February 1, 2022 • 36 mins
Alec Karakatsanis is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization that challenges systemic injustice in a legal system built on white supremacy and economic inequality.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam the podcast where
I speak with people who see the wrong in the
world that are driven to make it right. Today, I
have the distinct privilege of speaking with one of my
personal heroes in the fight to reform our criminal legal
system from top to bottom. Over the last forty years,
we've spent several trillion dollars on the War on drugs,
(00:22):
and yet forty years later, the usage rates of dangerous
drugs has gone up in this country. At some point,
you have to ask yourself, all of these bureaucrats who
are profiting off of and managing the system, are they
just stupid or are they just pursuing different goals than
the ones they've told us all along. As founder and
executive director of Civil Rights Score, he aims to strip
(00:45):
away the mechanisms that unjust the effect, primarily poor communities
of color. Al carkatsanis right now on Righteous Convictions. Welcome
(01:09):
back to Righteous Convictions. This is the show where I
get to interview people who are well doing righteous things
in the world, and as it happens, sometimes I get
to interview my personal heroes. Today is one of those days.
You've heard me talk about him before. Alec Carra cutsan
Us is doing the most profound work of anyone I
(01:29):
know in the world of criminal legal reform in the
United States. And Alec, welcome to Righteous Convictions. I'm so
happy to be here. Thank you for having me on. Yeah,
I've been almost like you're sort of adjunct PR person,
and I've been a very vocal supporter of your work
and very proud to have provided some of the seed
funding for your organization, Civil Rights Corps. And we're gonna
(01:52):
talk about that as we go along. But this story
goes back to while Yale and Harvard sort of umble
beginnings in terms of your academia UM Yale undergrad and
Harvard Law School, where of course Alex served as the
Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. So what
happened after you graduated? This is sort of really the
(02:14):
origin story that I think is so important for people
to hear, and you tell it in your book, and
the book is Usual Cruelty. What was your first move
after Harvard Law School? I went down to Alabama and
one of my mentors, the great civil rights hero Lonnie Guinier,
had suggested that I worked for a very particular judge
in Montgomery, Alabama, and so I spent a year working
(02:36):
closely with that judge, who had been one of the
first black federal judges appointed in the region by President Carter.
And I spent a year sort of working with that
judge and seeing up close how the federal criminal punishment
system works. And then I decided to stick around in
Alabama and became a public defender. I was representing very
poor people who were accused of federal crimes in Alabama,
(03:00):
and the vast majority of these cases were representing people
who had been caught possessing some plant that's on the
list of plants that the federal government says you can't possess.
And they've been separated from their children and their families
and their loved ones and their jobs and their homes
and their schools and placed in a cage, a cage
that was full of feces and mold and mucus and
(03:22):
urine and and no medical care and no fresh air
and no sunlight, really a torturous environment, constant beatings by
police who run the jail. I also represented a lot
of undocumented people. Those are my clients, and I used
to go to these sentencing hearings and you know, a
bunch of lawyers from this entity called the Department of Justice.
(03:43):
You know, it's an interesting Orwellian phrase. Right. They want
you to think that the purpose or effect of this
system of mass human caging is to do justice. Right.
It's kind of like when the US government renamed the
Department of War to become the Department of Defense because
they wanted to frame everything that they were doing and
about being sort of defensive in nature. And the same
(04:04):
thing has happened throughout the War on Drugs and the
modern mass incarceration movement. Early on, it was framed very
explicitly as a as a war on poor people, a
war on hippies, a war on black people, undocumented people,
and then over time it was portrayed to the public
as actually being about public safety. Police departments started developing
slogans like to serve and to protect, and they started
(04:25):
marketing themselves as actually about public safety, when throughout previous
hundred years they've actually marketed themselves as a means of
controlling the poor and controlling immigrants, brutalizing people who are
organizing around labor or women's rights or the civil rights movement.
It's really interesting to watch that shift. And I came
into this system right as Michelle Alexander was writing her
seminal book The New Jim Crow, really an attempt to
(04:47):
take back some of that narrative. It's not a justice system.
It's actually a system that is about controlling certain segments
of our population. And that's the brutal reality that I
walked into as a young twenty five year old person
becoming a public defender in Alabama. And there's a profound
story that I've heard you tell about spending a day
(05:09):
in a courtroom down there, which I guess you went
into as a learning experience, but it came out well,
that's exactly what it turned out to be, but turned
out to be a whole lot more right. You know,
after I left my job as a public defender in Alabama,
I then went to be a public defender in Washington,
d C. And saw many of the same things. And
after a couple of years of doing that, I decided
I wanted to quit my job as a public offender
(05:31):
and really attack these systems much more systemically. So I
actually got a grant from Harvard Law School, and the
first thing I did with that grant is, I flew
back to Alabama, and I just started going around the state,
sitting in courtroom after courtroom documenting what I was seeing.
I was actually wearing a hooded sweatshirt and just sort
of lending in in the back of the courtrooms. And
then after court I would be following people out with
(05:54):
their families and interviewing their families, are going up into
the jail, interviewing people, and I'll never forget, you know.
The first day I came back to Montgomery, before I
visited all my old friends there, and I went to
the local municipal court, the lowest level court there in Montgomery,
and and I walked in that morning. It was a
winter morning. I saw sixty seven human beings in jail,
(06:14):
guarb and metal chains. And as I watched, not one
of them was accused of a crime. They were all
there in that local courtroom because they owed money to
the city for unpaid debt, old traffic tickets and things
like that. And one by one I watched them come
up to the court and essentially begged for their lives.
You know. They would say things like, your honor, I
(06:35):
am a homeless veteran. I don't have any place to go.
I can't pay you. Please don't put me in a cage,
and the judge would say, pay me a thousand dollars,
you're going to jail. And then another woman to come
up and say, I have four children, your honor, one
of my children has a serious disability. Please don't take
me away from them, and he would order them in jail.
And I saw another man get down on his knees
in the courtroom begging for mercy, saying he had been
(06:58):
homeless and addicted to draw and he just didn't have
the money to pay his old tickets. And he was jailed.
And so, you know, for reasons I won't get into
on this podcast, that was actually removed from the courtroom.
And I guess you're not allowed to just make objections
randomly from the back of a courtroom if you're not
a lawyer in the case. But it was just such
an outrageous experience. And then so then I just actually
(07:19):
walked right down the hallway next door to the jail,
and I just started calling out the names of the
people that I had seen in court before I was
kicked out, and I met with five people that day.
I actually met with five people before they figured out
what I was doing and kicked me out of the jail.
You know, the first woman I met, Charnel Mitchell had
a one year old child and a four year old child.
(07:39):
Had been sitting on her couch on a Sunday night
with her one year old in her lap and her
four year old next to her, when the police reading
her home with guns and metal chains, and they arrested her,
and they literally took her away from her two little
children because she owed traffic tickets for four years prior,
and she had had the misfortune of like so many
(08:00):
hundreds of thousands of people throughout this country. I've been
put on a payment plan with a private company for
her traffic tickets because she couldn't afford them. And when
she couldn't pay the extra fees the company was charging,
the company put in the rest warrant out for her.
