Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, as an
Speaker 1: inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even
Speaker 1: represent my own. And nothing contained in this show should
Speaker 1: be used as medical advice or encouragement to use any
Speaker 1: type of drug. We're talking today about race and the
Speaker 1: war on drugs, two things that are inextricably linked in
Speaker 1: this country and many others. You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: Racist sentencing law is involving crack versus powdered cocaine or
Speaker 1: the police stopping frisk policies that disproportionly affect young people
Speaker 1: of color. But how the War on drugs came to
Speaker 1: be and who supported it as a complicated history. Today's
Speaker 1: guest is James Foreman Jr. Who wrote a book a
Speaker 1: few years ago called Locking Up Our Own Crime and
Speaker 1: Punishment in Black America, which landed up winning the Police
Speaker 1: Surprise for General Nonfiction in eighteen and being listed on
Speaker 1: all sorts of best sellers list. He's a distinguished academic.
Speaker 1: He's been teaching at Yale Law School for the last
Speaker 1: ten years. When he was younger, he came out of
Speaker 1: law school and clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice
Speaker 1: Sandra Day O'Connor. But after clerking in the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: what he did was relatively unusual, and it almost kind
Speaker 1: of reminded me a little bit of Obama's story where
Speaker 1: Obama leaves Harvard Law School and goes back to Chicago
Speaker 1: and become a community organizer. And what James decided to
Speaker 1: do was to go work at the Public Defense Years
Speaker 1: Office in d C. This was in the mid nineties,
Speaker 1: and so James, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Psychoactive. And let me just start by asking
Speaker 1: you why did you do that. I had gone to
Speaker 1: law school intent on doing civil rights work. So when
Speaker 1: I was in law school, I worked for the NUBLE,
Speaker 1: a CP Legal Defense Fund for two summers, and I
Speaker 1: really took a lot of classes that were focused on
Speaker 1: voting rights and employment law, traditional areas that civil rights
Speaker 1: law covered. But when I became a law clerk, one
Speaker 1: of the things that became very clear to me. And
Speaker 1: this is the early nineties, so we didn't have the
Speaker 1: term mass incarceration, but it was very clear to me
Speaker 1: that something terribly wrong and adjust was happening in our
Speaker 1: criminal system. Because I was working for Judge Is both
Speaker 1: on the Court of Appeals and then later the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: and we were faced with cases where when I would
Speaker 1: read the underlying transcript, I would see clear evidence of
Speaker 1: you know, legal malpractice, legal non performance. Lawyers just over burdened,
Speaker 1: not able to adequately represent their clients, and people who
Speaker 1: maybe some of them were guilty and getting longer sentences
Speaker 1: they deserve, some of them may have been innocent, and
Speaker 1: still we're getting convicted. People were getting represented by attorneys
Speaker 1: that a three hundred, four hundred, five hundred cases at
Speaker 1: a time, just getting shuttled through the process, and the
Speaker 1: appellate courts, the courts that you go to an appeal,
Speaker 1: weren't willing to do anything about it. Their position was, well,
Speaker 1: you got a trial, you had a lawyer, you had
Speaker 1: a warm body. That's good enough. And as I looked
Speaker 1: out at the world, I thought, well, what can I do?
Speaker 1: And it felt to me like working in that system,
Speaker 1: that criminal justice system, which is what we called it
Speaker 1: at the time, was the most important civil rights work
Speaker 1: I could do. And so even though it wasn't really
Speaker 1: talked about as civil rights work at the time, it
Speaker 1: felt clear to me that it was. And the d
Speaker 1: C Public Defender Service where I went to work, which
Speaker 1: was only about a mile from the Supreme Court in
Speaker 1: terms of the offices, although very different in terms of
Speaker 1: decor and and that sort of thing, but it was
Speaker 1: one of the leading public defenders offices in the country.
Speaker 1: So the chance to go work with a group of
Speaker 1: lawyers that included people like Charles Ogletree and Angela Davis,
Speaker 1: people who really set the bar for what counted as
Speaker 1: excellent representation, was just something that that I couldn't pass up.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Well, you know, let's just set a broader
Speaker 1: context here. So when you started doing this in d C,
Speaker 1: it's the early mid nineties, and you know, in eight
Speaker 1: when there was a kind of lull between Nixon's drug
Speaker 1: War and then the drug War of the eighties, there
Speaker 1: were basically five hundred thousand people behind bars in the
Speaker 1: United States in federal and state prisons and local jails,
Speaker 1: of whom about fifty thousand were there for a drug
Speaker 1: law violation. By the time you get to the early
Speaker 1: two thousands, we've gone from five hundred thousand people behind
Speaker 1: bars to over two million people behind bars. We've gone
Speaker 1: from having an incarceration rate that's kind of average for
Speaker 1: the world having one that is astronomically greater, in fact,
Speaker 1: the highest in the world. And among the people behind bars,
Speaker 1: we've gone from fifty thousand locked up on drug charges
Speaker 1: to five hundred thousand for whom a drug law violation
Speaker 1: was the principal offense. And that five hundred thousand doesn't
Speaker 1: even count all of the hundreds of thousands who get
Speaker 1: reincarcerated on parole and probation violations connected to drugs. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't even count the people committing crimes of you know,
Speaker 1: prostitution or petty theft to support to drug habit And
Speaker 1: it doesn't even count the people involved in the drug
Speaker 1: business who are getting involved in violent crimes that are
Speaker 1: as a result of the prohibitionist approach to drugs. So
Speaker 1: you're talking about a huge part of the prison population
Speaker 1: and jail population that's locked up in one way or
Speaker 1: another for either a direct drug glove violation, or something related.
Speaker 1: And when you break it out, you know, I was
Speaker 1: teaching at Princeton, living in New Jersey, and then I
Speaker 1: moved to New York and those two states. At that
Speaker 1: time lad the country, something like fifty of new admissions
Speaker 1: to prison were for drug glow violations. The only place
Speaker 1: that was higher than that was Washington, d c. Where
Speaker 1: a substantial majority of all the people being sent to
Speaker 1: the jail in prison there were for a drug glow violation.
Speaker 1: And there you are, as a public defender working in
Speaker 1: the midst of this. I mean, what did it feel like, Well,
Speaker 1: we felt like warriors for justice. When ever you're a
Speaker 1: minority group, you know, whether it's you know, what the
Speaker 1: early abolitionists would have felt, or people in the civil
Speaker 1: rights movement. And I know because that both my parents
Speaker 1: were in the movement. My mom came and visited our
Speaker 1: office and when the first thing she said was, wow,
Speaker 1: this reminds me of a movement office. And she was
Speaker 1: talking about the early sixties and SNICK, the Student Non
Speaker 1: Violent Coordinating Committee where she was a member. So we
Speaker 1: we had that kind of righteous indignation, certainty that we
Speaker 1: were fighting an unpopular cause, but a just cause, and
Speaker 1: that was the feeling that we had. Now having said that,
Speaker 1: we also knew our position was unpopular, right, So we
Speaker 1: knew all of the statistics that you've just mentioned. I mean,
Speaker 1: we were working as public defenders at a time when
Speaker 1: those statistics were being compiled. So I was going into
Speaker 1: courtrooms and facing judges and prosecutors, probation officers, social workers,
Speaker 1: bailiff's court martials who would all look at your client
Speaker 1: as you're the one that's bringing down the community. You're
Speaker 1: the one that is causing so much harm and degradation.
