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On the path that American children
travel to adulthood,
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two institutions oversee the journey.
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The first is the one we hear
a lot about: college.
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Some of you may remember
the excitement that you felt
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when you first set off for college.
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Some of you may be in college right now
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and you're feeling this excitement
at this very moment.
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College has some shortcomings.
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It's expensive, it leaves
young people in debt.
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But all in all, it's a pretty good path.
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Young people emerge from college
with pride and with great friends
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and with a lot of knowledge
about the world.
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And perhaps most importantly,
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a better chance in the labor market
than they had before they got there.
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Today I want to talk about
the second institution
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overseeing the journey from childhood
to adulthood in the United States.
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And that institution is prison.
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Young people on this journey
are meeting with probation officers
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instead of with teachers.
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They're going to court dates
instead of to class.
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Their junior year abroad is instead
a trip to a state correctional facility.
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And they're emerging from their 20s
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not with degrees in business and English,
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but with criminal records.
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This institution is also costing us a lot,
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about 40,000 dollars a year
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to send a young person
to prison in New Jersey.
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But here, tax payers are footing the bill
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and what kids are getting
is a cold prison cell
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and a permanent mark against them
when they come home
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and apply for work.
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There are more and more kids
on this journey to adulthood
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than ever before in the United States
and that's because in the past 40 years,
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our incarceration rate
has grown by 700 percent.
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I have one slide for this talk,
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here it is.
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Here's our incarceration rate,
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about 716 people per 100,000
in the population.
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Here's the OECD countries.
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What's more, it's poor kids
that we're sending to prison,
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too many drawn from African-American
and Latino communities
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so that prison now stands firmly between
the young people trying to make it
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and the fulfillment of the American Dream.
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The problem's actually
a bit worse than this
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cause we're not just sending
poor kids to prison,
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we're saddling poor kids with court fees,
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with probation and parole restrictions,
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with low-level warrants,
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we're asking them to live
in halfway houses and on house arrest,
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and we're asking them
to negotiate a police force
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that is entering poor
communities of color,
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not for the purposes
of promoting public safety,
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but to make arrest counts,
to line city coffers.
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This is the hidden underside to our
historic experiment in punishment:
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Young people worried that at any moment,
they will be stopped, searched and seized.
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Not just in the streets,
but in their homes,
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at school and at work.
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I got interested in this
other path to adultoood
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when I was myself a college student
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attending the University of Pennsylvania
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in the early 2000s.
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Penn sits within a historic
African-American neighborhood.
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So you have these two parallel
journeys going on simultaneously:
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the kids attending
this elite, private university,
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and the kids from
the adjacent neighborhood,
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some of whom are making it to college,
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and many of whom
are being shipped to prison.
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In my sophomore year, I started
tutoring a young woman
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who was in high school who lived
about 10 minutes away
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from the university.
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Soon, her cousin came home
from a juvenile detention center.
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He was 15, a freshman in high school.
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I began to get to know him
and his friends and family,
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and I asked him what he thought
about me writing about his life
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for my senior thesis in college.
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This senior thesis became
a dissertation at Princeton
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and now a book.
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By the end of my sophomore year,
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I moved into the neighborhood
and I spent the next six years
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trying to understand what young people
were facing as they came of age.
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The first week I spent
in this neighborhood,
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I saw two boys, 5 and 7-years-old,
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play this game of "Chase",
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where the older boy
ran after the other boy.
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He played the cop.
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When the cop caught up
to the younger boy,
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he pushed him down,
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handcuffed him with imaginary handcuffs,
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took a quarter out of
the other child's pocket,
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asked saying, "I'm seizing that."
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He asked the child if
he was carrying any drugs
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or if he had a warrant.
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Many times, I saw this game repeated,
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sometimes children would
simply give up running,
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and stick their bodies flat
against the ground
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with their hands above their heads,
or flat up against a wall.
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Children would yell at each other,
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"I'm going to lock you up,
I'm going to lock you up
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and you're never coming home!"
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Once I saw a 6-year-old child
pull another child's pants down
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and try to do a cavity search.
