[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on the Open Mind.

I'm truly honored to welcome our guest today, Bryan Stevenson, who needs no introduction, but for those of you who don't know him he is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Bryan, an honor to meet you and to welcome you on the Open Mind.

Thank you.

It's great to be with you.

Bryan.

You probably know this, but Dr. King made his first national television appearance on the Open Mind in 1957 with my grandfather.

You like Dr. King, are a pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement of 2020, this age that we live in today.

First, today in the Justice movement, we hear a lot of discussion about the front end and the backend.

And I wanted to clarify that with you from the outset and understand for our viewers and listeners, when people talk about the front end of the justice system versus the back end of the justice system, what do they mean?

Yeah, I think the front end really refers to this unique phenomena in America that has taken place over the last half century, where our prison population has gone from less than 300,000 nationally to over 2 million.

In the 1970s and '80s, we dramatically changed the sentencing laws in this country and expanded the kinds of sentences that could be imposed on a range of new behaviors.

So you had politicians from both political parties in the 1970s saying that people who are drug addicted and drug dependent are criminals, who should be punished for their addiction and dependency.

That sent hundreds of thousands of people to our jails and prisons that had never previously gone to jail or prison.

And today, of course, we argue that that was a mistake that we should have said that addiction and dependency is a health problem that needs a health response.

But what it yielded was this outbreak of extreme punishment, life imprisonment without parole, very lengthy sentences.

Three strikes you're out.

And so our prison population went from 300,000 in the early 1970s to over 2 million.

We have 5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's in prison.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

The front end refers to all of that matrix of sentencing laws and harsh punishments that have put so many people in our jails and prisons.

The backend refers to the hundreds of thousands of people who've gone through that system who have then been released.

We now have millions of people who are under the criminal justice control system.

They've been on probation, they're on parole.

And for this large and growing population of people who've been impacted by our criminal legal system.

There are these questions about what we do to help people who come out of jail or prison stay out of jail or prison.

And that's a really big question given the fact that in 2001, the Bureau of Justice projected that one in three Black male babies born in this country is expected to go to jail or prison.

One in six Latino boys is expected to go to jail or prison, and one in 15 Americans.

And so how are we going to help this huge population of people impacted by this system we have created over the last half century, is really the question that we think about when we think about the backend.

That backend refers to the fact you point out that there are more people under supervision, system impacted people on probation or parole than are actually incarcerated at this moment.

What do we want to do about that in a sustainable way to carry forward policies that are going to arrest the vicious cycle on the backend?

Well, I do think we have to radically shift our narrative about what we're trying to do when people make mistakes, when people commit crimes.

I think throughout the end of the 20th century, the only question policymakers were asking is how harshly should we punish someone for the crime they've committed?

Should we execute them?

Should we condemn them to die in prison?

Should we keep in prison for decades?

No one was really asking, what should we do to help people who have made mistakes, so that they don't make those mistakes again?

We really abandoned this concept of rehabilitation, of correction because the politics of that era was dominated by fear and anger.

We were only responding to the narratives that were shaping policy across the country.

I think we're now learning that it is costly, too costly to put everybody in prison and not care whether they stay out of prison when we release them.

And we've spent billions of dollars that have taken from state budgets, money for education, money for health and human services, money for highways, money for infrastructure, money for helping expand economic opportunities to the poor and middle class.

And I think that sobering constraint on spending, has made more people be curious about what we could be doing to reduce our recidivism rate to keep people out of jails and prisons.

And there are things obviously we can do on the front end.

I think treating addiction and dependency as a health problem rather than as crime problem, would do a lot to not only reduce the number of people going in jails or prisons but also help communities that continue to struggle with high rates of opioid addiction and death.

I mean, the opioid epidemic has just been devastating to communities across this country, particularly rural communities, where there have been very few interventions.

There are a lot of other punishments that we've created.

Punishing people who are the victims of sex trafficking because they're forced and compelled into these lifestyles that have criminality aspects and a lot of other things.

So, that's part of what we can do to reduce the burden that I think over incarceration has created in America.

But I also think we have to do a lot on this backend side.

I think it actually begins with what we do with people when they are incarcerated.

Our prisons have become more violent.

They become more non responsive to the needs of people with mental health challenges, behavioral problems.

There's less treatment, less care, less education in our jails and prisons today than there was in the 1970s and '80s.

And that creates a crisis because if you have people with severe disabilities, people with mental health problems, and you don't respond to those problems, and then you put them in a very stressful, traumatizing environment like prison, they're not going to be better when they come out.

They're actually going to be worse.

And so an intervention that looks to improve the rehabilitative quotient in our jails and prisons, I think would do an enormous amount to end this destructive cycle.

We have an opportunity to work with people who are undereducated to actually provide them with the educational skills and sources and resources that they need.