Speaker 1: You're the one that has to be punished. You're the
Speaker 1: one that has to be banished. So we believed we
Speaker 1: were right. But I'm not gonna lie. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: hard to work in a context when you see every day, um,
Speaker 1: people being sent to prison for long periods of time,
Speaker 1: some subjected to, you know, unjust conditions. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: hard to have a client who's addicted, who wants help,
Speaker 1: but there's a year long waiting list for heroin treatment
Speaker 1: programs in the community, and the only way that she
Speaker 1: could get treatment if she was going to ever get some,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't even very good, but the only way
Speaker 1: she could get a shorter waiting list. Was after she
Speaker 1: had been arrested and was facing sentence. I mean, think
Speaker 1: about that. What is it like to live in a
Speaker 1: community where if you know you're an addict and you
Speaker 1: call the government and you say, I want help. I
Speaker 1: don't have any money, but I want to help, I
Speaker 1: want treatment, and they say, okay, here, take a number,
Speaker 1: will call you back in a year to a heroin addict.
Speaker 1: But go out to the corner, sell something to feed
Speaker 1: your own addiction. Go sell five bags so that you
Speaker 1: get to keep one which you can then use. Then
Speaker 1: you get busted, then you're facing a maximum of thirty years.
Speaker 1: So we'll spend hundreds of thousands millions of dollars to
Speaker 1: lock somebody up in that era when we wouldn't even
Speaker 1: invest enough to open a treatment facility for much less
Speaker 1: money to serve their needs. So we're working in that
Speaker 1: context and that environment, and it's hard. It is exhausting
Speaker 1: to face up to that injustice every day and to
Speaker 1: carry that burden with you and to know that as
Speaker 1: hard as your fighting, you lose more than you win.
Speaker 1: M Oftentimes, even back then, to the extent there was
Speaker 1: treatment available almost the only way to get it if
Speaker 1: you were poor was basically through the criminal justice system.
Speaker 1: You know, there might be diversion programs. There were the
Speaker 1: emergence of these drug courts and things like this. There
Speaker 1: was pretending to provide strugtury me behind bars, but if
Speaker 1: you didn't have the money to pay for it, that
Speaker 1: was gonna be where it was gonna happen. Now I
Speaker 1: remember that, you know, here I'm teaching a prince in
Speaker 1: the late eighties early nineties, beginning to advocate. I'm surrounded
Speaker 1: by a lot of my you know, generally liberally politically
Speaker 1: minded colleagues, and what I see going on there is
Speaker 1: there's sort of abandoning basic liberal values when it comes
Speaker 1: to the drug war. And if I asked why, I
Speaker 1: think there were basically two reasons. One was freaking out
Speaker 1: about their kids, right. It's the way in which the
Speaker 1: war on drugs is oftentimes justified as one great big
Speaker 1: child protection act and therefore will pay any price, bear
Speaker 1: any burden, lock up as many people if it's just
Speaker 1: gonna make our kids a tiny bits. And the second part,
Speaker 1: which was more subtle in some respects, at least in
Speaker 1: their minds, was that the people getting locked up weren't
Speaker 1: our people right that when you looked at pictures of
Speaker 1: who was going to prison, it was overwhelmingly black and
Speaker 1: brown people. I mean, I remember we started advocating to
Speaker 1: reform the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, these draconian
Speaker 1: drug laws, and nent of all the people getting locked
Speaker 1: up were black and brown, even though that was vastly disproportioned,
Speaker 1: it was much smaller percent or actually involved. I mean,
Speaker 1: you just saw this pervasive kind of otherism. There's no
Speaker 1: way that Americans would have endorsed this kind of mass
Speaker 1: incarceration approach if, in fact, most of the people going
Speaker 1: to prison were white. How did that? I mean, here
Speaker 1: you are, living, in some respects the only majority black
Speaker 1: jurisdiction in America. It's not quite a state, but you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, what was that like for you in something
Speaker 1: in that type of context. Yeah, you know, it's an
Speaker 1: important point, and I and and I would love to
Speaker 1: hear your thoughts at some point on how you felt
Speaker 1: like you were able to shift the narrative with your
Speaker 1: colleagues at Princeton. You know, you're sort of using those
Speaker 1: as a stand in for this part of the community
Speaker 1: that is both wealthy and whider um and therefore somewhat protected.
Speaker 1: How did you get them to care? Because they now
Speaker 1: do care, They now do understand the drug war is
Speaker 1: an issue. I was working in a in a different context, right,
Speaker 1: I was. I was having conversations with a different group
Speaker 1: of people than what you're describing, because I'm a black
Speaker 1: lawyer operating in a majority black city. As you say, uh,
Speaker 1: and the dynamic there the politics around the drug war,
Speaker 1: even though it ended up leading to a similar set
Speaker 1: of policies and practice, Right, even though d C passes
Speaker 1: draconian laws and mandatory minimums and like I mentioned, a
Speaker 1: man maximum of thirty years um for selling even a
Speaker 1: small amount of of heroin um or cocaine, the motivations
Speaker 1: are more complicated, I think in the black community, and
Speaker 1: a little bit different than what you described, which was
Speaker 1: sort of a view that, well, this isn't happening to
Speaker 1: our children, because in the black community people know it
Speaker 1: was happening to their children. Now, there is a little
Speaker 1: bit of a class story that we need to layer
Speaker 1: in here, right, which is that the black elites who
Speaker 1: are elected to office and who run government agencies do
Speaker 1: receive some level of protection by their class status. But
Speaker 1: they don't receive total protection right there Still, for example,
Speaker 1: subject to the police officers doesn't necessarily know um their
Speaker 1: class background, and maybe doesn't even care if they do
Speaker 1: know UM. So there they received some level of protection,
Speaker 1: but they're not nearly as protected from the ravages of
Speaker 1: the drug war. Then, for example, the white colleagues you're
Speaker 1: describing in Princeton. But another piece of the story in
Speaker 1: a majority black community is that there was this sense
Speaker 1: that even though members of our community were being targeted
Speaker 1: and being locked up, they were doing things that were
Speaker 1: wrong and we're harmful and we're damaging to our community,
Speaker 1: and they had to pay the price. It might not
Speaker 1: be fair that a white kid in New Jersey could
Speaker 1: carry drugs or even distribute drugs by sharing them with
Speaker 1: classmates or even selling them to classmates and get away
Speaker 1: with it. That might not be right. But what's happening
Speaker 1: in our neighborhood, what's happening in Anacostia, what's happening in Shaw,
Speaker 1: what's happening in parts of DC that are being deeply
Speaker 1: affected by the drug trade. That has to be police
Speaker 1: and it has to be punished, And so maybe they
Speaker 1: should send more police out to Princeton to make this equal.
Speaker 1: But they shouldn't stop setting police Because I voter, citizen, grandmother, shopkeeper, parents.
Speaker 1: I still want to be able to walk to school
Speaker 1: in peace and in safety. I don't want shots ringing
Speaker 1: out at all time of the day and night. I
Speaker 1: don't want my kids to be offered drugs on the
Speaker 1: way to school. I don't want to see a group
Speaker 1: of fifteen year old guys standing on the corner who
Speaker 1: need to be in school at eleven am and aren't
Speaker 1: in school and are obviously selling drugs, Like that's not
Speaker 1: fair and that's not safe, and that's not right, and
Speaker 1: they need to be punished. And then there's one more
Speaker 1: thing that I just want to put on the table,
Speaker 1: which is that in the black community, that push towards
Speaker 1: punitiveness as a way of protecting ourselves is also matched
Speaker 1: by a desire for a deep investment in what we
Speaker 1: might call root cause solutions. Those same black voters that
Speaker 1: want longer sentences or want the more aggressive policing, they
Speaker 1: also are asking for more investment and treatment programs, more
Speaker 1: investment in and education, more investment in after school programs.