And I met her after about a couple of weeks
in jail, and she had no idea where her children were,
and she showed me her court document, and the court
(08:22):
documents said he has hundred and seven dollars or through
fifty nine days in jail, and Charnell explained to me
that in Montgomery, if you couldn't afford your debts, you
sat out your debt was the term she used for
fifty dollars a day. So if you had a hundred bucks,
you have to do two days in jail. If you
have a thousand bucks, twenty days in jail. Right, and
Charnell owed hundred and seven dollars with all the fees
(08:45):
from the private company tacked on. So they told her
she had to do fifty nine days in jail before
she could figure out what's going on with her kids.
And on the back of her court document, one of
the jail guards had been nice enough to give her
a pencil, and she'd been writing the days one through
fifty nine, and each day she'd been writing like fifty dollars,
fifty dollars, and some days she was writing seventy five
dollars and seventy five dollars, and then on the right
(09:05):
hand side she was keeping a tally and subtracting all
these these dollar amounts of her debt. And they asked
her what she was doing, and she said, well, on
ordinary days you get fifty dollars, but if you agree
to be a janitor for the city, and you clean
them theces and the blood and the mold urine from
the floor where you're sleeping on top of a bunch
(09:26):
of other women, next to the toilets and on the floors.
If you clean the judge's bathroom, they give you an
extra dollars a day. So Montgomery had this army of people.
And keep in mind, out of the sixties, seven people
I saw in court in the Betters prison, all of
them were black. The city had an army of impoverished
black people who were doing its janitorial labor on the
(09:47):
threat of being separated from their families and thrown in jail.
And Try now finished telling me the story. She had
been crying and her tears smudged this this court document
of this pencil, and I took a photograph of it.
And that day and now on the other people I
met became my first few clients as a civil rights lawyer,
and we filed. I had no idea what I was doing, Jayson,
I've never really done a case like this before. And
(10:07):
I just filed this federal class action lawsuit in federal
court in Montgomery, and within a few weeks we had
this big hearing and the federal judge was so upset
at what had been going on. He ordered all the
city officials who appear in front of him, including the
local judge, and explained how they could be doing this
because it's so illegal and unconstitutional. Instead of doing that,
(10:28):
they just released all these people from the jail in
a single day. And that was a profound experience for me,
because you know how far has this country come where
right now they're about four hundred and fifty thousand human
beings in jail cells on any given night in this country,
just because they can't make a cash payment. Where it's
become so normalized that a major town like Montgomery can
(10:51):
just release everybody from Mitch Jail in a single day,
a by any care in the world. And as soon
as I've in that case, I started investigating this going elsewhere,
I saw Michael Brown's Colvin Ferguson. I went to Ferguson,
embedded myself with a lot of the people who are
organizing there, the great local organization called Art City Defenders
and a bunch of organizers who were in the streets
every single night protesting his death and it and it
(11:12):
became clear that in Ferguson they averaged three point six
arrest warrants per household for unpaid debt, almost all of
them for a black person. So this is a city
that had almost completely converted its police force into a
debt collection agency. And I saw the same thing throughout Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
(11:33):
everywhere I went over the next few years, filing lawsuit
after lawsuit after lawsuit against these places, we saw the
same thing. Police prosecutors and judges had completely converted the
local criminal systems into a mass assembly line processing to
extract money and coerce people intopleting guilty for low level
criminal offenses. I mean, obviously, I'm familiar with so many
(11:54):
aspects of your story, and I quote you frequently, and
often what I do I say on me sound crazy,
and then I go research and all this ship is true.
So after these profound experiences that you had, you went
and started an organization called Equal Justice under Law. The
first organization I started, it's called Equal Justice under Law.
(12:14):
Although now I started a new sort of larger organization
called Civil Rights Core that I started in two thousand
and sixteen. I think, you know, we have a particular
set of skills as lawyers and as legal professionals. But
I don't really think these are problems that can be
solved by lawyers. These are deep structural problems in our
society that require a social movement to really change the
(12:36):
way people think. You know, for example, most people have
absolutely no idea what the police do. They've been propagandized
and sold all this misinformation. Did you know that police
only spend four percent of all of their time and
money on things that the police call violent crime. All
the stuff they spend their money on all their time,
(12:58):
these things that not even the police call via one. Right,
you look at a city like Portland's to take you
one example, over half of all police rests in Portlands
are for people who are homeless. The number one charge
in many major American cities number one arrest driving on
a suspended license. There are eleven million people in this
country who don't have a driver's license, not because they're
(13:20):
bad drivers, but because they owe debt. Right, And that's
the number one charge in many jurisdictions. The number two
charge possession of marijuana, trespassing by people who are very poor. Right,
This is the reality of our legal system. So what
I wanted to do was think about how could lawyers
contribute to a movement that changes the way people understand
(13:42):
and think about the punishment bureaucracy. Make no mistake, this
is a giant, profitable bureaucracy. At every single stage of
this bureaucracy, from the police officers on the street, the
companies that make all the software and surveillance technology and
tasers and guns and body cameras for the police. That
the company that makes body cameras for police, there's billions
(14:04):
of dollars, right, And that's just one little item that
police have. Right. But one of the points I want
to make is whether it's the police, whether it's defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges,
probation officers, parole officers, all of the companies that profit
off of prison and jail, phone call and medical care,
and the companies that have free labor in prison. Every
(14:26):
single stage of every single element of this system, there
is an entrenched set of interest. The multibillion dollars for
profit money bail industry, the private prison industry. Then there
are millions of people who are public employees who depend
on this system growing bigger every single year for their
own salary. We have spent trillions of dollars on this
(14:46):
system in the last forty years, and so what I
wanted to do is figure out how do we inform
the public about this giant waste that is this system.
You take the so called war on drugs. Right, over
the last forty years, we've spent several trillion dollars on
the war on drugs. Right, We've arrested tens of millions
of people, put them in prison for hundreds of millions
(15:07):
of years, separated tens of millions of children from their parents,
shot and killed, tens of thousands of people, fire bombed
and spray bombed of chemicals, millions of acres of pristine
rainforest throughout Latin America. You've surveiled the communication of literally
billions of people around the world. We have done all
of these negative things and many many more. Right, police
(15:29):
take more property from people in drug related civil forfraiture
than all burglary, theft, robbery, property crime combined in the US. Right,
So police are actually taking more property from people than
all of those property crimes combined. All of this is
in the name of the War on drugs. And yet
forty years later, the usage rates of dangerous drugs has
gone up in this country, The usage rates of dangerous
(15:52):
drugs by children has gone up. And so at some
point you have to ask yourself, all of these bureaucrats
we're profiting off of and managing the system, the police
that judges, the probation officers, and the pro officers, the prosecutors.
Are they just stupid? Do they just not understand that
these trillions of dollars and all of these destroyed lives
(16:13):
are not doing anyone any good and they're actually making
us less safe? Or are they not stupid at all?
Are they sophisticated? Are they just pursuing different goals than
the stories that they've told us about public safety? Right?
And what my career has shown me, this criminal ego system,
what people call the criminal justice system, it's not broken.
(16:36):
It's functioning exactly as these people intended to function. They're
just pursuing different goals than the ones they've told us
all along. One of the things that I've watched you
(17:03):
do with an appropriate i think sense of awe is
filing and winning these lawsuits focused on the unconstitutionality of
money bail. Yeah, so once we were in Ferguson, and
we did that I don't in a case that I
was just talking about, and these courts were all agreeing
with us that it's not only morally wrong, but also
unconstitutional to put a human being in a cage just
(17:26):
because that person can't pay a fine or a fee
right post conviction. So, if you have been convicted of
running a stop sign or speeding and or drug possession
or whatever it is, and they give you a fine
of a hundred dollars, if you're too poor to pay
a hundred dollars, it's unconstitutional to put you in a
(17:47):
jail cell. And yet that was happening every single day
all over the country. As we're winning those cases, it
occurred to me that the same constitutional problem is really
at the core of the American money bail system. You
only difference is that money bails what happens to you
before you're even convicted of anything. So the police arrestued
for something, you're brought to jail all over the country.
