Bryan Stevenson on the future of criminal justice

What if, instead of punishing people who made mistakes, we helped them? Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has spent his career working toward a more equitable and restorative criminal justice system. He joins Reid and Aria this week to discuss the root causes of mass incarceration in America and how we can build safe communities without excessive policing and sentencing. Bryan responds to GPT-4 stories that imagine how new technologies could prevent wrongful convictions and contribute to a better criminal justice system—but are the questions we ask still stuck in carceral logic? Read the AI-generated stories for this episode here. Read the transcript of this episode here. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all of the episodes, visit www.possible.fm/podcast. Topics: 5:37 - Hellos and intros 6:07 - Defining the criminal justice system and how it has evolved 11:51 - Where our approach to incarceration has started to shift 14:39 - GPT-4’s story about addressing minor crimes 23:45 - GPT-4’s story about reconciling wrongful convictions 28:28 - Is a world without prisons possible? 36:36 - The first steps towards criminal justice reform 39:33 - Progress afoot at the local level 42:36 - Reformulating sentencing and rethinking drug policy 46:15 - Rapidfire questions 54:50 - Debrief with Reid and Aria Possible is a new podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with a visionary from a different field: climate science, media, criminal justice, and more. The conversation also features another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode has a companion story, generated by GPT-4, which will serve as a jumping-off point for a hopeful, speculative discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively. Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Caitlin McCaskey, Taylor Washington, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, and Ben Relles.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  We're at a moment now where we can reject high rates of incarceration, we can reject fear and anger. And I do have hope. I do think there is something better waiting for us. And I actually believe that there is something that feels more like freedom, feels more like equality, feels more like justice, and I think it's waiting for us. And it isn't resting on prisons and over policing and threat and menace. It's resting on compassion, it's resting on a desire to see everyone healthy, a desire to see all communities moving in a direction where people have opportunity and promise.

• 0:46Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:47Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:49Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:54Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice and from entertainment to education.

• 1:01Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations also feature another kind of guest, GPT-4, OpenAI's latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we've generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.

• 1:19Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:26Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:34Reid Hoffman?

  Well, as amazingly excited as I am to be talking to Bryan Stevenson, I know Aria from our many conversations, you're even more excited. Obviously, you know, kind of as the soul of the country as it should be, of who we aspire to be, of what, not just what's kind of possible within the criminal justice system, possible in terms of our character, our aspirations, our intent, and Bryan is such a great exemplar of that.

• 2:05Aria Finger?

  You're right, Reed. I could not be more excited to talk to Bryan Stevenson. And there really are two reasons. One is the importance of this issue. For people who don't know, criminal justice reform, and when we think of the criminal justice system, the United States leads the world in the number of people we incarcerate. It's shocking. If you take a state, Louisiana, and you look at Louisiana versus Japan, Japan incarcerates 38 people per 100,000. Louisiana incarcerates 1,000 people per 100,000. This is orders of magnitude different. And the reason why I'm so excited about Bryan Stevenson is before this was an issue

• 2:47Aria Finger?

  people were talking about, before this was on the national radar, Bryan Stevenson dedicated his life to this issue. And he said, "We must be fair. We must be just. We cannot incarcerate 12-year-olds for the rest of their life. We cannot have a discriminatory system. We cannot wrongfully incarcerate people." And so this is just someone who is an idol of mine, because he has been doing the hard work his entire life. Bryan is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. He's the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that provides legal representation

• 3:31Aria Finger?

  to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. He also led the creation of two highly acclaimed cultural sites, the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, to commemorate the history of extrajudicial lynchings in the South.

• 3:50Reid Hoffman?

  Bryan is one of the people that, if I see him all the way across, like, a crowded room, I will work my way to him, because it's like, I just want to, to, to kind of show my appreciation for this amazingly hard and soulful work he does. And the fact that...

• 4:11Reid Hoffman?

  He doesn't just put in the blood, sweat and tears to do the work, but he maintains a personal balance of grace, of elegance. In, you know, kind of like, who is it we should be? Let me show you my, because you would naturally see someone who's like dealing with all this injustice to get angry, bitter, and it's like, no, no, no. We're going to work to get there together to, to be our nobler selves. It was, you know, kind of amazing, uh, visiting his museum, which I recommend everyone do. If you don't feel like you can emotionally and presently sit there and kind of own it

• 4:54Reid Hoffman?

  and understand the kind of the history of what's going on, you haven't done the truth and reconciliation yourself, right? It doesn't mean that you, it's not self-flagellation. It's the, I understand that I am a product of this society that earlier created this and that the echoes of this horrific slavery act play through time. And I myself am going to help heal this. Lots of thought provoking conversation on the horizon. Here's our conversation with Brian Stevenson.

• 5:37Aria Finger?

  We're so excited to be here today to talk about criminal justice reform and justice and, and ways that we can improve the system. But whenever we talk about systems, it's like, what system? And Brian, one of the things that you're so good at is explaining definitions. And where does one thing begin and another thing end? And what actually are we talking about when we talk about prisons and jails and criminal justice? So I would just love for you to tell us, like, what does the criminal justice system include? And what doesn't it?

