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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we continue our 30 Issues in 30 Days Election Series with Issue 15. We've come halfway. It's another segment on Crime and Criminal Justice, one of the biggest issues for voters this year, of course. Our topic today is For and Against Bail, For and Against Jail. In the New York State governor's race, for example, Republican Lee Zeldin is running very much on being a crimefighter while portraying Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul as soft on crime. Here's Zeldin this week reacting to a decision by the state parole board, though Hochul does not control it, to release a man convicted of killing a police officer in 1976.

Lee Zeldin: Dozens of cop killers have been released by this parole board. Dozens. If we don't stand up and do something about it, the fact is that dozens more will be released in the future.

Brian Lehrer: That's Zeldin this week. The governor does appoint the members of the parole board, but Hochul has been in office long enough only to have appointed one out of, I think, 15. Zeldin is also running on a position that some Democrats, including Mayor Adams, agree with him on. The state's bail reform law passed in 2019 is too lenient on potentially dangerous defendants charged with crimes that are no longer eligible to have bail imposed. Too dangerous, in Zeldin's opinion, to have that law in effect. Here's Governor Hochul on this program, this summer, defending her position that judges should not be allowed to apply a so-called dangerousness standard.

Governor Hochul: Dangerousness can be very subjective. This is what we've learned. Someone walks into a judge and sometimes dangerousness is determined by the color of their skin and a perception of dangerousness. That is an unfair system. That is not a justice system that we could be proud of.

Brian Lehrer: Governor Hochul, here on August 25th. What is bail for? What is jail for? It just so happens that Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times who went on to found the Marshall Project, that great nonprofit newsroom devoted to Criminal Justice coverage, has a new book called What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Let's explore these issues with Bill Keller. Bill, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Bill Keller: Thanks for having me on, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Would you start, as you do in the book, with some comparative stats about imprisonment in the United States compared to other countries?

Bill Keller: It's, I think, widely known that we incarcerate more people than just about any other nation on Earth, certainly than any other developed countries. We incarcerate at twice the rate of Iran and Russia, not ideal role models for human rights and civil law. Germany, five times. We're five times Germany. I think five times Canada. Another comparison is for what we used to be. For most of the 20th century, we didn't have the same level of over-incarceration that we have now. Really, the country took a real punitive turn in the '70s so that the incarceration rate now is at its peak, which is about 2008. The incarceration rate was about five times what it had been steadily for most of the 20th century.

Brian Lehrer: What happened in the '70s?

Bill Keller: A number of things happened. The crime rate did go up. It got featured in a lot of political talk which is much like what is happening now. A lot of politicians screened, they need to be tough on crime. The Black empowerment movement caused considerable white backlash and led to a disproportionately Black population growing in our prisons and jails. The media has some share of the blame for what happened in the '70s too, because we, and particularly TV news, highlighted sensational crime and helped the tough-on-crime politicians overhype the case.

Brian Lehrer: If we look at the '70s as a turning point where crime started to skyrocket, and we know it's ebbed a lot since then, regardless of whatever spike we're going through right now, it's not close to that, but do we have more violent crime than other countries if we have more incarceration? We have more guns than any other industrialized country as well, and no surprise, more shootings. Do we have more imprisonment, because we're just a more violent-crime-prone country?

Bill Keller: We are more violent than most countries. A lot of that has to do with the history of race and the racial divide. A lot of it has to do with the Second Amendment. It's so far out of proportion. That's why I often switch from the comparison with Norway or Germany to the comparison with the United States in 1960. We're out of proportion by our own standards.

Brian Lehrer: The title of your book indicates that you accept the term 'mass incarceration' to describe the era we've been in recent decades. It might be useful for listeners just to hear for a minute how you define or describe mass incarceration.

Bill Keller: Mass incarceration is a matter of proportion. I think it's implicit in the phrase that it's completely out of proportion to the dangers presented by crime. People don't decide about who to vote for based on data. You played some clips with a little bit of data from Lee Zeldin, which I think is questionable data. People are much more likely to form their opinions based not on data, but on high-profile crimes, crimes on the subway, Times Square crimes. Having a mayor who talks a lot about crime has probably shifted the political balance.

Brian Lehrer: You certainly ding Republicans in the book for how we got here, but also Democrats, including Joe Biden, for his role in the Federal Crime Bill of 1994. What role did Joe Biden play in that, and more generally, how similar or different were the Democratic and Republican ways of building the mass incarceration era?

Bill Keller: That's a really good question. Democrats were certainly partners in the creation of mass incarceration. The 1994 Crime Bill put a lot more cops on the street and militarized their equipment. It pushed for mandatory minimum sentences, which meant that judges had less discretion to give somebody a break or to fashion a penalty that was proportionate to the crime.

