Conferences & Events

I'm going to stop there. There is way more that I could talk about, but I'm going to turn over right now and have the panel join me. I'd like to begin by asking professor Victor Rios to get us started. Victor, you have talked about and you were open about, and in fact it's been an important part of your work, that you are system involved. That you were incarcerated as a young person, and you've turned that work into work with young people who've experienced gun violence, aggressive policing, and have gotten sucked into the system through the school-to-prison pipeline.

I've thrown out a bunch of statistics at a sort of meta level. Can you tell us about the lives of the young people that you work with and how their experience of the criminal legal system affects them and their communities?

Victor Rios: Yes, thank you, Nick. First, I would like to thank the Vera Institute for all its wonderful work it's done over the years to lead us in gathering empirical data on how marginalized populations are impacted by the system. I also want to thank the Federal Reserve for the invitation.

I've followed young people for over 20 years now that get caught up in the juvenile justice system. I hang out with them on street corners, at parks, courtrooms, homes, and neighborhoods across institutional settings, particularly in schools as well. I get to see that process that takes place throughout a day's time, throughout weeks, throughout months, throughout years to see where things go wrong, and sometimes where things go right, when they're able to find opportunities.

In those 20 years, some of the key themes I've found is that there's a very solid school-to-prison pipeline. And what that means is that kids that tend to get in trouble, and these are Black and Latinx youth, particularly males, but increasingly young ladies as well that get in trouble in school, end up getting sent to detention rooms that resemble prisons. After that, they get in trouble in those detention rooms at school, they end up getting kicked out of school, expelled. They end up on the street; they end up vulnerable. In a typical pattern, I'm thinking of one of the young people I followed for three years, where he got in trouble in school. He had no criminal record. He ends up on a street corner because he was expelled, and then they caught him for having marijuana on him, the police officer did. Gave him a ticket, a citation, no big deal.

He goes to court; the kid feels like it's no big deal. The judge tells him no big deal, I'm just going to put you on probation. It's no big deal. And the kid's feeling like it's no big deal to be on probation, I haven't been incarcerated yet. Unfortunately, once the system tags you as a young person, you end up just set up for that school-to-prison pipeline. The way it worked for this young person, like many other young people, is that he violates probation.

The way you violate probation, typically, particularly in the inner city, is that you lose many of your rights when you're on probation, like they could literally go into your grandma's home, search you, search your grandma if you're there, search your grandma's house. That happened to this kid, where he was just violating probation, not being at his home on time, he was at his grandma's home. It was a gang neighborhood, so they went into that home, searched the home, found more contraband, and he ends up incarcerated.

You fast forward 7, 10 years later. I follow them. I tracked them for this amount of time. You go to prison to visit them and you ask them, "Hey, can you tell me what major crime you committed to end up in prison?" And they can't tell you. They cannot tell you that one major crime, because how they end up in prison is through the small trickle effect events where they're just being constantly criminalized, pushed out of institutions that are viable, and that matter for them.

All to say, or the big point here that relates to the economy, is that the majority of young people I followed who ended up in that school-to-prison pipeline were young people that never found a job opportunity. Once young people found job opportunities, their likelihood of bypassing that school-to-prison pipeline was high. In other words, they were able to desist from crime because they had an opportunity at a viable job.

A lot of times we think that the kinds of jobs we have to provide have to be high-level, high-skilled. I agree with that philosophy. We have to prepare our young generations for those high-skilled, high-level jobs. But many times we forget that even some basic, part-time jobs can help young people temporarily as they prepare for high-tech, high-skilled jobs in the future. Just to conclude here, one field experiment we conducted was that I hired a group of young people that were highly involved in crime and violence in a neighborhood. I hired about six of them. I pretty much just said, "Look, you're going to be my research assistants. I'm going to pay you." At the time it was $15 an hour. "And I just ask one thing. On the weekend, try your best to stay away from getting in trouble." We looked at crime afterwards, and in that particular neighborhood, crime had dipped. We were so impressed by how much such a small, minute kind of job opportunity had allowed these young people to feel like, 'Hey, you know what? I can actually pull away from being involved in these kinds of activities.' I also would like to address the other branch of research I conduct, which is punitive policing, but I'll save that for later. Thank you.

Turner: Victor, thank you so much for that. Really appreciate your work. If we could, I'd like to bring Professor Lytle Hernandez into this conversation. Kelly, do us a favor and zoom out and back for us, and talk to us a little bit about the historical roots of the trends that we've been discussing, the life experiences that Victor referenced. What is the role of history and the impact of the system for people of color and Indigenous people?

Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Thank you, Nick, and thanks to the Fed for the opportunity to be here today. I am coming to this event from Los Angeles, the Tongva Basin, the homeland of the Tongva and Gabrielino peoples. I was asked to talk about the history of mass incarceration, and in particular its disproportionate impact upon Black, Indigenous and people of color.

I want to begin by saying that the disproportionate impact is certainly not random and no accident. It is a historical phenomenon with great, deep roots with dexterity. There's no single origin story to mass incarceration. I wish it were that simple, right? Nick gave us one of the first origin stories, and that is certainly that coming out of enslavement, moving into the period of emancipation, former slaveholders and other vested White partners of the South invested in policing and criminalization and incarceration, in ways that would subject African Americans, newly emancipated African Americans, to slave-like conditions.

This happened in many of the ways that just Victor was talking about, not through the criminalization of serious offenses, but in fact, through the policing of minor cases, the infamous pig laws, for example. You take a population, you impoverish a population, you make a population hungry, and then you criminalize the taking of pigs, right? The seeking of nourishment, the seeking of food. These pig laws and many others like it, vagrancy codes, led to a rising number of African Americans being incarcerated in the South and then sold off or leased out into forms of convict labor and thereby building the New South as unfree workers across the region. Michelle Alexander and many people have done this story very, very well. I'd encourage people to look at Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name or Michelle Alexander's work, The New Jim Crow, if you want to learn more about this history.

I would want to also, though, pivot to understand what are the origins of the story for Indigenous populations, and these stories all intersect at different moments. For Indigenous communities, the Indian wars, the efforts at removal and exclusion to seize native lands and to extinguish native sovereignty, which really raged across the 19th century. Those evolved across the 19th century from lores of banishment into a criminal legal system that specifically targeted native Indigenous populations.

Let me explain how this happened. For example, in California, and California is really important because as the Indian wars pushed across the continent, once you arrived in California, there was nowhere else to push Indigenous populations. This is where the practice of genocide really escalates and where you have the creation of a really refined criminal legal system to target Indigenous populations. In 1850 and 1860, as those campaigns are reaching a high point in California, you have the passage of several pieces of legislation called the Act for the Protection and the Government of Indians. The Act for the Protection and the Government of Indians criminalized vagrancy in particular. As you uproot and you displace a population, you've rendered them refugees and homeless, you then call them vagrants in their own homeland, you police them, you lock them up, and then you lease them out as convict workers.

We don't talk about this a lot in this country, but native and Indigenous populations played an extraordinary role, hard labor, hard time, building the roads, the orchards, the businesses, the industries, namely the American West that helped to create the wealth of this nation. They did it as convict laborers through the criminal legal system, as the campaigns of genocide were coming to a close.

Those are the stories for Black folks or for Indigenous folks in particular, and they intersect at different moments. There's no way that these are happening in silos. But there's also a story, an origin story about non-White immigrants who arrive in this country. And in particular, I'd like to talk about how Congress developed new rules, regulating who could enter the United States in the 1880s, first targeting Chinese immigrants. Since the 1890s, through the creation of deportation, the invention of a new tool, nearly 50 million people have been forced out of this country. Over 90 percent of them have been non-White. The U.S. immigration system is a shadow system, a partner to the criminal legal system that targets non-White persons, Latinx, Asian in particular, as well as African and Black. And it's no accident that as mass incarceration soared in the 1980s, so did deportation. One point where you see this all come together, is that in the federal prison system today, the number one charge sending people to federal prison is the invented crime of unauthorized entry into the United States by non-citizens. This is where it all comes together. Enslavement removal, exclusion of non-White immigrants, all of these are targeted non-White communities and it's how we can understand the incarceral state as really White supremacy at work, certainly across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Turner: Kelly, thank you. Such an important setting for us. You use words like targeting, and one of the senses that I think that this audience should really get from this is that the problems that we're talking about here, the racial disparities, the disparities suffered by Indigenous people, are not a bug of the system. The system was purpose built to accomplish these feats, and that's something that I hope that everyone will leave this session understanding.

I want to turn to my good friend, Phil, Professor Goff, and ask, you're an expert in policing, you're also as a social psychologist, you know a lot about how implicit bias manifests. We've talked a lot about sort of the historical roots of racism; talk a little bit about the role of policing and then also how implicit bias manifests in this system.

Phillip Atiba Goff: Sure, thanks Nick. It's a pleasure, it's an honor to be on a panel with Kelly and Victor, and Nick. I want to thank the Fed for inviting me here. Let me dig in a little bit to the question of implicit bias because I think it's one of the most popular and most profoundly misunderstood buzzwords in this space right now. As a scientist who helped to popularize the term initially, I have to say I'm a little bit dismayed when I hear people talk about implicit bias like it's this gremlin that lives in our minds and the thing that we need to do is treat individuals for it. That's not how implicit bias works. Implicit bias works by reflecting the world that we encounter and then subtly influencing our behaviors to be consistent with that map of the world. It is literally an audit test to see how bad structural racism is because if it literally seeps into everybody's mind, you can see it's pretty bad.

What implicit bias actually is the overlearned associations between, in this case, a group and traits about that group. If I see folks represented as criminal a whole bunch of times, I start to associate that, and then I make the slip, right. I see someone and I think that they are criminal, and I start to reproduce what I have seen. That's not an individual difference problem. That's not a hearts and minds problem. It's not a character flaw. That's a representation of the ways that structures are perceived in experiences. The solution to implicit bias then is not going in and trying to make somebody feel differently. The solution is changing the structure. The way that implicit bias shows up in law enforcement is the way that it shows up everywhere else. It shows up in decisions where high-minded egalitarian people believe they're trying to do the right things, but under time pressure, under a novelty of the stimulus, when they're in a bad mood, they end up doing things in one situation they might not do in another.

The biggest problem and the reason why implicit bias became so popular is because we don't get to observe ourselves in multiple universes at the same time if we're outside of a Marvel movie. What that means is I only go through life with one set of experiences. I say, "No, of course, that wasn't because of racism. That wasn't because of racism. That was just because they were engaged in a crime. That was because they actually looked suspicious." But when we aggregate across a bunch of experiences, not just yours, or not just one time, what we start to see as a pattern that can't be explained by just criminal engagement, criminal behavior, suspicious, whatever the heck that means. What we have in implicit bias is a tool for sort of revealing the map of structural racism. All of the accumulated excesses of these intentional systems that were constructed that now live on beneath our conscious awareness.