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Well, I think it is an important question because we've created a very different system over the last 50 years than what we had before that. Throughout most of American history, we didn't put a lot of people in jails and prisons. We didn't invest a lot of money in a carceral state. We thought about separating people who were a threat to others. We thought about accountability, but we didn't make it a centerpiece of our society. That changed in the 1970s when we had a generation of politicians come in who I think adopted the politics of fear and anger as a strategy for power.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  It was right after the Vietnam War protests and the disruption on college campuses. It was right after the civil rights movement and the radical changes in American society that saw the collapse of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation that saw the enfranchisement of millions of African Americans who for over a century had been disenfranchised. It was a time of great change in American society toward building a healthier and stronger democracy, but it caused some people to be afraid of what we were now entering. The political landscape was shifting because black people had the vote. Young people were insisting on a different way of thinking about conflict.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  And so our leaders in the 1970s began talking differently about punishment and the criminal justice system. And they invested millions of dollars to building new prisons and talking differently. We said that people who are drug addicted and drug dependent are criminal, and we said we have to punish them. We should have said that people dealing with addiction and dependency have a health problem, and we need a healthcare intervention, but we didn't make that choice. We made a carceral choice. And that began, that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people going to our jails and prisons. And over the last 50 years, we went from a nation with a prison population of less than 300,000 people.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  To a prison population with now 2.2 million people, nearly 5 million people on probation or parole, 80 million people with criminal arrests, which means that when they try to get jobs and try to get loans, they're disfavored by that arrest history. 800% increase in the number of women sent to jails and prisons, 80% of whom are single parents with minor children. And so by the beginning of the 21st century, we saw the Bureau of Justice projecting that 1 in 3 black male babies born in this country is expected to go to jail or prison. The projection for Latino boys was 1 in 6. And when you think about that, and just how consequential it is that a whole segment of our population

• 9:01Speaker 00

  is facing these risks of incarceration, you realize that we have created something that is central to the American experience. We've created a system and a structure of punishment and incarceration that is dominating life for many people in America. And as bad as that projection about 1 in 3 black male babies ending up in jail or prison, or 1 in 6, was the indifference that that projection generated. We didn't have a pandemic-like reaction to that horrific forecast. We just sort of have been acculturated to accept these high levels of incarceration, these high levels of imprisonment. We have this highest rate of incarceration in the world, and no one seems to be bothered by it. So to sustain that, of course,

• 9:45Speaker 00

  we had to invest billions of dollars in building prisons. We had to invest tons of money in more police and more prosecutors, more correctional officers, probation officers. We had to create private businesses that could relieve some of that incarceration by building private prisons. We had to engage private healthcare and private phone companies and private suppliers. And that has created a whole infrastructure that now profits from these high rates of incarceration. So even when we decide that we have too many people in jails and prisons, you have people with economic interests trying to disrupt efforts to bring down that prison population.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  And the politics, of course, have also shifted. So that's what we mean by the current state. This is a relatively new phenomenon in American history. And I think it's important to see it in relationship to what preceded it, which was this incredible period of activism and dramatic change in American society that broke down barriers and boundaries that had kept us constrained and segregated and not healthy in the way that I think a thriving democracy needs to be.

• 11:01Aria Finger?

  This picture you're painting is so dire, thinking about ripping apart families. I mean, how can you hear the one in three stat for black male babies going to prison and not not just be horrified at the discriminatory nature of our system? Although I have to admit, in the last 10 years, I've been given some hope. You know, Reed and I work with this amazing organization, Emilio, that gets free prison phone calls inside prisons and jails and tries to improve it. We've seen the still astronomically high prison population decrease just a little bit in places. Are there things that we can do legislatively or politically that you see have hope to maybe turn the tide on all of this?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I do think about a decade ago, things shifted a bit. You had people, both on the right and the left, that saw that this kind of incarceration is not sustainable. And you had people on the right who were saying, big government is bad. And what many of us were saying, well, if you're against big government, then you can't be comfortable with billions of dollars going into a carceral system that's taking money away from other services. And if you're progressive, you can't be comfortable with underfunding education and underfunding Health and Human Services and underfunding all of these social needs that we have because the money's being absorbed by our jails and prisons.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  And so I think it was encouraging that a decade ago, we started talking about not just being tough on crime, but smart on crime. People on the right adopted "right on crime." And those interventions did have an impact that have resulted in stabilizing the rate of growth in our jails and prisons in some states and then decreasing the number of people in jails and prisons in other states. The Congress has adopted a couple of bills that have been helpful in remediating some of the challenges of over-incarceration. The problem, of course, is that of the 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons,

• 13:14Speaker 00

  only 10% are in our federal prisons. So this is a state issue, and it has to be addressed state by state by state. And there are states that have taken this on and found consensus around the need to get some of these folks out of jails and prisons. And that's the reason why there has been some room for hope. It's still very scattered and very varied. There are states where things have not improved. There are states where things have improved dramatically. We've seen a retreat from some of the excessive punishment as a result of litigation, but also as a result of legislation. All of those things are encouraging. There's a dozen states that have abolished the death penalty in the last 15 years.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  There are states that have stopped condemning children to die in prison. There are states that are taking more health-oriented interventions to addiction and dependency, drug courts, and restorative justice. All of these things are policies that have created some hope that we won't repeat the last five decades with continuing imprisonment. But we're still in the early stages of a moment of recovery, a moment of response to the excess created over the last 50 years.

• 14:39Reid Hoffman?