(18:08):
As I mentioned, there is over four hundred thousand people
in this situation right now. You're told you're free to
go home to your family, to your job, to your school,
to your church, all you have to do is hand
us cash on the way out. And for several million
people every single year in this country, they're unable to
hand over that cash because they're very poor. And so
millions of people who jailed not because anyone has found
(18:31):
them to be necessarily jailable, but because they're poor. And
so we started in two thousand and fifteen with the
case of Christie don Varden, whose story I tell in
the book Challenging this system, And the first ten months
of fifteen we brought something like twelve lawsuits in twelve
different cities on this and we kept winning all these lawsuits,
and we started then filing lawsuits in bigger and bigger places, Houston, Texas,
(18:53):
which our Houston case has been getting probably between sixteen
and eighteen thousand people out of jail every single year.
And he is going alone who are charge of misdemeanors
who would have been jailed prior to our lawsuit because
they couldn't pay a couple hundred dollars. That's just Houston.
We've done this all over the country, making a very
simple argument, no human being should be caged because she
can't make a payment. Yeah, and it's interesting because you
(19:16):
said the words that these people weren't necessarily jailable, but
in fact, I would go further and say that the
system had already decided that it was not necessary to
jail them because we were willing to let them be free,
but only if they had money. So they weren't dangerous,
they just were poor or broke. And we live in
a country where I think approximately Americans don't have access
(19:39):
to four hundred dollars in cash. So for those people,
homelessness is one mishap away, right, one bad day away,
one accident, a fall, the loss of a job, or
some other misfortune, and they're very likely on the streets.
Of course. You know, people say, well, we have to
have bail, and I'm interested to see how you respond
(19:59):
to this, and I'm sure if what brought us up
to you? Someone says, well, what if a guy goes
and uh sprays and McDonald's with bullets, right, or some
other horrible scenario, right, which requires of the outliers, but
it does happen, what do you do with that? Do
you just release that person back to the streets. So yeah,
I mean I think that this is a really interesting
and important question. The first important way to answer that
(20:20):
question is to say, almost none of what police, prosecutors
and judges do has to do with that example you gave.
As I mentioned, only four percent of all police time
and only five all police arrests are for things that
the police and the FBI called violence. So one of
the problems of the system is it's so flooded with
(20:42):
these low level cases that are not about public safety
at all. They are about controlling poor people, controlling black people,
controlling and surveilling immigrants. The system is so flooded with
those cases that it doesn't have the ability to give
the care and attention it needs to the most serious
cases where someone is accused of hurting someone else. And
we actually know from the evidence that jail actually makes
(21:05):
people more likely to commit crime in the future. Jail
is not a way of making society is more safe.
And what we've learned from other countries, what we've learned
from a lot of experimentation in isolated parts of this country,
is even if someone is accused of hurting someone else physically,
if you actually focus on the underlying causes of that offense,
(21:27):
the trauma, the addiction, the mental illness, the toxic masculinity
that leads to so much gender based violence in this country.
You can actually address these problems and release people with
conditions and release people back into situations in the community
where people are getting the care and the treatment and
the attention that they need. And by the way, you know,
(21:47):
even shareffs and prison wardens and other people who I
talked to who I don't agree with on a lot
of these things, even those people by and large will
say only a very very small acentage of the people
who are in my jail or my prison are actual
like danger to other people in society. But it is
(22:08):
an important question. So even then, back to my scenario,
you have someone who is suspected of having committed a
grotesquely violent act. They're arrested at the scene of the
crime with the weapon in their hands. They've just wiped
out a number of people. You know, Dylan roof Right,
What should be done with someone like that upon their arrest.
I want to say two things. One is more aspirational
(22:29):
and one is a very practical answer to your question.
It is my belief that our society, because of all
of its inequality and violence and trauma, we create people
like Dylan ruf Right. Something natural about that it is
a product of the violence and the talk about ualinity
and the white supremacy and the inequality, and the poverty
(22:51):
and the lead poisoning, so on and so forth, and
the child abuse and the violence in our society. Like
if we had a much different society where we're actually
focused on giving children and other people the things that
they need, I just don't believe you would see things
like or at least we would see them only in
extremely rare cases. But the more practical answer is, you know,
(23:11):
I'll just give you an example. There's a coalition right
now in California of people who want to reform the
California Baale system. It's called the Care First California Coalition.
It's a coalition of survivors of violence, directly impacted people, researchers, professors,
nonprofit organizations. And that coalition has produced something called preserving
(23:32):
the Presumption of Innocence. And what that policy framework requires
is only in situations where someone is accused of directly
harming or trying to harm someone else, can the state
even consider putting them in jail before convicting them. And
even in those rare cases, there has to be a
robust process where the court and the public defender and
(23:55):
the prosecutor and the judge, social workers and others, they
consider what their options do we have short of jailing
this person to keep them in the community safe prior
to their trial. And in many cases, there's answers. There's
drug treatment, alcohol treatment, violence interruption services, mental health services,
(24:15):
there's impatient mental illness treatment, there's various forms of home confinement.
There's all these different things that can be done short
of jailing that person. And so if the government proves
that there's nothing else it can do short of jailing
a person prior to trial, and then it's completely consistent
with the u. S Constitution to jail someone if the
court determines that they're a danger to the community. And
(24:37):
so that's a process that that we could have in
this country. That's a process that they have in many
other countries, and that would be a very reasonable, immediately
implementable reform that would go a long way toward reducing
the jail in prison and population in this country. All
(25:07):
of the same people who created and profited from the
money bailst whether it's the multibillion dollar for profit money
bail industry, or all the judges and prosecutors who use
money bail to get people in jail cells so they
can keep the assembly line journey, because they know that
people are only going to plead guilty and pleading guilty
(25:30):
quickly if they're stuck in jail, because they want to
get out, And so the whole system relies on coercing
people with the threat of staying in jail into pleading
guilty so they can collect fines, more fees, so they
can get them back out, so they can pross some
more cases, so the cycle can resume, right. And so
one of the really interesting things over the last few
(25:50):
years has been amazing public consciousness about the money bail system,
whether it was the death of Sandra Bland in Texas
jail cell or the death of Clif Brouter in New York,
a teenager who was caged on rikers and brutally beaten
for three years, including a year and a half in
solitary confinement, because he was wrongfully accused of stealing a
(26:11):
backpack from another child couldn't pay money bail. These stories
seeped into the popular consciousness, and along with a lot
of the cases that we've been doing and a lot
of the organizing work that a lot of our partners
and other people are on the country are doing. Many
people around the country now know about the injustices of
the money bill systems. But what people don't understand those
(26:32):
very same people who were totally happy to create and
run and profit from and benefit from the money bail
systems for decades are still in power. Those are the
very same people who are deciding what to replace the
money bail systems. Right So, judges, prosecutors, legislators all over
the country have been responding to our victories and the
(26:54):
money bail system by trying to pass so called reforms
that are fake. And that is really the reason I
wrote the book. I wanted people to have a set
of tools they could understand to evaluate whether a proposed
reform to this massive bureaucracy is actual reform it's gonna
(27:15):
help real people in their lives, or is a fake
reform that is just meaning to put a sort of
fancy veneer of justice over all of the same outcomes.