Speaker 1: They're frustrated that the Recreation Center closes at four pm
Speaker 1: when it should be open until eight nine pm. They
Speaker 1: want the city to be spending money on those things.
Speaker 1: They want the federal government to be spending money on
Speaker 1: those things. So they're asking for more of everything, more policing,
Speaker 1: more prosecutions, but more investment in social services as well.
Speaker 1: And what we get in the nineties is not all
Speaker 1: of the above, right, what we get is one of
Speaker 1: the above. We get this unilateral focus on law enforcement, police, prosecution,
Speaker 1: prisons as the solution. So those are some of I
Speaker 1: think the complicated dynamics that we need to layer in
Speaker 1: when we understand how it was that black communities came
Speaker 1: to be behind some of these tough laws. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, James, you know, it was a curious phenomenon
Speaker 1: for me because, I mean, even when I started writing
Speaker 1: and speaking about this, you know, at the height of
Speaker 1: the drug were in the late eighties, the racial elements
Speaker 1: to this stuff, the fact that the origins of the
Speaker 1: drug laws were too in many rays were racist. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you look at the origins of the cocaine laws
Speaker 1: in the South, or the ways in which marijuana laws
Speaker 1: were directed in Mexicans, or the antiopium laws at Chinese,
Speaker 1: so the origins of that were apparent to me. Um.
Speaker 1: It was also a history here when during alcohol prohibition,
Speaker 1: I mean, some of the leading champions to prohibit alcohol
Speaker 1: oftentimes were people from the black church, the black community
Speaker 1: who saw the devastation of alcohol in their communities and said,
Speaker 1: you know, let's support alcohol prohibition. And then, of course,
Speaker 1: where do the prohibition laws land up being disproportionately enforced
Speaker 1: is in black communities and against black people. And I
Speaker 1: see all this going on, but I'm not really in
Speaker 1: a position Shin, as a young white academic, to be
Speaker 1: hitting the point of the racism of the drug war,
Speaker 1: in part because if I tried that, people coming from
Speaker 1: black community is saying who are you, white professor? Ideally
Speaker 1: professors saying this sort of stuff. Do you have any
Speaker 1: idea what crack cocaine is doing to our community? Don't
Speaker 1: you understand we need this tough stuff, we need this.
Speaker 1: And I would sometimes say, well, you know, sometimes it's
Speaker 1: a matter of tradeoffs. Sometimes maybe you need if you
Speaker 1: want more of the good stuff that you're talking about,
Speaker 1: the investment in communities, one needs to find ways to
Speaker 1: spend less on the law enforcement side. But those arguments
Speaker 1: did not start to really get traction until the mid
Speaker 1: to late nineties. Yeah well if if if then, I
Speaker 1: mean I think not until later. Well, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: just thinking about in June. I saw there was a
Speaker 1: recent Supreme Court decision with Justice Thomas, the most conservative
Speaker 1: guy in the court, writing it. And then you have
Speaker 1: you know, Justice so do Mai or the most liberal
Speaker 1: who is no choice but to sign on because the
Speaker 1: law is pretty clear. But both of them are quoting
Speaker 1: your book in their decisions to make a different argument.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I see what you mean. When you're when
Speaker 1: you're putting the date in the mid nineties, you're really
Speaker 1: talking about within the black community specifically. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: that that opinion that was fascinating. Justice Thomas was trying
Speaker 1: to recount a particular history of black support for the
Speaker 1: kind of laws that were at issue, that were that
Speaker 1: were being discussed in that case, right, mandatory minimums and um,
Speaker 1: some of the crack cocaine distinction, and you know, broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: he was making the point, which is correct, that many
Speaker 1: members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported mandatory minimums in
Speaker 1: the eighties. Uh, that many leaders in the black community
Speaker 1: called crack the worst thing to hit us in slavery,
Speaker 1: which is actually a title of a chapter in my book.
Speaker 1: So he's making the point that listen to say that
Speaker 1: these just have a single, you know, racist origin is
Speaker 1: to misunderstand the history. And Justice Thomas was in d
Speaker 1: C in the nineteen eighties. He was reading the same
Speaker 1: you know, black papers and other newspapers, and black media
Speaker 1: and and black speakers in the broader media who were
Speaker 1: making these claims that that crack cocaine was so damaging,
Speaker 1: and he draws on the book for that purpose. And
Speaker 1: then Justice, so to myor, says well, okay, yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's only part of the history. And then she expands
Speaker 1: it out to the nineties and she says, look, here's
Speaker 1: the thing you need to know. By the nine nineties,
Speaker 1: when the racist impact and the racial impact of these
Speaker 1: laws started to become clear, many of the black elected
Speaker 1: officials who had supported these laws in the eighties, now
Speaker 1: by the mid nineties were opposing them. And we're pretty consistently,
Speaker 1: pretty uniformly saying we need to end these mandatory minimums,
Speaker 1: we need to eliminate the crack cocaine distinction. And she
Speaker 1: makes the point which we talked about earlier, which is, yeah,
Speaker 1: they wanted tougher laws even back in the eighties, but
Speaker 1: they also wanted all these other things, all these other
Speaker 1: investments that they weren't getting. And a bunch of reporters
Speaker 1: called me that day and said, you know, check this
Speaker 1: out to justices are citing your book and for opposite conclusions,
Speaker 1: and you know who's right. And what I said to
Speaker 1: them was, you know, this isn't gonna be satisfying to you.
Speaker 1: And but they're both right that they're correctly using the book,
Speaker 1: and I believe correctly using the history for different points.
Speaker 1: And I do agree with you that by the nineties,
Speaker 1: certainly by the late nineties within the black community, there
Speaker 1: was a growing understanding, at least among experts I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say had broadened out into the general population that whatever
Speaker 1: the motivations had been in the eighties, now we were
Speaker 1: starting to see the terrible negative impact on the community.
Speaker 1: M by just for our audience. When James referred to
Speaker 1: the crack cocaine disparity in the mid nineteen eighties, Congress
Speaker 1: past legislation where they basically said that possession or sale
Speaker 1: of small amounts of crack cocaine will get you the
Speaker 1: same penalty as sale or possession of one hundred times
Speaker 1: as much powder cocaine. So you could get five to
Speaker 1: ten years behind bars mandatory minimum for possessing five grams
Speaker 1: of crack cocaine, it would take five hundred grams of
Speaker 1: powder cocaine, and by and large, you know crack cocaine.
Speaker 1: The people getting locked up for crack cocaine possession and
Speaker 1: sale were typically black, and those on powder were more
Speaker 1: likely to be white or sometimes Hispanic. So that's the
Speaker 1: disparity we're talking about there, you know, James, I should
Speaker 1: say from where I was sitting, right, So I pop
Speaker 1: out in the late nineteen eighties. I write a series
Speaker 1: of articles and prestigious journals. You asked how I began
Speaker 1: to move some of my colleagues. So I published a
Speaker 1: piece in the liberal journal Foreim Policy, in the conservative
Speaker 1: General Public Interest, and then in the you know, uh,
Speaker 1: prestige publication Science, all basically saying the war on drugs
Speaker 1: is doing more harm than good. And probably the person
Speaker 1: I'm debating more often than any other one back then
Speaker 1: is Congressman Charlie rangle right, and he's the famous Harlem congressman.