I was encouraged when the tech sector began looking to build a generation of workers that could work in the green economy.

And many of these sectors started working with people and institutions like jails and prisons, people on probation, people on parole.

There are opportunities to treat people with lifelong disabilities that have never gotten treatment while they are in custody.

I think that part of it is gonna be a really important part of how we, again, change the future.

And then when people come out, I think we have to make the conditions for success much less perilous.

Most of the people that go back to prison in this country go back for what we call technical violations.

They go back because they haven't paid a parole, monthly parole fee.

They go back because they miss an appointment with a custodial official.

While we don't want people missing appointments or not making payments, I don't think it's sensible to send somebody back to prison for 10, 20 or 30 years just because they missed that one appointment.

Sometimes people miss appointments.

I've had clients miss appointments because they had a health crisis had a heart attack, were in the hospital, couldn't get to their probation officer or their parole officer and then get revoked, sent back to the prison with costly health problems that now the state has to try to manage in a custodial setting.

So, I think changing that framework so that we are motivated to actually keep people out of prison rather than looking for any opportunity, any excuse to send people back to prison if they make a mistake if they have a technical violation.

And I do think it's worth pointing out here, Alex, that that means removing the economic incentive that a small group of people have in keeping our prison population high.

We didn't have this in the '70s and '80s, but today we have private prisons that actually make money only if the prison population is at a certain high level to keep the beds filled.

And I think that has created this perverse incentive to support these kinds of technical revocations.

And they don't worry that people go back to prison.

I think for the rest of society, people who care about public safety, people who care about the health of a community, we ought to all want to keep people from going back to prison after they've served their time and have been released.

So, is that reverse perverse incentive as much at a factor on the backend?

How do you demonetize that effectively?

As we look at a legislative year approaching now in 2025 with a new president, a new congress, 50 governors and state houses across the country, what's the most effective strategy to engage in that demonetization if in fact that's the most critical assignment?

Well, I think it's certainly one of the critical assignments.

And I really think we just have to retreat entirely from the concept of imprisonment for a profit.

If you give private players financial incentives to keep a prison population high, it's gonna be hard to combat the forces that they can unleash in legislative spaces, in policy making spaces.

'Cause let's face it, we have a criminal justice system that frequently treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.

The people who are incarcerated or largely people with very few resources, and they don't have the economic ability to counter the lobbying and the spending that often goes along with opposing bills, that would reduce or eliminate revocation for technical violations.

And so I think we have to just make a policy decision that we dont want people profiting economically by high levels of incarceration because we think that that doesn't actually help us get to public safety.

It doesn't help us get to healthy communities.

And there are a lot of states that are now saying, we don't want private prisons.

We're not going to do that anymore.

It was a failed experiment that went on for 20 or 30 years, and we now realize that it's not helping us advance public safety I'd like to see that spread, frankly, across the country.

I think the services that we provide to people need to be provided by people who are not motivated by money.

And that includes things like healthcare, that includes things like access to basic supplies, phone calls.

All of these things have been given over to the private sector that has an interest in high prices, but beyond that, high populations of people in jails and prisons.

And so I do think we have to just say, no, we actually wanna get to the point where we do not have the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

We think our nation will be stronger if the rate of people being incarcerated is not as high as one out of three young Black men, or one out of six young Latino boys or one out of 15 Americans.

That ought to be something that motivates us to do better.

It is not a measure of a good society, a healthy society, a democratic society where opportunity is flourishing.

So I think that's number one.

Number two, I also think we have to make it expedient and profitable to keep people out of jails or prisons.

We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this carceral universe that we've built, and I think it's just too much.

And if we reduce the number of prison beds that are in this country, we will actually incentivize the kind of spending, the kind of activities that will actually keep people out.

And I think if you look at the juvenile system, Alex, there's a lot to learn there.

There were states that were spending over $150,000 a year, to keep children under the age of 18 in juvenile detention facilities.

And when somebody began to think about that, they began to realize that wow, for a lot less than that, we could keep these kids out of facilities.

And not only that, help them get to a better place.

Most of us, if you gave us $50,000 a year to work with a young person who's struggling, we could turn that young person's opportunities and future into something really bright and hopeful.

And if we gave that money to professionals, we really could do that, and we could reduce the spending by a third and promote public safety.

Because I think public safety is a big part of this.

My view is that we could reduce the prison population in America by half today, and you would not see an increase in crime rates tomorrow.

It would not have any impact on public safety.

But what it would do is generate hundreds of millions of dollars that could then be spent on services, on public safety, on care, on education, on programs that facilitate the kind of transition that would help communities become healthier.

How are we doing?

[laughs] What progress are we making?

Is there a certain metric that you've assessed in these recent years that shows promise, meaning we can look at it and say the system has shrunk in these 12 states, or even in just one state and public safety has improved?

Yeah.