That's the way that it lands in policing and the criminal legal system. What it means is literally those biases make it more likely that Black folks, Indigenous folks, Latinx folks are going to get marked as suspicious. They're going to get stopped. They're going to get searched. They're going to get arrested. It determines what charges are brought, right, or it helps to influence that. What sentences are doled out. What portion of those sentences end up getting served. How likely someone is to receive early release and the economic opportunities available upon reintegration. But so does explicit bias. Not all bias is implicit, and we shouldn't imagine that we're beyond explicit bias somehow as if the last four-plus years needed any more amplification. As we're having these conversations about where we're at, I think, Nick, and I know that this was part of your goal in asking me the question, I think part of what that question compels us to do is look seriously at the definition of racism.

Part of the reason we're talking about all of this stuff. We're talking about race and racial disparities is because we've marked it as something that's not morally acceptable. We've said, "If the reason that people are being incarcerated is because of their race, well that can't be OK." But then we define racism as something that has to be intentional in the hearts and minds of someone. It's not just that I'm doing this to you because you're Black. I'm doing this for you because you're Black and I don't like Black people. That's what the federal standard is. The two-for-two standard is on charging. And the reason why implicit bias got picked up by activists and organizers in the first place was, it provided a different language. What's happened in the years, the decade-plus since when it was being popularized, is it, like every other tool that has been effective to resist racism, gets warped by racism as a tool against those were organizing against it.

This is what happened with the politics of respectability, where folks were wearing church clothes when they knew they were getting beatings in order to reveal the savagery, right, of White supremacy, particularly in the U.S. South. It's what happened to work slowdowns on plantations, where Black slaves organized their labor to resist the profit motive. And then afterwards, the politics of respectability gets turned into pull up your pants. And those work slowdowns got weaponized stereotypes that Black people are just lazy. That's why we can't pay them. Implicit bias is being used in much the same way to forestall the true changes that we need. The structural changes that would make things right. OK. In this moment, what I'm inviting us to do and what the science of implicit bias invites us to do is to name that racism is both interpersonal, individual and internal, and structural. That I don't need a bad actor or bad faith to produce patterns of disparity that literally have economic impact that at this point is incalculable, human impact that at this point is incalculable because we haven't bothered to calculate it.

My hope is, as we move through this day and these conversations, that we're not stuck with a limited definition that roots it in inside the hearts and minds of people. No one has ever taken to the streets to demand that a dominant group, that White people, feel differently in their hearts. They take to the streets to stop patterns of behavior, both in policing and then downstream. Policing is where I spend most of my time, but in incarceration and in re-entry and reintegration, implicit bias, explicit bias, but also the structural racism that forges all of that stuff together, right, affects literally every decision point. If you imagine that it's not you, congratulations. Know that as a scientist, I don't care. I care that it affects the person next to you. The person whose name is next to yours on the Zoom box, right. The other people in your organization. On the aggregate, it produces aggregate problems in behaviors at literally every stage in the criminal legal system.

Turner: Phil, thank you so much for that. I want to give everyone a quick time check. We have about three minutes left. I'm going to ask the panelists to respond to... I mean, we're doing this in 35 minutes, which is pretty much a speed record here. I want to ask all the panelists to respond to this question, which is, is there a certain economic impact that we need to be thinking about? We began with President Bostic, obviously referring to underemployment, and earnings loss, and so on. Are there things that we should call attention to? Kelly, I'd love to just ping you, if you don't mind for a second. You began talking about landholders in the South as sort of stakeholders for these sort of the human capital that was put to work. That was leased. That was bought. This is an employment program for someone. Who are the stakeholders today?

Lytle Hernandez: Great. Thank you. That's a great question. I'll add a little bit, and then we'll pass it around. I mean, certainly, mass incarceration has been a jobs program. It's been a jobs program upstate for prison guards in many places but also in urban communities. Look, we'd have to address the issue that a sizable number of the people working in the carceral state, the security state, are Black and Brown folks themselves who are policing, engaging Black and Brown folks. Make no mistake. There's no historical uniqueness to this that Black folks have always been charged to be put at the face of White supremacy. You go back to the plantation. You go back to roles that we have been forced to take up. You go back to the Buffalo Soldiers being forced to clear the American West of native folks. This is not an excuse. This does not say that White supremacy is not at work. If 19th-century Black folks could be put in charge of clearing native folks from the land, Black folks today certainly could be put in charge of policing our own communities.

That is one thing to look at is we need a new jobs program that makes sure all of us have access to safe, good-paying jobs that do not produce harm for our own families and for our communities. That goes for the imprisoned and the people who do the policing. The other thing I want to lift up that we haven't talked about is the other forms of extraordinary extraction that not just happened from the individual who was policed and incarcerated, but from the people who love them. So, Nick, you had talked about bail bonds. Here in Los Angeles with the Million Dollar Hoods project, which I run, we were able to calculate that nearly $20 billion have been levied against Black and Brown communities in money bond in the last few years. Most people can't pay that. You have to pay a bail bond deposit to a private industry, which is another stakeholder here. And nearly $200 million was paid by Black and Brown folks in particular. We know from the Ella Baker Center that it's women who pay the bail bonds. It's disproportionately men who were arrested. It's disproportionately women who pay those bail bonds. Women who lose those monies are losing access to transportation funds, are losing access to rent money, losing access to money to buy trumpet lessons for their children. There are many stakeholders in this beyond individuals who are policed and incarcerated.

Turner: Thank you for that. Thanks very much, Kelly. Let me just ask Phil or Victor, if you have in a quick 20 to 30 seconds, if there's a particular economic impact that you want to make sure that this audience understands before I pass us on to the next event, please, please do.

Rios: I guess that policing has been overfunded, incarceration has been overfunded over the last 50 years. We have to figure out how to generate or shift those funds around to fund schools, community programs, job opportunities. With the new human infrastructure, and conversations, I think schools in my work are at the center of this, should be at center of this, conversation. And that they provide a space in local communities where we can continue to infuse resources beyond teachers. Counselors, therapists, success coaches, mentors, programs for young people based out of local schools. That's one important solution. And, of course, job programs within those schools that young people could sign up for and become part of.

Turner: Thank you, Victor. Phil, how about you?

Goff: All right. About one in five adults in the United States are going to have contact with law enforcement, but we know that in almost every city, less than 10 percent of what they do has anything to do with violence. We fund local law enforcement to the tune of about $115 billion a year, which is more than triple the combined efforts of state funding for child welfare, substance abuse, mental health. What is my other thing? Oh, and homelessness. Those other things are the root causes of things we like to think of as crime and violence. What we're doing is we're funding the punishment for the people who step out of line, but not the things that would prevent it in the first place.

We provide people with terrible options and then punish them for the choices within that. That's just dumb financially. If you didn't care about the equity issue in it, it's just a backasswards way of trying to solve the problem. Let me end on backasswards. We can change it over to the other panel.

Turner: That's a great place to end. Thank you, Phil, Kelly, and Victor, for this fantastic discussion. I'm so sorry that we had to move it through so quickly. I'm now turning us over to a fireside chat we're very lucky to hear. This conversation between Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari. President and Attorney General, over to you.

Neel Kashkari: Thank you very much. Thank you for that great conversation. It is great to be with all of you today. My name is Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, and it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce our distinguished visitor here today, Attorney General Keith Ellison. It's great to be with you in person, Attorney General.

Keith Ellison: Thank you, Mr. President.

Kashkari: Thank you for being here. I'm going to give you a brief background, even though everyone knows who Attorney General Ellison is. I want to give a brief background, a brief introduction. Keith Ellison was sworn in as Minnesota's 30th attorney general on January 7, 2019. He obviously got a lot of national attention for the outstanding work you and your team did in prosecuting Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. Prior to becoming Minnesota attorney general, for 12 years, Mr. Ellison represented Minnesota's fifth congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Before being elected to Congress, he served four years in the Minnesota House Representative, and prior to elective service, spent 16 years as an attorney focusing on civil rights and defense law.

It is great to have you with us here, Attorney General, because I want to start by talking about your life's experience. This conference today is focusing on racism and the criminal justice system as it relates to the economy. Can you give us some context of what you have seen in the various roles you've had? The role that racism plays in our criminal justice system today?

Ellison: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. President. One thing I do want to mention in terms of my own credentials is that I worked with you and Justice Allen Page to change the Minnesota constitution to make education, public education, a paramount right for kids, which I think will move us a long way towards a safer, more just society. I'll just put that in.

Kashkari: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Ellison: That's in my resume, too.

What do I see? What I see is that we use the criminal justice system to solve social and economic problems. I see we use police officers, who are there mostly to do the right thing and help people, to solve every conceivable bad outcome people are facing in a given moment. They have to deal with mental health crises. They have to deal with poverty. They have to deal with homelessness. They have to deal with so many other problems when really what they should be dealing with is just trying to make people safety, promote public safety. Instead, what they have to do is safety plus a whole range of socioeconomic problems. I see that in a range of things, and the fact is, our society has not been static.

It has changed over time. The fact of the matter is in the '60s, we were talking about war on poverty, and well, we left out the poverty and just put more and more and more resources into the incarceral state, which starts with, of course, policing and ends with people being in prison. Not that those resources are not important. I'm a prosecutor. We prosecute people, and they get the sanctions that the court issues. But I do wonder whether or not we've put more into that part of the system than we really should've, and I think that there's certainly costs to be paid for those choices.

Kashkari: Well, from my perspective at the Federal Reserve, why does the Federal Reserve care? One of our goals is maximum employment.

Ellison: Right.

Kashkari: As many Americans as possible participating in our economy and contributing. And we know that people with criminal backgrounds, whether it's minor or significant, have barriers for participation in the economy.

Ellison: Absolutely.

Kashkari: That hurts them, but that also holds our economy back. I look at this, and I think it seems like there's a business of criminal justice, which may be a profitable business in the short run. But is it possible that we as a society are paying much more for that business of criminal justice in the long run in terms of diminishing our economic potential?

Ellison: I think the answer is clearly yes. There are a lot of costs to running a criminal justice system this way. There's the cost to the loved ones who pay exorbitant phone fees just to talk to their loved one who's incarcerated. There are costs associated with the bail system. There are costs associated with many, many parts of the system, and we can go into that.