So what I mean specifically about that with bail, Well, um,
if you think about bail, we had a federal bail
reform movement back in the nineteen sixties and seventy was
actually led by Bobby Kennedy before he was assassinated, and
(27:36):
this movement was saying many of the same things that
you and I are saying today, Jason. They were saying,
it's completely wrong to put a human being in a
jail cell just because they can't make a payment. It's wrong,
it's unconstitutional, it's barbaric. So what do they do. Well,
they got rid of the money bail detension in federal courts.
Back they put a sentence in the federal law that
says nobody can be forced to pay a money bail
(27:57):
amount that they can afford. At the time they did that,
about a quarter of all people charged with federal crimes
were jailed just because they were poor, so it was
a pretty big problem. But what they did at the
same time is they gave judges more discretion to detain
people without money. And today, thirty seven years later, that
(28:19):
of people detained who are presumptively innocent, it's now seventy.
So we got rid of jailing people because they are poor,
and we tripled the amount of which we jail people.
Guess what if you look at the demographics of the
seventy of people charged with crimes who are presentibly innocent,
who are detained in federal court. Right now, they're even
more disapportionately poor, and even more disapportionately black, and even
(28:41):
more disapportunately immigrant than they were back in So the
so called reform that was done to make things so
much better to stop jailing poor people has ended up
jailing poor people at more than three the rate. The
same is true now. We're seeing all over the country
the states that are trying to pass money bail reform laws,
the prosecutors in judges in those states are trying to
(29:01):
push for changes that increase their own power to detain
people without money. And the bail industry and the for
profit prison industry and the prison telecom industry, which are
all multibillion dollar industries, one of which the biggest prison
telecom company is actually owned by the billionaire owner of
the Detroit Pistons, who is making his fortune while having
(29:24):
signed contracts with jails that prohibit people from hugging their
children and visiting in person with their loved ones on
his theory that they'll spend more money on his phone
calls if they're not allowed to actually see their loved ones.
These people are combining to replace the money bail system
with the system of electronic monitoring, so that people might
be released instead of being released on bail, they're going
(29:46):
to be released with a device that tracks all their
movements that they have to pay for, and that these
multibillion dollar corporations are going to charge monthly fees for,
so they'd be making the same amount of money off
the same people, but instead of calling it bail, they're
going to call it electronic monitoring. So this is the
reason I wanted to do this podcast and the reason
I wrote the book. People need to understand that all
(30:10):
of these injustices that you and I are rightly outreached
by the people that benefit from them, that caused them.
They're still in power, and they're constantly thinking of fake reforms.
They're going to keep all the same outcomes that are
going to change the labels and the hope that ordinary
people around this country don't notice. Yeah, it all comes
down to money. It seems like money and cruelty. Yeah,
(30:32):
the ankle monitors. While it seems you know, relatively benign
compared to being in one of those horrendous jail cells,
you know, there's a whole lot of anguish that comes
with that. You know, I had a friend who's going
through this, who's innocence was awaiting trial in Nevada, and
you know, she lost her job because she was arrested.
And now with the ankle monitor, she went to get
(30:53):
a job. She was hired as a cocktail waitress, and
Dave saw the ankle monitor and fire right away. Not
to mention you have to plug it in. Basically, you
have to bide by a set of rules that turns
your home and your existence into just a different type
of jail cell. And anything you break, of course, results
and you're going back to that same jail cell, but
now with having spent even more money to pay for
(31:14):
your own home confinement. It goes on and on and on.
So as we wind down, UM, I want to talk
about how people can get involved. It's it's super simple.
By the way, you can go to Civil Rights core
dot org and there you can donate, you can read more,
you can read read the book. And if you're not
going to get the book, the book is usual cruelty,
(31:37):
do what I do regularly, which is just Google Alec
car cuts on us and Yell Law Review and an
article will come up that if you read. I promise you,
if you read the first two or three pages of this,
you will be more informed than half of the people
I know that are working on criminal justice reform. So
google alec, carcuts, honest and yell law Review. Read that,
(31:59):
then to Civil Rights core dot org. Donate get involved.
It's going to take all of us if we're gonna
actually tame this monster, because it's it's time, it's way
past time. And if it hasn't already impacted you or
your family, it can at any moment where it's ugly
head the life you saved, maybe your hone. Just to
(32:20):
give people other ways of plugging in, you should get
involved in your local community. I would recommend finding a
local mutual aid group, a local jail support network, a
local court watch group where you can get together with
the people in your community actually watch what judges and
prosecutors are doing. Local community bail fund that is getting
people out of jail, Like there's a local campaign in
your area to stop the construction of a new jail,
(32:41):
or or a local campaign to reduce the resources that
are going to your police department and instead increase the
resources that they're going to teachers and artists and after
school programs and the health treatment and a diction treatment.
Those are absolutely vital and there are people doing that
at every single sitty in town in this country, and
you should find them and be a part of what
they're doing. So this podcast we have two traditions too,
(33:04):
wrapped in one, which is our closing. The first part
is called the Magic one Question, And the Magic one
question is this, if you had a magic wand and
could waive it and fix one problem, what would it be.
I'm gonna say, if we forced our society to confront
all of the problems with out resort to human caging,
we'd all be so much better and so much more
(33:25):
connected to each other, and we have a much more
loving and caring and less unequal society. You know, I've
said this on this program before. I think the number
of people that we society needs to be protected from
is not zero, but it's a lot closer to zero
than where we're at now. Before we go to our closing,
I want to invite our Audi institune in next week
(33:46):
when we're going to be joined by two time NBA
All Star TV announcer and personality and assistant coach of
the Miami Heat Karan Butler, who spends his time off
the court working on reforming the system that's so negatively
impact that his own life before he made it big.
And now we go to the closing of our show,
which is appropriately titled Words of Wisdom, where first of all,
(34:09):
I thank you Alec Arkatzas for joining us and for
all your incredible work, and then we're all going to
collectively take a moment to really just tune in to
the sound of your voice for your final thoughts or
as we call them here on righteous Convictions Words of Wisdom.
Thank you, Jason. I think I would just say there
are a lot of really powerful institutions in our society
(34:30):
that have a vested interest in getting you to think
that they believe in equality and justice and call themselves
the justice system, and they have sold you a series
of myths about what the purpose of this system is.
And it's really important that you critique, that you question
(34:50):
the things that the media is telling you, question what
you're being told about. Why we have police as the
solution to homelessness, Why cops, pro skeeters, judges and prisons
of the solution to a so called drug problem? Right,
What is the reason that these systems are actually functioning?