  So Brian, let's turn to our first GBD-4 generated story, which suggests how the benefits of technology working in concert with policies might help minors navigate or find alternatives to the criminal justice system.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Mia, a 14-year-old girl, was caught shoplifting at a mall along with two of her friends. She was arrested by the mall security, who scanned her biometric ID and contacted her parents and the police. The police arrived and interviewed Mia and her friends using an artificial intelligence system that assessed their risk level, their motivation, and their remorse. The system also accessed their academic, social, and family records, and found that they were all doing well at school, had no history of violence or substance abuse, and had supportive and caring parents.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  The system then suggested a diversion program, which involved restorative justice, community service, and counseling as an alternative to formal prosecution and detention.

• 15:55Reid Hoffman?

  Any reactions to the AI story?

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I do think there are some fundamental shifts that we need to make. First of all, I think if we just ask, "Does someone have to be in jail or prison? Are they a threat to others?" That that's a really important place to start, because I think we could release half the people in our jails and prisons, and we would not see an increase in the crime rate. It would not do anything that has an impact on public safety, because we've put so many people in prison, not because they're a threat to public safety, but just because we're mad. And so people who got 20-year sentences because they wrote a bad check, people who shoplifted and got 30 years because of some prior convictions,

• 16:42Speaker 00

  this is all kind of an unhealthy policy rooted in fear and anger. And part of what we have to do is to step back from policymaking rooted in fear and anger. I'm persuaded that fear and anger are the essential ingredients of injustice and oppression. I think fear and anger makes you tolerate things you should never tolerate. It makes you accept things you should never accept. It was fear and anger that caused us to lower the minimum age for trying children as adults. Because we had criminologists going around the country arguing that some children aren't children, branding them super predators and using that rhetoric to create an environment where we were literally putting five and six-year-old children in handcuffs in classrooms.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  We were creating these pipelines from schoolhouses to jailhouses. And so I think the first thing we have to do is to step back from that really misguided punitive idea that prison is the only way we can solve social problems and healthcare problems and mental health problems, et cetera. The first principle has to be, how do we help people who've made mistakes? And I want to emphasize the word "help", because that's not been our orientation. Our orientation has been, how do we punish people who make mistakes? And it's been fueled by a very misguided idea, which is that we can put crimes in jails and prisons.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  When you look over the last 50 years and you look at the way legislators and policymakers and judges and even politicians have talked about issues of crime, they talk as if they have the power to put a crime in a jail or prison. "Oh, I hate that crime of burglary. I hate that crime of assault. I hate that crime. So I'm going to put that in prison for 50 years, 100 years. I hate the crime of child pornography. I'm going to put that in for 1,000 years." And we act as if we have the capacity to put a crime in jail or prison. But of course, we don't. We don't have the ability to put a crime in jail or prison. We can only put people in jail or prison. And people are not crimes. People are more than crimes.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  And so there is an effort within technology to kind of focus more on the people. Who are these people?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  And two things start to happen when we focus on the people. There are some folks that want to use technology to get a more accurate picture of who this person is. What's their background? What is their capacity? What are their grades? What are their opportunities for success, et cetera? And my problem with that kind of predictive punishment, that kind of predictive policing, is that I don't think we understand the complexity of human behavior enough to actually predict what someone's going to do that's a threat. What we can do is assess someone's need for help. And so, for example, in the shoplifting narrative,

• 19:46Speaker 00

  my problem was that the technology was looking for attributes that this person has that might make them less appropriate for punishment. And I get that, but there are so many people in our society who don't have those attributes, who are also not appropriate for punishment. I don't think we should put any 14-year-old children who've been arrested for shoplifting in prison as a response to that shoplifting. It's not going to help that child, and it's not an effective way to help the people who have been victimized by that shoplifting recover. And so, rather, what I'd like to do is to use the technology to help us assess who needs help. And that's a different focus.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  But I can tell you that if we use technology to evaluate which are the children living in zip codes, where there are high levels of trauma, where there's high levels of distress, where there are high levels of need. I know that there are thousands of children living in families that are violent, where they're surrounded by abuse and gun violence. We know that we have children living in families where these children are hearing things that are traumatizing. And by the time these kids are four and five, they have trauma disorders. And we need to understand the relationship between trauma and engagement with our criminal legal system.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  And what we know about trauma is that it will cause you to be hyperreactive. It will cause you to not act the way we need you to act. It's like our combat veterans, when they go to places where they're constantly being threatened. You know, if any of us were threatened, our brain would begin producing chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline to help us cope with that threat. If we're healthy, when the threat is gone, we get back to normal. But if we're constantly exposed to threat, our brain just begins to produce those chemicals all the time. That's what happens to some of our combat veterans. And so when they come back home, their brain is triggering that stuff even when there's no need for it, and they react poorly, they react violently, they react inappropriately. We've learned that that's a trauma disorder, and we need to help that veteran recover from trauma.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  We have to create an environment where we need to make them feel safe, and that's how they get better. Well, I think there are millions of children in this country who are dealing with these kinds of trauma disorders. And rather than using technology to predict which of those children are going to cross lines and engage in behaviors that are criminal, we need to be looking, using technology to identify these children so we can have interventions that help us address that trauma. And how can we use technology to not only identify these individuals, but to support these individuals with the helps that they need? Because we are spending billions of dollars on punishment when we could be spending billions on billions of dollars on help.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  And not only would that improve public safety, it would also help people who have been disfavored and marginalized and excluded and unfairly treated get the help that they need.

• 22:45Aria Finger?