But the biggest cost is the cost of human creativity and potential. The fact is you've got people who could be operating at a far more optimal way but cannot because of the criminal justice system. It's not just the people who have been charged and convicted of crime, notwithstanding the issue of false convictions and exonerations. Let's just talk about the people who actually did something that they're accused of. What about their kids? What is the economic price to pay to a child of an incarcerated parent? What is the economic price to pay for a family when perhaps the partner of that incarcerated person is forking over family budget to get into a car and drive a long way to go have a visit? I mean, these are massive prices. And what about the pre-conviction before anybody's convicted of anything, we're presumed innocent until proven guilty. What about the bail? The price of somebody sitting in jail waiting to go to trial. People pleading guilty to things they didn't do because the plea negotiation says, "If you plead guilty today, you get out today. But if you want to trial, you're going to stay in longer." A lot of costs to be paid, and I think we need to really look at that.

Kashkari: You are the top law enforcement officer of the State of Minnesota. How constrained are you? I mean, because as you just said, Derek Chauvin's case is brought to you.

Ellison: Yeah.

Kashkari: Your job was to go represent the people and try to get as close as you can to justice for George Floyd and George Floyd's family. If you're always focusing on the next case ...

Ellison: Right.

Kashkari: ... how do we make... how do we get to the systemic reform that we also need?

Ellison: Well, this is a great question. I have the benefit of being able to look at the system a little bit more broadly. Because not only do we do criminal prosecution, we also do consumer justice. We also do residential utility stuff. We also do charities enforcement. I get to have a broader view of the system than if all I did was criminal prosecution. And what I see taking in all those other parts is that we could save ourselves money on the criminal side if we put more money into the health care side, the consumer side, the employment side.

Kashkari: Education.

Ellison: Thank you for mentioning that. Oh, definitely the education side. And again, we're here at the Minneapolis Fed. Let's give a note of thanks to the Minneapolis Fed and Art Rolnick, who really started a national conversation about the importance of investing in early childhood education.

But no doubt, we've got to have a systemic conversation. My hope, Mr. President, is if we... is if the George Floyd matter does something for our country, it is we spark a conversation about how we go forward from here. A lot of question about, is this an inflection point? The answer is obviously, it depends. I want to thank the Fed for having a conversation about racism in the economy with pieces of it focusing on the criminal justice system because that's the moment we're in. That's the conversation needs to be had. Can we have a multiracial shared economy? Or are we going to have one where it advantages some and disadvantages others based on their ancestors being in servitude? I mean, that's the real question that this moment presents to us, and I'm hoping that we move for true economic growth and opportunity for everyone. Liberty and justice for all. That's really what I hope this conversation sparks.

Kashkari: Well, I couldn't agree more. I mean, just to be candid. It was the murder of George Floyd ...

Ellison: Yeah.

Kashkari: ... that made me and my colleagues here ask ourselves, "What role can we play? What more can we do?"

Ellison: Right.

Kashkari: That's what caused me to reach out to President Bostic at the Atlanta Fed, our colleague, Eric Rosengren at Boston, and then led to this national conversation. I'm proud that all 12 Federal Reserve Banks are arm-in-arm at this work committed to taking this forward. But I'm also sensitive. I mean, I remember when Rodney King was beaten.

Ellison: Sure.

Kashkari: I remember the national outcry, and then nothing happened.

Ellison: You're right.

Kashkari: We can't let that happen again.

Ellison: Well, Kenneth Clark, who was a noted sociologist. Those who studied the Brown v. Board of Education case know that he's the one who gave Thurgood Marshall the factual basis for arguing that segregation hurt Black kids through the doll study. He testified before the Kerner Commission in 1967, in which he said, "It's police violence, which resulted in civil unrest." He said, "Look, it's like an Alice in Wonderland experience. We have the tragic incident followed by protests, followed by civil unrest, followed by commissions and task forces, followed by inaction."

That's what he said. In this moment, we need to be aware of the danger of inaction. Inaction is a possibility here. The most likely outcome, when anything happens, is the status quo prevails. We've got to put extra effort in saying, "What are we going to do different?" Or are we just going to stay on this same pattern? Bottom line is we have a chance here to say, "Is our criminal justice yielding safety and justice, or is it simply perpetuating the lack of opportunity for certain segments of our community?"

I think there is a good argument to be made that we're perpetuating inopportunity or whatever the word is. I think this is the time to do something about it. I think the Fed has an important role to play, starting with convening a conversation because you can't really do anything until you think it through and talk about it first. the Fed is in a very critical place to say, "If George Floyd, as an economic actor, somehow had access to employment during the pandemic or income, would he have found himself passing a fake 20 [dollar bill]?" If, in fact, that's what happened because there's no proof that he knew that 20 was fake. Would we be in a situation where a business like Cub Foods would need to send people out to go get back that 20 or some sort of system where they would be like, "Look, that's too small of a thing for us to make a big deal about."

Would we have a system where we're going to go get three, four, five, six police officers or more to all convene to go get a fake 20 and somebody gets killed as a result of a fake 20? I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine how this whole thing started and if the resources expended justify the harm or alleged harm done. I mean, these are all economic questions. And so much of what we define as racism blows through the economy and often has an economic reason for why it happened, whether it be short-term, as you mentioned. And we also have to calculate the long-term implications of doing it that way. It's a good time to be talking about this.

Kashkari: Well that mean, you articulated exactly why this is such an important conversation for the Federal Reserve to be part of. Again, I go back to, for all of us, we go back to the goals that Congress has assigned to us, maximum employment. All right. That means everybody participating in our economy. Our economy reaching its full potential.

Ellison: Right.

Kashkari: And if we're going to lead people on the sidelines, we're hurting them, but we're also hurting our economy's potential.

Ellison: That's right.

Kashkari: I make no apologies for us having this conversation, and we're more committed to this than ever. Now, let me shift gears. Could you talk about safety? There's a national conversation going. There's a defund the police movement. I'll give you my observation. My personal opinion. We need the police. We have police officers at the Minneapolis Fed protecting us.

Ellison: Right.

Kashkari: I'm glad we have them, and we need them. We need the police for public safety, but we also can't keep doing what we've been doing. So, the question I have for you, Attorney General, is so many of the proposals that I hear about, let's say banning chokeholds...

Ellison: Right.

Kashkari: ... as an example seem sensible, but they all seem very micro.

Ellison: Right.

Kashkari: How do we get at the institutional racism that is woven in the system? It's not just a bunch of little micro policies that's going to get ...

Ellison: Absolutely right. Well, first thing I think we need to do is say, "Let's let the police do what the police do best," which is, protect people, right. If we focused on that, would we have the same system that we have? Because if we focused on that, I don't think we'd have 1,700 untested rape kits in the City of Minneapolis, right. If we focused on that, I don't think we'd have a whole... we'd have four or five squad cars dealing with the fake 20. I think we'd have different outcomes if we said, "Let's keep the main thing, the main thing." But we do other things than the main thing. Part of what we do is I think we maintain a certain hierarchy in our society. And if you look at the history of policing, it didn't start out as solely a matter of protecting the public from harms and crimes.

It started out, quite honestly if you look in South Carolina's cities, started out as slave patrols. In New York, there was a huge role of disciplining immigrant labor that the police sort of morphed into. In Minneapolis itself, the police department grew up around economic interests. Things have changed, and it's time for policing to change. Policing should be a profession in which we say there are harmful things that happen. Let's protect people from them. And where we have, essentially, an economic or health-related problem, let's get resources to solve that. So, for example, if somebody is in an autistic meltdown, is the right response to send the police? Well, it has been because who else are you going to call?

Kashkari: Right.

Ellison: We don't know who they're going to... We don't know. There's a problem. We don't know who to call. There's got to be another way of deploying resources to serious problems that are not necessarily fixed by somebody who's coming there with a gun to use force. I think as a society, we need to want to acknowledge that that person is often needed. Sometimes needed. We do need people to respond with force to certain situations, but we don't always. And what can we do about prevention? What can we do about engaging health outcomes? You take marijuana, for example. Because we've made it illegal, it's now a police problem.

Maybe what we should do is regulate it and say, "It's not a police [matter] unless you're driving a car or some sort of thing." But then the same way we deal with alcohol. I mean, we turn things into police problems. Given the fact that we have great technology to take a picture of your plate if you run a red light. Do we need these traffic stops? Which even police officers will tell you often carry a lot of danger with them. Can we use other resources to solve this problem? And then what you do is you allow the police to really specialize on what they're really, really good at, which is somebody is committing...

You need an officer to go to a domestic violence. You need an officer to go to an in-process robbery. You need officers to do that. But I think we need to do a rethink on how we do it. I join you in saying, "You'll never hear me say defund the police." But if we're going to hire more, what are they going to do? And how are they going to do it? And the ones that do respond with force, we need to say, "How do you... Well, how do we enforce the requirement of de-escalation?"

For example, look, I don't claim to use less profanity than the average person. I won't use it on your show today. But I mean, I might use some colorful language sometime. But for an officer to walk up to a person they've stopped and drop a bunch of expletives, is that right? If I was a chief, I would discipline that. Not because I am so much better, because I'm not. But it escalates the problem rather than de-escalates a problem. In the case involving George Floyd, George Floyd's first engagement with the officers is, "Get the F here and you effer," and all this kind of stuff, gun in his face before anything has even happened. That spikes the tension in that moment. I mean, we've got to understand that there are things that officers do that don't make the problem less of a problem and make it more of a problem.

We know we can make progress because, in cities like Newark and Camden, New Jersey, they have. But it's by de-escalation and making it a priority that is enforced by the chief. It's by people just getting sick of paying out massive awards and settlements. It's people understanding that when the police have a bad relationship with the community, it inhibits solving crimes like murders. And so those are the things that we've really got to do.

Kashkari: But is there... Do typical police chiefs have the power that they need to be able to implement the kind of cultural change that you're talking about?

Ellison: I'd say, in general, the answer is no. I think you have a lot of... Look, I'm a guy who believes in unions. But you have collective bargaining agreements which go far beyond paid days off and holidays. They go into how many officers will be on the force? What will the discipline be? I believe in due process. But I also believe that if the chief says, "You have violated the norms of this department, you're out." Then that officer... there should be some check to make sure that the discharge is not discriminatory or whatever, but that officer probably should be on their way out.

In the State of Minnesota, in the City of Richfield, the police chief said, "You have beaten up people for no good reason. And you just did it again. You're fired." That case goes up to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court says, "Well, the collective bargaining agreement says that this will be handled by an arbitrator and the arbitrator has said this guy's not out." Overrules the chief. Now the chief is going to deal with this guy who he's fired. Now, what's going to happen then? Everybody else on department is like, "Well, the chief doesn't really run the department. And you can act up and beat up people, use excessive force and stay." That should not be. That's bad administration of a police department.

Kashkari: How do you address that?

Ellison: I think you've got to pass some sort of state law that says, "Collective bargaining agreements can contain a lot of things, but they cannot... No arbitrator can override the chief in a case of excessive force or corruption."

Kashkari: Or, I'm just making it up, is there a role for the Attorney General's Office or something like that? Some third-party to say, "Hey, we'll look at the facts here." I mean...