Once you ask yourself that question, I think it's really
important to ask the next question, which is what am
(35:12):
I going to do in my own life every single
day to reduce the level of inequality and violence poverty
in our society? How am I going to use this
precious time on earth to make a difference for all
of the human beings who are survivors of this incredibly brutal, unnecessary,
(35:35):
wasteful punishment bureaucracy. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions
with Jason plom Thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Claverne,
and Kevin Wards, with research by Lalla Robinson. The music
(35:57):
in this production was supplied by three time oscar ainated
composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
at Lava for Good. You can also follow me on
TikTok and Instagram at its Jason Flom. Righteous Convictions with
Jason Flom is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
and association with Saybout Company Number one
Welcome to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam the podcast where
I speak with people who see the wrong in the
world that are driven to make it right. Today, I
have the distinct privilege of speaking with one of my
personal heroes in the fight to reform our criminal legal
system from top to bottom. Over the last forty years,
we've spent several trillion dollars on the War on drugs,
(00:22):
and yet forty years later, the usage rates of dangerous
drugs has gone up in this country. At some point,
you have to ask yourself, all of these bureaucrats who
are profiting off of and managing the system, are they
just stupid or are they just pursuing different goals than
the ones they've told us all along. As founder and
executive director of Civil Rights Score, he aims to strip
(00:45):
away the mechanisms that unjust the effect, primarily poor communities
of color. Al carkatsanis right now on Righteous Convictions. Welcome
(01:09):
back to Righteous Convictions. This is the show where I
get to interview people who are well doing righteous things
in the world, and as it happens, sometimes I get
to interview my personal heroes. Today is one of those days.
You've heard me talk about him before. Alec Carra cutsan
Us is doing the most profound work of anyone I
(01:29):
know in the world of criminal legal reform in the
United States. And Alec, welcome to Righteous Convictions. I'm so
happy to be here. Thank you for having me on. Yeah,
I've been almost like you're sort of adjunct PR person,
and I've been a very vocal supporter of your work
and very proud to have provided some of the seed
funding for your organization, Civil Rights Corps. And we're gonna
(01:52):
talk about that as we go along. But this story
goes back to while Yale and Harvard sort of umble
beginnings in terms of your academia UM Yale undergrad and
Harvard Law School, where of course Alex served as the
Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. So what
happened after you graduated? This is sort of really the
(02:14):
origin story that I think is so important for people
to hear, and you tell it in your book, and
the book is Usual Cruelty. What was your first move
after Harvard Law School? I went down to Alabama and
one of my mentors, the great civil rights hero Lonnie Guinier,
had suggested that I worked for a very particular judge
in Montgomery, Alabama, and so I spent a year working
(02:36):
closely with that judge, who had been one of the
first black federal judges appointed in the region by President Carter.
And I spent a year sort of working with that
judge and seeing up close how the federal criminal punishment
system works. And then I decided to stick around in
Alabama and became a public defender. I was representing very
poor people who were accused of federal crimes in Alabama,
(03:00):
and the vast majority of these cases were representing people
who had been caught possessing some plant that's on the
list of plants that the federal government says you can't possess.
And they've been separated from their children and their families
and their loved ones and their jobs and their homes
and their schools and placed in a cage, a cage
that was full of feces and mold and mucus and
(03:22):
urine and and no medical care and no fresh air
and no sunlight, really a torturous environment, constant beatings by
police who run the jail. I also represented a lot
of undocumented people. Those are my clients, and I used
to go to these sentencing hearings and you know, a
bunch of lawyers from this entity called the Department of Justice.
(03:43):
You know, it's an interesting Orwellian phrase. Right. They want
you to think that the purpose or effect of this
system of mass human caging is to do justice. Right.
It's kind of like when the US government renamed the
Department of War to become the Department of Defense because
they wanted to frame everything that they were doing and
about being sort of defensive in nature. And the same
(04:04):
thing has happened throughout the War on Drugs and the
modern mass incarceration movement. Early on, it was framed very
explicitly as a as a war on poor people, a
war on hippies, a war on black people, undocumented people,
and then over time it was portrayed to the public
as actually being about public safety. Police departments started developing
slogans like to serve and to protect, and they started
(04:25):
marketing themselves as actually about public safety, when throughout previous
hundred years they've actually marketed themselves as a means of
controlling the poor and controlling immigrants, brutalizing people who are
organizing around labor or women's rights or the civil rights movement.
It's really interesting to watch that shift. And I came
into this system right as Michelle Alexander was writing her
seminal book The New Jim Crow, really an attempt to
(04:47):
take back some of that narrative. It's not a justice system.
It's actually a system that is about controlling certain segments
of our population. And that's the brutal reality that I
walked into as a young twenty five year old person
becoming a public defender in Alabama. And there's a profound
story that I've heard you tell about spending a day
(05:09):
in a courtroom down there, which I guess you went
into as a learning experience, but it came out well,
that's exactly what it turned out to be, but turned
out to be a whole lot more right. You know,
after I left my job as a public defender in Alabama,
I then went to be a public defender in Washington,
d C. And saw many of the same things. And
after a couple of years of doing that, I decided
I wanted to quit my job as a public offender
(05:31):
and really attack these systems much more systemically. So I
actually got a grant from Harvard Law School, and the
first thing I did with that grant is, I flew
back to Alabama, and I just started going around the state,
sitting in courtroom after courtroom documenting what I was seeing.
I was actually wearing a hooded sweatshirt and just sort
of lending in in the back of the courtrooms. And
then after court I would be following people out with
(05:54):
their families and interviewing their families, are going up into
the jail, interviewing people, and I'll never forget, you know.
The first day I came back to Montgomery, before I
visited all my old friends there, and I went to
the local municipal court, the lowest level court there in Montgomery,
and and I walked in that morning. It was a
winter morning. I saw sixty seven human beings in jail,
(06:14):
guarb and metal chains. And as I watched, not one
of them was accused of a crime. They were all
there in that local courtroom because they owed money to
the city for unpaid debt, old traffic tickets and things
like that. And one by one I watched them come
up to the court and essentially begged for their lives.
You know. They would say things like, your honor, I
(06:35):
am a homeless veteran. I don't have any place to go.
I can't pay you. Please don't put me in a cage,
and the judge would say, pay me a thousand dollars,
you're going to jail. And then another woman to come
up and say, I have four children, your honor, one
of my children has a serious disability. Please don't take
me away from them, and he would order them in jail.
And I saw another man get down on his knees
in the courtroom begging for mercy, saying he had been
(06:58):
homeless and addicted to draw and he just didn't have
the money to pay his old tickets. And he was jailed.
And so, you know, for reasons I won't get into
on this podcast, that was actually removed from the courtroom.
And I guess you're not allowed to just make objections
randomly from the back of a courtroom if you're not
a lawyer in the case. But it was just such
an outrageous experience. And then so then I just actually
(07:19):
walked right down the hallway next door to the jail,
and I just started calling out the names of the
people that I had seen in court before I was
kicked out, and I met with five people that day.
I actually met with five people before they figured out
what I was doing and kicked me out of the jail.
You know, the first woman I met, Charnel Mitchell had
a one year old child and a four year old child.
(07:39):
Had been sitting on her couch on a Sunday night
with her one year old in her lap and her
four year old next to her, when the police reading
her home with guns and metal chains, and they arrested her,
and they literally took her away from her two little
children because she owed traffic tickets for four years prior,
and she had had the misfortune of like so many
(08:00):
hundreds of thousands of people throughout this country. I've been
put on a payment plan with a private company for
her traffic tickets because she couldn't afford them. And when
she couldn't pay the extra fees the company was charging,
the company put in the rest warrant out for her.
And I met her after about a couple of weeks
in jail, and she had no idea where her children were,
and she showed me her court document, and the court
(08:22):
documents said he has hundred and seven dollars or through
fifty nine days in jail, and Charnell explained to me
that in Montgomery, if you couldn't afford your debts, you
sat out your debt was the term she used for
fifty dollars a day. So if you had a hundred bucks,
you have to do two days in jail. If you
have a thousand bucks, twenty days in jail. Right, and
Charnell owed hundred and seven dollars with all the fees
(08:45):
from the private company tacked on. So they told her
she had to do fifty nine days in jail before
she could figure out what's going on with her kids.
