Joshua Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 122 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Scott Hechinger about bail reform in New York. Scott Hechinger is the Founder and Director of Zealous, a national initiative that activates, trains and supports state and local public defenders in partnership with local organizations, the people and communities defenders represent, with and artists, to leverage storytelling and new media advocacy strategies to break through the noise, complicate prevailing narratives and end mass criminalization. Zealous was an outgrowth of Scott’s work as a public defender for close to a decade, first at Partnership for Children’s Rights representing low-income families and children in special education litigation, and then at Brooklyn Defender Services representing people charged with crimes who couldn’t afford an attorney. Welcome to the DecarcerationNation podcast, Scott.
Scott Hechinger
So glad to be on and it’s been way too long in coming. We’ve been trying to do this, but it’s my fault. And I’m glad to be with you.
Josh Hoe
I think we’re both tried to do it several times, and it just never worked on the schedule. And I’m glad we finally made it work.
I always ask the same first question: How did you get from wherever you started, to where you were a public defender, and then to where you were starting organizations designed to end mass incarceration?
Scott Hechinger
It’s a good first question. I’ll maybe take it in three snapshots. I grew up in Washington, DC. I was a seventh-generation Washingtonian. I have no idea why, but my folks got off the boat in the early 1820s, in Baton Rouge from Germany, escaping from violence there and headed straight to the swamp, and have been there ever since, and so I’ve broken the legacy. So my folks are upset with me. But I remember in DC, I grew up looking up to my grandfather, my grandfather was, like me, a white privileged man. He was a business owner. And he was also appointed the first chairman of the DC City Council by Lyndon Johnson. And he could have just gone about his business and continued to amass wealth and not focused outward, but he really did what he could, not to give back, but to give forward. I remember, his office was down in the basement of his house. His wall was filled with photos of him shaking hands with civil rights leaders marching on Washington, meeting with business leaders. He was among the first to hire black people into senior management positions and did a lot of work with NAACP. As the chairman of the DC City Council, he desegregated the police force. Now, hindsight is 2020, that clearly has not changed things despite a desegregated police force in most places. But it was revolutionary at the time, and around conversations with regard to the mandatory minimum sentences for gun violence, he was adamantly opposed to it, even though he was very much for gun control. I remember his handshake school, I called it the handshake school. And that really drove me early on just to get a sense of public service. And I really looked up to him and also just like how to use, or the obligation really,to use this power and privilege, to not waste it and to actually pay it forward. I went to law school to put myself in the best position to do what my grandfather did in different formats. He wasn’t a lawyer, I was the first person in my family to go to law school. But I remember not knowing exactly what issue was going to be [mine] and how I was going to kind of hone in on that issue. And within the first day or so during the orientation, I heard Bryan Stevenson speak; he was a professor, I went to law school at NYU School of Law. And it was a speech that many have heard. It never gets old. It is powerful, it’s deeply personal. The two things that stuck out to me – stick out to a lot of people – are that criminal justice is the civil rights issue of our time, and everyone is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.
Josh Hoe
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that speech three times and it’s been amazing every time.
Scott Hechinger
I get it. Anyway, after that speech, I was like, I know my issue is going to be criminal justice and I’m tethering myself to that guy. And for whatever it’s worth, my first law experience was doing really early state-by-state research on mandatory minimums, mandatory juvenile life without parole sentences, that in very small part supported his ultimate argument in the Supreme Court v. Sullivan, to end juvenile life without parole for juveniles in non-homicide cases. And he was the one who encouraged me to become a public defender. I didn’t know what I wanted to do my first summer as a lawyer, he said what do you want to do? I said I want to work with people. I want to work on the frontlines. I want to fight the system, I want to be as close to where the injustice is as possible. He’s like, You should be a public defender, and New Orleans just set up an office for the first time; it was one of the silver linings of Hurricane Katrina. I headed down there and saw public defenders, both as activists, I remember Steve Singer, the head of the office getting literally dragged out in handcuffs, being held in contempt of court for making simple legal arguments, and I also saw defenders of storytellers. My job in New Orleans, as an intern, was literally I was the runner. And the runner was the person who needed to meet as many people as we possibly could, in the 30 minutes before these mass arraignments in the Orleans Parish Prison loading dock, to find out as much about them as we could and connect as much as we could and then literally run these like short stories, the three blocks in the blazing New Orleans summer heat, to the one public defender sitting in the witness box in the magistrate judge’s courtroom, where they looked through video screen at a sea of orange jumpsuits and indiscernible black faces and just basically set bail one after the other. And I don’t know if it was a masochist. It was a horrific summer. It was a moving summer, but it was like this is what I want to do. I’m gonna stop there because there’s more to talk about. But that was how I decided to become a public defender. How I got to starting this crazy thing called Zealous is the next part, but I feel like I’ve already been talking too long with this question.
Josh Hoe
Well, I do have to ask you, you said you grew up in DC and I think we’re a similar age. And so I have to, maybe this wasn’t part of your growing up. But I have to ask about gogo music and DC punk if you’re down with any of that.
Scott Hechinger
Actually primarily gogo. I am a drummer.
Josh Hoe
I’m a drummer too.
Scott Hechinger
So glad we finally connected; we found each other!
Josh Hoe
My dad’s a jazz drummer. It’s a small world.
Scott Hechinger
That’s amazing. No, my grandfather, a different grandfather, my grandfather on my mom’s side was a drummer. He was really into music. He was Mr. Blues. He was a DJ, but he had this drumset in his basement . . . a 1962 Slingerland black mother of pearl. Amazing – that I got all fixed up. And yeah, but I say I’m a drummer. Unfortunately, since my six-year-old was born I’ve kind of not been drumming, I can’t do it. But yes, Go Go music. I was obsessed with it. I was in a gogo band. I literally played drums, not like in a very big gogo band. But we had our own school gogo band. And yeah, for those of you don’t know, DC it’s a, I guess it’s like a combination, the way that I would describe it’s like, hip hop, funk, Latin rhythms, heavy bass, and more than the music itself, the experience of going to a gogo, which is just people usually dancing in, like really, really heavily in basketball gyms was just a scene, is part of DC life and culture.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, I didn’t live in DC. But one of my real joys as a young guy was passing tapes back and forth with people across the country. And that’s really how I learned music. And you know a lot of that stuff that would come back would have good gogo tracks on it and stuff like that. So that’s how I got into it a long time ago. So throughout this interview, I suspect we’re going to talk a lot about media and platforming. Since we’re talking about your time as a public defender, it seems like a decent time to ask this: Do you have a theory for why defense attorneys are rarely nominated for judgeships and rarely get to participate in things like media roundtables on crime. We see every prosecutor in the world get platformed, every prosecutor in the world gets judgeships. Why do only half of the folks who practice, or probably less than half of the folks that practice, get that privilege, or those privileges?
