was two years old, if I started to back the
Speaker 1: car out before he was buckled in, would have a tantrum. Right,
Speaker 1: pure kids are smoking today. We can prevent, we can
Speaker 1: provide treatment, and there will be and there will be
Speaker 1: money to spare. So I would legalize drugs. I would
Speaker 1: reduce the length of time that people who do commit crimes,
Speaker 1: violent crimes, well, for all crimes, but for those people
Speaker 1: who scare us the most. John Mohammad, remember the Washington sniper. Right,
Speaker 1: you have to incapacitate him forever, right, Jeffrey Dahmer, Right,
Speaker 1: you have to inca mentally mentally ill, that's a whole
Speaker 1: different story. That's that's item four. The great shame of
Speaker 1: our society today is that the people in prison have
Speaker 1: a mental illness. More people receive acute mental health care
Speaker 1: in the jails in this country than they do in
Speaker 1: the mental hospitals. Mentally ill people don't belong in jail,
Speaker 1: and it is a scandal in our mentalists out of crime.
Speaker 1: You're not allowed to give violent inmates in any kind
Speaker 1: of a system drugs. You're not allowed to well if
Speaker 1: if if they're being treated for mental illness, people mentally
Speaker 1: just for being, you're not even drug them to quiet
Speaker 1: them down. You can't know without a court order. I
Speaker 1: mean you can if there's a court order. Number three,
Speaker 1: um Number three is I would change the way we
Speaker 1: release people from prison. I would actually do away with
Speaker 1: the parole boards and discretionary parole. I would make every
Speaker 1: sense a determinate sense. I would say you're gonna be
Speaker 1: under the control of the state for a period of time.
Speaker 1: Let's just say, for arguments, take five years. For the
Speaker 1: first three of those years, you're gonna go to prison,
Speaker 1: and we'll leave it up to the corrections people to
Speaker 1: decide back someimum medium minimum. But at the end of
Speaker 1: three years, you're coming back to the community. And when
Speaker 1: you come back to the community, you're gonna live in
Speaker 1: a halfway house. And while you're in the halfway house,
Speaker 1: we are going to help you connect with a relapse
Speaker 1: prevention program to prevent your relapse to drug abuse. And
Speaker 1: we're gonna help you to get involved in an a
Speaker 1: A program. And we're gonna help you find a job.
Speaker 1: And you're not gonna have to pay us any money.
Speaker 1: You're gonna save the money you earn on your job,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna help you find a place to live.
Speaker 1: And when you've saved enough money to pay a month's
Speaker 1: rent in a month's deposit and maybe another month, you
Speaker 1: can go home and live on your own and we're
Speaker 1: done with you. So I would I would have fixed sentences,
Speaker 1: and that way what happens now is Johnny Jones goes
Speaker 1: to prison for uh five to fifteen years, those at
Speaker 1: five or is at fifteen, and parlber PAROLESO five. The
Speaker 1: victim says, my god, I thought he was going away
Speaker 1: for fifteen years. Or he goes in front of the
Speaker 1: parole board and they say, Johnny, we're gonna hold you
Speaker 1: for five more years. When I pleaded guilty and my
Speaker 1: lawyer told me that if I did everything right and
Speaker 1: kept my nose clean, I'd be out in five And
Speaker 1: the probert says, well, we were in the room when
Speaker 1: that deal got made. The whole system currently is deceptive,
Speaker 1: undermines respect for the rule of law, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: allow us to release individuals from prison in a planful way.
Speaker 1: So I would those are the three things I would change.
Speaker 1: Are you glad you're done? Are you glad you're walking
Speaker 1: away from that? It was? It was, It was a
Speaker 1: fascinating career. I am absolutely glad I'm done. You are um?
Speaker 1: Was its spiritually deadening in other ways as well? I mean,
Speaker 1: because I I can't think of anything more horrific than
Speaker 1: when I was in prison. At some level, there is
Speaker 1: no place also a grown man could have as much fun.
Speaker 1: When I was the warden of Hudson Prison, I used
Speaker 1: to say to people that it was a cross between
Speaker 1: being the headmaster of a somewhat down on its hills
Speaker 1: boys school and the King of England, because you were
Speaker 1: in charge and you had to deal with everything from
Speaker 1: the pipes in this hundred year old facility breaking, to
Speaker 1: making sure that there was adequate food and that the
Speaker 1: food was well prepared, to making sure that there were
Speaker 1: no contagious diseases, that tuberculosis didn't spread, that measles didn't spread,
Speaker 1: that people got psychiatric care. You had to deal with
Speaker 1: labor relations, you had to deal with ethical issues, you
Speaker 1: had to deal with legal issue with a lord governor.
Speaker 1: And it was fascinating and in that respect, I couldn't
Speaker 1: have had a better career today. Martin Horne is a
Speaker 1: Distinguished Lecturer in Directions at John j College and serves
Speaker 1: as the Executive director of the Permanent Sentencing Commission, which
Speaker 1: works to clarify, simplify, and create New York States sentencing guidelines.
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