  So Brian, I had such a similar reaction to the first AI story. You know, a 14-year-old girl is shoplifting, and it's like, well, if she has stable parents and get good grades, then maybe we don't punish her. And I thought, that's already what happens in white, middle-class communities. You just say, oh, you know, she needs some help, we'll help her out, she just had. And then the the insinuation is, well, if this girl gets bad grades and has unstable parents and doesn't have food, to your point, we should somehow punish her? It's like. No, we should somehow help her. And so I just thought that was so interesting because often AI reflects, you know, what is available on the internet and what, you know, what is the sort of common narrative today?

• 23:27Aria Finger?

  Our next AI story also had to deal with a, an issue that you work on a lot, which is wrongful incarceration. And I say that wrongful incarceration is the, the gateway drug into criminal justice reform. I think a lot of people get involved with wrongful incarceration because they can't, how could that be happening? We have to do something about that. And when they learn more about the criminal justice system, they see, oh, wrongful incarceration is bad. But actually, there's so many other parts of the justice system that are also not okay. So I would love to ask for your reflection on the AI story that was about wrongful incarceration. What made sense to you? What totally didn't? And sort of what has been your experience?

• 24:11Aria Finger?

  I mean, you've gotten a lot of people out of prison that were wrongly incarcerated.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Well, I think, again, if we're going to be hopeful and we're going to use technology to create a better future, I still think we have to ask different questions because the structure of the narrative was a nonprofit organization decades from now using technology to help strengthen the argument that this person has been wrongly convicted, using that to persuade others that this person should be exonerated. And I just still think that's the wrong orientation. I think that we want technology to pressure prosecutors and police to reevaluate the work that they have done. So we know that every legal system in this country,

• 24:58Speaker 00

  from policing to prosecution to sentencing to corrections, has been corrupted by a lot of presumptions of dangerousness and guilt, a lot of bias, a lot of bigotry, a lot of discrimination. And no one has actually taken the time to think about, oh, my God, for decades, we've had biased ideas shaping our thought about who's, who's dangerous and who's not. We've had unhealthy.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Sentences and unhealthy decision makers. We've excluded people of color. We've excluded the poor. Rather than figuring out how we identify the people who are innocent that some third party does, I think we have to say, no, every police department should be using technology to reevaluate all of the arrests they've made, all of the convictions they've supported. Every prosecution office should be using technology to rate the reliability of every conviction that they have imposed where someone is still in custody. And I think technology could help us say, oh, you know what? There's a high risk of a wrongful conviction here because there were not a lot of supporting witnesses. There wasn't a lot of evidence.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  We relied on experts that weren't really experts. There are so many things that we could know about the reliability of the convictions that have now put 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons that would help us, guide us into understanding where now we need to start reexamining things. But rather than making it the burden of some nonprofit or the burden of some third party to persuade these same institutions to do the right thing, it should be the obligation of these institutions to use technology to begin reevaluating what they've done. You know, where we've made the most progress in our society is when we have frameworks that cause us to rethink things.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  So the Surgeon General, after decades of people smoking all the time, said, no, we have to reevaluate what the risk is. And when we discovered that smoking created an elevated risk of heart disease and lung cancer, we said, okay, now we're going to put restrictions on tobacco advertising. We're going to start campaigns to discourage people from smoking. We realized that this wasn't healthy and we couldn't just think about what we're going to do in the future. We had to begin dealing with that legacy. There has been a real harm, a real cost. To a half-century of policing that has been contaminated by bigotry and racism and abuse of power. There's a cost to a half-century of prosecution and excessive punishment

• 27:38Speaker 00

  that has been undermined by all of these forces. And we need to be thinking about using technology to reevaluate the harm, to reassess the harm, so that the investigation of wrongful convictions, the investigation of excessive punishment, isn't the burden of some third party, but it becomes an essential feature of how we make policing and prosecution legitimate, how we make it something that moves toward justice, moves toward fairness. And if we don't do that, it will forever be an institution that is kind of contributing, manufacturing, if you will, more wrongful convictions. And AI won't help us solve that problem until we turn the direction of it on these very institutions themselves.

• 28:24Reid Hoffman?

  Do you see, as you look out, do you think it's possible to create a society without prisons?

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. And I think part of why I'm interested in history and narrative work is because if we're really, if we're honest and willing to look at it, we can see the way in which we can become a healthier society. So we haven't acknowledged it, but I think we are a post-genocide society. I think what happened to indigenous people when Europeans came to this continent was a genocide. We killed millions of native people through famine and war and disease. We created a constitution that talked about equality and justice for all, but we also created this insidious narrative of racial difference, which became like an infection. We were committed to equality and justice,

• 29:11Speaker 00

  but we didn't apply those concepts to indigenous people because we said, oh, no, those native people are savages. And that narrative of racial difference became a real burden, a real toxic liability in the American experience. And it created two and a half centuries of slavery. And the brutality and the bondage and the humiliation of enslavement was horrific. But the greatest evil of American slavery was the false narrative we created to justify enslavement because enslavers didn't want to feel immoral or unjust or unchristian. So they made up this false narrative that black people aren't as good as white people, that black people are less capable, less worthy, less deserving. And that narrative was so powerful that it survived the Civil War.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  We were more committed to racial hierarchy and white supremacy after the Civil War than we were to the rule of law. And that's why thousands of black people were pulled out of their homes and beaten and drowned and tortured and lynched. And we were not a good country. We were not a healthy country when mobs were coming to jails and pulling people out and torturing them on the courthouse lawn. And you look at the pictures where families are bringing their children to witness the barbarity and the cruelty of a lynching. It is not healthy. And then we create a legal architecture of segregation and we have these horrific signs and we create this bifurcated world where no one is really free. Black people are burdened by segregation, but no one's free because white children