Speaker 1: And you know, the the you know, the successor to
Speaker 1: the famous Adam Clayton Powell. He's chairing this Lick Committee
Speaker 1: are Narcotics, And he and I are going at it
Speaker 1: on Nightline and on you know McNeil, Lair Report and
Speaker 1: NPR and ABC and stuff like this, and he's trying
Speaker 1: to mock me as the white professor saying this stuff.
Speaker 1: And I'm basically going at him about how he is
Speaker 1: one of the biggest problems with American drug policy. Jesse Jackson,
Speaker 1: same thing. You know, he's declaring himself the leader, he
Speaker 1: is the general or on drugs. I think you mentioned
Speaker 1: that Wrangle said he was the general too. They both
Speaker 1: they both wanted to be the general in the War
Speaker 1: on drugs, and and Wrangle had pushed through some of
Speaker 1: the most draconian policies. And mind you, it wasn't just
Speaker 1: on criminal justice stuff, right, you also had on needle exchange,
Speaker 1: where the public health people were beginning to say do it.
Speaker 1: And then when you see is huge opposition within black
Speaker 1: communities in New York City, Mayor Dinkins becomes mayor, succeeding
Speaker 1: a conscience shuts down the one little trial needle exchange
Speaker 1: program and the Congressional Black Caucus initially opposes, you know,
Speaker 1: needle exchange, but the transition happens most rapidly among black
Speaker 1: political leadership. I mean, that's where you see they essentially
Speaker 1: lead beginning in the mid nineties, whether it's on needle exchange,
Speaker 1: whether it's on sentencing reform that. And it's where you
Speaker 1: see oftentimes the younger Black leaders, the newer, younger members
Speaker 1: of Congress, and also with the state legislatures who were
Speaker 1: challenging the older generation. Right. And so that's where we
Speaker 1: begin to get some actual momentum. And I should say
Speaker 1: there were exceptions, because what was pivotal when I started
Speaker 1: speaking out in eight was you had in Baltimore, you know,
Speaker 1: a new mayor, former chief Prosecutor, Kurt Schmoke, who's steps
Speaker 1: up at the Conference of Mayors basically saying the war
Speaker 1: on drugs is doing more harm than good. Right. You
Speaker 1: have on James Baldwin speaking up in eighties six saying
Speaker 1: we gotta legalize drugs because you keep it this way,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be against black people. But I mean, I
Speaker 1: remember how Kurt Smoke bravely making this case as the
Speaker 1: as the black mayor of a majority I believe Black
Speaker 1: City is just being clobbered by both white and black
Speaker 1: members of the community and leadership and just seen as
Speaker 1: this kind of devian voice at the time. You know,
Speaker 1: you get to the mid nineties and it begins to
Speaker 1: evolve in a way that opens up the potential to
Speaker 1: begin to make some reforms possible, at least at the
Speaker 1: state level. Man, that is so interesting your perspective. I wish, honestly,
Speaker 1: I wish I had been able to find access to
Speaker 1: some of those debates between you and Wrangel that in
Speaker 1: the in the eighties, because that would have been really
Speaker 1: rich for material for the book. But Smoke, right, Kurt Smoke,
Speaker 1: you're so he There should be an awar I don't know,
Speaker 1: are there. I don't know if there's a Kirch Smoke Award.
Speaker 1: But now in this era, when there's an understanding, a
Speaker 1: really different understanding about drugs and there's more of a
Speaker 1: consensus that goes in that direction, somebody should honor him
Speaker 1: because you are so right. You are so right. Actually, James,
Speaker 1: the only award, the only word there is, is given
Speaker 1: out by the Drug Policy Alliance for you. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think one of the bravest politicians in America. You know,
Speaker 1: he would have made for a great U. S. Senator
Speaker 1: for Maryland. And I think one of the things that
Speaker 1: got in his way was the fact that he had
Speaker 1: been so courageous on this issue. We'll be talking more
Speaker 1: after we hear this ad. I want to say in
Speaker 1: your book, you talk about going to your students and
Speaker 1: getting these kind of blank stairs, and you say, without
Speaker 1: taking heroin into account, one cannot understand African American attitudes
Speaker 1: towards the drug war. And you go back into a
Speaker 1: history which very few people know about how and why
Speaker 1: the experience around heroin in the sixties and early seventies
Speaker 1: shape things. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think that if my students today, I mean, if
Speaker 1: they know anything about this era that we're talking about, um,
Speaker 1: they know maybe a little bit about the eighties and
Speaker 1: nineties and Crack, right, maybe some of them have watched
Speaker 1: the Wire. Um, but you're right, there's very little um
Speaker 1: understanding about heroin in the nineteen sixties. But Heroin really
Speaker 1: devastated black communities in some analogous ways to what Crack
Speaker 1: would do uh in the eighties. Um and and and
Speaker 1: I think set the stage for some of these um
Speaker 1: punitive black attitude. Some of the political leaders that we're
Speaker 1: talking about, they were in college and shortly after college
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties, so they were very much alive
Speaker 1: during this period of time. So in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the homicide rate doubled and in some cities tripled. And
Speaker 1: at the same time, at the same time as homicides
Speaker 1: rates rates were increasing, you also saw a massive influx
Speaker 1: of heroin. For a complicated set of historical reasons. Some
Speaker 1: of it had to do with UM exposure in Vietnam
Speaker 1: and and folks coming home, but for all the sort
Speaker 1: of different reasons, the bottom line is that you started
Speaker 1: to see, especially in the late nineteen sixties, you started
Speaker 1: to see a huge uptick in heroin use and heroin addiction.
Speaker 1: So in d C, which are the numbers that I
Speaker 1: know best, they test everyone entering the DC jail every year,
Speaker 1: and in the early nineteen sixties nineteen sixty three, about
Speaker 1: four of the people who are entering the jail are
Speaker 1: testing positive for heroin. And by the end of the decade,
Speaker 1: less than ten years later, um it has become it
Speaker 1: has risen to almost forty and so you get this
Speaker 1: massive increase, right, you get this explosion, and it's then
Speaker 1: associated also with a lot of a public presentation of
Speaker 1: drug You so you get syringes that are being left
Speaker 1: in front of homes and businesses. You get people that
Speaker 1: are nodding off on park benches, You have people that
Speaker 1: are gathering on on stoops and some of them are
Speaker 1: strung out. And you get neighbors again focusing on d C.
Speaker 1: But the same story you could tell in every black
Speaker 1: community across the country really kind of deluging their elected
Speaker 1: representatives saying you gotta do something about all of these
Speaker 1: heroin addicts are public spaces, don't feel they don't feel
Speaker 1: safe anymore. And I don't want to walk into my
Speaker 1: backyard and my back alley and find like multiple dirty syringes.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to live like that. And so there's both
Speaker 1: a rise in heroin use, a rise in heroin addiction.