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In the first 18 months that I lived
in this neighborhood,
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I wrote down every time I saw
any contact between police
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and people that were my neighbors.
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So in the first 18 months,
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I watched the police stop
pedestrians or people in cars,
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search people, run people's names,
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chase people through the streets,
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pull people in for questioning,
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or make an arrest every single day,
with five exceptions.
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52 times, I watched the police
break down doors,
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chase people through houses
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or make an arrest of someone
in their home.
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14 times in this first year and a half,
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I watched the police punch, choke,
kick, stomp on, or beat young men
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after they had caught them.
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Bit by bit, I got to know two brothers,
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Chuck and Tim.
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Chuck was 18 when we met,
a senior in high school.
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He was playing on the basketball team
and making C's and B's.
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His younger brother, Tim, was 10.
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And Tim loved Chuck,
he followed him around a lot,
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looked to Chuck to be a mentor.
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They lived with their mom and grandfather
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in a two-story row home
with a front lawn and a back porch.
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Their mom was struggling with addiction
all while the boys were growing up.
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She never really was able
to hold down a job for very long.
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It was their grandfather's pension
that supported the family,
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not really enough to pay
for food and clothes
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and school supplies for growing boys.
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The family was really struggling.
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So when we met, Chuck was
a senior in high school.
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He had just turned 18.
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That winter, a kid in the schoolyard
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called Chuck's mom a crack whore.
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Chuck pushed the kid's face into the snow
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and the school cops charged him
with aggravated assault.
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The other kid was fine the next day,
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I think it was his pride that was injured
more than anything.
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But anyway, since Chuck was 18,
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this ag. assault cause sent him
to adult county jail
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on State Road in northeast Philadelphia,
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where he sat, unable to pay the bail --
he couldn't afford it--
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while the trial dates
dragged on and on and on
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through almost his entire senior year.
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Finally, near the end of this season,
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the judge on this assault case
threw out most of the charges
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and Chuck came home with only
a few hundred dollars
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worth of court fees hanging over his head.
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Tim was pretty happy that day.
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The next fall, Chuck tried
to re-enroll as a senior,
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but the school secretary told him that
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he was then 19 and too old
to be readmitted.
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Then the judge on his assault case
issued him a warrant for his arrest
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because he couldn't pay
the 225 dollars in court fees
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that came due a few weeks after
the case ended.
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Then he was a high school dropout
living on the run.
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Tim's first arrest came later that year
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after he turned 11.
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Chuck had managed
to get his warrant lifted
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and he was on a payment plan
for the court fees
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and he was driving Tim to school
in his girlfriend's car.
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So a cop pulls them over, runs the car,
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and the car comes up
as stolen in California.
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Chuck had no idea where in the history
of this car it had been stolen.
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His girlfriend's uncle bought it
from a used car auction
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in northeast Philly.
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Chuck and Tim had never been
outside of the tristate,
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let alone to California.
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But anyway, the cops down at the precinct
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charged Chuck with
receiving stolen property.
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And then a juvenile judge,
a few days later,
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charged Tim, age 11,
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with accessory to receiving
a stolen property
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and then he placed on
three years of probation.
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With this probation sentence
hanging over his head,
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Chuck sat his little brother down
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and began teaching him
how to run from the police.
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They would sit side by side
on their back porch
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looking out into the shared alleyway
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and Chuck would coach Tim
how to spot undercover cars,
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how to negotiate a late-night police raid,
how and where to hide.
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I want you to imagine for a second,
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what Chuck and Tim's lives would be like
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if they were living in a neighborhood
where kids were going to college,
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not prison.
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A neighborhood like the one
I got to grow up in.
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"Okay," you might say.
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"Chuck and Tim, kids like them,
they're committing crimes!
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Don't they deserve to be in prison?
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Don't they deserve to be
living in fear of arrest?"
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Well, my answer would be no.
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They don't.
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And certainly not for the same things
that other young people
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with more privilege are doing
with impunity.
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If Chuck had gone to my high school,
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that schoolyard fight
would have ended there,
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as a schoolyard fight.
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It never would have become
an aggrevated assault case.