Scott Hechinger
It’s a complicated question, with different answers, and they all kind of intersect. One is tied in with broader conceptions in popular culture that’s kind of inborn from the moment that we are aware. You know, we learned that police are heroes, that’s the first thing we see in cartoons, and the next step is that public defenders, once you start learning about them, are unserious, uncaring, you know, bottom of the barrel, might as well not be attorney attorneys. There’s this deeply embedded understanding of who public defenders are, how serious we are about public policy, how expert we are on the system, how smart we are, how we have collective knowledge, and how as defenders and defender offices, we see just an enormous volume of cases and are able to actually see how the range of laws and practices intersect. The harm that people we represent, we see how these lofty laws that are interpreted by courts are really applied every day. That’s not what everyday people think, that’s what the general public thinks of, it’s not what leaders think of. And then beyond that, because of that public perception, which is more that we’re hapless, and we don’t care, we’re not an expert. But then it’s also that all we do is, you know, want to get people out of jail. And we don’t care about public health and safety. We do care about public health and safety. We have very different ideas about how to actually achieve that; we all are living in these communities, we’re all in cities, we don’t want people to get hurt. Unfortunately, this massive system that we have, and the hundreds of billions of dollars that we spend is not actually getting us to a place of public health and safety. But what leaders kind of see and I think what leaders fear, and this is why we don’t get appointed into judgeships and we don’t get placed in positions of power is that they fear the same kind of political suicide that comes with being quote-unquote, soft on crime, right? So defenders get lumped in with this, quote-unquote, soft on crime narrative. And if they appoint public defenders, then that’s opening them up to potential political attack for caring more about, quote-unquote, criminals, than victims, caring more about, you know, decarceration or abolition than safety, when those aren’t mutually exclusive. Well, last but not least, though, there’s some self-imposition on this issue of public defenders. And I saw this firsthand. You know, we, I think we don’t learn media skills like we don’t really learn how to talk to the media in law school. And then once we’re in court, we are taught, really importantly, to be client-centered, and client-centered becomes, looking at different defenders in defender offices becomes, “no comment”, becomes protective at all costs. There’s feelings that we don’t have – even from more socially conscious folks that are more into social justice – that we shouldn’t be speaking. Because what, why, why is it our role? There’s enough power dynamics inside of court. And that’s like, legit, why are we replicating that on the outside? I don’t think just because defenders are talking doesn’t mean that people represented can’t be. And so we limit ourselves. And so that’s where the concept and now the work of Zealous really started, early on, asking, as I’m in court every single day, with a massive amount of resources compared to other defender offices, with these social workers, and investigators with relatively low caseloads, which unfortunately means like 80 to 100 only, which is insane.
Scott Hechinger
But still, 95% of the people I’m representing are pleading guilty, whether they’re guilty or innocent, whether ….. the system constitutionally, and they were silenced. And I was asking, why aren’t we as defenders and as defender offices speaking out more? Why aren’t we collaborating in thinking about non-extractive and non-exploitative ways to partner with the people we represent, to breathe life into the systemic injustices that we’re seeing? Why aren’t we talking to the press more instead of saying no comment? We’re being reactive when they reach out about either a sensational case or even an issue everyone’s talking about like bail; why can’t we actually identify an issue and proactively pitch it to them so that someone learns about it. Why aren’t we using social media etc? We’re losing the battle over people’s perceptions about crime and punishment, and what it’s going to take to achieve public health and safety. We need to get engaged smartly, strategically in those conversations. And I think that then will lead not only to better policies but hopefully to more experienced people in positions of power.
Josh Hoe
Well, you brought up bail. And I know for a very long time, both of us have been screaming from the rooftops about New York’s bail reform law as loudly as we could, as often as we could. So I guess we should start there. When did New York pass its bail reform law? And what were the major innovations in that law?
Scott Hechinger
April 2019, bail reform was passed in New York and went into effect in 2020. The major innovations were ending the possibility of judges to set bail in most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Bail is an amount of money. It’s supposed to be an incentive, it’s an amount of money that after you’re charged, bail is set, it’s an amount of money to ensure you come back to court, you pay the money, and as long as you come back to court, even if you’re found guilty, even if you’re if even if you plead guilty, you get the money back. It’s not supposed to be a punishment. But in reality, the people who are filling our jails, 500,000 people around the country, 1000s in New York City, are people who just cannot afford to buy their freedom. And so for a certain class of crimes, non-violent crimes, it blocked judges from [setting] down. But what it also did was offer in its place, additional resources for people who were released, to get engaged with services, to give them reminders to show up to court. And before it even went into effect, it was being blamed for everything.
Josh Hoe
I want to go very deliberatively because there’s been so much talk about this over the last few years. I want to make sure we hit all the points so that anyone who’s listening has an idea why we get so frustrated by what’s going on with what the major narrative has been.
Scott Hechinger
That’s it, it was limiting the number of cases, types of cases where someone could end up caged on bail they couldn’t afford, it was in recognition of the fact that we knew from data, that bail was not necessary to ensure return to court. If we knew it before bail funds were around, we knew it certainly after bail funds were around, where we actually saw that in 96% of the time that judges …. on misdemeanors, they were wrong. Bail wasn’t necessary to ensure return to court; bail funds paid their money, they weren’t on the financial hook, and they still came back and overwhelmingly didn’t get re-arrested. So it was a modest response.
Josh Hoe
And there was also a part about discovery, right.