Ellison: Well, there is, and we have gotten more involved. The Police Officers Standards and Training Board has an important role to play. The POST board. They deal with police officer licensing. One good thing about policing in Minnesota is you have to be licensed. That's not the case in every case. They're fighting over that in Illinois right now. But in Minnesota, you have to be licensed. But the fact is, once you get your license... It's kind of like you get your license. See you later.

Kashkari: Right.

Ellison: They need to have much more control over that license. Because if a police officer's not licensed, they cannot practice policing. In the same way, a doctor or a pharmacist or a lawyer.

Kashkari: Right.

Ellison: I think that the POST board needs to be more involved. And I will tell you that if the POST board says, "We're going to start snatching licenses," it will not hurt policing. It'll make policing better because what you have now, Mr. President, is a scenario in which for many police departments, not all, but for many police departments, the people who are the most aggressive who violate the law the most, not the law, but the rules, the most who had the most complaints, those people, they stick around and the people who would report on them, who would say that this is wrong, those people get hazed by those guys.

I'll tell you a quick story of what I mean. There was an officer named Cariol Horne, a Buffalo police officer. She and her partner go to make an arrest. Her partner is beating the crap out of somebody unnecessarily. She intervenes to stop them, he punches her in the face, and you think, "Oh, he's in trouble." No, she was in trouble. She actually ends up getting fired, loses her pension, and has to fight in court. If it was not for some pro bono lawyers at Harvard Law School, she would not have her pension, but because of them, she does have her pension. It was just a horrible episode where the person trying to protect the reputation, dignity of the department, and the person who was being assaulted, is the one punished. In too many departments around this country, the people who want to uphold good standards find themselves fired, disciplined, or at least hazed by fellow officers who don't believe in any of that. We need a department where good behavior is rewarded, bad behavior is punished or kicked out. That's what we really need.

Kashkari: We are, unfortunately, this has got to, the time is flown. We're just about out of time. I want to end ...

Ellison: Oh, my goodness.

Kashkari: I know. I want to end on, are you optimistic given where we are in this moment? I'll give you one thing that gives me optimism is body cameras.

Ellison: Yeah.

Kashkari: We wouldn't know 1 percent of what we know today. Maybe the people living it knew it, but the rest of us would not know absent body cameras. So, that gives me some optimism. Are you optimistic about the future?

Ellison: I'm optimistic for a number of important reasons. Like I said, Newark, Camden, it can be done. There are other cities doing it. I'm also optimistic because of the 14 Minneapolis police officers who signed a letter saying what Derek Chauvin did is absolutely unacceptable, and they want to be with the people of Minneapolis to move forward reform.

I'm optimistic because of all the officers who came to testify in the Chauvin case to say that's wrong and we cannot abide that. I'm optimistic for a number of reasons, including Chief [John] Harrington. Who's now Commissioner Harrington, who co-led a task force with me on reducing deadly force encounters with police. There is a lot of reason to believe that we are on a better path that we're on now. In fact, the attorney general of Ohio, a conservative Republican, issued a book on how to investigate excessive force complaints by police. That's a good thing, but we all, as a society, need to heed the words of Kenneth Clark. We are in danger of inaction and we need to commit to action past the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act right now. And let's keep on making a society where we have liberty and justice for all.

Kashkari: Amen. Well, Attorney General Ellison, I want to thank you on behalf of all of my colleagues at the Federal Reserve System for being here. Really appreciate your wisdom, sharing it with us today. And I want to end on a personal note before I hand it over to David and just say the Derek Chauvin trial was probably the most important, the highest profile court case in recent memory, globally. I just admire the way you led the effort because it was never about you. It was clear from the start that your focus was on doing the people's work and you put the team together, gave them space to do their job. And I just, that was public service. I really admire you for the way that you did that. Thank you.

Ellison: Thank you, Mr. President, good to see you.

Kashkari: You bet. David, over to you.

David Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you very much President Kashkari and Attorney General Ellison. Thank you for that extraordinary conversation. We have an extraordinary panel of experts prepared and ready to discuss, but we could have continued to listen to that discussion for the next several hours. So, really appreciate the president of the Fed and the attorney general there in Minnesota.

My name is David Muhammad, I'm the executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. I'm going to take us to our next discussion, I really want to start by thanking the Fed for pretty extraordinary...I've said that word a few times, because this seems unprecedented in the depth of the discussion, the caliber of people involved for this discussion by the Fed. I just want to appreciate the Fed for their work and for being bold and having these real discussions that are necessary.

Thank you again. Today, we're going to discuss the connections between segregation, policing, and the economy. As we've been discussing since the murder of George Floyd, we have been in an era in this country like none other, where you've had public awareness and willingness to reform policing to a level that has reached a peak. Proposals to make reforms, budget adjustments, investments in community alternatives are being considered, but also in the past several months with the increase in gun violence, some communities are rethinking such reforms and some bold announcements have been walked back. As we heard in a previous panel, we spend $115 billion every year on local police departments. Several cities across the country are taking up a half or more than half of the general fund of that city on one department. Today we discussed segregation policing in the economy and joining us today is an extremely impressive lineup of experts.

You have Walter Katz, who is the vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures and, and their bio are long and impressive. We'll leave it to you to look up their bios in the program. We also have Yvette Gentry, the director of justice and opportunity at the Metro United Way, Clark Neily, the senior vice president of legal studies at the Cato Institute, and Kevin Washburn, the dean of the University of Iowa College of Law. Walter, we'll start with you. You have written a paper that lays out an alarming overview of police misconduct, the origins of racialized policing, but also proposals for reform. Can you tell us about these proposed reforms and how can we get there?

Walter Katz: Thank you so much, David. And for those like you and I, who've been working in this line of work for many years, a forum like this is something we could not have imagined, I think, five or six years ago. I join you in appreciating this opportunity. Let me take a step back and just summarize what I think are the historical antecedents to where we are today with policing. Those who want to detach the history from the present, I think, are doing a great disservice. The destruction of Black Wall Street was a hundred years ago. The Chicago massacres, which were triggered by a boy, a young Black boy pre-adolescent, who was swimming in a White side of a beach in Lake Michigan. The largest Black uprisings were all triggered by police violence, whether it be Rodney King in 1992, Watts in 1965, Miami in 1980, or the uprisings that occurred last year after the murder of George Floyd.

What we learned about the officer who killed George Floyd was that he was known as an unusually rough officer who used similar force on other people before. Of all the remarkable and frankly traumatizing facts that we learned from the killing our George Floyd, for me, as somebody has worked in police oversight and police accountability for more than a decade, I can tell you what stood out to me the most. Not what occurred necessarily at 38th [Street] and Chicago [Avenue] on May 25 of last year, but something that occurred a few years earlier in September 2017, when Chauvin, the officer was called to a house for what appeared to be a family disturbance. Now, just the kind of disturbance, we would say, we want police officers to respond to because we don't know what could happen. Well, a 14-year-old boy was being unruly and the way that Chauvin dealt with it was to grab him by the throat, beat him in the head with his flashlight, then he took him to the ground, handcuffed him and kept his knee on his neck and his upper back for 17 minutes. For that conduct, Officer Chauvin was never held accountable. No complaint was sustained, his use of force was found in policy. It was never criminally investigated, and three years later George Floyd lay dead. In my view, and having worked in police accountability, as I said for a very long time, that had Officer Chauvin been held responsible for what occurred in 2017, I would make the bold statement that it's more likely that George Floyd would be alive today. Instead, the lack of accountability, where we let officers behave in manners like that and allow them to justify their conduct in the grounds of a reasonable force, allows for that to happen. But where it occurred matters and the neighborhoods which see aggressive policing are the neighborhoods which are the Black and poor neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods do not appear organically. They are a result of segregation. They are a result in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, of housing covenants which were introduced in the early 1900s, which expressly prohibited the sale of property to Black people, to Asians, to Jews. What you found is that the Black population was crowded into smaller and smaller neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods, which were then successful, which then emerged as the Black middle-class like the Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul, were then raised to build an expressway. At every turn, your opportunity for Black ownership of property was limited. Your opportunity to get loans at reasonable rates was limited. And it's no wonder that then as you dislocate people from economic opportunity, the poverty sets in.

What the role of policing has played, especially in these Northern cities like St. Louis, like Minneapolis, like Chicago, like Detroit, is to do two things. One, which is to regulate the order of Black people living in these regulated neighborhoods, and two, to protect White neighborhoods from Black intrusion. That encouraged aggressive policing. We saw that aggressive policing emerged throughout the history of policing, but then codified in the concept of disorder policing, which involves like broken windows, for example, with a real focus on traffic stops on aggressive searches, on really sending the message that your body is not an autonomous thing, but is subject to search and stop and aggressing by the police at any time. I'm going to cut it short here, I go into depth in this in the paper. But what I talk about here is that while we may want to shrink the footprint of policing, and we should have a conversation about that, policing will still exist. The Derek Chauvins of the world or officers like that will still be responding to these family disturbances. All officers should be trained in de-escalation, and those who fail to deescalate, but instead aggravate, should be disciplined, and if necessary, removed. Public employers should be investing in early intervention systems so that officers who abuse or dehumanize the public can be identified, preferably by independent oversight as early as possible and where appropriate, removed from policing. Local prosecutors should have a much larger role to play, not just in fatal encounters and fatal officer-involved shootings, but in incidents that result in significant injuries like to that 14-year-old boy, there has to be an independent set of eyes to determine whether or not a crime occurred. And then there's other measures we could look at, like collective bargaining restrictions, decertification, which the attorney general mentioned, which I think is a critical factor. I would also argue that we as a country should be embarking and the difficult path of transitional justice and truth seeking. To understand how modern policing is connected to economic policy, how modern policing is connected to segregation. And how we've empowered policing to play that role and it's time for some significant reconsideration.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you. Walter, one really quick follow up. If you could just give us a short, you can give us a three-hour answer, but give us the short version. How do we overcome, and Attorney General Ellison mentioned this, issues of the union's, arbitration, police officer bill of rights laws that worked effective accountability?

Katz: Yeah, great question. I think that a lot has to do, when we look at collective bargaining, there are three different types of terms. There are terms that are subject to mandatory bargaining, such as wages and hours worked. There are areas which are prohibited bargaining, which can't be negotiated whatsoever because, for example, they're regulated by state law. The third is permissive bargaining areas where the cities don't have to negotiate but choose to. Often these accountability measures, which make it really difficult to hold officers responsible for misconduct for excessive force fall within the permissive bargaining. I'll give one brief example, the state of Illinois House Bill 3653, which codified decertification of officers who engage in misconduct, specifically states that the decertification measures are not subject to collective bargaining. Carving out terms which are really about accountability and order and discipline should not be subject to collective bargaining, but should really fall under the purview of state law.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to go next to Clark Neily. You received a paper written by Walter Katz and you've heard a brief synopsis of it. Can you give us your response? What do you like and not like, what are other additional proposals you might have to get us to a reform policing?