Speaker 1: There's a demand for a response, and there's also a
Speaker 1: deep distrust in the black community which goes back for
Speaker 1: centuries of government interventions and some government responses. So some
Speaker 1: of the Nixon administration, which did many, many, many terrible
Speaker 1: things on many topics, including on drug policy. One little
Speaker 1: small thing that they were doing right at the time
Speaker 1: was they actually were investing in methodone and other heroin
Speaker 1: treatment centers. But what there was deep resistance to some
Speaker 1: of these centers from a very distrustful black community, including
Speaker 1: black nationalists, who said, listen, we're fighting for our people's freedom.
Speaker 1: We are fighting a revolution, and we don't want our
Speaker 1: people to be strung out on heroin supplied by the
Speaker 1: pusher on the corner or Method one supplied by the government.
Speaker 1: Both of those are ways of keeping us down, their
Speaker 1: ways of keeping us unconscious, and their ways of keeping
Speaker 1: us out of the fight that we all need to
Speaker 1: be engaged in. We need all of our faculties to
Speaker 1: be able to fight for freedom and fight for justice
Speaker 1: and fight for civil rights. So you have this anti
Speaker 1: drug from the left perspective, you have a distrust of
Speaker 1: government perspective. You have neighbors and regular folks just freaking
Speaker 1: out about this problem, and at the same time, you
Speaker 1: have the very beginnings of what will become right the
Speaker 1: prison prosecutor uh police approach that would end up being
Speaker 1: the dominant approach by the nineteen eighties and nine nineties.
Speaker 1: And it's like sitting there ready to seize on this opportunity,
Speaker 1: and that's that's ultimately what happens. M hm. You know,
Speaker 1: essentially you bring up the method on issue, James. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was oftentimes referred to in black communities as the
Speaker 1: white man's chemical bracelet, as another form of social control.
Speaker 1: And I think what part of what helped to change
Speaker 1: that was when there was a fellow named Dr Benny prim,
Speaker 1: a liberal Republican and probably the leading black man in
Speaker 1: drug treatment circles nationally, who eventually entered the federal government
Speaker 1: Health in Human Services under the first President Bush. But
Speaker 1: I think when he starts speaking up, that really moves
Speaker 1: things in New York and elsewhere. And I'll tell you
Speaker 1: another little story. It must have been I don't know,
Speaker 1: mid late nineties. I get a meeting with Reverend Calvin Butts,
Speaker 1: who's the head of Abyssinian Church in Harlem, one of
Speaker 1: the most famous black ministers in the country. And people say, Ethan,
Speaker 1: whatever you do when you go up there, you know,
Speaker 1: you can talk about the arrest and Carsonarry don't talk
Speaker 1: about methanon, but what the hell? And so I'm meeting
Speaker 1: with him and I raised the issue of methanon and
Speaker 1: he says to me, let me tell you something. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you something about meth and I'm going, okay,
Speaker 1: here it comes, chemical bracelet, all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: And he says, do you know that some of the
Speaker 1: most respected members of my church have been on methanon
Speaker 1: for many years? Do you know that some of the
Speaker 1: deacons in my church or on it? Do you know
Speaker 1: that many of their cases, not even their family knows.
Speaker 1: I just know because of my pastoral privilege. And then
Speaker 1: he says to me, could you imagine what it would
Speaker 1: be like if they felt free to speak up in
Speaker 1: church and say, I am a person who has been
Speaker 1: on methanon for many years and nonetheless have a family
Speaker 1: and a job in leading good night. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: the transformation that would happen? You know. It's another point
Speaker 1: you raise in your book, which is that the people
Speaker 1: who are being victimized by the war on drugs oftentimes
Speaker 1: it's just young black men just being shipped into the system,
Speaker 1: but it's even people who are getting that's not a
Speaker 1: nintenance treatment, who are intimidated that their voices are not heard.
Speaker 1: And that that's changed a lot now, But back then,
Speaker 1: there was no sense that such a person was even
Speaker 1: entitled to have a voice. Yes, the issue that you
Speaker 1: raise is exactly right. This is true throughout America. It's
Speaker 1: also true in the black community, which is that some
Speaker 1: of the people who are most directly harm, most directly affected,
Speaker 1: whether they are struggling with addiction, whether they're people who
Speaker 1: are incarcerated, their voices aren't value. Their voices are very
Speaker 1: diminished when we talk about the problems with the system
Speaker 1: and what to do about it. I first saw this
Speaker 1: up close in d C. In the ES, the Public
Speaker 1: Defender Service had people who would o lobby city council,
Speaker 1: and we were very reluctant to send our clients and
Speaker 1: their families to advocate on some of these issues, whether
Speaker 1: it was a prisoner's right question or whether it was
Speaker 1: a stop in frisk kind of question. And we didn't
Speaker 1: we didn't have an infrastructure to train people how to
Speaker 1: become effective advocates. It just wasn't a thing. And one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why that was the case is that
Speaker 1: there was a sense that our clients and their family
Speaker 1: members were so stigmatized and ridiculed. I talked before about
Speaker 1: how when they went into the courtroom and everyone looked
Speaker 1: at them as the enemy. So how are we going
Speaker 1: to send them down to the city Council to argue
Speaker 1: um on this issue. Weren't we just gonna lose all
Speaker 1: all credibility? And they often wouldn't have wanted to go
Speaker 1: testify because they would have felt all that scorn and
Speaker 1: shane and stigma being heaped upon them right by everybody
Speaker 1: of the city council hearing who's saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: you want to come and talk about this problem with
Speaker 1: prison conditions, but let's talk about what you even did
Speaker 1: to be in prison in the first place. Or if
Speaker 1: it's the mom and you want to talk about disparities
Speaker 1: and then the drug law, well let's talk about why
Speaker 1: your kid was even out there in the drug game
Speaker 1: to begin with. What kind of mom are you to
Speaker 1: have allowed that to happen? Right? You can just imagine
Speaker 1: what a haunting and terrible experience that would be for
Speaker 1: for somebody. So in the nineties, in the two thousand's
Speaker 1: until really fairly recently, still too much, but but it
Speaker 1: is changing. Those voices are left out of the conversation,
Speaker 1: and so you know, you get all those community members
Speaker 1: that I described to are outraged about the person that's
Speaker 1: nodding off on the bench and leaving the syringes or
Speaker 1: selling drugs on the corner. But nobody who's actually being
Speaker 1: directly harmed by the system's response is getting their voice heard.
Speaker 1: So that, to me, I think is one of the
Speaker 1: biggest things that has changed but still has to continue
Speaker 1: to change. Um And in particular, what I believe is
Speaker 1: that organizations that care about these issues have to continue
Speaker 1: to develop the advocacy skills people really need to be
Speaker 1: trained and supported to become highly effective and to build
Speaker 1: on their life experiences and to be able to translate
Speaker 1: those into ways that persuade at the city, county, state,
Speaker 1: and national level. M hm, Now it makes sense. So
Speaker 1: here I'm gonna ask you a very challenging question now
Speaker 1: in part because I'm asking you to pack a lot
Speaker 1: into this. So there are three significant points you make
Speaker 1: in the book. I mean, many others, but three that
Speaker 1: I kept highlighting. One was you talk about the simultaneous
Speaker 1: over and under policing of crime in black communities. The
Speaker 1: second is you point out that mass incarceration, the rise
Speaker 1: of mass incarceration is not the results of some great,
Speaker 1: big campaign being mandated from on high, but a result
Speaker 1: of small distinct steps with all sorts of different players.