Scott Hechinger
So separating out the two, they’re both pretrial justice reforms. Bail has to do with pretrial caging. There’s intersections with discovery, which really means evidence. But discovery reform in New York, up until 2019, or up until 2020, when it went into effect, New York was one of the four most restrictive, least transparent states in the country when it came to evidence. Prosecutors literally were entitled by law to withhold the most important pieces of evidence until the day of trial; we’re talking about witness statements, police reports, things that when we would go to conferences outside of New York, we would talk about discovery laws, and other defense attorneys, including from Texas that has the most progressive discovery laws will look at us like we had three heads, like how can you prepare for trial? And the answer is you can’t. The other piece was we never made it to trial because guess what? Someone would plead guilty because they were incarcerated and wanted to go home pretrial and/or, on top of that, people were completely in the dark. They didn’t know what evidence was going to be used against them. And people are like, well, if they did it, they obviously know. But the truth of the matter is so many times in our cases, it’s like accomplice liability where like how close were they saying I was? or how did they tie me to this crime? And obviously, everyone knows how wrongful convictions happen all the time. So no, it was a major problem. Discovery reform literally just brought New York in line with the rest of the country. That’s literally all it did. And what that means is, not only allowing the defense and defendants to know the evidence against them, like in Texas, like in all the southern states, like in Florida, all the places you think would be backwards; not. But it also strengthened protections for victims of crime that didn’t exist before. So it made it so that prosecutors can still request, can actually affirmatively request to withhold witness information and kind of firewall it between defender and the defense attorney; the defense attorney might be able to see it. But they were under a strict obligation not to share, which was something new.
Josh Hoe
So before we get to the rest of the details of what happened after that, probably most people listening right now have a strong feeling about this in the first place. But nobody’s seen it as many times up close and personal as you have. So could you at least just talk about why you think pretrial release is so important. And I could talk about this for a week, you could probably talk about it for a week. But if you can just, you know, dig deep and give me a summary of what you think; why do we care so much about pretrial release?
Scott Hechinger
Number one, the constitutional presumption of innocence is a thing. And I think we should all care about that. We’re talking about caging people who have not been found guilty of anything, which is a whole other conversation, whether people who are guilty of something should be caged. But we’re caging people and the decisions being made at a moment when no one knows anything about what happened within 24 hours of arrests, number one. Number two, the violence of pretrial detention and pretrial caging. The very same drivers of violence: isolation, shame, economic deprivation, and violence itself, are the exact characteristics of places like Rikers. So we wind up sending people away, pre-trial, presumed innocent, under this kind of public safety rationale, and we’re literally increasing the chances that they’re going to come out far more damaged and more likely to get rearrested for violent felonies than before. So it’s a public safety reason. Number three, why do we care about this? While folks are facing the violence on the inside, think about the stuff that they’re losing on the outside. And not just that, so they’re losing jobs, they’re losing housing and losing education. But the people who were not arrested, your family members, the elderly in need of caretaking, their children are being left without caretakers and without support and financial support. So just enormous economic and social damage. [Even] if you don’t care about any of that stuff, and you just care about your taxpayer money, it’s an exceptionally expensive proposition; it is over $1,000 per night, per person, without even any medical conditions to jail someone on Rikers Island; it’s more than the most expensive hotel room in New York City, or maybe as much. But it’s enormously expensive. And at the end of the day, it’s also just – as I was saying earlier – it’s unnecessary. We know from data over a long period of time, that one: at the same time that we’ve decreased pretrial incarceration over the past 20-30 years, something like 80%, the same number, kind of the same percentage number of drop-in major index crimes also went down. So you don’t need incarceration to reduce the number of crimes. We know that people show up to court, they just do. I know this from firsthand experience. I know this from data. And we know that when people are released, whether they’re charged with violent felonies, misdemeanors, or non-violent felonies, they do not get re-arrested for violent felonies. And that’s continuing through to today, which we’ll talk about later. So we should all care about it.
Josh Hoe
And we also should care about facts and truth and things like that. That should matter. Not long after the bill was implemented, the backlash started, we were both pretty involved in trying to scream back against it. Tabloids like the New York Post started publishing anecdotal and – I did a lot of research on these particular cases – often outright fraudulent stories about people who’ve been supposedly let loose because of the new bail law – often before the new bail law was even implemented. What do you remember about that period?
Scott Hechinger
I remember being so angry and so frustrated. I expected the police and prosecutors to be fear-mongering and to be sensationalizing. What I didn’t expect and I should have, and now I do, was how gullible the media was. And it wasn’t just the New York Post. It was the New York Times, it was you know, it was the big trusted, more trusted news sources that kept repeating these lies. It was so brazen too, it was so brazen, even before. Between April and January, when the law hadn’t gone into effect, and everything was getting blamed on it. And I remember before this, I’m Jewish, and I remember there were these attacks, these three assaults, there’s this woman who was in a serious mental health crisis, who slapped or assaulted in some way these three observant Jewish women. Obviously, I don’t want that, no one should want that. The question then becomes [for] somebody who’s in a mental health crisis, will caging them help them? And then beyond that? Like, why? How do we feel about weaponizing a tragedy?
Josh Hoe
Well, yeah, because there were a couple guys who got killed if I remember, or there’s some kind of tragedy the week before. And when they arrested her, they tried to act like giving her release was the same as ignoring this other thing that had happened a couple days before, if I remember correctly, am I right?
Scott Hechinger
That rings a bell but it was so frustrating because it was just like they were using so cynically, you know, real concerns historically present around antisemitism and hate, you know, hate in general, when this didn’t appear to be hate-related, because the mental health issue and who knows, um, but more than that, using someone else’s hurt, to blame something that’s totally unrelated. And I remember one of the women actually was so horrified, she reached out and spoke to the New York Daily News and a number of reporters, calling out the fact that she doesn’t think that the woman who was out there should be sent to jail and that she was really horrified by the fact that police and prosecutors with votes and power were using her hurt to rollback a policy before it even had gone into effect. So I just remember being angry and also then doing something about it, which was just tweeting a lot. It was trying to share stories of success, folks who were out, trying to point out the fact that it hadn’t started yet, talking about data, like even if, before it started, you can’t judge any policy based upon short-run statistics and starting this, this project that we actually just relaunched called Justice Not Fear, where we identified, it started by December, but we’d launched this thing that we heard actually helped prevent more rollbacks that centered the issue of fear-mongering as a social and racial justice imperative. So folks knew that this was happening; and two, public defender offices and organizers who were legal experts, were writing back debunks to all of these false public statements to all of these, these this bad media and we wound up, we were asked for it by lawmakers, we were able to provide lawmakers with the truth. We were able to provide the general public with the truth. And yeah, it was as effective as we could have gotten, but unfortunately, wasn’t enough.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing . . . what is the old saying about papers and unlimited ink, they just seem to be able to just keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. I think we all fought pretty hard, and the end result is that former Governor Cuomo stepped in and threatened, if I remember correctly, to hold up medical funds at the beginning of the pandemic if bail reform wasn’t partially rolled back. So then they did roll it back. What parts did get rolled back?