It also abolished Pell grants for prison inmates. One of the things that really does make a demonstrable difference in recidivism rates is education, especially college-level education. Pell grants are coming back, prison inmates are going to be eligible for them again. As a consequence of the '94 law, the number of prisons that offered accredited college courses just fell off the edge of the earth.

Brian Lehrer: Where else does rehabilitation come in? The title of your book is What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Where does rehabilitation come into this story? A big-picture sweep of recent decades of history, politically or in terms of what kinds of rehabilitation actually happen in American prisons? Pell grants for college is one kind.

Bill Keller: Pell grants and education has been studied and there are studies and meta-studies that show that particularly higher education, post- secondary education have a dramatic effect on the recidivism rate, so do a number of other programs, anger management, parent counseling. There are programs that some inmates mentor [unintelligible 00:10:25].The experience of mentoring a younger inmate seems to be good not only for the younger inmate but for the more seasoned inmate who takes him under his wing.

Brian Lehrer: Bill Keller is my guest, former executive editor of The New York Times who went on to found the Marshall Project, which reports exclusively on criminal justice. His new book is called What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Listeners, for you, if you want to call in, let's take his title question head-on. What's prison for in your opinion as this is a debate in New York State and elsewhere around the country? Who should be in prison or in jail?

Jail is for defendants before their case ends in a conviction or an acquittal or something else. Jail is before the case is resolved, prison is if you get sentenced at the end of that. What is prison for, what is jail for in your opinion? What should it be for? Are we hitting it about right right now, or too much or too little? (212)-433-WNYC, (212)-433-9692. What's prison for? Or you can tweet @brianlehrer.

Bill, to take the title of your book, What's Prison For?, head-on, people might say prison is for punishment, do the crime, do the time for its own sake. People might say it's for rehabilitation, as you've been discussing, to reclaim as many lives as possible for both the sake of the person and society as a whole, and some might say it's primarily for deterrence. A lot of people might say that. Fewer future crimes will happen if people are punished because then those who might commit crimes would know they would be punished with prison if they commit them. That's one thing people think prison is for. Am I leaving anything out, any big categories?

Bill Keller: One, incapacitation. People who are locked up can't be a danger to the general public. There's one statistic that you have to keep in mind when you answer the question of what prison is for, that is that roughly 95% of the people who are in prisons and jails now are going to get out someday by finishing their sentence or getting parole. The question that I pose in the book is do you want those people to be brutalized, stigmatized, lacking in any kind of marketable skills, or would you rather have them prepared to make the transition to real life, where they're going to be our neighbors and our voters? The voting part depends on what state you live in, of course.

Brian Lehrer: To your last reason that people list about what prison is for, I have heard people say that one of the reasons that crime declined so much since the 1990s is because so many of the "bad guys" were locked up. Do the stats support that or refute that?

Bill Keller: They support the fact that-- Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Brian Lehrer: That's okay. Do the facts support that crime went down to a significant degree starting in the 1990s because of mass incarceration because so many of the people who had committed violent crimes were locked up for meaningful periods of time?

Bill Keller: We had one of our reporters at the Marshall Project write a piece which we called Ten Not Entirely Crazy Reasons for the Decline in Crime. There's wild arguments about that. Most scholars will agree that mass incarceration had some impact, maybe as much as 25% or 30% of the drop in crime was attributable to that, but the other factors include the aging of the baby boomers. Crime tends to be a younger person's game, and the boomers aged and that brought crime down.

Technology was a factor. We do our banking on the internet and don't carry around wads of cash. We have security systems in cars so they don't get stolen as often. There are some more far-fetched explanations I tend to take with a grain of salt. One of them was Roe v. Wade, which reduced the number of unwanted children who would be inclined to a life of crime. I don't endorse that one particularly, but it tells you how much scholarly debate has gone into this question.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call on what prison is for. Desmond-- Or is Desmond not ready? Let's see. How about Andrew in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Andrew.

Andrew: Hello. I want to go back to the top of the segment. I have a basic question. I'm sitting here listening. Why do we have five times as much incarceration as-- Let's just use Canada as an example. Do we have five times as much crime? Is it the justice system? Is it the social support structures for young people? Do we have any good science behind why there's five times more crime in America than other developed nations? I'll take my answer off the air. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Bill?

Bill Keller: Yes, there's a lot of science. It depends on how far back you want to go. Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow is enormously popular and full of smart analysis. She traces it back to slavery. When slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment, it made one exception for nobody should be subjected to forced labor, except people who've been convicted of a serious crime.

The plantation owner who was serviced by slaves became the plantation owner serviced by convict labor. It goes a little ways towards explaining not only why we have so many people incarcerated but why it's so disproportionately Black people who are incarcerated. The other factors, some of which I've already mentioned, crime did go up, but our incarceration rate is not entirely explainable as a result of the actual crime rate.