And on the back of her court document, one of
the jail guards had been nice enough to give her
a pencil, and she'd been writing the days one through
fifty nine, and each day she'd been writing like fifty dollars,
fifty dollars, and some days she was writing seventy five
dollars and seventy five dollars, and then on the right
(09:05):
hand side she was keeping a tally and subtracting all
these these dollar amounts of her debt. And they asked
her what she was doing, and she said, well, on
ordinary days you get fifty dollars, but if you agree
to be a janitor for the city, and you clean
them theces and the blood and the mold urine from
the floor where you're sleeping on top of a bunch
(09:26):
of other women, next to the toilets and on the floors.
If you clean the judge's bathroom, they give you an
extra dollars a day. So Montgomery had this army of people.
And keep in mind, out of the sixties, seven people
I saw in court in the Betters prison, all of
them were black. The city had an army of impoverished
black people who were doing its janitorial labor on the
(09:47):
threat of being separated from their families and thrown in jail.
And Try now finished telling me the story. She had
been crying and her tears smudged this this court document
of this pencil, and I took a photograph of it.
And that day and now on the other people I
met became my first few clients as a civil rights lawyer,
and we filed. I had no idea what I was doing, Jayson,
I've never really done a case like this before. And
(10:07):
I just filed this federal class action lawsuit in federal
court in Montgomery, and within a few weeks we had
this big hearing and the federal judge was so upset
at what had been going on. He ordered all the
city officials who appear in front of him, including the
local judge, and explained how they could be doing this
because it's so illegal and unconstitutional. Instead of doing that,
(10:28):
they just released all these people from the jail in
a single day. And that was a profound experience for me,
because you know how far has this country come where
right now they're about four hundred and fifty thousand human
beings in jail cells on any given night in this country,
just because they can't make a cash payment. Where it's
become so normalized that a major town like Montgomery can
(10:51):
just release everybody from Mitch Jail in a single day,
a by any care in the world. And as soon
as I've in that case, I started investigating this going elsewhere,
I saw Michael Brown's Colvin Ferguson. I went to Ferguson,
embedded myself with a lot of the people who are
organizing there, the great local organization called Art City Defenders
and a bunch of organizers who were in the streets
every single night protesting his death and it and it
(11:12):
became clear that in Ferguson they averaged three point six
arrest warrants per household for unpaid debt, almost all of
them for a black person. So this is a city
that had almost completely converted its police force into a
debt collection agency. And I saw the same thing throughout Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
(11:33):
everywhere I went over the next few years, filing lawsuit
after lawsuit after lawsuit against these places, we saw the
same thing. Police prosecutors and judges had completely converted the
local criminal systems into a mass assembly line processing to
extract money and coerce people intopleting guilty for low level
criminal offenses. I mean, obviously, I'm familiar with so many
(11:54):
aspects of your story, and I quote you frequently, and
often what I do I say on me sound crazy,
and then I go research and all this ship is true.
So after these profound experiences that you had, you went
and started an organization called Equal Justice under Law. The
first organization I started, it's called Equal Justice under Law.
(12:14):
Although now I started a new sort of larger organization
called Civil Rights Core that I started in two thousand
and sixteen. I think, you know, we have a particular
set of skills as lawyers and as legal professionals. But
I don't really think these are problems that can be
solved by lawyers. These are deep structural problems in our
society that require a social movement to really change the
(12:36):
way people think. You know, for example, most people have
absolutely no idea what the police do. They've been propagandized
and sold all this misinformation. Did you know that police
only spend four percent of all of their time and
money on things that the police call violent crime. All
the stuff they spend their money on all their time,
(12:58):
these things that not even the police call via one. Right,
you look at a city like Portland's to take you
one example, over half of all police rests in Portlands
are for people who are homeless. The number one charge
in many major American cities number one arrest driving on
a suspended license. There are eleven million people in this
country who don't have a driver's license, not because they're
(13:20):
bad drivers, but because they owe debt. Right, And that's
the number one charge in many jurisdictions. The number two
charge possession of marijuana, trespassing by people who are very poor. Right,
This is the reality of our legal system. So what
I wanted to do was think about how could lawyers
contribute to a movement that changes the way people understand
(13:42):
and think about the punishment bureaucracy. Make no mistake, this
is a giant, profitable bureaucracy. At every single stage of
this bureaucracy, from the police officers on the street, the
companies that make all the software and surveillance technology and
tasers and guns and body cameras for the police. That
the company that makes body cameras for police, there's billions
(14:04):
of dollars, right, And that's just one little item that
police have. Right. But one of the points I want
to make is whether it's the police, whether it's defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges,
probation officers, parole officers, all of the companies that profit
off of prison and jail, phone call and medical care,
and the companies that have free labor in prison. Every
(14:26):
single stage of every single element of this system, there
is an entrenched set of interest. The multibillion dollars for
profit money bail industry, the private prison industry. Then there
are millions of people who are public employees who depend
on this system growing bigger every single year for their
own salary. We have spent trillions of dollars on this
(14:46):
system in the last forty years, and so what I
wanted to do is figure out how do we inform
the public about this giant waste that is this system.
You take the so called war on drugs. Right, over
the last forty years, we've spent several trillion dollars on
the war on drugs. Right, We've arrested tens of millions
of people, put them in prison for hundreds of millions
(15:07):
of years, separated tens of millions of children from their parents,
shot and killed, tens of thousands of people, fire bombed
and spray bombed of chemicals, millions of acres of pristine
rainforest throughout Latin America. You've surveiled the communication of literally
billions of people around the world. We have done all
of these negative things and many many more. Right, police
(15:29):
take more property from people in drug related civil forfraiture
than all burglary, theft, robbery, property crime combined in the US. Right,
So police are actually taking more property from people than
all of those property crimes combined. All of this is
in the name of the War on drugs. And yet
forty years later, the usage rates of dangerous drugs has
gone up in this country, The usage rates of dangerous
(15:52):
drugs by children has gone up. And so at some
point you have to ask yourself, all of these bureaucrats
we're profiting off of and managing the system, the police
that judges, the probation officers, and the pro officers, the prosecutors.
Are they just stupid? Do they just not understand that
these trillions of dollars and all of these destroyed lives
(16:13):
are not doing anyone any good and they're actually making
us less safe? Or are they not stupid at all?
Are they sophisticated? Are they just pursuing different goals than
the stories that they've told us about public safety? Right?
And what my career has shown me, this criminal ego system,
what people call the criminal justice system, it's not broken.
(16:36):
It's functioning exactly as these people intended to function. They're
just pursuing different goals than the ones they've told us
all along. One of the things that I've watched you
(17:03):
do with an appropriate i think sense of awe is
filing and winning these lawsuits focused on the unconstitutionality of
money bail. Yeah, so once we were in Ferguson, and
we did that I don't in a case that I
was just talking about, and these courts were all agreeing
with us that it's not only morally wrong, but also
unconstitutional to put a human being in a cage just
(17:26):
because that person can't pay a fine or a fee
right post conviction. So, if you have been convicted of
running a stop sign or speeding and or drug possession
or whatever it is, and they give you a fine
of a hundred dollars, if you're too poor to pay
a hundred dollars, it's unconstitutional to put you in a
(17:47):
jail cell. And yet that was happening every single day
all over the country. As we're winning those cases, it
occurred to me that the same constitutional problem is really
at the core of the American money bail system. You
only difference is that money bails what happens to you
before you're even convicted of anything. So the police arrestued
for something, you're brought to jail all over the country.