Scott Hechinger
Yeah, Governor Cuomo did the capital H hero.
Josh Hoe
He got a book deal out of it, right.
Scott Hechinger
Oh man, in the dead of night, three weeks in, something like that, to the pandemic, in empty, empty halls. You know, the Democratic lawmakers did this too in halls that previously, were filled with organizers who had been working for decades for this, [they] repealed or rolled back bail reform. The primary ways that they rolled it back, before even giving it even close to a chance to succeed in that version, was the same way that the initial bail reform limited the number of cases so like, like the majority of misdemeanors and non-violent felonies weren’t eligible, it increased the numbers of non-violent felonies and misdemeanors that were then eligible, not all, and it could have been worse, that we’re eligible for bail. It also, even for those cases that weren’t that were still not bail eligible, so the other misdemeanors and the other non-violent felonies, it gave judges greater discretion in certain cases to jail . . . pre-trial. So for example, if you get arrested for jumping the turnstile once, that first shot, you’re not eligible for bail, but let’s say you got to get to that doctor’s appointment and you can’t afford public transportation like many folks can’t. And they walk through an exit gate, a misdemeanor on top of a misdemeanor is jailable. Or take, you know, being arrested for low-level drug possession, or petty larceny, stealing to survive or sleeping where you’re not supposed to sleep. That’s actually been a huge increase in the Rikers population since the rollbacks went into effect.
Josh Hoe
So we have, unfortunately, as the pandemic started to unfold, as this was all happening, we had a national increase in homicides. And some of this obviously also happened in New York. And since that spike in homicides, the tabloids, and the NYPD have really never seemed to miss an opportunity to loudly proclaim that bail reform is the culprit. I know the answer to this already. But does this claim make any sense at all to you?
Scott Hechinger
Your listeners or viewers aren’t gonna be able to see me but I’m throwing up my hands again, in rage and smiling. It’s so ridiculous.
Josh Hoe
The ones that watch us on YouTube can, the ones that are listening can’t, but they now know.
Scott Hechinger
There’s so many things that are wrong with it. Okay, so number one, that the absolute gall, of police, take the NYPD, who get paid a historic amount of money in the history of the world, and actually the most in all the United States – $11 billion at least, that’s before a lot of other things are added – a year, ostensibly according to them to provide public health, public safety to the people, to protect and serve. This happened on their watch, right? Like even if, like if you want to blame anyone, look at the fact that homicides did spike. You know, it happened despite spending an enormous amount of money, and what an incredible sleight of hand to be able to say and just gall, but sleight of hand. Unfortunately, it works on people to be able to say, but it was something else that literally barely is given, hadn’t had a chance to succeed yet. Their interventions have been going on for over half a century. And it’s happening on their watch. But the media buys it. When the media buys it, they spread that and amplify that lie to the people. And we somehow buy it and just like don’t think about this. Number two: the thing that’s ridiculous about it is looking at the trends. Right. I mean, you mentioned that homicides were up. Also important to note, historically still way down over the last 20 to 30 years from where they were. I mean, there’s a lot less homicides, a lot less shootings. Well, homicides were up a lot, but most other major crimes were down across the country. These homicide increases, and these other decreases, these patterns held true. When we say across the country, you have to understand in places that had reform, which are very few places, in all the places that didn’t have reform, in places that had police protests, in places they didn’t have police protests, and places where police morale was high and low, red states, blue states. So when I read those statistics, when I made it past the headlines that are all like FBI data, homicides are at an all-time high. But what I read as the main takeaway is that it literally undermined a year and a half’s worth of effort by the NYPD to lie that bail reform was the cause of anything, good or bad, in their cases it is bad, because it happened everywhere. Yet instead, they were able to, I would say convince the media; the media was just willing to do what they always do, and kind of repeat the lies and people ….
Josh Hoe
And there’s also the second level of error that’s happening here with the media. You know this idea that you can take a national trend, and attribute it to local causes is so dishonest, so terrible! It just makes me so furious, because why in the world would the same spike happen in New York City and Fort Worth, but you blame it on something that was New York policy based? That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
Scott Hechinger
And this just gets into, you know, the important discussion about like journalism and journalists like, like, number one, the kind of the credulousness of journalists still, how they rely and print police baseline, before even having to go into the fact that it’s transparently kind of false and not founded in fact. We all know more than ever, because of cell phone footage and because of actually some really good journalism, that police lie, they lie all the time, they lie about things big and small. They lie on the record. They lie in testimony. We know like Dermot Shea, who for a year and a half was saying bail reform causes gun violence when confronted by the tree-squawker, an Assemblywoman, straight up said, Okay, give me the data to back it up. He said I don’t have any. What did your data say? And he said, Well, actually, the number of cases of people with gun violence is relatively few to none who were out on bail. So they know, the journalists know that they lie, and they still, they still continue to write. And that’s number one. Number two, kind of the flip side of that is, they don’t and this is on them. But this is also on, you know, communities and organizers and the ability to kind of connect journalists to other sources. They don’t talk to defenders, they don’t talk to organizers, people with direct experience, abolitionists, academics, folks that really care more about public safety and health than anyone else. I mean, they just continue to rely. And also just the data that they use, like they should not be ever relying on short-run statistics. And if they do, they should be disclaiming it up and down that there’s no way to tell causation from short-run statistics. And we have long-term statistics that show policing is a terrible strategy for public health and safety. And decarceration actually doesn’t cause more crime. So better practices are needed.
Josh Hoe
Yeah. And so then there was … lately, there’s been kind of a second twinge of this, which is that they haven’t been talking as much about the gun crimes and stuff being bail reform. But now it’s shoplifting and minor crimes that are the result of bail reform. That’s the new kind of taste of this thing. So do you have any thoughts about that?
Scott Hechinger
I should have started up top with this. And hopefully, folks have made it this far into this conversation. But is what they’re saying true? Like none of it is true. None of the things that they’re saying is true. But like talking about, like what we do know, like, really quickly. Maybe not really quickly, I’m just saying, we know that bail reform, to the extent that it still exists, and it does exist, has been an extraordinary success. And I say extraordinary success. I also want to say, believing strongly that there are still way too many people caged, there’s over 5000 people currently in Rikers Island, caged pre-trial, 1000s more around the state. But it’s also an extraordinary success. Nearly 200,000 people statewide are free who otherwise would have faced the prospect of . . What’s happened with those 200,000, folks? First of all, we’ve saved over $650 million as taxpayers and avoided costs for their incarceration. And if you care about the fiscal costs, and if you care about public safety, there’s been no increase from before bail reform, and the number of rearrests for violent felonies is non-existent.