Clark Neily: Yeah, thanks so much. It's wonderful to be here. This is an incredibly important issue obviously, and it's one we've been discussing and debating at varying levels of intensity for more than a year now. One of the things that's deeply concerning, I think is how little has changed despite the sustained amount of attention that the issue of policing has received, including in the halls of Congress, which has been debating various police reform proposals again for well over a year and has not been able to make significant progress. I think part of the problem that we have to be very upfront about is the outsized influence of the law enforcement lobby. I would argue that it's probably the second strongest political lobby in the country. It wields extraordinary influence over the legislative process. I would say, objectively speaking, the law enforcement lobby seems to have no goal that is more important to it than preventing real accountability. I think that's clearly where our focus has to be for a number of reasons, for reasons of individual justice, but also because at least for those of us who believe that police have an important role to play in society, and I certainly do, they're not able to discharge that role. They're not able to be effective in their job unless they have the trust and confidence and support of the community. Many of the communities in this country that are most in need of effective policing that have the highest rates of homicide and other violent crimes also have the worst relationships with police in those communities. I think that the genesis of this bad relationship is an accurate perception on the part of people in those communities. Let me emphasize that it is an accurate perception that there is a double standard in terms of the level of accountability, to which we, and they, as ordinary citizens are held by members of law enforcement on the one hand, and the level of accountability to which members of law enforcement permit themselves to be held, which I think could be best described as near zero.

Near zero accountability is our policy for members of law enforcement. I think the public has come to accurately perceive that that's the case. As long as that remains, I don't think there's any realistic hope of repairing the relationship between ordinary citizens and particularly citizens who live in communities of color and the people that we deploy to those communities to police them. Reasonable people can differ about how to restore proper accountability. We've certainly had some interesting discussion about that today. I personally believe that one thing that has to be on the table is the ability of citizens to bring civil rights lawsuits against police officers who violate their rights. Here's the reason for that. There are only really three mechanisms of accountability for police officers who commit rights violations. One is a criminal prosecution that can be effective, but it is absolutely not an across-the-board solution, both because not all rights violations are criminal, and also because we know that in many cases, the prosecutors who have to make the decision, whether to bring charges against the officers have a significant conflict of interest because they have to work with those police, and they depend on them to testify in their cases and get convictions. So, the criminal justice system, I think, is not, will not get the job done.

The other approach is so-called internal accountability mechanisms like internal affairs and citizen review boards. Those are also hampered in significant ways. The law enforcement community has been very effective at effectively defanging citizen review boards and making sure that internal investigations come to nothing, as in the example that Walter gave with Derek Chauvin back in 2017. That leaves one avenue of accountability that the citizen can initiate themselves. They don't have to convince somebody within the police department to initiate, they don't have to convince a prosecutor to initiate, a citizen can initiate a civil rights lawsuit against a police officer who they believe has violated their rights. I think that we've got to make sure that that remains a viable avenue for people whose rights have been violated by police to pursue accountability. Right now, the number one obstacle to people's ability to bring civil rights cases against police officers is the judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity, which enables rights-violating police to prevent the victims of their misconduct from having their day in court, simply by imposing a legal rule that says that if the particular act of violence or other misconduct that was perpetrated against you the citizen by the police officer has not already been the subject of some other pre-existing court case, then it doesn't matter whether they violated your rights. They're still entitled to qualified immunity because of the particular right at issue is not quote unquote clearly established.

There's no perfect solution in my judgment to the problem of police accountability, but what we can do and what we must do is to prioritize it and to recognize that without accountability, there can be no effective policing and then also recognize that arguably the most effective avenue for accountability is the one that citizens are able to initiate and pursue themselves, which is the ability to bring a civil rights lawsuit against rights violating police officers. We've got to make that a more effective avenue of accountability in my judgment. Thank you.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to turn to Yvette Gentry. There's been all of these re-imagining public safety task force processes. I think as Clark said, we've seen a lot of discussion, but not a lot of movement across the country through some of these processes that our organization has been a part of and others. We see that a large portion of the work, particularly the patrol divisions of police departments, are responding to non-criminal, low-level policing, and the attorney general in Minnesota mentioned this as well. Given your career and experience. Can you tell us about not only the challenge of accountability and how we can increase it, but also how we can change and improve police?

Yvette Gentry: Wow. I've been sitting here for an hour and a half, just saying some amens and then shaking my head a little bit, and then just chomping at the bit to engage in the conversation because I have worn a lot of hats over the past 30 years. The majority of my life has been in law enforcement, boots on the ground. Most recently going back to serve as interim chief at LMPD, the Louisville Metro Police Department. There have been some things that I really want to lift up that other people have said that I really think are critically important. One of them is the danger of inaction. You heard Attorney General Ellison talking about it. The fact that we do need police officers, but we need to have a both-end conversation.

We have got to do something about the expectation that police officers are going to be jacks of all trades. We are putting unnecessary pressure and we are sending people who are very, very woefully underprepared to deal with issues in community that we know 40 hours of training is not going to help them overcome. I'm talking about police officers that are responding to an enormous amount of issues that are not what they are designed and what they were really trained to do. Mental health is one of them, but we cannot just keep acknowledging that that's an issue and not saying we have got to require other professionals to mobilize. One of the things that I want to lift up in the conversation since I do have that experience of boots on the ground as a police officer, is the lack of other professionals in these communities.

While the data is true, the need for accountability, all of that, it is not proactive. We have to proactively have other professionals and people in these communities helping to create conditions that don't lead to this mass incarceration issue or over occupying of police officers. Because I can tell you night after night, when I was responding to homicides, there was nothing, there was no one else around but other police officers who did care, who wanted to have more, who had no options. Our jails have become places where we had to take people to detox, and we award some of our jails for the work that they have done, but we have got to take that work away from them. When we have conversations about defunding, I say take the work and the resources, that's the proper thing to do.

In the '80s and the '90s, we did, we took a lot of money away from social service agencies, from mental health professionals. We have to beef them up. But we also, when we talk about legitimacy, there are other professionals that lose legitimacy because they don't have the right proximity to the issues. When you look to your left or right as a police officer, and you don't see some of the professionals that you see on the six o'clock news condemning the behavior of other officers, and when the cameras go away, they're not there. That's just the reality. When I went back to serve as a police chief and trying to have conversations, I am all for accountability of officers. I'm all for having that, but when you're looking at officers in the face, it's hard to legitimize the position of other people when they don't come around. That's one thing that we have to lift up and really get active, doing things about it.

The second thing is the role in the policy space. As I have transitioned out of law enforcement into the role of public policy and the nonprofit world, I'm really active in that. That is something we cannot underestimate, and that is the role that every citizen can play. I'm so thrilled that the Federal Reserve is lifting up this conversation that they're having the economic conversation, because that is a place where everybody can play a role and needs to be active. We are spending $ 180 billion maintaining mass incarceration. The money is there if we just do things differently, but we are incarcerating people we're mad at, not who we're afraid of. We have a dashboard in Louisville that shows one woman in particular spent 300 days because she was unable to pay a $100 fine. We will incarcerate somebody at $130 a day cost because they can't pay a $100 fine.

That is an absurd financial decision. That's just morally wrong, but just financially stupid. And we continue to uphold that. While we have all these agencies and organizations uplifting equity, and creating departments of equity and all of that, we still have lawmakers that are going behind us creating more harmful policy, like taking away second chance Pell opportunities and not allowing kids who are incarcerated to get a GED because we raised the dropout age and things of that matter. I'm glad we're having this conversation, but the police officer, boots on the ground perspective cannot be lost in this discussion.

Muhammad: Thank you. I want to just do a quick follow up. You've been a police chief. I work with police departments around the country. The police chief in Oakland, California, where I live is a good friend. I think he’s an extraordinary person, right. He has a tough job. I joke with him about it all the time. But I'm going to ask you about this point of calling for a greater accountability, calling for more funding, for social services to take off some of the workload of police doing too much is not anti-police, right. You've talked about officer accountability can be credibility, right? Increasing police legitimacy. Can you just talk a bit about how greater accountability, greater having social services and community response to take some of the workload off of duties … Officers tell me all the time they're not interested in doing and shouldn't do but aren't equipped to do how that's not anti-police.

Gentry: Absolutely. When you talk about the funding, if you take the work, you should have the resources. I'll just give you a perfect example. When I retired as deputy chief in 2014, I could go before our Metro council prior to that, when I was administrative chief, and get just about whatever I wanted. At that time, LMPD had $153 million budget, I believe. Transition a year and a half later, I came back to work and I was over at parks and recreations and zoos and all of these other social services ... people that were providing, supporting the community. I asked for $143,000 to do some preventive efforts. I was called back to council six or seven times, and then ultimately not given that money. There's people who make decisions who don't want to fund prevention efforts.

We have got to acknowledge that and put some resources behind those efforts because it's not so much the police don't want to do it. I recognized that after 40 hours of training, I was not prepared to be an effective person to come into a mental health crisis and give a solution that is appropriate. We keep sending people with guns to address issues like homelessness, and mental illness, and issues of addiction because other people are absent and have not mobilized their services in these communities. We have got to change that.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm going to turn to Kevin Washburn. Native Americans are often left out of these discussions around criminal justice reform, around policing, despite being significantly impacted and affected by very high rates of incarceration or police violence. Can you talk about some of the ways that the indigenous experience with policing is different or even more extreme than in other communities?

Kevin Washburn: Thank you, David. And thank you colleagues for these great ideas. It's an honor to be here. I've spent much of my academic career examining policing, and also the other institutions of criminal justice in the Indian reservation area in the context of prosecution of native Americans on Indian reservations, which is mostly outside of urban areas. But whether in rural or urban areas, one of the problems for native Americans is just visibility. As a small population, we can sometimes be sort of invisible, so I'm glad that you asked me to be here and appreciate that the Fed the Federal Reserve Banks for, including us. A study by the CDC of data from 1995 to 2015, found that Native Americans actually have a higher incidence of deaths at the hands of police than even Black Americans, at least on a per capita basis. Let me repeat that because it helps to reduce that invisibility, I talked about. Native Americans die at the hands of police at an even higher rate than Blacks. That's not a competition that the first Americans are happy to be winning, I will say that, but it means that we've got a lot in common with Blacks and other people of color on these important questions. And Walter's insight that this distrust by Black people for law enforcement has deep historical roots. That's true for native people as well. It's different roots, right? Its treatment of Native Americans is America's other original sin other than slavery, but we are important allies in these discussions and Mr. Katz's proposal would help all people of color, frankly. I think that those proposals are really good. Let me offer some observations. I think that Mr. Katz was right to think about transitional justice as part of the solution here, because I always come at these questions wanting to be much more holistic and looking more for root causes. And let me tell you why. Let's talk just specifically about policing.