Brian Lehrer: Now I'll go to Desmond in Crown Heights. Desmond, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling today.

Desmond: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call, Brian. I didn't get your host's name, but I want to get straight to the point. He has made several good points that back up what I'm about to say. The United States was based on land theft and stolen labor. The economics, basically, in this country, function on getting free labor or the cheapest possible labor. Harry Blackmon's book Slavery by Another Name talks about what they did after slavery was abolished.

Prison, by the amendment that says that it should free slaves, basically retrogrades and says that you can have slave labor as long as you are incarcerated. That's the second thing.

The third thing is that the big shock of having women have control of their bodies cut down the number of people who would be involuntarily impoverished by having too large families. If you don't have a population of people that you can grind down because they're willing to work for the lowest possible wages, it makes it hard for the people who are at the highest levels to be able to run things at the most greedy way.

Now, I'm not a communist, but I'm a person who understands supply and demand. There's no reason for somebody, for the top executives' compensation to have increased by an order of magnitude from what it was in the '50s, '60s, and '70s to what it is now. Greed drives this country. They made a movie where they said, "Greed is good." Everything that points to what's happening in the economy right now, everybody's complaining about inflation. Inflation is being driven by greed.

Brian Lehrer: Desmond, thank you very much. That character wasn't necessarily sympathetically portrayed in that movie. Bill, I know you commented before and the science doesn't necessarily back up. The Roe versus Wade led to a decline in crime theory. Have we at least gotten away from crime being an economic boon to some sectors of society? Because there's still some prison labor, but there are rules against prison labor in the way that you were describing before from the 19th century and I guess maybe early 20th century where there was actual convict labor working on plantations, right?

Bill Keller: Right. Well, I apologize for my voice. I have Parkinson's and it sometimes makes my voice go wonky. Your call is right. That profit plays a part in the contemporary prison system. For starters, there's something like 10% of the people who are incarcerated are in prisons that are run by private for profit companies. Beyond that, the state-run prisons contract out all sorts of services from transport to medical services to cafeterias and uniforms.

One that's particularly contentious at the moment is telecommunications companies charge outrageous sums for incarcerated people or their families to have a phone call every week. I don't buy the idea that it's one-for-one capitalism and greed-produced mass incarceration, but the two are joined at the hip.

Brian Lehrer: Few more minutes with Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times and founder of the Marshall Project, the nonprofit news organization that reports on criminal justice, and his new book, What's Prison For? JJ in the East Village has another answer to that question. Hi, JJ. You're on WNYC?

JJ: Yes, hi. Actually, I have family members who commit crimes over and over again, and the only thing that they do understand is punishment by going to jail. They don't want to work at 15, $20 an hour. They see a lot of fast money out there. They see the fast money in entertainment, in sports, in drug sales, and they're attracted to it. What do you do with people like that? The only thing I can see that keeps them safe and society safe is that they're being punished by being in jail.

Bill Keller: It doesn't work is the answer to that question. Your family members or friends that you know who keep going back are part of the evidence of that. The recidivism rate in this country is higher than it is in most other countries and part of that has to do with the fact that prisons are not, I'm generalizing here, but prisons are not a therapeutic environment. They can actually contribute to your likelihood of committing a new crime because they communicate an attitude of disrespect for authority. The culture inside of prison, although everyone is different. The culture inside of prison is not often reformative.

Brian Lehrer: Not wanting to work for 15, $20 an hour, as the caller says, goes to what you said about a college education being helpful with recidivism. Recidivism is very much a part of the debate in New York right now in the governor's race and other things. I don't know if you've been following some of the examples that come out in the New York Post and on some of the TV channels that they like to emphasize, but either because of the bail reform or, anyway, they've been stories about people arrested.

I saw one over a hundred arrests in the last couple of years and the guy keeps getting arrested. Then finally he was arrested for something pretty serious. Maybe it's a chicken and egg question. Where do you think the bail reform that's being debated in New York right now fits into the big picture of what we've been discussing, including recidivism?

Bill Keller: Before we came on the era, I didn't deal that much with bail reform in the book, just in passing but I tried to find some evidence, an answer to the question of whether the 2019 bail reform could be attributed, could be an explanation or be tied to recidivism and an increased crime. There is nothing I could find that demonstrates that that's the case. Anecdotally, it seems to be the case. You get people who are let go without bail, who commit a crime and it gets attention. Statistically, there's nothing I could find that demonstrates-- Crime has gone up in New York City, but it's gone up at pretty much the same rate as other localities and cities that don't have bail reform.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we leave it therefore today with Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times from 2003 to 2011 that he founded the Marshall Project, which continues to report on criminal justice as a nonprofit news organization. Now, Bill has a new book called What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Bill Keller: You're welcome.

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