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Not a single kid that
I went to college with
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has a criminal record right now.
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Not a single one.
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But can you imagine how many might have
if the police had stopped those kids
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and searched their pockets for drugs
as they walked to class?
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Or had raided their frat parties
in the middle of the night?
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"Okay, " you might say.
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"But doesn't this high incarceration rate
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partly account for a
really low crime rate.
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Crime is down, that's a good thing."
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Totally, that's a good thing.
Crime is down.
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It dropped precipitously through
the 90s and through the 2000s.
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But according to a committee of academics
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convened by the National Academy
of Sciences last year,
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the relationship between our
historically high incarceration rates
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and our low crime rate is pretty shaky.
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It turns out that the crime rate
goes up and down
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irrespective of how many young people
we send to prison.
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We tend to think about justice
in a pretty narrow way:
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good and bad, innocent and guilty.
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Injustice is about being
wrongfully convicted.
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So if you're convicted
of something you did do,
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you should be punished for it.
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There are innocent and guilty people,
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there are victims and
there are perpetrators.
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Maybe we could think a little bit
more broadly than that.
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Right now, we're asking kids who live
in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods,
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who have the least amount
of family resources,
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who are attending
the country's worst schools,
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who are facing the toughest time
in the labor market,
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who are living in neighborhoods
where violence is an everyday problem,
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we're asking these kids to walk
the thinnest possible line
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to basically never do anything wrong.
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Why are we not providing support
to young kids facing these challenges?
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Why are we offering only handcuffs,
jail time and this fugitive existence?
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Can we imagine something better?
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Can we imagine a criminal justice system
that prioritizes recovery,
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prevention, civic inclusion,
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rather than punishment?
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(Applause)
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A criminal justice system
that acknowledges
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the legacy of exclusion that
poor people of color in the US
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have faced and that does not promote
and perpetuate those exclusions.
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(Applause)
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And finally, a criminal justice system
that believes in black young people,
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rather than treating black young people
as the enemy to be rounded up.
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(Applause)
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The good news is that we already are.
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A few years ago, Michelle Alexander
wrote "The New Jim Crow",
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which got Americans to see
incarceration as a civil rights issue
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of historic proportions in a way
they had not seen it before.
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President Obama and Attorney General
Eric Holder have come out very strongly
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on sentencing reform,
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on the need to address
racial disparity in incarceration.
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We're seeing states throw out
Stop and Frisk
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as the civil rights violation that it is.
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We're seeing cities and states
decriminalize possession of Marijuana.
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New York, New Jersey
and California
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have been dropping their
prison populations, closing prisons,
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while also seeing a big drop in crime.
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Texas has gotten into the game now,
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also closing prisons,
investing in education.
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This curious coalition is building
from the right and the left,
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made up of former prisoners
and fiscal conservatives,
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of civil rights activists
and libertarians,
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of young people taking the the streets
to protest police violence
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against unarmed black teenagers,
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and older, wealthier people,
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some of you here in the audience,
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pumping big money into
decarceration initiatives
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In a deeply divided Congress,
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the work of reforming
our criminal justice system
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is just about the only thing
that the right and the left
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are coming together on.
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I did not think that I would
see this political moment
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in my lifetime.
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I think many of the people
who have been working tirelessly
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to write about the causes and consequences
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of our historically
high incarceration rates
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did not think we would see
this moment in our lifetime.
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The question for us now is,
how much can we make of it?
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How much can we change?
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I want to end with a call to young people,
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the young people attending college
and the young people struggling
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to stay out of prison
or to make it through prison
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and return home.
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It may seem like these paths
to adulthood are worlds apart,
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but the young people participating
in these two institutions
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conveying us to adulthood,
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they have one thing in common:
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both can be leaders in the work
of reforming our criminal justice system.
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Young people have always been leaders
in the fight for equal rights,
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the fight for more people
to be granted dignity
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and a fighting chance at freedom.
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The mission for the generation
of young people
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coming of age in this, a sea-change
moment, potentially,
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is to end mass incarceration and
build a new criminal justice system,
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emphasis on the word justice.
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Thanks.
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(Applause)