Josh Hoe
In fact, the data I’ve seen suggests that it is a slightly lower number than before bail reform, at least the dashboards I’ve looked at.
Scott Hechinger
Folks that are released, folks that have been released, who otherwise would have been eligible for bail, on any given month, less than 1% of them are re-arrested for violent felonies. And even less, it’s less than half a percent are arrested for . . . So if right now, and just to put it in perspective, it’s extraordinarily successful. Right now, Eric Adams is, and we can talk about dangerous lists in a second, but he’s like, we need to repeal bail reform and allow judges, because it’s not successful, you know, to allow judges to take into account someone’s dangerousness, right, their gut feeling of whether someone is dangerous, to allow them to be caged. I want your listeners to think about any system that could possibly, without literally having a crystal ball or Minority Report technology, do a better job of assessing risk than less than 1% of people who are released going to commit a violent felony, less than half a percent. You can’t get better than this. It’s good for public health, it’s good for public safety, people are in their jobs with their families, we get enormous cost savings. And we should be celebrating that, and Democratic lawmakers so far are defending that. And it’s just a shame that so many folks are falling victim, again to just really transparent fear-mongering. We can do better and we’re already seeing really positive results.
Josh Hoe
And you just mentioned the new mayor and I think you can draw a somewhat straight line from the beginning of this nonsense straight through to him getting elected. Do you see it as a cause of why Mayor Adams was elected?
Scott Hechinger
Yeah, as an advocate who cares deeply about truth and injustice, and, and talking about and pushing for and advocating for policies that do better for all of us. We can’t lose sight of the fact that Democrats, liberals, progressives, across all, diversity and spectrums are also beholden to the same kind of entrenched understanding of crime and politics that we were born with, popular culture media. And this includes people who live in communities that are most over-policed. And, and so I think, Mayor Adams’ election, despite the fact that it’s not just that he’s a former police officer, but that he lands on this kind of very conservative, right, fear-mongering, tough on crime agenda. The fact that he was elected is really a symbol of how far we have to go even on the left. We’re seeing this, it’s not just in New York, we’re seeing it with Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, we’re seeing it with our city in Los Angeles, and London Breed’s most recent kind of nod and caving to the fear-mongering, calling for an emergency and calling for more police to arrest people in need, instead of helping them. We have a lot to do, to bring, you know who should be allies, people who ostensibly care about civil rights, people that ostensibly care about you know, all the things we’ve been talking about, to kind of see the light.
Josh Hoe
And there’s so many just unbelievably terrible things that come from this. I mean, when he first got elected, the two first things I remember him doing or saying were, let’s reinstate solitary at Rikers, and let’s get rid of the. . . . I think he got rid of the convictions integrity unit. Did he do that? Was there one in the first place? Maybe not that one. But then he gave a speech that you commented on, that said that there was no form of order in our cities and suggested that anything goes in New York City and other places. Your response was that this reminded you of Trump’s American carnage speech. And I think that’s a fair comparison. And it sounds like we both agree that New York isn’t an anarchist wasteland, right?
Scott Hechinger
No, one thing to say is that literally any single person that is harmed, or hurt or shot or killed, it’s an enormous tragedy. Like that’s like, it’s a problem. If it’s one, it’s a problem. And there are too many people, right, you can talk about historical context, we can talk about the fact that it’s not as bad as they say it is, that it’s a problem. And if you actually care, if we actually care and I do, about people getting shot, and guns on the streets, and all this stuff, you need to follow the facts. And you need to actually look into policies and practices that are actually going to stop that and make people safer. That’s the thing I don’t want to lose sight of, right? It’s not anarchy. And then but again, it really did feel when he won, and by the way, with significant, I don’t know what was the percentage of votes, not that many. But when he won, it felt like – it didn’t feel like Trump winning at all, nothing will ever feel like that – but when he started coming out with these statements before he even started, his first order of business was really expanding the torture of solitary confinement. But then before, it was either before or right after he came in office, on that front, responded to the majority of city council asking him to reconsider by saying, you have no cause to question what I do because you’ve never been a police officer. It felt like, that feeling of wow, it is way worse than I already thought it was going to be. And I remember talking to advocates and being like, it’s going to be a real, this is terrible. It’s going to be a really long fight. It just keeps getting worse.
Josh Hoe
But then it keeps getting worse. But then we have the President of the United States who is supposed to you know, at least ostensibly, you know, we were talking about the left-right divide a second ago, although he obviously has a history with mass incarceration, I’m just saying, he comes in and he was holding up Mayor Adams like some kind of a role model for what he’d like to see other leaders across the Democratic Party look like. This is pretty terrifying to me. You know, we have the leadership of one of our two party’s actively pushing for dictatorship and the leadership of the other one, you know, moving from George Floyd to American carnage in less than two years. How did we get from millions of people in the streets to Empire Strikes Back in like, you know, two years?
Scott Hechinger
By electing Joe Biden?
Josh Hoe
I mean, well, but what was the alternative? Trump right?
Scott Hechinger
Obviously at that point exactly. But it was like who we chose as the standard-bearer. And one thing, since we brought Joe Biden into the picture, the things that I think about there, too, is it’s way worse than I could have ever imagined on the criminal justice front. I mean, the fact and again, I didn’t, I had low expectations, obviously, but it’s way worse. He has still to this day, correct me if I’m wrong, but he still has yet to use his presidential constitutional power to grant a single clemency or pardon, he has literally granted more pardons to turkeys than he has to human beings, number one. there’s no stronger sign of, of just an abrogation, abdication of morality an abdication of power to do like the slightest bit of good than to issue a single pardon.
Josh Hoe
Plus he has like 18,000 on his desk.2
Scott Hechinger
And the last thing I want in the world, I haven’t seen and I don’t know, all 18,000 or whatever. But like the fact that he hasn’t even if he’s in his head, it’s like trying to try and understand, right? If there is a worry about the political blowback of certain people who he would pardon, first of all, use the power of your microphone and stand behind what you do and use that to shift the narrative around violent crime. But the fact that there’s, you know, 10s of 1000s of people, I don’t know, the actual numbers, that’s currently in federal custody for marijuana, that he won’t even do that, is really something really something terrifying.