• 30:37Speaker 00

  are being taught that they're better than other people because of their color, which is a lie. It's a kind of child abuse because they're not going to be able to relate to the beautiful world that surrounds them. They're going to be constrained to just that white world that they've been told is the only world that matters. And it constrains our ability to be free, to love, to actually be whole. And then again courageous people step forward and break down that architecture of segregation. But we're still dealing with that narrative of racial difference. And so we were once a society that tolerated wholesale massacres of indigenous people. We were once a society that tolerated chattel slavery. And at each point, we did something courageous and remarkable.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  The 4 million people who were enslaved after, who won emancipation after the Civil War could have said, Oh, we want retribution against those who enslaved us. We want revenge against those who separated us from our children. But they instead chose community and a healthy future. They chose fellowship. They chose citizenship. The thousands, the millions that fled the American South in response to terror lynching went to other parts of this country where they chose to build new communities. After the civil rights movement, Dr. King led thousands into embracing nonviolence. He didn't say, we want retribution and revenge. He said, we just want the vote. We just want to be treated fairly. And I think we're at a moment now where we can reject high rates of incarceration. We can reject fear and anger.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  And I do have hope. I do think there is something better waiting for us. And I actually believe that there is something that feels more like freedom, feels more like equality, feels more like justice. And I think it's waiting for us. And it isn't resting on prisons and overpolicing and threat and menace. It's resting on compassion. It's resting on a desire to see everyone healthy, a desire to see all communities moving in a direction where people have opportunity and promise. And I think we have to talk about that better world, that thing that's outside of what we've seen, because if we don't talk about it, we get blinded by the problems that we do see.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  And it causes us to not imagine things that we need to imagine. The United States should take no comfort, no pride at all, in having the highest rate of incarceration. We should be talking about what are we going to do to eliminate that? I don't think we talk enough about how we end crime. That's the conversation I want to have. How do we end crime? How do we eliminate domestic violence? How do we eliminate sexual violence? How do we eliminate gang violence? How do we eliminate police violence? How do we create communities and relationships between people where we don't have the need for these institutions that are threatening and menacing? And if we don't start talking about how do we end crime? How do we solve crime? How do we? Then we're not going to get where we need to go.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  And that's why I think it is healthy to imagine this different world. This other world that is not dependent on the kind of prisons and the kind of policing that we have constructed in our contemporary society, which in some ways stand in the way of the conversation that we need to be having. Our politicians should stop saying, oh, we're going to be really tough on the people who rape, murder, and rob you. They need to start talking about what are we going to do to create a world where there is no rape, where there is no murder, where there is no robbery. And if we think that's too naive or too idealistic, then I don't think we actually understand where we've been. You know, I'm the great grandson of people who were enslaved.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  My great grandfather learned to read while he was enslaved in the 1850s because he believed that one day he'd be free. And in Virginia, on a plantation in the 1850s, there was nothing rational for an enslaved black person to hold on to that said, oh, freedom's coming around the corner. And yet, he had that belief. And because he could read, he taught my grandmother to read, who worked as a domestic her whole life into her 90s. But she thought that education was powerful, and she made sure that all of her 10 children were readers. And I'd go see my grandmother, and she'd stand on the porch sometimes, and she'd have books, and she'd make you read a book before she'd let you in the house. And I grew up in a poor racially segregated community, but my mother went into debt to buy us the World Book Encyclopedia because she thought there was power in those books

• 34:58Speaker 00

  that showed us a bigger world than the world we could see. You know, I went to Harvard Law School. I'd never met a lawyer until I got to law school. But I had this generation of readers. I had a great grandfather who believed in the hope of freedom, a grandmother who believed in the hope of education, a mother who gave me the hope and the power that comes with imagining things better, bigger than what I've seen. And we have to tap into that to actually create the kind of democracy, to create the kind of nation that I think would really be a light on the hill, that would really help our world represent a commitment to democracy and basic human rights.

• 35:35Aria Finger?

  I mean, there's so much to learn from our history. There's so much to learn from your family's history. I mean, it's just so beautiful, the way you talk about your family. And I think what's so important when you talk about this idealized future. One is you say, we can get there. But you're talking about a future with no prisons. And you're also talking about a future with no crime and a future with no domestic abuse. And I think so often in our politics, why do we say, you know, when we're talking about crime, you can either be tough on crime or you can welcome crime into our communities. It's, as you mentioned, no. If we reduce prison sentences, if we reduce prisons, we can actually all be safer. So my question for you is, we want to reduce crime.

• 36:20Aria Finger?

