“who want to reduce incarceration is a way of taking advantage of the power that cities and metropolitan areas and local communities have […].”
Sept. 17, 2019 (Crystal Gwizdala/S&H Editor)
By Patrick Sochacki
SAGINAW – Delta College president Jean Goodnow welcomed a crowd to the historic Temple Theatre in downtown Saginaw for the first President’s Speaker Series presentation of the fall semester.
Goodnow introduced the speaker, Emily Bazelon, a staff reporter for the New York Times and a professor at Yale Law School. Bazelon recently wrote a bestselling book titled “Charged.”
“Through her tireless research, [Bazelon] uncovered the impact that prosecutors have within the criminal justice system leading to the mass incarceration rates in the past 40 years,” said Goodnow. “Tonight we will be discussing the ramifications of the broken parts of our system, along with the possible solutions.”
When Bazelon took the stage, a warm round of applause filled the air as she wished the audience a happy Constitution Day.
“For me, it’s the perfect occasion to be speaking to you,” Emily said with a slight chuckle. “I’m a law nerd by nature and I wrote a book that is about the power of prosecutors. […] In a lot of ways, its sort of hidden message is the power of democracy.”
The discussion began with how she had the idea for writing “Charged,” which came from the time she was writing an article for the New York Times about the three-strikes law in California.
“California had this very harsh sentencing law: if you get convicted of a third crime, then you would go to prison for life,” said Bazelon. “There was a ballot initiative to change the three-strikes law and make it less harsh.”
Bazelon went on to mention how she talked to the elected prosecutor, Steve Cooley, in Los Angeles and found out that he supported the law. She was surprised by this.
When asked why he chose to support the law, he told a story about a man named Gregory Taylor. Gregory had a case that showed up in Steve’s office, but did not go to Steve. It went to a different attorney.
The case was based on the crime of Gregory Taylor unscrewing the screws to the screen door of a food pantry. It was 5 a.m. and he was hungry. The prosecutor that received the case charged Gregory with his third strike. He went to prison for the rest of his life.
Steve said that if this case had come to him, he would have never charged Gregory with a third strike. This struck Bazelon.
“I had never thought about the idea that the desk your case lands on could really determine the whole course of your life,” said Bazelon. “But once I noticed the power that prosecutors have, I started to see it everywhere. Then, when I started working on my book, what I saw was, there is a real connection between the power of prosecutors and the way in which mass incarceration has risen so much in this country.”
in an exclusive interview backstage at the Temple Theatre. Sept. 17, 2019
(Crystal Gwizdala/S&H Editor)
Emily Bazelon dives deep into “Charged”
The Collegiate spoke with Bazelon prior to her presentation to get some further insight into her book.
Patrick Sochacki: Can you just tell me generally what your book is about?
Emily Bazelon: Sure! My book is about the power of prosecutors and it tells the story of a young woman in Memphis named Noura and a young man from Brooklyn named Kevin. They are both people who went through the criminal justice system and whose lives were really shaped by the different prosecutors who charged them with crimes. So I used their case to show the different ways prosecutors use their power, and also to look at the new movement to elect prosecutors who are looking to reduce mass incarceration.
Sochacki: What does the incarceration rate in America look like?
Bazelon: There are more than 2 million people in jail and prison in the United States right now. That is five times the number that we imprisoned in the 1970s. One way to think about this is that in the 70s, we had the same rate of incarceration as countries in Scandinavia, like Sweden and Denmark. They continued at that same level and we went up this enormous amount.”
Sochacki: Do you believe progressive district attorneys are the best weapon against mass incarceration and the issues we have in the justice system today?
Bazelon: I think they’re a shortcut to reducing mass incarceration. The cleanest solution is for lawmakers to pass new laws. If sentences are too harsh, then that responsibility lies in the cleanest way with the legislature. Legislatures can repeal mandatory minimum sentences, they can lower punishments and they can clean up the criminal codes which have over 4,000 crimes in them in a lot of states. But state legislatures can be a heavy lift for change. They’re big organisms to get your hands around. So I think the movement to elect prosecutors who want to reduce incarceration is a way of taking advantage of the power that cities and metropolitan areas and local communities have to have their own say in what criminal justice should look like where they live.
Sochacki: You have mentioned in your writing that when you started to research for the book, the change currently going on in the system was not really occurring. Could you tell me about the wave of change you started to see?
Bazelon: I think you really see that wave take off in 2016. That election saw about a dozen prosecutors run as candidates who are saying “we are going to have fewer people in prison, we want prison and jail to be a last resort, we want to get rid of cash bail, I don’t think we should be putting people in jail for smoking marijuana.” There are a number of elements to this platform. And these folks won! I think what you see in these races is that local communities really got the vote out for people who are directly affected by the criminal justice system. Then I think you also see people who are conservative, and want the government to spend money wisely, getting concerned about all the billions of dollars we spend on incarceration and wondering what we’re really getting from it. So it’s a combination of these local community groups, often inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, and then it has this bipartisan element where you have conservatives who are fiscal hawks and are also supporting these kinds of reform candidates.
Sochacki: You mentioned plea deals in your book. Do you believe plea deals are dangerous to democracy and our constitutional freedoms?
Bazelon: The constitution provides for the right to a jury trial. It doesn’t say anything about plea bargains and a jury of your peers means the state has to prove the evidence against you. It’s a really important check on government power. It’s the time when we find out whether the police followed the law when they searched you, whether the prosecutors followed the law; there are all kinds of reasons why trials are important. Yet we live in a country where more than 95% of convictions are obtained through plea bargains. We are so dependent on plea bargaining; it’s hard to imagine the system without it.
Sochacki: In the appendix of your book, you lay out a 21-point plan for ways to change the system in a positive way. What is the most important point in your opinion?
Bazelon: I think the most important overall point is shrinking the size of the system. So you can do that by declining to prosecute some minor crimes like fare beating in New York, or I would argue marijuana falls into this category. You also do it by using jail and prison as your last resort and thinking about how long someone really needs to be separated from society for. You know we’ve gotten accustomed in this country to sentences that are much longer than in other countries and we don’t get an extra deterrence benefit from them. The difference between going to jail for 3 years for a robbery, versus 5 or 10 or 15 years, there’s no evidence that person is going to be more likely [to reoffend] with a longer sentence than with a shorter sentence. We have a ton of research showing that once you’re in your late 30’s even if you committed a violent crime the chances you’re going to do something like that again are very low. We don’t take that into account in our sentencing policies, so I think this question of good resource use punishment is the most pressing question of all.
