On the path that American children travel to adulthood,
two institutions oversee the journey.
The first is the one we hear a lot about: college.
Some of you may remember the excitement that you felt
when you first set off for college.
Some of you may be in college right now.
You're feeling this excitement at this very moment.
College has some shortcomings.
It's expensive and leaves young people in debt.
But all in all, it's a pretty good path.
Young people emerge from college with pride and with great friends
and with a lot of knowledge about the world.
And perhaps most importantly,
a better chance in the labor market than they had before they got there.
Today I want to talk about the second institution
overseeing the journey from childhood to adulthood in the United States.
And that institution is prison.
Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers
instead of with teachers.
They're going to court dates instead of to class.
Their junior year abroad is instead a trip to a state correctional facility.
And they're emerging from their 20s
not with degrees in business and English,
but with criminal records.
This institution is also costing us a lot,
about 40,000 dollars a year to send a young person
to prison in New Jersey.
But here, tax payers are footing the bill
and what kids are getting is a cold prison cell
and a permanent mark against them when they come home
and apply for work.
There are more and more kids on this journey to adulthood
than ever before in the United States
and that's because in the past 40 years,
our incarceration rate has grown by 700 percent.
I have one slide for this talk,
here it is.
Here's our incarceration rate,
about 716 people per 100,000 in the population.
Here's the OACD countries.
What's more, it's poor kids that we're sending to prison,
too many drawn from African-American and Latino communities
so that prison now stands firmly between the young people trying to make it
and the fulfillment of the American dream.
The problem's actually a bit worse than this
cause we're not just sending poor kids to prison,
we're saddling poor kids with court fees,
with probation and parole restrictions,
with low-level warrants,
we're asking them to live in halfway houses
and on house arrest,
and we're asking them to negotiate a police force
that is entering poor communities of color,
not for the purposes of promoting public safety,
but to make arrest counts,
to line city coffers.
This is the hidden underside to our historic experiement
in punishment:
Young people worried that at any moment,
they will be stopped, searched and seized.
Not just in the streets, but in their homes,
at school and at work.
I got interested in this other path to adultoood
when I was myself a college student
attending the University of Pennsylvania
in the early 2000s.
Penn sits within a historic African-American neighborhood.
So you have these two parallel journeys going on simultaneously:
the kids attending this elite, private university,
and the kids from the adjacent neighborhood,
some of whom are making it to college,
and many of whom are being shipped to prison.
In my sophomore year, I started tutoring a young woman
who was in high school who lived about 10 minutes away
from the university.
Soon, her cousin came home from a juvenile detention center.
He was 15, a freshman in high school.
I began to get to know him and his friends and family,
and I asked him what he thought about me writing about his life
for my senior thesis in college.
This senior thesis became a disertation at Princeton
and now a book.
By the end of my sophomore year,
I moved into the neighborhood
and I spent the next six years
trying to understand what young people
were facing as they came of age.
The first week I spent in this neighborhood,
I saw two boys,
5 and 7-years-old,
play this game of "Chase" where the older boy
ran after the other boy.
He played the cop.
The cop caught up to the younger boy,
he pushed him down,
handcuffed him with imaginary handcuffs,
took a quarter out of the other child's pocket,
asked saying, "I'm seizing that."
He asked the child if he was carrying any drugs
or if he had a warrant.
Many times, I saw this game repeated,
sometimes children would simply give up running,
and stick their bodies flat against the ground
with their hands above their head
or flat up against a wall.
Children would yell at each other,
"I'm going to lock you up and you're never coming home!"
Once I saw a 6-year-old child
pull another child's pants down
and try to do a cavity search.
In the first 18 months that I lived in this neighborhood,
I wrote down any time I saw any contact between police
and people that were my neighbors.
So in the first 18 months,
I watched the police stop pedestrians or people in cars,
search people, run people's names,
chase people through the streets,
pull people in for questioning,
or make an arrest every single day
with five exceptions.
52 times, I watched the police break down doors,
chase people through houses
or make an arrest of someone in their home.
14 times in this first year and a half,
I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on, or beat young men
after they had caught them.
Bit by bit, I got to know two brothers,
Chuck and Tim.
Chuck was 18 when we met, a senior in high school.
He was playing on the basketball team and making C's and B's.
His younger brother, Tim, was 10.
And Tim loved Chuck, he followed him around a lot,
looked to Chuck to be a mentor.
They lived with their mom and grandfather
in a two-story row home with a front lawn and a back porch.
Their mom was struggling with addiction
all while the boys were growing up.
She never really was able to hold down a job
for very long.
It was their grandfather's pension that supported the family,
not really enough to pay for food and clothes
and school supplies for growing boys.
The family was really struggling.
So when we met, Chuck was a senior in high school.
He had just turned 18.
That winter, a kid in the school yard
called Chuck's mom a crack whore.
Chuck pushed the kid's face into the snow
and the cops charged him with aggravated assault.
The other kid was fine the next day,
I think it was his pride that was injured more than anything.
But anyway, since Chuck was 18,
this ag. assault cause sent him to adult county jail
on State Road in northeast Philadelphia,
where he sat, unable to pay the bail --
he couldn't afford it--
while the trial dates dragged on and on
through almost his entire senior year.
Finally, near the end of this season,