I think there are four or five metrics that I think we should pay attention to And in some areas we've done, we've made a lot of progress.

And in others the progress has stalled.

And there's one or two where I worry that we could be at risk of repeating the mistakes of the past.

Where we've made some progress is in recognizing that having the largest prison population in the world is not healthy.

It's not sustainable.

It's not something we can afford.

And it actually degrades the quality of life for almost everyone.

And so that steady growth of the prison population that you saw in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early aughts has slowed, and the prison population has stabilized.

We haven't seen continued growth over the last six or seven years.

And I think that's an encouraging sign.

The second thing we've done is to really shift the narrative 'Cause the narrative drives these policies.

It was a narrative that people using drugs and dependent on drugs were criminals that had to be punished, that pushed us into this place.

When people were competing on who was the toughest on crime, we were vulnerable to a lot of excessive punishments.

I had clients who stole a bicycle and got life without parole.

People who wrote bad checks for less than a hundred dollars, getting life without parole because of habitual felony offender laws.

And no one seemed to think that was too much.

And I think that narrative has shifted.

There are some states that have done some really impressive things to bring down their population while improving public safety that become models, that other states could use if they were motivated to do that.

I think the barrier, and this is where I worry that you are beginning to hear some of the repeat of some of that rhetoric that pushed us in the '80s and '90s.

There's the growing emergence of what I call the politics of fear and anger, where we "otherize" people and wanna throw people away.

And I think that kind of rhetoric makes us vulnerable to repeating the mistakes of the past.

If we can push back against that, get to the point where we can all want to be in a nation that doesn't have the highest rate of incarceration, that wants to see people succeed, then I think we can do some really important things.

And then the last I think metric is what kind of commitment are we going to make structurally, to improve outcomes for people who are dealing with disabilities, mental health disabilities?

What are we gonna do to help people dealing with addiction and dependency so that they can get to a new relationship with that dependency that has shaped their lives?

What are we going to do to reduce the level of violence?

Because people have quick access to guns because, arguments that used to happen 50 years ago are now deadly shootouts.

We've gotta deal with those issues and we gotta make a commitment to reducing gun violence, to improving mental health care and treatment for people who have been traumatized, and be responsive to the poor and the neediest people in our society.

If we do those things, then I think we can see real promise on both the front end and the back end.

We do still see folks on death row and also folks executed where there is a preponderance of evidence to exonerate them, but not the legal avenue to actually do so.

But I know your work is a testament to the fact, I hope that there's been a decline in wrongful prosecutions and convictions over the last decade.

Is that accurate that there has been?

Well, I think there's certainly been an increased awareness of the problem.

You know, 20 years ago it was very hard to get people to take seriously this question of of wrongful conviction.

We began to see that change 25 years ago.

We began to see that change at the end of the '90s when a lot of new evidence, DNA helped us usher in an era where we could prove people were wrongly convicted.

That raised other questions.

And we have seen a lot of progress.

The death sentencing rate in this country has dropped dramatically over the last 10 years.

The execution rate has dropped dramatically.

Eight states have abolished the death penalty, but there's still a tremendous amount of work to do.

When prosecutors were all talking eight years ago about conviction integrity units and doing everything that could be done to make sure that people wrongly convicted were identified and exonerated, I was very hopeful.

About half of those prosecutors have stopped talking about that in this moment.

So, I still think we're in this narrative struggle, but we have the tools to greatly improve the reliability of our system.

We do.

So, you do think that it is predominantly on the backend in which this crisis still resides, that is wrongful prosecutions and convictions that occurred years or decades ago as opposed to incoming malfeasance or miscarriages of justice?

Yeah, I think it would depend on where you are.

So for example, I know that in places like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, there's been a real commitment to eliminate any doubt before convicting someone of a very serious crime.

There are other regions where you haven't seen that change, and I wish I could say things are more likely to, problems are more likely to be avoided in some counties across the south and Midwest than we'll see.

But I can't say that because we haven't seen that kind of change.

I don't think there's any question, though that the biggest problems were evident in that big push when everybody was just rushing to throw people into jail and prison, in the '80s and the '90s and the early aughts.

And I do think that's where you're gonna see the greatest percentage of wrongful convictions in our larger kind of infrastructure in larger universe of people impacted.

It doesn't mean that it's not happening now because it is happening now.

I just think in a lot of the areas you've just seen a greater attention to the problem of wrongful conviction.

And certainly the places where there are conviction integrity units, we've seen a lot of progress made in those jurisdictions.

When it comes to the status of our cities and the unhoused and the economically dispossessed.

When you see a crisis of huge proportions in major cities, does your mind go to the miscarriage of the justice system, the hijacking of the justice system, when you see that kind of decay?

And that occurs in rural rural communities too.

It's not a strictly urban problem.