Josh Hoe
And he also, in the Biden-Sanders unity plan, he promised to move clemency out of the DOJ. And the whole reason that one of the main arguments for doing that is it creates another kind of insulation so that when they recommend a bunch of people for clemency, that at least gives you some play if you’ve got to have plausible deniability, that you’ve got some. But he didn’t even do that. He promised to do that. He didn’t even do that.
Scott Hechinger
Let me tell you also, just in addition to this, for literally months and months and months, the attention of so many advocates were focused on something that eventually came true, which we but the fact that we had to spend so much energy fighting was remarkable. During the Trump years, under the Cares Act, he released something like I don’t know, 3000-5000, maybe there’s more, 1000s of folks who applied to be put in house, like released into home arrest or to home confinement, because of COVID. And these were folks vetted heavily by the government, and they were out and thriving, similar to the bail conversations, and an exceptionally small number of people wind up getting sent back to prison for violating the conditions of the release. And Biden comes into power his DOJ and Merrick Garland interprets this memo to say they’ve all got to be sent back as soon as the emergency order lifts. And then after some blowback, he pushed back and said, okay, just the folks who are not out on drug crimes, all the other stuff need to be sent back, rip them from their families, and put the most number of people in history in one fell swoop into federal prison.
Josh Hoe
Oh, also, let’s not forget that another one of his campaign promises is to reduce the federal prison population by over 50%. He really did say that I’m not making that up.
Scott Hechinger
He’s literally doing everything he possibly can. And finally, you know, I think it was like two months ago, Merrick Garland came out and said, finally, you know, he’s, we’re not going to do this like, and it was like, Good, great. Why do we have to fight for so long for the most obvious thing? and again, the understanding was like there was some concern about political blowback. 1
Josh Hoe
I did two 24-hour Twitter events on that subject and the whole time in my head, I’m going, why is this even something we’re fighting about?
Scott Hechinger
There’s so much there’s so much injustice, and there’s so many things like all over the country that we need to be fighting for. Why do we need to be fighting for the easiest obvious stuff? So yeah, Biden coming in and propping up Mayor Adams was not surprising and also highly disappointing. One thing that I think is important to note is that Biden stayed. And I, my understanding, and I have information very purposefully so, far away from any conversations around pretrial detention, dangerousness, and bail. He focused exclusively on policing. And one thing I do want to call out is that in some of the stuff that Biden talked about, he wrote about this in the New York Daily News, it’s not enough, but they did talk about some things. And because we’re talking about how horrible the current system is something that actually has been proven to work elsewhere, and some more investment in, I’m not endorsing Adams’ plan. . .. But I do want to use the opportunity to call out violence interruption programs. These are programs where they were folks who have been harmed by and have also harmed others, usually, an overlap, who’ve done time, work with community to connect and solve problems, before they become actual conflicts or step in ahead, or after violence has happened work through restorative justice approach. In the places where this has been tried throughout the country – in far too small numbers – it’s been way more successful when it when compared to similar neighborhoods, than really more of a responsive,kind of situation of policing, not to mention the inability for them to solve crime,s and also like the criminal, the criminogenic nature of policing, the same way we talked about earlier, like jails, being characterized by the same drivers of violence, like policing right now, I did not live in an over-policed neighborhood, the people I represented did, and I would often every day, most days I would be there. And it just drives, just being on a block and seeing 10 police cars drive by in the span of 30 seconds and seeing these like floodlights at night. And this ever police presence, people that I represented talked about feeling imprisoned in their own neighborhoods. And so yeah, we can’t lose sight of the fact that it’s not that we need alternatives to incarceration, dark spaces, and alternatives to policing, just because they work better. We also know that policing itself actually causes crime.
Josh Hoe
As we turn the corner here, I guess the next thing, I was going to talk a little bit about Alvin Bragg. I mean, obviously, it’s the same story we’ve been telling all the way through. But a lot of what we’re talking about is – I think I said this up top – almost a collusion and unnatural relationship between law enforcement, press departments, and the actual media, and you’re starting to fight back against this with the new organization, which you can definitely talk about some more. We have 1000s of organizations across this country, all of us are, you know, fairly busy doing specific work in the areas we’re in. But it seems like there has to be some way that we can pivot and at least use our combined powers to try to break through in some way or to work together to breakthrough in some way or to, to at least, counter this narrative, almost entirely false narrative, that keeps getting shoved down everyone’s throat and is successful. I mean, we’ve talked about how it changes elections. And, you know, people’s perception seemed to be that we’re the crazy people, even though the data is all on our side, which is – and I don’t mean crazy in a pejorative, like anti-mental illness kind of way. I mean, people think that we are wrong, even though the data is on our side.