(18:08):
As I mentioned, there is over four hundred thousand people
in this situation right now. You're told you're free to
go home to your family, to your job, to your school,
to your church, all you have to do is hand
us cash on the way out. And for several million
people every single year in this country, they're unable to
hand over that cash because they're very poor. And so
millions of people who jailed not because anyone has found
(18:31):
them to be necessarily jailable, but because they're poor. And
so we started in two thousand and fifteen with the
case of Christie don Varden, whose story I tell in
the book Challenging this system, And the first ten months
of fifteen we brought something like twelve lawsuits in twelve
different cities on this and we kept winning all these lawsuits,
and we started then filing lawsuits in bigger and bigger places, Houston, Texas,
(18:53):
which our Houston case has been getting probably between sixteen
and eighteen thousand people out of jail every single year.
And he is going alone who are charge of misdemeanors
who would have been jailed prior to our lawsuit because
they couldn't pay a couple hundred dollars. That's just Houston.
We've done this all over the country, making a very
simple argument, no human being should be caged because she
can't make a payment. Yeah, and it's interesting because you
(19:16):
said the words that these people weren't necessarily jailable, but
in fact, I would go further and say that the
system had already decided that it was not necessary to
jail them because we were willing to let them be free,
but only if they had money. So they weren't dangerous,
they just were poor or broke. And we live in
a country where I think approximately Americans don't have access
(19:39):
to four hundred dollars in cash. So for those people,
homelessness is one mishap away, right, one bad day away,
one accident, a fall, the loss of a job, or
some other misfortune, and they're very likely on the streets.
Of course. You know, people say, well, we have to
have bail, and I'm interested to see how you respond
(19:59):
to this, and I'm sure if what brought us up
to you? Someone says, well, what if a guy goes
and uh sprays and McDonald's with bullets, right, or some
other horrible scenario, right, which requires of the outliers, but
it does happen, what do you do with that? Do
you just release that person back to the streets. So yeah,
I mean I think that this is a really interesting
and important question. The first important way to answer that
(20:20):
question is to say, almost none of what police, prosecutors
and judges do has to do with that example you gave.
As I mentioned, only four percent of all police time
and only five all police arrests are for things that
the police and the FBI called violence. So one of
the problems of the system is it's so flooded with
(20:42):
these low level cases that are not about public safety
at all. They are about controlling poor people, controlling black people,
controlling and surveilling immigrants. The system is so flooded with
those cases that it doesn't have the ability to give
the care and attention it needs to the most serious
cases where someone is accused of hurting someone else. And
we actually know from the evidence that jail actually makes
(21:05):
people more likely to commit crime in the future. Jail
is not a way of making society is more safe.
And what we've learned from other countries, what we've learned
from a lot of experimentation in isolated parts of this country,
is even if someone is accused of hurting someone else physically,
if you actually focus on the underlying causes of that offense,
(21:27):
the trauma, the addiction, the mental illness, the toxic masculinity
that leads to so much gender based violence in this country.
You can actually address these problems and release people with
conditions and release people back into situations in the community
where people are getting the care and the treatment and
the attention that they need. And by the way, you know,
(21:47):
even shareffs and prison wardens and other people who I
talked to who I don't agree with on a lot
of these things, even those people by and large will
say only a very very small acentage of the people
who are in my jail or my prison are actual
like danger to other people in society. But it is
(22:08):
an important question. So even then, back to my scenario,
you have someone who is suspected of having committed a
grotesquely violent act. They're arrested at the scene of the
crime with the weapon in their hands. They've just wiped
out a number of people. You know, Dylan roof Right,
What should be done with someone like that upon their arrest.
I want to say two things. One is more aspirational
(22:29):
and one is a very practical answer to your question.
It is my belief that our society, because of all
of its inequality and violence and trauma, we create people
like Dylan ruf Right. Something natural about that it is
a product of the violence and the talk about ualinity
and the white supremacy and the inequality, and the poverty
(22:51):
and the lead poisoning, so on and so forth, and
the child abuse and the violence in our society. Like
if we had a much different society where we're actually
focused on giving children and other people the things that
they need, I just don't believe you would see things
like or at least we would see them only in
extremely rare cases. But the more practical answer is, you know,
(23:11):
I'll just give you an example. There's a coalition right
now in California of people who want to reform the
California Baale system. It's called the Care First California Coalition.
It's a coalition of survivors of violence, directly impacted people, researchers, professors,
nonprofit organizations. And that coalition has produced something called preserving
(23:32):
the Presumption of Innocence. And what that policy framework requires
is only in situations where someone is accused of directly
harming or trying to harm someone else, can the state
even consider putting them in jail before convicting them. And
even in those rare cases, there has to be a
robust process where the court and the public defender and
(23:55):
the prosecutor and the judge, social workers and others, they
consider what their options do we have short of jailing
this person to keep them in the community safe prior
to their trial. And in many cases, there's answers. There's
drug treatment, alcohol treatment, violence interruption services, mental health services,
(24:15):
there's impatient mental illness treatment, there's various forms of home confinement.
There's all these different things that can be done short
of jailing that person. And so if the government proves
that there's nothing else it can do short of jailing
a person prior to trial, and then it's completely consistent
with the u. S Constitution to jail someone if the
court determines that they're a danger to the community. And
(24:37):
so that's a process that that we could have in
this country. That's a process that they have in many
other countries, and that would be a very reasonable, immediately
implementable reform that would go a long way toward reducing
the jail in prison and population in this country. All
(25:07):
of the same people who created and profited from the
money bailst whether it's the multibillion dollar for profit money
bail industry, or all the judges and prosecutors who use
money bail to get people in jail cells so they
can keep the assembly line journey, because they know that
people are only going to plead guilty and pleading guilty
(25:30):
quickly if they're stuck in jail, because they want to
get out, And so the whole system relies on coercing
people with the threat of staying in jail into pleading
guilty so they can collect fines, more fees, so they
can get them back out, so they can pross some
more cases, so the cycle can resume, right. And so
one of the really interesting things over the last few
(25:50):
years has been amazing public consciousness about the money bail system,
whether it was the death of Sandra Bland in Texas
jail cell or the death of Clif Brouter in New York,
a teenager who was caged on rikers and brutally beaten
for three years, including a year and a half in
solitary confinement, because he was wrongfully accused of stealing a
(26:11):
backpack from another child couldn't pay money bail. These stories
seeped into the popular consciousness, and along with a lot
of the cases that we've been doing and a lot
of the organizing work that a lot of our partners
and other people are on the country are doing. Many
people around the country now know about the injustices of
the money bill systems. But what people don't understand those
(26:32):
very same people who were totally happy to create and
run and profit from and benefit from the money bail
systems for decades are still in power. Those are the
very same people who are deciding what to replace the
money bail systems. Right So, judges, prosecutors, legislators all over
the country have been responding to our victories and the
(26:54):
money bail system by trying to pass so called reforms
that are fake. And that is really the reason I
wrote the book. I wanted people to have a set
of tools they could understand to evaluate whether a proposed
reform to this massive bureaucracy is actual reform it's gonna
(27:15):
help real people in their lives, or is a fake
reform that is just meaning to put a sort of
fancy veneer of justice over all of the same outcomes.