Most of you will remember in the 1970s and 1980s when we said that the problem is that we don't have enough Black and minority police officers. If we can just make that happen, we can do better hiring and recruiting and that would solve the problem. More Black police officers, more fair policing for the Black community. Well, it didn't. Over time, we succeeded in making our police departments more racially diverse and marginally better, but it didn't make a huge difference in police treatment of minority offenders. It didn't make the difference that we'd hoped, and that's why we're still here today talking about these questions. We thought we had a solution, but that solution was not fully adequate in solving the problem. Is a diverse police force better? Absolutely it's better, but it needs to be part of a holistic approach to these problems.

So let's talk about some of the other societal contributors that contribute to the problems, my own experience, and I was briefly a violent crimes prosecutor for Indian country offenses, was that drug and alcohol abuse on the one hand and mental illness on the other figured really prominently in contributing to violent offenses on Indian reservations, but we know that these are also the serious social problems that are aggravating factors in creating victims of police violence. It's harder to be a police officer if the person you're dealing with is on drugs or alcohol, or has significant mental illness. De-escalation is really, really important, but reasoning with the person who is out of their mind is not easy. It cannot address the whole problem. And we cannot ask police to do the impossible. It's a lonely darn job, frankly, it just is and it's a really difficult job. So, one of the things we need to do is look at the other side of that equation. We need to provide better support for people who are using, or who have mental illness, because we can avoid more of these situations and we can make the police job easier, prevent that police interaction, that negative police interaction, from occurring in the first place.

By the way, alcohol and substance abuse and mental illness, those also have a disparate impact on the poor and people of color. If we don't start providing more opportunities for treatment, if we can't start providing more opportunity for treatments and more support for people with mental illness, if we don't, we're going to expect some of this to continue. As Mr. Katz noted, there's really a lot of economic roots to bad policing as well that go back many decades. He also did a nice job. I thought that was really good insight showing that we don't focus holistically on repeat offenders. We focus on the repeat offenders on the offender side, but we don't focus on the repeat offenders on the police side because some of the police officers are repeat offenders, right? That was a really good insight, I thought.

We have to think more holistically and systemically about these problems. Where I live, I'm saying there is systematic racism is controversial. Our society is really divided right now. But if you're willing to agree with me that we have systemic racism, we need systemic solutions as well. We can't even just look at policing alone. We have to look more broadly than that. Let me stop there and turn it back. But this has been a really interesting discussion. I'm really grateful to be part of it. Thank you.

Muhammad: Thank you very much. We only have five minutes left. I'm going to ask each panelist to take just 60 seconds. It's going to be difficult. I want to ask a question and add in a few questions we received. One question received is about whether officers should be required to have a four-year degree and another question we received is the relative cost between a police officer and a social worker and the investment or the return on investment. With those two audience questions in mind, I also want to layer on that, if we could, what could we do right now to improve the quality of policing or the outcome, the impact on police communities? We can just take about 60 seconds each. We'll start with Walter and work our way around.

Katz: Sure. I'm not going to give the immediate answer, but I think that I'm a strong believer in that we look outside the United States to learn potential better practices. For example, Canada has a very robust, independent prosecutor model to evaluate significant uses of force and fatal encounters. When it comes to the training of officers, I think there's some really interesting models outside of the United States, especially if you look to Scandinavia. You cannot... to become a police officer in say Sweden or Norway, for example, recruits attend a three-year policing university. They essentially come out of policing university with a degree in policing before they ever enter the force. It does not look like our criminal justice degrees here in the United States. Here in the United States, we've had basically relied on one form of police training, which is the academy-type training, which is often a type of training where it's an intentionally stressful training. It looks more like paramilitary and military training. When these recruits get out of the academy and then go into field training, they are already been well imbued in force. You get far more force training than they do get de-escalation training, far more force training than you would get psychological training. The kind of officer we'd want to see is holistic, is well-grounded in the history of policing, well-grounded in sociological issues that they can actually be a problem solver before they are a law enforcement officer.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you. Chief Gentry?

Gentry: I agree with Walter wholeheartedly on more training. I would push back on the four-year degree pre-hire because what we have seen in law enforcement and in my experience has been, when we shifted about 12 years ago to require a four-year degree, our police force got much younger and we missed out on that lived experience of the older, more-seasoned person who had bumped up against life a few times and was a much better problem solver. I want to be able to hire that 35- or 40-year-old man or woman, and be able to train them more post-hire than just requiring a four-year degree and trading that for a bunch of 23- and 24-year-olds that just don't have the life experience.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you. Clark Neily?

Neily: Well, obviously, it's a huge challenge. I think that ultimately boils down to this. If you want to be respected, you have got to act respectably. One thing we should not have police officers doing is policing for profit. They should not be engaged in civil forfeiture. There should not be an emphasis on fines and fees. Police departments should not be dependent for their budgets on the amount of revenue that police officers raise. Police need to be more accountable. We talked about that before. If you engage in some conduct that somebody says has violated their rights, you have got to be willing to submit that grievance or that dispute to a neutral arbiter and not invoke judicially invented defenses like qualified immunity. The last thing I would say is we've got to really seriously think about what happens when we send police into communities to enforce laws involving non-morally wrongful behavior.

Police in many communities are still arresting people and dragging them into the criminal justice system for things like simple marijuana possession. That can be a life-destroying event for people. I understand that police have to enforce the laws, they're on the books, but we put them in an incredibly untenable position when we have laws on the books that require them to go into communities and effectively ruin people's lives for no good reason whatsoever. Again, if you want to be respected, you have to behave respectably. I would like to see the police and law enforcement community put some of its lobbying muscle into repealing some of these laws that involve the enforcement of criminal laws against people who've done nothing truly morally wrong.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you. And lastly, Kevin Washburn.

Washburn: Yeah, let me just bring it back to away from the focus on individual police officers because part of this is the priorities of the police department and the leadership. We've talked about the criminalization of minor offenses, of poverty, really. But we've got an underpolicing problem going on too. We have underpolicing of some very serious offenses and that's where the missing and murdered indigenous people problem arises from. Frankly, it's also where the Me Too movement comes from. Attorney General Ellison mentioned the 1,700 untested rape kits in Minneapolis that was a scandal. We need to make sure police are focusing on the most important problems. There are big overarching holistic priorities that we need to talk about, too. That can help change the community's trust in police officers and help refocus them on more important problems that we need to address. Thank you.

Muhammad: Thank you very much. Thank you for this extraordinary conversation, this discussion, this rich discussion that we could easily go another hour with these expert panelists. I appreciate your time and more so your work. Thank you very much. We're going to take a break and then come back to more discussion. Thank you.

All right. Welcome back, everyone. Welcome back. We'll give folks just a moment to return. We're going to continue this incredible discussion about racism and the economy, the criminal justice system, policing, and we want to move to a discussion on misdemeanors and the monetary sanctions associated with them. Once again, we have a very impressive group of panelists, experts on the subject that I am honored to participate in and to moderate this discussion.

We have more than 2 million people incarcerated in America. Mass incarceration has incredible racial disparities and detrimental impacts for the large number of people arrested, convicted, and incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. Incarceration is ineffective, harmful, and extremely expensive. It does not work. It makes people worse and it costs too much The collateral consequences that impacts not just the individual who is incarcerated, but their family and the community, has had the racial, disparate impact, but also an impact on the economy and how whole communities have been negatively impacted by mass incarceration. Today, we are going to discuss the impacts of nonviolent convictions and monetary sanctions. Again, we have this incredible panel, Dr. Jennifer Doleac, who is an Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M. We have the District Attorney of Suffolk County in Boston, Rachael Rollins, and Andrea Young, who is the executive director of the ACLU of Georgia.

We're going to start with Dr. Doleac, who, like Walter Katz in the previous panel, has written a very good paper and proposal on how we can reduce the use of incarceration and conviction of those accused and arrested for nonviolent offenses. We're going to first ask you, Dr. Doleac, can you talk about this work that you have done and what are the proposals to reform this system that has so many negative impacts and consequences?

Jennifer Doleac: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. I've worked with my co-authors, Amanda Agan and Anna Harvey, to put together this proposal that you mentioned to begin to address the problem we've been discussing today, the large and disparate impact of the criminal justice system on communities of color. As researchers, we're focused on figuring out what works to make our criminal justice system more fair and effective. We spent a lot of time evaluating the real-world effects of policies on key outcomes. Our proposal aims to help defendants avoid their first criminal record. There's lots of research showing that trying to undo the effects of criminal justice involvement after the fact is really hard, and many well-intentioned policies that aim to help people after they already have a criminal record, simply don't work. Our goal in this proposal is to reduce the flow of new people into the criminal justice system upfront.

We consider two levels of criminal offenses, misdemeanors, so minor offenses like disorderly conduct, and trespassing, and minor drug possession, and shoplifting, and then felonies, which are more serious offenses like larceny, burglary, and robbery. Based on recent research, we argue that prosecutors should implement a presumption of non-prosecution for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses, that is make the default action to simply dismiss those charges outright with the option to pursue charges in exceptional cases. For nonviolent felony offenses, we suggest they increase their use of diverted judications, where if defendants successfully complete a probationary period, all charges are dismissed. In both cases, these policies will have the biggest benefits when targeted at first-time defendants, those without a conviction at the level of the current charge.

It turns out that first-time defendants are at a fork in the road where we can pull them into the criminal justice system or not. For many of these defendants, simply being arrested for their first offense will serve as enough of a wake-up call for them to change course, or perhaps the offense was a one-time mistake or misunderstanding, and they never would have offended again anyway. Helping them avoid a criminal record means it will be easier for those defendants to find a job and housing and avoid future criminal activity. Research shows that when prosecutors gave these defendants a second chance without a criminal record, those defendants are dramatically less likely to show up back in court in the future. That is the second chance has actually increased public safety. They allow prosecutors to focus their energy and resources on more serious crimes and offenders who pose a real threat to the community. While such policies would be race neutral, they will disproportionately benefit Black defendants and other people of color because these groups are so overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Because of this disparate impact, we also expect these policies will help reduce racial disparities and economic outcomes like employment.

This proposal is supported by rigorous evidence. I'll refer you all to the written proposal for that, but I do want to highlight two areas where additional policy experimentation would be helpful. One is how much discretion to give to individual prosecutors. We know that whenever human beings have discretion, racial bias tends to seep into those decisions. If our primary goal is to reduce racial disparities, then a blanket policy would be better, something like we never prosecute someone's first shoplifting charge, for instance. However, such blanket policies could have unintended consequences. If the community interpret such policies as everyone gets one free shoplifting offense, it could increase illegal or reckless behavior. We wouldn't want that. There are tradeoffs here and the right amount of discretion to give prosecutors may vary from place to place. We encourage prosecutors to experiment to figure out the balance that works best in their community.