Scott Hechinger
I’ll tell you about the kind of framing of the work that Zealous is doing, and I think it kind of reflects a lot of the kind of the nature of what’s needed right now, in a multi-pronged approach. First, we need to recognize that we are in a current national reckoning over people’s basic perceptions of crime, injustice and what it’s going to take to achieve public health and safety, and for the last 50 years, and that continues to today – it’s been controlled by really strong, coordinated messaging and storytelling by pro-carceral forces, police, prosecutors and prisons. And by high coordination, by kind of collaboration, and being on the same page. My organization Zealous really aims to do what I think we need to do which is to topple this imbalance of power and control over criminal legal policy and media, to not just fight back effectively, but to really ensure more than just modest changes, like transformative changes that then endure. I don’t want us to be constantly in this position, I don’t think anyone does, of doing a little modest win and then just constantly fighting. Like, create the environment. So how are we doing that? One, we are really leaning heavily on our defender and defense practice. So thinking about defenders, in defense offices, as you know, just 1000s and 1000s of untapped social justice champions, folks who are experts, have extraordinary perspective and important relationships with the people they represent, to step outside of court to leverage this range of storytelling skills and media skills that they didn’t learn in law school. And then offices wide, actually optimize them help defender offices get optimized to be able to share data that otherwise wouldn’t be shareable, to share systemic injustices that no one’s writing about, to breathe life into those systemic injustices with true-life stories in a way that’s not extractive and exploitative, for the people who are going through it. If defender offices can get more engaged, I think that’s a big part of it. The second piece is, you mentioned coordination, collaboration, right? It’s not enough just for defenders to start speaking out, especially if they do so without intention. Defenders collaborating with what are previously siloed groups, so defenders, organizers, people at direct experience communities, and even artists, what might it look like if we broke down those silos and everyone was working together and thinking through strategically what one side could say, one other side could and actually develop true coalitions. and so what we’re trying to do is model some of what has been really successful in New York, which is true collaboration between defenders and community organizations, really breaking down that distrust? And what might that look like to strengthen in New York and elsewhere? And so we’re doing a lot of work at these intersection points, like working with organizers and defender offices working with folks on the inside who are currently incarcerated with advocates on the outside and vice versa, to strengthen that practice. And lastly, like a lot of the truth and justice, like while you’re, while we’re doing this kind of organizing, and training and skill-building, capacity building, we’re also just working directly with the journalists. So you know, this Justice Not Fear project is a way to provide them with the truth, like legal expertise. We’re also talking about organizing, we’re trying to bring journalists in the same way that they’ve got those long term relationships of trust with police, we want to help them build really strong relationships of trust with folks on the ground who know what’s actually going on, who truly care, we know the facts, who can speak to their experience and vice versa. So it’s about. like what we need to do, it’s going to be a multipronged approach, I think it needs to be, It can’t be in just one jurisdiction. We’re seeing that the one thing, the one thing that is like one, it’s a silver lining of just how ridiculous the kind of the police tactics are, is that they’re so common. And they’re the same things and the same patterns, everything, we see the same things and all the progressive cities, for example. And so I think there’s a great potential right now to kind of do, I’m seeing this actually happening and needs to happen more, coordination between advocates, we’re really honed in and focused on this issue in those various jurisdictions, share what’s working, share what’s not and kind of build, build from there. And another silver lining piece of COVID, which is weird, or the silver lining, this one happens to be about COVID, which is weird, but true. At least in my work, I’ve seen in the social justice sphere, zoom and the ability to see people has really increased the ability to grow and strengthen trust in coalitions that are traditionally separated by geography and a phone call would never have worked in the past. And so I’ve seen that there’s actually great potential for that kind of coordination.
Josh Hoe
So ultimately, I’ve asked a version of the question, I just asked you a bunch of different people over the last year, and I’ve gotten all kinds of different answers. I’ve gotten answers like everyone needs to create their own platform. I’ve got answers like, we need to hijack traditional platforms, we need to have people represented in traditional media, we need to have you know, there’s just a ton of different answers. And I’m sure to some extent it’s all of the above that we probably need to do, but do you have a feeling though, I understand you’re doing all this stuff, but you know, just the other day I turned on the television, it’s Morning Joe. And of all people, the civil rights icon, Reverend Al is sitting there talking about how we need to lock more people up because toothpaste is getting locked up in his convenience stores, I guess because of shoplifting, and I’m just like, What in the world is happening here? I just feel like, you know, we’ve got more people than ever, more information than ever, and we’re still losing the media battle.
Scott Hechinger
Yeah. But what it’s going to take is working directly with journalists. It’s working directly with newsrooms, it’s working directly with editors to call them in, calling out only goes so far, but calling them in and really, you know, training them on a range of things, from using humanizing language to, to thinking more critically about sources. And the sources are not just, don’t just talk to the police. And actually don’t talk to the police at all, because there’s interested in if you’re going to quote them say that, but also, don’t just go to the traditional talking heads, who are actually not deeply rooted in community, are not defenders and fighting every day in court, who are not organizers, who are not, you know, abolitionists. Abolitionist is like this dirty word, like, you know, you mentioned the word, the word quote, unquote, crazy; people are like, your ideas are nuts, no, I think it’s nuts to continue doing what we’re doing right now. The folks who are thinking the most critically, are the ones that are most critical of our current system. And, and so, I think, you know, in addition to the ground level work, it’s also really talking to and doing really hard work with journalists. You know, I’ll just say, though. Yeah, I mean, that’s still like, the work that we’re doing, is it worth this national organization, but the problem with national organizations generally, is they kind of swoop in and screw things up and bounce around. our approach is really, we don’t invite ourselves in. But when we’re invited in, it’s all supporting, like, long-term We’re not gonna unfortunately, I want to say like, we’re not going to see this, it’s not going to take a couple of months, like we’re gonna have some losses along the way, it’s gonna, this is like a battle this is a multi-year at the very least, battle. And I think we’re in this position where if we, if we work with the press, when we get them to think about what the project that we’re working on, is a project for truth and truthfully, objectivity, and show that it will actually improve journalism, not to mention, lives. And we, build a long term, we strengthen coalition on the ground, um, skill folks up to be able to be more fluid in talking about these issues in a way that translate them for, for the general public where they can actually be brought on to shows instead of the Al Sharptons of the world, I think we’re going to be in a better place long-term. We need to focus on honesty, focus on better journalism as a social and racial justice, that is a human rights issue. That is a civil rights issue. Right now. We can’t anymore think about media as separate from people in cages. There’s a direct line from bad journalistic practices to harm. Yes, other folks carry out the harm, pass the policies, support the policies, actually do the caging. But the media literally makes it happen.
Josh Hoe
I agree with you there. So people really liked this last year. I asked if there were any criminal justice-related books that they might recommend to others, so I’m bringing it back. Are there any books you’ve read recently that you might recommend?
Scott Hechinger
I’m trying to think . . . Mariame Kaba’s book is extraordinary. It’s a collection of, speaking of abolitionists, being absolutely the most reasonable people always in the room.
Josh Hoe.
That’s right up here.
Scott Hechinger
I’m trying to find a copy of this new book that was put out by Pen America. It was called the Sentences that Create us; I’m actually halfway through, but I got a head start on it because I work closely with Kate, who’s the head of PEN America. And it’s a collection of essays, on writing, in a variety of contexts, in media, different mediums, for people who are incarcerated. But also, the lessons are written by people who either are currently or were formerly incarcerated. But they come with, first of all, the lessons are kind of broadly applicable, I think, to all kinds of advocacy and best practices and collaborations. But they also come with actual exercises that you can do. And so it’s an extraordinary book, the Sentences that Create Us. One of the coolest things, among many cool things, is that they got significant funding to be able to provide something like 75,000 copies to people who are currently incarcerated, by I think the Mellon Foundation. And I’m talking with PEN America, we’re also going to get these into the hands of as many public defenders as possible for them to be thinking critically about the experience of incarceration, how they can partner with the people they represent more effectively. It’s just a beautifully written book and my colleague, Alejo Rodriguez, our Director of Collaborative Advocacy, wrote an essay in this book, so I’m also proud to know one of the co-authors. It’s a series of essays I highly recommend.