Speaker 1: You know, nobody fully being responsible almost reminded me of
Speaker 1: the way you described it is the way we think
Speaker 1: about the financial meltdown in housing and loan and all
Speaker 1: that in two thousand and eight, right where everybody's making
Speaker 1: small steps, nobody is ultimately responsible and it all kind
Speaker 1: of adds up. And the third point you make is
Speaker 1: while we tend to focus on Washington, d C. In
Speaker 1: the federal government sense of the word, and the White
Speaker 1: House in Congress and all that, in fact, most of
Speaker 1: criminal justice and most of the war on drugs is
Speaker 1: operating at the local level. So now I wonder if
Speaker 1: you could pollo three together and sort of analyze that
Speaker 1: this is gonna make the question really tough. There's already tough, brother,
Speaker 1: it's already tough. Keep going, I know, okay, But what
Speaker 1: really captive met in the book was you talk about
Speaker 1: the journey of Eric Holder from his years his U
Speaker 1: S attorney in in d C. To his years as
Speaker 1: Attorney General from Obama where he becomes the driving force
Speaker 1: in Obama's second term basically for criminal justice and drug
Speaker 1: law reform. Just you know, provide our audience with a
Speaker 1: sense maybe through the lens of Eric Holder as a
Speaker 1: as a key character in all of this. Yeah, absolutely, um, So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think Eric Holder in some ways is
Speaker 1: a perfect character to to to understand and the book
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, and to understand especially the
Speaker 1: trajectory from kind of the then to the now. You know,
Speaker 1: you've in a number of your comments you've talked about
Speaker 1: growth and evolution among black representatives that and elected officials
Speaker 1: that you've worked with over the years, right, whether it's
Speaker 1: Wrangel or Jackson, and and I think Holder is a
Speaker 1: really great example of this. So Holder is a local
Speaker 1: elected official in Washington, d C. So he has all
Speaker 1: that power that we're talking about that comes at the
Speaker 1: local level initially, right. And you know a eight percent
Speaker 1: of prisoners in this kind tree are in state and
Speaker 1: local prisons, and of law enforcement in this country is
Speaker 1: state and local. So that's why, Um, for listeners who
Speaker 1: care about this issue, the place that they want to
Speaker 1: be focused on is their state capital. The place they
Speaker 1: want to be focused on is at the city level.
Speaker 1: Those are much more important than whether or not the
Speaker 1: federal government passes this law or that law on this topic.
Speaker 1: It really is. And Holders an example of that. So
Speaker 1: he's a local elected official, uh, and then he gets
Speaker 1: becomes an appointed official as the chief prosecutor in the city.
Speaker 1: And Eric Holder is in a lot of ways, I
Speaker 1: think what we would call in the black community traditionally
Speaker 1: and my parents generation would call a raceman. And by
Speaker 1: which I mean he is somebody who deeply, passionately, like
Speaker 1: just every fiber in his body, he cares about black
Speaker 1: people and he wants the black community to thrive. And
Speaker 1: in the eighties and nineties, he's looking out at the
Speaker 1: world as a judge and as a prosecutor, and he
Speaker 1: sees crack as the worst thing that's hit us in slavery.
Speaker 1: He sees the body counts, the homicide rate um getting
Speaker 1: two levels that had never gotten to throughout history. And
Speaker 1: he gives a speech uh in the early saying, listen,
Speaker 1: black people lost our freedom under Jim crow and we
Speaker 1: are losing our freedom now. But what's gonna keep us
Speaker 1: from our freedom now is in segregation. It's not Jim Crowe.
Speaker 1: It's crime and violence and people are afraid to leave
Speaker 1: their homes. Right. So he draws a direct analogy from
Speaker 1: Selma to Washington, d C. In the early nineties, and
Speaker 1: he launches a very very aggressive stop and frisk vehicle
Speaker 1: campaign operations sees fire that leads to black drivers, black motorists,
Speaker 1: and especially young black people getting stopped and searched and
Speaker 1: frisk at overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers. And he does it because
Speaker 1: he wants to get the guns off the street, right.
Speaker 1: He does it because he wants to create a safe community.
Speaker 1: And the tools that he feels like he has at
Speaker 1: hand is law enforcement. So he really does help to
Speaker 1: build the system of mass incarceration that we now know
Speaker 1: and called by that name. Having said that, by the
Speaker 1: time he gets into the federal government in the Obama administration,
Speaker 1: he's still a race man. And now he's looked at
Speaker 1: this accumulated evidence and he's horrified. He doesn't tell the
Speaker 1: story the way I'm telling it. He doesn't identify his
Speaker 1: own actions in the way that I am, and elected
Speaker 1: officials and people in public life typically you know, don't
Speaker 1: do that. As academics, we say, oh, you know, I
Speaker 1: messed that one up. I was wrong. I make a
Speaker 1: mistake that's not really like how elected officials really roll.
Speaker 1: But regardless, he does then take a series of actions.
Speaker 1: This time from the federal government standpoint to try to
Speaker 1: undo some of the damage um that has been caused.
Speaker 1: And my thing is, we're all going to make mistakes.
Speaker 1: I have made mistakes. We're going to take physicians that
Speaker 1: are wrong. To me, what's really important is are you
Speaker 1: willing to with an open mind except and evaluate new evidence,
Speaker 1: see when you're wrong, and act in response to try
Speaker 1: to shart a new course forward. And I think Holder
Speaker 1: can be very proud of the fact that he has
Speaker 1: done just that. Now. Again, none of the individual actions
Speaker 1: that he took, either in the nineties or more recently,
Speaker 1: created this system or going to dismantle it. So when
Speaker 1: people say to me, well, what's the most important thing
Speaker 1: to do, I say, it's all important, right, It's all important.
Speaker 1: The question is finding where you fit in right? Where
Speaker 1: can you how have influence? And every single person in
Speaker 1: this country, every single person who's listening to your podcast,
Speaker 1: they do have power, They do have the ability to
Speaker 1: help us chart a new course forward. It might be
Speaker 1: helping to legalize substances in the state that they're in.
Speaker 1: It might be ending disparities, ending mandatory minimums we still
Speaker 1: have a lot of them. It might be getting clean
Speaker 1: slate legislation passed so that once you've served your time,
Speaker 1: your record is wiped clear and you get a chance
Speaker 1: to re enter society as a full citizen. The precise
Speaker 1: laws and policies that need to change are going to
Speaker 1: vary from county to county, city to city, state to state,
Speaker 1: but I can guarantee you that there's work to be
Speaker 1: done in every single city, every single county, in every
Speaker 1: single state. And I think it's really up to us.
Speaker 1: Two sees that moment, you know, when Black Lives Matter
Speaker 1: really emerged so rapidly a few years ago, five six
Speaker 1: years ago, And for me, what was inspiring about it
Speaker 1: was it was as if there was a new civil
Speaker 1: rights movement that at last was not reluctant to embrace
Speaker 1: the drug policy reform agenda, treat drugs as a health issue,
Speaker 1: pro needle exchange of method on legalized marijuana, and mass
Speaker 1: incarceration in all of these sorts of things. And I
Speaker 1: think part of it is when you look at the
Speaker 1: black people getting killed by cops. You know, you look
Speaker 1: at George Floyd right in Minneapolis, or or before him,
Speaker 1: you know, Philando Castile in Minneapolis. So you look at
Speaker 1: Michael Brown Ferguson, which set the whole thing off for
Speaker 1: Lecon McDonald in Chicago, or Terence Crutcher and Tulsa right,
Speaker 1: or even the Eric Garner case involving a guy selling
Speaker 1: Lucy's in New York. In every case which you have
Speaker 1: is the cops saying, oh, it only happened because they
Speaker 1: were on drugs. So there's this constant way in which
Speaker 1: the drug pieces being somehow used to excuse or legitimize
Speaker 1: a killing of a typically are in black man. And
Speaker 1: so there's something inspiring about that that's forcing the issue.