  We want to get to this future where there's less or no prisons. What are the concrete first steps? Like, what do we need to do? What would you call on the people listening to do? How can we get there?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Well, we would just have to have the courage of our convictions. We just have to be honest enough to do the things that we know can make a difference. We know that if we provide care and treatment to people who are dealing with addiction and dependency, we can help them and we can keep them from offending. We can keep them from doing things that disrupt our level of comfort and the public safety index. You know, it's not a crazy thing. You look at the homicide rate in the United States and you look at the homicide rate in Canada and countries all across the world. And we know that a society that is littered and contaminated with high numbers of guns is a society that's going to have a lot more harm. And so we have to make the honest decision to choose between,

• 37:15Speaker 00

  do we want high rates of crime and violence? Or do we want guns? And if we decide that we want actually safer communities, we're going to have to step back from this false idea that we're safer, we're healthier if everybody has a weapon. And a lot of that kind of analysis is actually not even a hard thing. The data is there. We have other societies that have modeled some of this. We didn't always have the problems that we're seeing now. These are problems that we have created.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Created because we haven't invested in interventions to help people are dealing with addiction, interventions, helping people deal with trauma, interventions that help people deal with mental health. And I think that's the pathway for just being willing, being courageous enough to make the decisions that clearly are going to have an impact on offending. If we taught people to read and write, if we helped them and empowered them to learn new skills that would allow them to contribute to society without the need to steal or to hurt or to harm, we'd make a profound, have a profound impact on the recidivism rate. Our recidivism rate is much, much higher than the recidivism rate of a lot of countries

• 38:29Speaker 00

  that have less money, less resources, less capacity. And yet they've made interventions that have had an impact. And so I think that has to be part of it. The other part of it is to think differently about our obligations to one another. In America, it's very easy to isolate yourself from the poor, the marginalized, the excluded. And when you're isolated, you don't hear things that you need to hear. You don't see things you need to see. And the problem with so many of our policies is they're made by policymakers who are not proximate to the problems. They're trying to fix things that they don't understand. We have a vaccine to the COVID virus because our medical researchers knew that to actually help people recover from this pandemic,

• 39:12Speaker 00

  they had to understand everything about that virus they could. And in medicine, we've adopted this notion of proximity because we know that we won't have development. We won't solve how we cure these diseases until we understand everything about that disease.

• 39:28Aria Finger?

  And so you mentioned that, you know, if you look to Europe, you can see places that spend less money, have lower recidivism rates. Like we're doing it wrong here. And it seems like we know the right things to do. We might just be lacking the political will, or as you say, we're lacking the courage. So are there, are there any places in the U.S. that have pockets of hope? Because it is such a decentralized system where we are doing the things that other prison systems, other countries are doing. Is there any hope that we see locally?

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Well, I do. I mean, I think there are certainly places where interventions have been made. I'm a big fan of, so Atlanta had a mayor Shirley Franklin, who after she left office, actually engaged in something called the Purpose Built Communities. She was frustrated that she didn't see the progress. And they made interventions in communities where there were high rates of crime and violence. And they committed new opportunities for kids in these areas. They surrounded children with care and services, and they had amazing results. You know, there are researchers and programs that have used trauma-informed interventions that have had profound results, where people are actually doing so well

• 40:41Speaker 00

  because of this intervention that's rooted in this notion of proximity. I'm still grieving the loss of my dear friend, Paul Farmer, who was the co-founder of Partners in Health. And what they did was kind of push past the rhetoric, push past the idea that people in the developing world, people in Haiti, people in countries where there weren't a lot of resources, couldn't benefit from strategies that could help them reduce the rate of tuberculosis or reduce the rate of HIV. And instead, they went into these communities, they got Proximate, they developed this model of community health workers that would stand with those who were sick and afflicted. And they produced some of the best cure rates, some of the best outcomes for people dealing with multi-drug resistance tuberculosis in the world,

• 41:26Speaker 00

  better than what we have in the US and some of these affluent areas. But it was rooted in an intervention that says, let's give Proximate to the folks who are directly impacted. And now you see the beginnings of a healthcare system in Rwanda and places across West Africa that exceed what we can see in many parts of our country. And that's what reinforces for me this idea that we absolutely can do so much more than we think we can do.

• 41:55Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think the Proximate is always a very good call. Because, you know, the Proximate is, you know, listen to the narrative, participate, visit the museum. It doesn't necessarily mean we all need to be as amazing heroes as Paul or as you. Just it's see and have an open heart, open mind as to what we want to be doing in order to be helping here. Like, if you were to be able to wave a wand and kind of, you know, say, here's what our policy should be, here's what we should be doing, where would you, you know, wave the wand?

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Well, I think I would start with our drug policies because we have so many people who are still burdened by imprisonment behind those. If I could just end incarceration for people who are dealing with addiction and dependency and take the money, the billions of dollars we could save, and invest that in care and treatment, I would do that first because not only would that bring down our incredibly high rate of incarceration, but it would also be an investment in restoring families, in restoring relationships, in restoring communities that would have residual benefits for the next generation. Maybe we wouldn't see that one in three outcome if we could actually put back moms and dads

• 43:12Speaker 00

  and brothers and siblings free of addiction and dependency who could be new models for a potential change. That would be the first thing because I think that's where we've seen that the greatest driver of our high rate of incarceration has been that misguided response to addiction and dependency. If I got a second wand, it would be to reformulate sentencing because I think it's just extreme. I mean, we, most countries in the world don't have the death penalty. They don't have life imprisonment without parole. They actually want people motivated to get to a better place so that they don't reoffend. We do the opposite in this country.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  We condemn, we throw people away, we provide no incentive for getting to a better place because we say it's hopeless. And I think that orientation has created so much harm and so much tragedy that we have to just reject all of that. You know, the idea that the United States in the 21st century still believes that the way you stop killing is to kill people to show that killing is wrong is really quite shameful. You know, the death penalty isn't an issue you should think about by asking whether people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed. The threshold question is, do we deserve to kill? And we've got this unbelievable error rate. For every eight people we've executed, we've now identified one innocent person on death row.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  And the truth is, we would not tolerate that level of error. If for one out of every eight apples in the store, if you touch one, you died instantly, we would stop selling apples. We would give up the pleasure of apples if there was that kind of risk of error, of mortality, of wrongful outcome. But we haven't done that, and that has to end. And we don't need it. It's not a deterrent. And so just pushing away all of that excessive punishment would be the second thing I would do. And then the third thing I would do is I would surround the people in our system, not by people who hate them, not by people who think that they have no value or no purpose or no meaning, but by people who believe that we're all more than the worst thing we've ever done. If we actually surrounded people