So what I mean specifically about that with bail, Well, um,
if you think about bail, we had a federal bail
reform movement back in the nineteen sixties and seventy was
actually led by Bobby Kennedy before he was assassinated, and
(27:36):
this movement was saying many of the same things that
you and I are saying today, Jason. They were saying,
it's completely wrong to put a human being in a
jail cell just because they can't make a payment. It's wrong,
it's unconstitutional, it's barbaric. So what do they do. Well,
they got rid of the money bail detension in federal courts.
Back they put a sentence in the federal law that
says nobody can be forced to pay a money bail
(27:57):
amount that they can afford. At the time they did that,
about a quarter of all people charged with federal crimes
were jailed just because they were poor, so it was
a pretty big problem. But what they did at the
same time is they gave judges more discretion to detain
people without money. And today, thirty seven years later, that
(28:19):
of people detained who are presumptively innocent, it's now seventy.
So we got rid of jailing people because they are poor,
and we tripled the amount of which we jail people.
Guess what if you look at the demographics of the
seventy of people charged with crimes who are presentibly innocent,
who are detained in federal court. Right now, they're even
more disapportionately poor, and even more disapportionately black, and even
(28:41):
more disapportunately immigrant than they were back in So the
so called reform that was done to make things so
much better to stop jailing poor people has ended up
jailing poor people at more than three the rate. The
same is true now. We're seeing all over the country
the states that are trying to pass money bail reform laws,
the prosecutors in judges in those states are trying to
(29:01):
push for changes that increase their own power to detain
people without money. And the bail industry and the for
profit prison industry and the prison telecom industry, which are
all multibillion dollar industries, one of which the biggest prison
telecom company is actually owned by the billionaire owner of
the Detroit Pistons, who is making his fortune while having
(29:24):
signed contracts with jails that prohibit people from hugging their
children and visiting in person with their loved ones on
his theory that they'll spend more money on his phone
calls if they're not allowed to actually see their loved ones.
These people are combining to replace the money bail system
with the system of electronic monitoring, so that people might
be released instead of being released on bail, they're going
(29:46):
to be released with a device that tracks all their
movements that they have to pay for, and that these
multibillion dollar corporations are going to charge monthly fees for,
so they'd be making the same amount of money off
the same people, but instead of calling it bail, they're
going to call it electronic monitoring. So this is the
reason I wanted to do this podcast and the reason
I wrote the book. People need to understand that all
(30:10):
of these injustices that you and I are rightly outreached
by the people that benefit from them, that caused them.
They're still in power, and they're constantly thinking of fake reforms.
They're going to keep all the same outcomes that are
going to change the labels and the hope that ordinary
people around this country don't notice. Yeah, it all comes
down to money. It seems like money and cruelty. Yeah,
(30:32):
the ankle monitors. While it seems you know, relatively benign
compared to being in one of those horrendous jail cells,
you know, there's a whole lot of anguish that comes
with that. You know, I had a friend who's going
through this, who's innocence was awaiting trial in Nevada, and
you know, she lost her job because she was arrested.
And now with the ankle monitor, she went to get
(30:53):
a job. She was hired as a cocktail waitress, and
Dave saw the ankle monitor and fire right away. Not
to mention you have to plug it in. Basically, you
have to bide by a set of rules that turns
your home and your existence into just a different type
of jail cell. And anything you break, of course, results
and you're going back to that same jail cell, but
now with having spent even more money to pay for
(31:14):
your own home confinement. It goes on and on and on.
So as we wind down, UM, I want to talk
about how people can get involved. It's it's super simple.
By the way, you can go to Civil Rights core
dot org and there you can donate, you can read more,
you can read read the book. And if you're not
going to get the book, the book is usual cruelty,
(31:37):
do what I do regularly, which is just Google Alec
car cuts on us and Yell Law Review and an
article will come up that if you read. I promise you,
if you read the first two or three pages of this,
you will be more informed than half of the people
I know that are working on criminal justice reform. So
google alec, carcuts, honest and yell law Review. Read that,
(31:59):
then to Civil Rights core dot org. Donate get involved.
It's going to take all of us if we're gonna
actually tame this monster, because it's it's time, it's way
past time. And if it hasn't already impacted you or
your family, it can at any moment where it's ugly
head the life you saved, maybe your hone. Just to
(32:20):
give people other ways of plugging in, you should get
involved in your local community. I would recommend finding a
local mutual aid group, a local jail support network, a
local court watch group where you can get together with
the people in your community actually watch what judges and
prosecutors are doing. Local community bail fund that is getting
people out of jail, Like there's a local campaign in
your area to stop the construction of a new jail,
(32:41):
or or a local campaign to reduce the resources that
are going to your police department and instead increase the
resources that they're going to teachers and artists and after
school programs and the health treatment and a diction treatment.
Those are absolutely vital and there are people doing that
at every single sitty in town in this country, and
you should find them and be a part of what
they're doing. So this podcast we have two traditions too,
(33:04):
wrapped in one, which is our closing. The first part
is called the Magic one Question, And the Magic one
question is this, if you had a magic wand and
could waive it and fix one problem, what would it be.
I'm gonna say, if we forced our society to confront
all of the problems with out resort to human caging,
we'd all be so much better and so much more
(33:25):
connected to each other, and we have a much more
loving and caring and less unequal society. You know, I've
said this on this program before. I think the number
of people that we society needs to be protected from
is not zero, but it's a lot closer to zero
than where we're at now. Before we go to our closing,
I want to invite our Audi institune in next week
(33:46):
when we're going to be joined by two time NBA
All Star TV announcer and personality and assistant coach of
the Miami Heat Karan Butler, who spends his time off
the court working on reforming the system that's so negatively
impact that his own life before he made it big.
And now we go to the closing of our show,
which is appropriately titled Words of Wisdom, where first of all,
(34:09):
I thank you Alec Arkatzas for joining us and for
all your incredible work, and then we're all going to
collectively take a moment to really just tune in to
the sound of your voice for your final thoughts or
as we call them here on righteous Convictions Words of Wisdom.
Thank you, Jason. I think I would just say there
are a lot of really powerful institutions in our society
(34:30):
that have a vested interest in getting you to think
that they believe in equality and justice and call themselves
the justice system, and they have sold you a series
of myths about what the purpose of this system is.
And it's really important that you critique, that you question
(34:50):
the things that the media is telling you, question what
you're being told about. Why we have police as the
solution to homelessness, Why cops, pro skeeters, judges and prisons
of the solution to a so called drug problem? Right,
What is the reason that these systems are actually functioning?
Once you ask yourself that question, I think it's really
important to ask the next question, which is what am
(35:12):
I going to do in my own life every single
day to reduce the level of inequality and violence poverty
in our society? How am I going to use this
precious time on earth to make a difference for all
of the human beings who are survivors of this incredibly brutal, unnecessary,
(35:35):
wasteful punishment bureaucracy. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions
with Jason plom Thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Claverne,
and Kevin Wards, with research by Lalla Robinson. The music
(35:57):
in this production was supplied by three time oscar ainated
composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
at Lava for Good. You can also follow me on
TikTok and Instagram at its Jason Flom. Righteous Convictions with
Jason Flom is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
and association with Saybout Company Number one
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