The other area where we need more experimentation is figuring out which categories of first-time defendants benefit from leniency and how much leniency they should get. So existing research focuses on nonviolent misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but we might see public safety benefits if we help some first-time violent offenders avoid a criminal record as well, perhaps those charged with simple assaults or weapons offenses. In addition, we might not need the probationary period that currently comes with diverted judications and those felony offenses I mentioned earlier. Dismissing those charges outright might be just as beneficial from a public safety perspective. We simply don't know yet. I personally would love to see some jurisdictions try different versions of these policies to see what's most effective.

Overall, we are encouraged by recent research showing that giving first-time defendants a second chance to avoid a criminal record can not only reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system, but also make communities safer. We're also encouraged by increasing collaborations between academics and policymakers to measure the effects of policy changes and iterate on those policies as needed. It was a delight for our team to work with DA Rachael Rollins' office on our own study on this misdemeanor prosecution, and we're grateful for her willingness to follow the data. We hope that other policymakers follow her lead. Our doors are always open if folks want to talk to us about how to measure the effects of policies in their own jurisdictions. Thank you.

Muhammad: Thank you. It was a great segue. DA Rollins, thank you for your time and your work on this. Your office has implemented reforms that Professor Doleac studied, her and her colleagues' research. Can you tell us about what you've learned, what you've implemented and how those are going so far?

Rachael Rollins: What was most important to me as a candidate was not tricking anyone in to vote for me, right? I wanted people with their eyes wide open to know exactly what they were going to get as their district attorney. Six weeks prior to my primary, I put up a list of 15 categories of crimes where we were going to flip the presumption, from prosecuting to declanation, diversion, or dismissal. I wanted people to know what those crimes were, and I wanted them to know what my policies were going to be. I said, "If you agree with this, I want your vote. If you don't, I don't want your vote." And we won with 42 percent of the vote in the primary, and then over 80 percent of the vote in the general. Then the hard work actually began. We had to write a policy memo and then implement those policies, right? It doesn't matter if you have something on a wall at an employer that says, "Everyone's welcome here." If the culture is that you don't feel welcome, it doesn't matter what the sign says.

We have the Rollins memo that we implemented, but then we did spend a lot of time making sure. I show up, almost like undercover boss, right? I just show up in different court rooms around my jurisdiction unannounced to see, "Are we prosecuting low-level, non-public safety-related motor vehicle offenses. Are we prosecuting trespasses? What are we doing there?" I implemented the data. I implemented the policy, but I also welcomed the opportunity for outsiders to have complete unfettered access to our data; 67,000 cases, I think Doctor, we went back 17 years, it was easy to say in the beginning because of course, none of those years were mine, but nonetheless, there were two years that were mine when the study actually came out. We were willing to see what that showed, and we would have followed the data. If it showed that crime increased, I would have had to adjust that list of 15. But I'm proud to say Boston is one of the very few urban metropolis cities where crime is down 17 percent right now even after the pandemic. So, thank you.

Muhammad: Thank you, DA Rollins. I watched every second of every episode of Trial 4. I feel like I followed your campaign.

Rollins: Black Irish. Black Irish. That's me.

Muhammad: That's right.

Rollins: Right. Yeah.

Muhammad: And speaking to that, may I ... we're talking about the way we handle lower-level offenses, but I also know you care very much about police reform as well. Just briefly, can you talk about some of that work and where we're headed in at Suffolk County?

Rollins: I try to explain to the police that my job is to, 90+ percent of the time, we are walking in shoulder-to-shoulder to prosecute somebody, and we are allies. But in the circumstances when they break the law, or there is an officer-involved shooting, which is not necessarily a law would be broken in that circumstance, that we are not aligned. I am looking at them almost as a regulator. It is really important that we don't collude with each other, right? One of the first things I did was create a discharge integrity team. It's almost like the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board]. When there's an officer-involved shooting in Boston, there are four outside specialists that handle that officer-involved shooting. Nobody in my office makes that ultimate determination but me, and I'm an outsider. I had never worked at the Suffolk County DA's office. My background is as a former federal prosecutor. I've been a criminal defense attorney. I like to tell people that I also have siblings that have cycled in and out of the criminal legal system. I feel like I have a very different lens that I look at this work... deep respect for the military and law enforcement, but also fully understanding the failures, quite frankly, of our criminal legal system of people, right? These are not cases. Every one of those docket numbers represents a human life that has been impacted and oftentimes by many systemic failures.

I have really tough conversations with the police. We are honest with each other. They, I think are not used to very tough conversations number one. And I'll be candid, I don't think they're used to women being in leadership. There's some of that as well. But whether we have sharp elbows or bump and bruise, we continue to come together. I am very proud of much of the work that the Boston police department, the Winthrop, Chelsea, Revere, Transit and Mass state police department does. And then I call them out when they are not doing well. We have some things that we should not be proud of and we are holding those officers accountable. It's that tension, right, of making sure we say they did a great job when they did, but that doesn't mean I'm always... It's not pro or anti-police, it's just, I'm going to be honest, right? If you are lying and saying you showed up to work an overtime shift and you weren't even there and the GPS says that you weren't there, we're prosecuting you. I'm not going to mince my words about it. I'm going to say you dishonored your badge. If you are raping small children, Patrick Rose Sr., I'm going to light you up and hold you accountable for that. I'm going to say it's despicable that this individual got to rise to the highest levels of the Boston Police Patrolman's Association. That doesn't mean I don't support the police when they do well, but we have to be able to have a spine and stand up and say, "No, you won't do that again." And what are the policies that you have put in place police department to make sure that you have an audit function and that this does not continue to happen?

We've done a lot of work here in Suffolk County. The last thing I'll say, David, is I think it's really important when we make mistakes, and we have, we should be not proud in Massachusetts that we have not one, but two of the largest drug lab scandals in the history of the United States of America. What I'm really proud of is I said, "You know what, anything these two chemists touch, I want dismissed. Period." And then our Hinton lab, which is where two of them work, was grossly mismanaged. Governor Deval Patrick shut down the Hinton lab. Now what I'm saying is all 70,000 cases from that Hinton lab, we're dismissing them because you know what, if we're the government and we cheat, we can't win. That is just... You don't even have to be a lawyer for that. I teach my 8-year-old those rules. I feel like it's very important when we show up and we are authentic and we say out loud, "We made a mistake. We're making it better. And this is what we're doing." Here's what happens. People start believing in the system again. We start having people show up for jury duty that wouldn't before. We start having people say, "You know what, I did witness something 15 years ago with that murder that I never spoke about because I actually believe that the police and the prosecutors are doing things differently now." That's what's important about having new leadership and different faces and different lenses in different roles.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you. A lot of research says when there's more trust in law enforcement, there's a lot more cooperation and more effective outcomes, and the way to get to more trust is certainly greater accountability. Thank you, DA Rollins. And Executive Director Andrea Young, another aspect of this need for reform in the criminal justice system is not only it is extremely ineffective and harmful and expensive to taxpayers, but taxing to the folks, mostly who come from impoverished neighborhoods who are in the system, who are levied significant fines and fees and have long lasting collateral consequences, let alone the cash bail system that has so many problems. Can you talk about all of the challenges that you all have done extraordinary work in Georgia and of course ACLU around the country in trying to challenge these practices that negatively impact individuals and families?

Andrea Young: Yes. Thank you very much. I want to echo what so many of the panelists have said, it's really great to be having this conversation under the auspices of racism and the economy. The ACLU embarked on a smart justice initiative to cut mass incarceration by 50 percent. I want to echo that often, one of the ways to address the racial disparity is to look at those areas where there's a lot of discretion. The more discretion in the system, the more harshly it falls particularly on African-Americans and people of color, generally. We've done a lot of work in Georgia on bail reform. Our past Republican governor actually worked closely with the community because of the cost of incarcerating people pre-trial to the system. Some improvements have been made. There's more opportunity now to be released without a cash bail requirement, which when you look at a city like Atlanta, and by that I mean the city not the metropolitan area, but the city of Atlanta, the average household income for African Americans is $25,000 a year compared to $80,000 for Whites.

If you have any kind of a set schedule, it's going to fall... it's going to mean that basically people without money stay in jail pre-trial and people with money get out. We've had assistance. Atlanta has actually committed to releasing people on their own recognizance and making that the default, unless a person can be proven to be a danger to the community, in which case $100,000 shouldn't mean that you get out of jail to be harmful in the community. But these bail and bond fees, we've brought litigation across the state to try to get a proportionality, to fulfill requirements that actually these things should be set based on people's ability to pay. Typically, especially outside of metro areas, people are just faced with schedules, just standardized schedules. We had a woman in her 70s with mental health issues who walked out of a convenience store with $6 worth of peanuts and spent 15 days in jail because she couldn't make bond, didn't have $1,000 dollars.

Most Americans with incomes under $30,000 cannot make bail. You might recall that Sandra Bland died in jail because her family in Chicago couldn't get together $500 to get her out on bail on what started off as a traffic stop. We have been pursuing this both at... often cities and counties can have a lot of discretion at making it easier for people to get out on their own recognizance. And we've been working on policies and also using litigation. What we find is when we're successful, then judges and other communities get training in how to avoid a lawsuit from the ACLU. We're happy to have that effect, but statewide policy is really the most effective.

Another thing about the human cost of these policies is people... we had to sue the city of Savannah because the police were going to apartment complexes and getting them to sign an agreement that they would not rent to people with criminal records. The punishment when you're, particularly when you're low income, the punishment for these low-level offenses far outweighs the damage to society and is persistent and lifelong. One of the things, one of the reasons that Raphael Warnock, our new senator from Georgia, had so much credibility, he did expungement clinics in his church to help people clear their records in an efficient and cost-effective way, thereby making them more employable. I mean, sometimes people were being denied senior citizens housing because of a 20-year old felony or 30-year-old felony.

The lifelong consequences of our system are so detrimental in so many ways. And of course, one of the things that is perhaps really a Catch-22 is that in so many of our states, people with felony convictions can't vote. Then the fines and fees prolong that period. Right now in Texas, someone has just been charged with voting when they were towards the end of their probationary sentence after serving their felony. Therefore, you have a situation where people who are the most harmed by this system can't then vote for people like DA Rollins who will then change the system and make it more just and more fair.