• 45:23Speaker 00

  who have fallen down with people who believe that your crime doesn't define you, that you're more than the worst thing you've done, that if you tell a lie, you're not just a liar. If you take something, you're not just a thief, that even if you kill somebody, you're not just a killer. If we surround folks who have fallen down with those kinds of people, who have ideas about how you recover, about how you restore, about how you pay back, about how you heal yourself and heal others, how you forgive and all of that, then I just think we're going to have a very different future than the future we're going to have if we continue to invest in just menace and threat and punishment and abuse, which currently characterizes so many aspects of our legal system.

• 46:15Aria Finger?

  And so we end every episode with three questions. Is there a movie, a song, a book, a piece of culture that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 46:26Speaker 00

  You know, it's interesting, during the pandemic, I spent a lot of time just kind of rediscovering things. And I, when I was a teenager, Stevie Wonder's album Songs in the Key of Life was just this transformational moment. And I felt that way then, but I didn't quite understand it. But over the last year, I've been just rediscovering that music. And it was cutting edge, talking about technology, it advanced technology and music. It was really cutting edge in terms of his use of technology and synthesizers and electronic sounds. But it was also rooted in this lyric that both described the harm of our past, but the hope

• 47:05Speaker 00

  of our future. And, you know, when you encounter a piece of art like that, that's now like almost 50 years old, and it still has that power and that kind of promise, it really inspires you.

• 47:19Aria Finger?

  Definitely gonna listen to that on my commute home. Thank you, Brian.

• 47:23Reid Hoffman?

  And I was about to say the same thing. I'm gonna be listening to that today. What other things outside of this are inspiring you and giving you some hope?

• 47:32Speaker 00

  You know, I've become much more interested in the power of art and culture to help people hear and see things that they need to hear and see, to think differently about the world. And I think, you know, it's because we've been involved in creating this memorial and creating this museum. I really underestimated the power of these spaces to have an impact on the issues that I care most deeply about. So I'm excited about that. You know, when we opened our national memorial, we commissioned a Ghanaian artist named Kwame Okotobamfo to do a sculpture about slavery. And we have this sculpture at our memorial, and it depicts six people. And it really reveals the brutality of slavery, but it also reveals the humanity

• 48:17Speaker 00

  of the enslaved. And I've been so moved by the number of people who have said, yeah, I've lived in this country my whole life, and I've never seen a sculpture about slavery that depicts its brutality, but also the humanity. And it's changed my relationship to that institution. And I now see in art and in these kinds of cultural efforts, the opportunity to uplift, to inspire. You know, I had the privilege of going to the Biennial and I saw Simone Lee's brick house and these structures, this imposing, powerful, twenty some foot black woman that embodied this strength, but also this resilience and courage. When you see it, it creates a different relationship to how do you think about what we can do in the world?

• 49:01Speaker 00

  So I see in art and culture, real power. We have a project where we're putting markers at every lynching site. And each time we put up one of these markers and communities come together, there's a lot of emotion, there's a lot of conversation. But there's a lot of hope about communities recovering from this difficult past. And I, I'm now seeing in art and culture, the power to transform in a new way, a way I kind of, that sustained me and carried me when I was younger. But now I have a deeper appreciation of just what make, what can make a difference in the lives of people and a community on some of these difficult issues.

• 49:41Reid Hoffman?

  And actually, your comments remind me about, of the many magical parts of the Legacy Museum, is the urns of earth from the lynchings is not just kind of, I felt that very grounding, you know, as a yes, the intensity of this.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Oh, well, thank you, thank you. Yeah, we want everybody to come to Montgomery and spend time at our Legacy Museum and our National Memorial. It's a pilgrimage, it's a journey, but we think it can be a really important one to have that exposure, to hear these voices. It's a first person narrative museum. And I think there's nothing quite like hearing the voices of people who have lived through some of these experiences, to begin to imagine what you can do in your lifetime during this era to create a healthier world.

• 50:30Aria Finger?

  Yeah, I love that call to action for everyone because we all need to be part of the solution. We've been talking a lot about technology. And so I'd ask, is there one technology that you're excited about that has really sort of potential to change criminal justice?

• 50:45Speaker 00

  I think technology that is promising is, I do think we have now the ability to immerse people into environments that would not otherwise be accessible to them. And that, I believe, is really exciting because if we can help people understand the torment and the travail and the challenge of fleeing your home and crossing the border, which is what technology has done in some of the exhibits that have come out, where we can help people understand what it's like to be confined in a cage and be worried about where your children are and all of that.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  I think immersion can build empathy, can build our compassion, can help us see things and understand things that we need to see and hear. Storytelling has always had that power, which is why so many of us have been impacted by movies and by books and by film and by culture. Technology that is immersive, I think, intensifies the storytelling and can really produce a kind of awareness that helps us recognize that all children are children. It helps us recognize that we have to push back against those who otherize people because of their ethnicity or their religion or their color or their race. And I hope we see more of that.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Technology that makes it easier to understand one another, to hear one another, to see one another is, for me, the kind of technology that will allow us to build a healthier world.