But as Bryan Stevenson, when you see the unhoused in our cities, does your mind immediately go to this as a consequence of what transpired in the '80s and '90s?

It does.

I mean, I think it is fundamentally unjust in a nation with our resources that we have so many communities where the problems of the unhoused, the problems of the poor, the problems of people dealing with disabilities and trauma are so manifest.

To me, it is fundamentally unjust to have the means and the resources to do something about these problems and then not do it.

And we had opportunities, 'cause many of these people have been in our criminal legal system, and so we had those opportunities and we didn't respond to those problems then.

And so now we see them manifest today.

But I think the second part of it is that we have not made a commitment to addressing poverty in this country.

I mean, at DJI, my organization, we now have two of our largest programs are anti-poverty programs.

We have a program where were providing support to people who are food insecure.

And these are largely working class single parent families where there's food insecurity.

And by providing the household head $400 a month over six months, we see these families avoid the kind of crisis that results in homelessness, that results in distress and then criminal engagement.

And we're a small nonprofit and we've spent, you know, a few million dollars on this.

But we've seen remarkable progress with over 4,000 families that have benefited from that.

If you took this to scale and you think about what government could do in urban areas and in rural communities, I just think we could absolutely do so much better to eliminate these problems.

And I think the injustice is our unwillingness to see this as a fixable problem, a solvable problem.

I think we've gotten this false idea that people wanna be out, you know, vulnerable to abuse and the cold and the elements that they don't want to live in a comfortable environment.

They don't want to be responsible.

And I just think that's a false narrative.

Most people don't want to be haunted and tormented by psychosis or schizophrenia or a range of mental health problems.

And I think we have to see that as a challenge to our commitment to eliminating bias and poverty, eliminating the health crises that many people carry.

But yes, also taking advantage of the opportunities that we've had in the justice system to come up with more equitable and more effective solutions for people who are struggling.

What is the most realistic prescription in 2025 on a bipartisan basis?

When you look at the possibility of reform, and it might be an anti-poverty, national, federal program.

It might be something specific to the front or backend, but for you, what's the most realistic bipartisan governing reform or legislation that you would suggest?

I think the federal government should make a major commitment to helping the states recover from a half century of over incarceration.

The reason why our prison population got so big was actually on the state side.

Less than 10% are in our federal prisons.

And so I'm not interest I'm interested in what's happening there, but I don't think it, I think it's a mistake to focus exclusively there.

Billions of dollars went from the federal government to the states to incentivize more enforcement, more incarceration, more imprisonment, more extreme sentencing.

And I think we need a counter investment, to bring down these populations.

And so I would love to see something like the Infrastructure Act law that we saw during the Biden administration enacted to the justice, the health, the public health, public safety initiative of 2025 would be a major investment to help states bring down their prison populations, improve public healthcare for people dealing with disability, dealing with trauma, dealing with the emotional triggers that often engage people in the criminal legal system, and then building an infrastructure.

Help these states build an infrastructure where we can house, feed, retrain, retool, educate people to have functional independent lives.

That would be number one.

Number two would be a major anti-poverty initiative that just seeks to eliminate hunger in America.

I don't think we've been bold enough.

I don't think we've been ambitious enough.

We have so much money in this country.

We have enough food that's wasted to totally eliminate hunger in America.

But we've allowed the effort to feed the hungry to become partisan and structured and bureaucratic and mediated by a lot of partners and players that don't have ending hunger as a primary goal.

And I think that has to shift.

And I just think we have the capacity to eliminate food insecurity in this country.

And when we do that, we're going to see fewer people dealing with homelessness.

We're gonna see fewer people dealing with the petty thefts.

And we're gonna do a lot of those things that disrupt our our sense of safety and comfort, I think will be addressed.

And then the last thing would be just change the narrative about rehabilitation and restoration, about grace and mercy.

We've made it unpopular to say, I'm a politician and I believe in grace for those whove fallen.

I want mercy for those who've made mistakes.

I wanna help people recover when they make mistakes.

I don't wanna just punish people.

I don't want to just throw people away.

I wanna actually get us to the point where no one commits a crime.

And if they made me czar, I'd say our goal long term is to end crime.

And nobody talks like that.

And I think we need to be talking more about how we can end these crimes through interventions that if we put our mind to it, I think it could be effective and transformative.

I'd love America to become the safest society in the country, the society that has a response to human failure and mistake that other countries wanna emulate, rather than the most punitive society on the planet.

I don't think that's something that can sustain us long term, if we're gonna be the kind of moral and democratic leader that a lot of us would like to see this country be.

Bryan Stevenson, an honor for you to join me today.

Thank you so much for your insight.

My pleasure.

[music] Please visit the Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind Download the podcast on Apple and Spotify and check us out on X, Instagram and Facebook.

Continuing production of the Open Mind has been made possible by grants from Vital Projects Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, and Draper Foundation.