Josh Hoe
Well, I can’t really let you get away after what you said earlier without asking if you have any particular favorite drummers because music is something that comes up on here quite a bit.
Scott Hechinger
So so many of me what’s in my head right now? Let’s go, I’ve been listening again, as always, I go through my favorite bands. So Ringo Starr, he always gets a bad rap because super simple.
Josh Hoe
He was a very clever player.
Scott Hechinger
was beautiful John Bonham of course Dave roll more recently, like the air too.
Josh Hoe
I wish he played more drums these days. He is a great drummer.
Scott Hechinger
Dennis Chambers just in terms of shops um Oh God, I was watching you know, it’s embarrassing. I’m a little embarrassed to say I don’t like how they’re perceived these days but like, last night for whatever reason that a YouTube rabbit hole I was I did that a lot. I I came across the drummer, remember that band new math? That was like around like the 2000. Yeah, he was like this really was like hit song. It was called I forget what it was called. But like hadn’t even thought about them for 21 years anyway he was the drummer for them so I think it’s like Devin King or something that shows showed up and him now and he was like a historian about music and about drummers and you know, they talked beautifully about it but his playing is extraordinary. Man give me someone with the drummer for Fugazi speaking of DC
Josh Hoe
I’m a Fugazi guy, you guys. Uh, you know, um, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard there’s a band now called Black middie. I’m not like a huge fan of them, but their drummer is actually quite good. That’s what I would throw out just off the top of my head who’s a recent drummer. He’s pretty good.
Scott Hechinger
I guess they’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Danny Carey from tool one of my favorite.
Josh Hoe
Oh, yeah. They were just in town. They were just in Detroit last night I think
Scott Hechinger
And I’ve seen them a lot. I’ve actually seen them 14 times. My brother and I are mutual fans. I also happen to love, I mean look, I love all kinds of music. Like literally everything but also recently have gotten really into kind of I don’t know what to call like Raul rock like really intense, like really intense heavy metal very fast like blast beats stuff. Love and Love being right now most Shuddha that have for a while their drummer Thomas hockey is one of the most extraordinary drummers so their music is insane. I shouldn’t use that word. It’s problematic I know.
Josh Hoe
I do that sometimes.
Scott Hechinger
But what’s amazing about it for the drummers out there is that the top beats it’s all in for force you can bob your head to it’s like 1234 really heavy, and his kick drums are doing the most insane polyrhythms that like literally last, you know, 20 sometimes 30 You know, 30 bars and it’s just it’s all set up and it’ll be raised Tame Impala, which is really just Kevin Parker. He plays all the instruments. I think he’s one of the most underrated drummers out there also basis but his drumming is spectacular. Also really simple, very slick, similar vibe to Ringo Starr, and that it’s like less is far more.
Josh Hoe
I am definitely a Ringo Starr Charlie Watts, less is more kind of feel drummer. So I appreciate that a great deal.
I always ask the same last question. What did I mess up? What question should I have asked but did not?
Scott Hechinger
Oh, man, and I would never have thought to ask this question, but like, what my son thinks about what I do? He’s only 6.
Josh Hoe
Oh, that’s a great question. I’d love to hear the answer to that.
Scott Hechinger
I talk to my son – he’s six years old – about stuff all the time. And first of all, he knows, even though I’m not currently practicing, it’s painful for me, he still thinks, he still considers me currently a public defender. And if you ask him, What do public defenders do, he will say proudly, get people out of jail, free them. But he also, I don’t think this is unique to him, although we really talk about these issues. Young kids, like, have this sense of the obviousness of injustice. So, he’ll say things to me, he’s very proud of what I do, because he’ll say things that he’s really affected by it when he sees people that don’t have homes, and he’ll see a big building going up, but he’ll say, Dad, I got a great idea. There’s space there. Why don’t we just have people go into this new fancy condo, which is going to cost $6,000 a month, whatever it is? And it’s like, having to talk to him about why, and then the questions that then come up, why? He really understands this, someone was pretending to be a police officer and said, I’m gonna put you in jail. And he was really affected by that. He was like, Don’t you realize that, like, if you . . . that’s gonna make me worse, that’s gonna make me more mad. And so he has, he understands this really elemental version of what we were talking about earlier, where if you put someone in a really violent, horrific place, that’s not going to actually solve any problems. So he’s, he’s a good kid.
Josh Hoe
You’d like to think it was pretty intuitive. It seems intuitive to me.
Scott Hechinger
Who knows if he wouldn’t be there, if we didn’t, if we didn’t, at this point at six, going on seven, if we didn’t talk about this all the time, given that he does watch Paw Patrol, and it’s about police. Nice and no one gets put in jail. At least I don’t think so. But I wonder at what age, people’s opinions really start getting formed. And I think it’s pretty early on. Oh he asked another amazing question the other day, he’s looking at a police officer, why do police get to have guns if they shoot so many people? Um . . . good question.
Josh Hoe
Great Britain used to have a much better answer to that. They don’t. Thinking about the houses kind of reminds me – I don’t know if you ever saw the old George Carlin bit about homelessness and golf courses. I mean, he basically just said, Why do we have all these golf courses and homeless people? Why are we spending all this money enclaving all this territory across our country, when people don’t have places to live?
Scott Hechinger
I could have seen where that was going. It makes sense.
Josh Hoe
Well, I really appreciate you doing this. It’s always great to get to talk to you. Thanks, again.
Scott Hechinger
Thank you for having me.
Josh Hoe
Now my take.
One thing we have definitely learned over the last five or six years is that the truth is no longer necessary for moving the needle. What seems to matter most, as Orwell foretold, is repeating the same false information over and over again, as loudly as possible. Oh, and also, if possible, make sure the people repeating that false information also wear a badge or the conservative suit of a prosecuting attorney. That might seem hyperbolic. But what we’ve seen for almost three years, is an endless drumbeat from tabloid press outlets, combined with the media arms of New York law enforcement, blaming criminal justice reform for crime, when most of the increases in crime happened on their watch. As I’ve said many times before, the increase in homicides is a nationwide problem. It’s happened in places with criminal justice reform, without criminal justice reform, in places with GOP mayors, with Democratic mayors, and in places with increased and decreased police funding. This was not about reform. But it does say something about our approach to crime. As long as we continue to believe that bringing the entire weight of the government down with both feet on individuals who commit crimes, instead of putting any investment into addressing the things that actually cause crime, we will continue to fail.
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