• 52:23Reid Hoffman?

  Well, we've been talking about this, you know, throughout our entire discussion about achievable, what happens if everything breaks humanity's way? If like, you know, kind of the narrative catches fire, what do you think like is achievable in the next 15 years? Like, what do you think you go this, this, and this? These are the things that they're within our grasp of our lifetimes. We just need to reach for them.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a lot. I mean, I really do think we could eliminate extreme punishment and sentencing. I think we could reduce the prison population radically. I think we could create billions of dollars to invest in education and interventions of help that help those who are most marginalized. I think if we were committed, we could eliminate hunger and food insecurity in America in the next 15 years. We have the capacity to do that. We could create access to healthcare that allowed us to treat many of the mental health problems that then turn into behavioral problems that turn into crimes and violence. All of those things, I don't think it's crazy to say, if we were committed and we focused on that over the next 15 years, we could do that.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  And we would be a radically, radically healthier society. I think that then would lay the foundation for really big dreams, really big ideas. You know, we say at the end of our museum that the purpose of the museum is to create a world where the children of our children are no longer burdened by the legacy of slavery, no longer constrained by narratives of racial difference. And I don't think that's a crazy aspiration. I don't think that's an impossible dream. But it will require a kind of work, a kind of commitment. And so I think all of those things are achievable. We're a wealthy nation. We have the resources. We're not like a lot of other countries that just can't find the means to do some of the things

• 54:19Speaker 00

  that need to be done. But we have to start articulating a future that's more equitable, that's more just, that's healthier, that's more inclusive, and that recognizes that the freedom and equality and justice that's better, that's waiting for us, is going to mean that we have to care more about injustice and the lack of freedom and the inequality that continues to burden us.

• 54:50Reid Hoffman?

  Aria, that was, that was, as always in Talking to Brian, was a amazing experience.

• 54:57Aria Finger?

  He is such a genuine human. I was stifling back tears when he was talking about treating children like children because the idea that you'd look at a black 10-year-old and a white 10-year-old and think one of them is a super predator and one of them is a child. I mean, yeah, you can't not cry. It's insane.

• 55:15Reid Hoffman?

  And in part of the, the kind of the justice moments is not just the justice for people who are wrongly imprisoned, they're not a threat to people, wrongly tortured, but also it's justice for all of us in terms of like, who do you want to be? What society do you want to be part of? And like when we were talking about the death penalty, when innocent people are wrongly executed, their blood is on all of our hands. It's on the blood of our society. It's one of the reasons to, to get rid of the barbaric death penalty. And it's not just for them, but to stop this wrong activity for us and as part of who

• 55:57Reid Hoffman?

  we can become as human beings. Read the book, go to the museum, do the pilgrimage, all of this as part of that pilgrimage. Do the pilgrimage because it's part of the joy of you discovering every individual that you too can be on this path of humanity.

• 56:17Aria Finger?

  And it was so interesting that he was so hopeful about the future and he saw so many ways that technology could be used in the future to create this better world. When he gave specifics, you would imagine, oh, he'd say, okay, technology for predictive policing or predictive for better ankle monitors or predicted, like, we can use technology to do. And he said, no, no, no, no, we're framing the questions the wrong way. We can use technology to lift us all up and see who needs help. We can use technology to identify the young people who need more help with reading. We can use technology, and you've said it so many times, Reid, to get every kid a tutor. We can use technology to give people mental health solutions. So all of these technological solutions we've been

• 57:02Aria Finger?

  thinking about are actually the same technological solutions that we need in our criminal justice system. We just need to apply them so we can reduce the people in the system so that we can... Treat humans like humans, honestly. That would be a great place to start, in my mind. And it was just, it was so striking that that's where he went. Because of course, he's a, he's a human first kind of guy.

• 57:25Reid Hoffman?

  The right question is, how do we help people? Right? The right question is, how do we get the reintegration in the society? And that right question is the right prompts. Right? That not only are we doing prompt directing, obviously, of the AI and the Rorschach test of what we see in doing it, you know, with kind of GBD forward sort of, but it's the right prompts for us as human beings. It's that, that, that the right question is like, yes, yes, yes. What, what do you want to see happen? Because what you'd want to see is, no, no, we'd have healing. We'd have, we'd have the progress by which we're living in a society, you know, compassionately, together. That's what, like, how do we help? That's the right prompt.

• 58:10Aria Finger?

  Absolutely. And, and as you said, if there's 80 million Americans who have had, have been arrested, have an interaction with the criminal justice system, and then the rest of the Americans are, are, those are their brothers and sisters, and they're living with that, like, we, in order to fix this, in order to change this, we need to help everyone. We need to heal everyone. Like, this is a stain on everyone if we, if we don't do something about it. And so, right, what are the questions we should be asking? What are those prompts?

• 58:43Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network. Hosted by me, Reid Hoffman, and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sarah Schlied. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 58:57Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Caitlin McCaskey, Taylor Washington, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, and Ben Relis.