Speaker 1: And the question will be I think, to some extent,
Speaker 1: as a younger generation of black activists and allies begin
Speaker 1: to age up, begin to have their own kids, begin
Speaker 1: to freak out about their own kids, will they land
Speaker 1: up becoming more conservative as well, or will they keep
Speaker 1: to the kind of youthful enthusiasm um that they've demonstrated
Speaker 1: over recent years. What do you think? Wow, that's why
Speaker 1: I'm not really in the prediction business. But I do
Speaker 1: really like how you frame that question. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not in the prediction business, but I
Speaker 1: am you know, I'm in the hoping business. The thing
Speaker 1: that I hope that some of this new generation will
Speaker 1: focus on is really trying to build up alternative structures
Speaker 1: and alternative approaches for how to respond to really what
Speaker 1: are real and genuine and pressing social problems. So to me,
Speaker 1: the libertarian take on drug policy has never had any
Speaker 1: appeal to me personally and what I mean by that,
Speaker 1: And this gets a little bit to your question about
Speaker 1: sort of over policing under policing, which is that in
Speaker 1: the black community, whether you're talking about drug policy, whether
Speaker 1: you're talking about poverty, whatever, it is that you're talking about,
Speaker 1: these issues harm black communities especially, And this is what
Speaker 1: a little bit was behind right when Wrangle was making
Speaker 1: fun of you or attacking you in the eighties, even
Speaker 1: though I think he was wrong right on that the
Speaker 1: ultimate issue. Part of where he is coming from, and
Speaker 1: part of where a lot of the people that I
Speaker 1: write about are coming from, is they're like, look, this
Speaker 1: problem of addiction, this is real. Do not minimize it,
Speaker 1: Do not say well, it'll just like let's just do
Speaker 1: nothing and it will be fine. That for me anyway,
Speaker 1: I know there's a lot of people and may probably
Speaker 1: you have a lot of listeners that are like down
Speaker 1: without analysis I'm not. I believe that whether we're talking
Speaker 1: about drugs or whether we're talking about violence, I don't
Speaker 1: care the issue that you're talking about in the black
Speaker 1: community because of a history of racism that goes back
Speaker 1: to slavery, which we have in this country for longer
Speaker 1: than we haven't. Because of that and Jim Prow and
Speaker 1: all of the inequities that persist to this day in
Speaker 1: the black community, we need a robust, affirmative, trauma informed,
Speaker 1: community based, and government led and government supported set of responses.
Speaker 1: So I don't want people to call nine one one
Speaker 1: and send a police officer when there's somebody who's strung
Speaker 1: out on the corner. But I also don't want there
Speaker 1: to be no number to call. That's why I'm inspired
Speaker 1: by cities where activists are developing alternative systems three one
Speaker 1: one systems where you can call a number and not
Speaker 1: get a police officer, but you can get a social worker,
Speaker 1: a mental health worker, a counselor who can come and
Speaker 1: respond because that person might be in need and they
Speaker 1: might want help. And I'm not for coercion, but I
Speaker 1: am for building up a very very robust network so
Speaker 1: that everybody can access services as quickly and efficiently and
Speaker 1: with as much care as we would all want for
Speaker 1: our child. So my hope is that this new generation,
Speaker 1: alongside the critique of what happened over the last fifty years,
Speaker 1: right alongside that, will be an equal commitment to building
Speaker 1: a new set of approaches going forward. Let's take a
Speaker 1: break here and go to an ad. One of the
Speaker 1: things that also came out in your book was you
Speaker 1: talked about I think while you were still working in
Speaker 1: the Public Defender's Office, you're involved in starting this charter school,
Speaker 1: the Maya Angelo School, educating people in the juvenile justice system,
Speaker 1: And that seems exactly like the sort of thing one
Speaker 1: needs a tremendous proliferation of. I mean, is that what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, And do you think it's possible for
Speaker 1: these things to be multiplied a hundred of thousandfold and more. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: but it requires a significant investment. The Maya Angelo School,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a good example of the kind of
Speaker 1: thing um that we are going to need, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna need more government support for to do programs like this.
Speaker 1: So when I in the nineties, when I was a
Speaker 1: juvenile defender in d C. And I was very frustrated
Speaker 1: by the fact that even when I would win a
Speaker 1: case and my client would be protected from the worst
Speaker 1: parts of this system, they would go back to the
Speaker 1: same nothing that they were involved in beforehand. There they
Speaker 1: oftentimes had been already pushed out of the traditional public school,
Speaker 1: and they were they were those kids that I talked
Speaker 1: about before that people were upset about. Who are fourteen
Speaker 1: fifteen years old who were outside at eleven am on
Speaker 1: a weekday, And people are like, why aren't they in school? Well,
Speaker 1: sometimes they weren't in school because they had been pushed
Speaker 1: out of the regular school. Sometimes they weren't in school
Speaker 1: because they had already been tracked into the least engaging classes.
Speaker 1: I was so frustrated when I would go to visit
Speaker 1: schools with some of my juvenile clients and I would
Speaker 1: see these alternative schools with outdated curriculum and no you know,
Speaker 1: functioning equipment, and and no useful, meaningful textbooks. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was it was a kind of thing that if
Speaker 1: your child were put into that environment, you'd be sitting
Speaker 1: in in the Board of Education like you'd go on
Speaker 1: like a hunger strike out of out rage that they
Speaker 1: considered this adequate education for your child, but because the
Speaker 1: kids are poor, because the kids are of color, because
Speaker 1: their parents, although they care a lot about education, don't
Speaker 1: have the resources or the access to influence public officials.
Speaker 1: Nobody was objecting. So we said, well, what if we
Speaker 1: start an alternative school with a job training piece. Because
Speaker 1: so many of my clients what they said was, you know,
Speaker 1: I want a job, I want good teachers, I want
Speaker 1: small classes, but I also want a chance to work
Speaker 1: and make money. Because I'm poor, I have no money.
Speaker 1: I can't take my girlfriend to the movies on a weekend.
Speaker 1: And so David Dominici, who was a lawyer in d
Speaker 1: C um really kind of envisioned this and together we
Speaker 1: put it together with lots of support from my colleagues
Speaker 1: at the Public Defender's Office and lots of people around
Speaker 1: d C and we created what was initially a school
Speaker 1: for twenty kids. We now have a couple of campuses.
Speaker 1: We run the school now inside DC's juvenile prison. And
Speaker 1: our basic idea is that the kids that need the
Speaker 1: most and the best should get it. We normally give
Speaker 1: them the least and the worst. But what if we
Speaker 1: actually gave them our best. What if we gave them
Speaker 1: small classes and engaged teachers, and a robust curriculum and
Speaker 1: opportunity to work outside of school. What if we really
Speaker 1: invested in them and try to create a sense of
Speaker 1: family in the school and a sense of high expectations
Speaker 1: while we supported them along the way counselors and mental
Speaker 1: health workers because many of them are suffering with trauma,
Speaker 1: sometimes never diagnosed. What if we did that and we've
Speaker 1: now done that. But let me just go back to
Speaker 1: the point where we started. It's expensive. We're still not
Speaker 1: adequately funded um by public sources, so we have to
Speaker 1: try to raise private money, which is hard. So, yes,
Speaker 1: programs like ours can transform lives. They can change the
Speaker 1: statistical trajectory, they can change individual trajectory. They can help
Speaker 1: communities heal and thrive. But they can only do it
Speaker 1: if we're willing to say, you know what, that kid
Speaker 1: that's fourteen years old and has been arrested or has
Speaker 1: dropped out of school and has four or five years
Speaker 1: behind and whose parent is incarcerated, they're gonna need more support,
Speaker 1: and that's going to cost more money. But that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing. You're absolutely right. It's one example. There
Speaker 1: are many more. That's the kind of infrastructure that I
Speaker 1: think that we need to build in communities, in black
Speaker 1: and brown communities, in poor communities of all colors across
Speaker 1: this country to to to give people the opportunity that
Speaker 1: they deserve. Well, you know, I guess you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: just to conclude all this here, we are now in
Speaker 1: a period where in the last couple of years, the
Speaker 1: number of shootings and homicides has increased in many parts
Speaker 1: of the country, where the fear of crime, especially violent crime,
Speaker 1: is growing um where people are beginning to to freak out.
Speaker 1: The rates are, of course dramatically lower than they are
Speaker 1: back in the late eighties and early nineties, but people
Speaker 1: were getting accustomed to having very low rates. At the
Speaker 1: same time, we're also in an era were unlike under Reagan,
Speaker 1: Bush and Clinton, you know, where governments are spending more
Speaker 1: money to some extent. Then I look politically, I mean,
Speaker 1: you brought this up in your book that just a
Speaker 1: few years ago. You know, you still have public opinion
Speaker 1: polls showing a substantial majority of blacks, not as much
Speaker 1: as whites, but substantial majority of blacks still saying they
Speaker 1: want more policing. And you see, you know, black voters
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly especially older voters supporting Joe Biden over the competitors
Speaker 1: in the Democratic primary who are much more supportive of
Speaker 1: criminal justice reform. When we look forward these next few years,
Speaker 1: are we going to see some shutting down? You know,
Speaker 1: nothing freaks people out and makes it conservative like fears
Speaker 1: of rising crime. What's your take on these trends right now?
Speaker 1: I think it's hard to know, obviously, you know, it's
Speaker 1: hard to be sure. And and one thing that we
Speaker 1: do know is that of all the things that we
Speaker 1: don't want to be in the prediction business about its
Speaker 1: crime rates because nobody would have predicted a twenty year
Speaker 1: steady decline starting in around two thousand, late late nineties.
Speaker 1: You just couldn't have known that was going to happen. Um.
Speaker 1: I do think in the world that I operate in
Speaker 1: and what I see with with teenagers and young people,
Speaker 1: the impact that the pandemic has had cannot be overestimated
Speaker 1: in terms of driving whatever is happening right now. Having
Speaker 1: said that, what I do believe is that we aren't
Speaker 1: going to go back because I think that there is
Speaker 1: a consciousness around some of those mistakes and they impact
Speaker 1: that they have had. I think if you look for example,
Speaker 1: at President Biden's speech that he gave in response to
Speaker 1: rising crime rates. It was as different of a speech
Speaker 1: as as a Biden would have given years ago as
Speaker 1: you could ever possibly imagine. It was addressing the same topic,
Speaker 1: crime is going up and what are we gonna do
Speaker 1: about it? But there was nothing in that speech about
Speaker 1: building more prisons. And in fact, there was a lot
Speaker 1: in that speech about community based responses to crime, violence interruption,
Speaker 1: violence prevention, hospital based interventions. There's a proposed five billion
Speaker 1: dollar investment in community based violence prevention. These are credible
Speaker 1: Messengers programs. These are programs like Cure Violence, where they're
Speaker 1: going out into the neighborhoods, they're working with young people.
Speaker 1: When a shooting happens, they're going to the hospital, they're
Speaker 1: talking to the person who was shot and the family
Speaker 1: was shot because they don't want a retaliation. This is
Speaker 1: one of the things that we we do know about
Speaker 1: violent crime in particular, is a huge percentage of it
Speaker 1: is retaliatory. So if you can interrupt that initial retaliation,
Speaker 1: then you can start to have isolated incidents as a
Speaker 1: posed to what you and I saw in the eighties
Speaker 1: and nineties, right, which is incident, retaliation, retaliation, retaliation. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you've got ten twenty thirty shootings instead
Speaker 1: of one. So I I don't believe. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: where you know I said before, I don't do predictions,
Speaker 1: but I do do hope. I am a hope for person,
Speaker 1: and I don't believe that we are um going to
Speaker 1: make the same that that similar set of mistakes. It
Speaker 1: may be that some of the momentum gets slowed, there's
Speaker 1: no doubt about it. But I think that we've made
Speaker 1: too much progress, uh to ever go back to the
Speaker 1: days when you were on Nightline UM talking about harm
Speaker 1: reduction and Charlie Wrangel was telling you that you were
Speaker 1: a naive liberal and what we needed to do was
Speaker 1: have more police and more prosecutors and more prisons. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things that I think you
Speaker 1: you point in the book that distinguished the crack era
Speaker 1: was the ways in which the war on drugs also
Speaker 1: became a war against violent crime, much more so than
Speaker 1: with drew in the hair Own era. And I think
Speaker 1: part of the success of the drug policy reform efforts
Speaker 1: over the last twenty years has been that it's more
Speaker 1: and more disentangled that the people have become more sophisticated
Speaker 1: understanding that. You know, one reason we need to legalize
Speaker 1: marijuana is so that it just stops being a pretext
Speaker 1: for cops arresting vast numbers of young people. One reason
Speaker 1: we need to expand access to treatment is because we
Speaker 1: want to reduce the violence on on the streets and
Speaker 1: drug markets. So I think there's a more sophisticated perspective
Speaker 1: on this stuff today, which really is promising for the future. James,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you too, because I thought your
Speaker 1: book was a very brave and nuanced and thoughtful book,
Speaker 1: and I think it's a book of historic significance. I
Speaker 1: think it amply deserved the Politz there, and I just
Speaker 1: wish you all the best on your continuing engagements to
Speaker 1: try to promote more sensible policies from your vantage points.
Speaker 1: So thank you, very very much. Thank you. Psychoactive is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Katcha Kumkova
Speaker 1: and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Geesis, and Darren Aronovski. For Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams
Speaker 1: and Matt Frederick for iHeart Radio, and me Ethan Nadelman.
Speaker 1: Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks
Speaker 1: to Avivit Brio, Sef Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Beatty. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to share your own stories, comments, or ideas,
Speaker 1: please leave us a message at eight three three seven
Speaker 1: seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three Psycho zero.
Speaker 1: You can also email us as Psychoactive at protozoa dot
Speaker 1: com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Nadelman. And
Speaker 1: if you couldn't keep track of all this, find the
Speaker 1: information in the show notes. Tune in next week. From
Speaker 1: my conversation with sex call in this Dan Savage, drugs
Speaker 1: are something I recommend to long term couples frequently. You know.
Speaker 1: I think ecstasy saved my marriage. Terry and I were
Speaker 1: at a real low point and we got a cabin
Speaker 1: on the Pacific coast and took a weekend away and
Speaker 1: did eat. I recommend pot all the time, a little
Speaker 1: bit of pot. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't
Speaker 1: miss it.