Muhammad: Thank you. Thank you. I want to ask a couple of brief questions to everybody and Dr. Doleac, this notion of all of these collateral consequences, like you have the immediate issue which is very harmful of unnecessary and harsh consequences for low-level behavior, which is often having to do with issues of poverty and institutional racism and housing policies going back for decades. I think somebody in earlier panel talked about the pig laws, right? And then you have these collateral consequences. Have you seen, one what are the proposals that you've made in terms of addressing these that you see in jurisdictions, obviously we're talking about Suffolk County, of course, but have you seen jurisdictions implement effective policies to reverse these conditions?

Doleac: Yeah. Our proposal really focuses on avoiding the criminal record upfront, and so avoiding these collateral consequences by just making sure people don't have a record to begin with. I have other work on Ban the Box policies, and I've thought a lot about Clean Slate policies showing that they really don't work. They're not effective. They can actively backfire. Those types of policies and other policies that lots of groups have tried to implement to really try to address the collateral consequences after the fact, after someone already has a criminal record and has dealt with the problems of that for many years. Sometimes, it's just really difficult to reverse those effects. That's why we've really emphasized in this proposal, trying to just stem the flow of people into the criminal justice system to begin with.

And because, you're totally right. I mean, in our study in Suffolk County, we're looking at nonviolent misdemeanor charges. A lot of those people who are prosecuted wind up not actually with a conviction on their record in the end. They just have a criminal record of the arrest and prosecution. And that alone is visible to other law enforcement and a lot of employers. And so even if a person isn't actually convicted of this still very low-level offense, it can still make it difficult for them to get housing and find a job and just reintegrate into civilian life and move on with their lives. And so, I completely agree. I think these are all reasons to really care about this issue and to be pushing for the kinds of reforms that DA Rollins and others have been pushing for.

Muhammad: DA Rollins, I think with some people unfamiliar with the system here, "Oh, you're just going to not prosecute, so it's open season on theft and low-level offenses." Can you talk about the other type of diversion programs that are available, that actually could be a lot more effective than incarceration, or alternative options to supporting people and families in need?

Rollins: One of the first things I try to explain to people is it costs $55,000 a year to send someone to the Suffolk County House of Corrections. And if you send somebody somewhere where they come out more mentally ill, 100 percent are more and more likely to overdose when they leave. They're more violent and less employable. That's a failure, right? And I like to try to explain to non-lawyers, if you had a company, David, that your slogan was 67 percent of the time this car will hurt you or it fails, company would be shut down immediately, right? If you had a marketing or management understanding that like, "Wow, we fail 67 percent of the time." That's what a recidivism rate is, right? A lot of the individuals that we are seeing in our house of corrections, which are where the low-level nonviolent non-serious crime, some violent stuff, but a lot of pre-trial people are held and then two and a half years or under, overwhelmingly, seventh grade or below education diagnosed DSM-5 mental health disorder, cognitive impairment, substance use disorder, right?

Those are systemic failures. None of us get to choose who we are born to, where we live, what school system we go to. We have to... I watched the panel before me, when we heard about all these people talking about different countries, and when Walter Katz said something, I thought about corrections officers in Germany have to go to school for two years to learn how to be corrections officers because Germans actually believe if you commit a crime, we have failed you as Germany, right? I remember I was there with a group of progressive prosecutors, and I said, "OK, but what is the voting thing when they get out, they get to vote." And they kept looking at me and it was translated. And they were like, "What do you mean? No, they vote." And I'm like, "Well, right, but not if they commit a felony." And they were like, and this is a quote, "They never stopped being German." And I'm like, "Damn." Right. That is not the way we do things. I had to have it translated into eight other languages for me to finally say, "Aha, I get it." Right. Because it is such a foreign concept to us, the country that incarcerates the most people. I think it's really important that we think differently fiscally about what we are doing and how much we are wasting, and how much we are failing, right. That's number one. I do want to also point out a couple other quick things. Criminal records and eviction records and credit reports are very similar, right? They are not allowing people to thrive after they have touched the system once.

Nobody is their best moment. I like to remind people that think very highly of themselves that nobody is their worst moment. But what we do is we want to brand you with your arraignment. As the doctor pointed out, even if eight months from now it's dismissed. Half of the prosecutors don't even know how to read a CORI [Criminal Offender Record Information] or a BOP [Board of Probation], let alone a landlord or somebody who's looking at you for an employment to say, "You were charged with this, wow." Did they know what DSM stands for, dismissed? Or D later on down the line. They still get to see that, it's not expunged. I think we have to explain the system better so that people understand it. The last thing I will say is we need people like me, instead of me just talking about returning citizens, et cetera. I hire people with criminal records, in the DA's office. I might not hire somebody who ran MS13 to run my gang unit, likely not, but I can have somebody work in operations. I can have somebody work in administrative work or community engagement, or quite frankly, helping us try to speak to younger generations to disrupt violence before it happens. And then we don't out them to say like, "Oh, we just hired Jennifer, she's a felon, p.s. and please be nice to Jen." No, we list her just like everyone else. And then we put our money where our mouth is so that when Amazon and Vertex and GE say to me, well, we have a really hard time and we can't hire. Whoa, whoa, whoa, if I can hire people with a criminal record, and I'm the chief law enforcement officer in Suffolk County, you can hire people with a criminal record.

We have to start doing that, speaking out about it. It's irrelevant to the identity of the person, but it's important that we voice that it is happening, and they are thriving just like the employees that we currently have in Suffolk County.

Muhammad: Thank you. Andrea, so there's a lot of folks who regardless of facts, regardless of statistics or the reality, they push back on any reform. That is happening all over the country around bail, New York, especially it's happening a bit in California. Can you talk about, there's one funny example in California where some pushback on legislation that produced five felonies that should've never been felonies to misdemeanors. And there were people saying it was causing crime to go up and it hadn't even been implemented yet. Can you talk about some of the mythology that has been out there about the cash bail causing all these problems, but also the problems, obviously, that cash bail create?

Young: Yeah. Well, I think the mythology, one of the things that's definitely come through is how much mythology is involved in the way that we run the criminal legal system. I want to reference what Chief Gentry said about the difficulty of getting money for things like recreation, for things that we know would prevent crime. We know after-school programs, for example, prevent juveniles from either being victims or being involved in criminal activity.

One of the ways that we got bail reform done is that in Fulton County, in DeKalb County, our two largest jurisdictions, they were spending $100 million a year pretrial keeping people incarcerated. Pretrial often for low-level offenses when they would finally got around to court, it's like time served. It is not cost-effective; it is very costly. The state of Georgia spends over $1 billion dollars a year for its system of incarceration. Meanwhile, our K-12 state budget is acknowledged even by conservatives in the legislature to be underfunded by over $1 billion dollars. If money is not an unlimited resource, then we need to think about the best ways that we are using that money and that there is a cost to all the choices that we make in our criminal legal system.

I also want to really applaud DA Rollins on hiring people with records. I think this is something that employers can choose to do. Employers are trusting the judgment of the police in making these arrests. We heard what, 10 million people arrested every year? If people are taking into account arrest records and not being willing to consider them as employees, they are contributing to both their own problem and to the larger problem of society.

I hope this is something the Fed will really look into more because we see some employers like construction and so forth that have decided we're not going to be limited. I think also Dr. Doleac was sort of referencing one of the things we found, if we do Ban the Box, then Black men have no way to demonstrate that, no, I actually have never had a criminal record. And so again, because we are operating in this racist environment where there are all these mythologies and presumptions about people based on who they are and where they live, with the color of their skin, unfortunately some of us have to constantly prove over and over again that, no, we actually never have been arrested. No, we actually do have a college degree. That's the tragedy that Ban the Box can end up being actually detrimental to Black men who have never been involved in the criminal justice system.

Muhammad: Thank you. I can't believe we're out of time. I would love to dig in further. Thank you so much DA Rollins, professor Doleac, executive director Andrea Young for this incredible discussion. Thank you for the work that you do more than anything else. We want to appreciate the panel on this discussion, the Fed of course for having us. Despite the extraordinary reforms that have happened in the last several months and years, we have a lot of work to do. We still have mass incarceration in this country, and we have a lot of work to do, but appreciate this discussion. I'm going to pass it off to Chanda Smith Baker, who's the chief impact officer and senior vice president of the Minneapolis Foundation.

Chanda Smith Baker: Thank you, David. And what a wonderful afternoon. I have the pleasure of summarizing the day. I am Chanda Smith Baker. I'm the chief impact officer and SVP at the Minneapolis Foundation and host of a podcast called Conversations with Chanda, where we talk about issues like we're discussing today.

Our panel today will be three of the Federal Reserve presidents, Raphael Bostic from Atlanta, Neel Kashkari in Minneapolis, and Eric Rosengren of Boston. But before we move to the panel, I've been invited to share a few thoughts in a summary of what I have heard today. I want to start out with just talking a little bit about the work at the Minneapolis Foundation. I was struck as I was listening and thought about the ways in which we have defined at the foundation, how vibrant communities can happen. We described that by promoting civic participation and leadership, fostering belonging, connection, and inclusion, increasing access to opportunities that advance upward mobility, and by seeing and dismantling barriers that are holding equities in place.

With those points in mind, and with the understanding of the consistent and systemic way in which indigenous and people of color have been targeted and engaged in the criminal legal system, as a result of systemic racism, we are clear that vibrant communities cannot happen without addressing this very issue that we've been discussing today. As I listened, I could not help but think about the numerous justice-impacted people that I've engaged with in my years, working in the social sector, working in for, and with communities that have really struggled despite their very best attempts to move forward.

One young man in particular, KJ, who was very talented that I became engaged with. I understood how early he had been involved in the system. He committed a crime. He served his time and once released he did everything possible to move forward, to take care of himself and his family. He envisioned his life as a real estate agent. He took the classes, he engaged many of us along his journey to make sure that he was making the right decisions, the right choices, and creating the right network to support him along the way, him and his children. But at the end of the day, despite so many of us, even with those of us in position supporting him, he was denied the real estate license that he needed because of his criminal background. This is happening over and over and over again in our city and in our country, excluding people from the economic realities that they deserve and that our communities need in order for us to realize the vibrant communities that we are striving for. The data, the videos, the firsthand accounts, the evidence has documented the harm, the generational harm to indigenous and people of color.

Today the harm we're discussing is racism in the criminal justice system, and the negative impact on our economy. Here I am in Minneapolis; Minnesota is experiencing a political moment for reform, but key gaps remain, and many cases are growing. In connection to that the goal of the Federal Reserve of maximizing employment is sitting in my mind, and we know that the unemployment rate alone tells an incomplete story. It is an inaccurate account of economic devastation that's happening in Brown and Black communities across this country. As you heard today, Nick Turner, in our opening panel along with others describing criminal justice reform or the criminal legal system reform is more than just incarceration. It is also about the 10 million people booked each year in jail, as well as the significant issues in probation, parole, fines and fees, and life navigating all of our systems with a criminal record. As a country, we have decided that justice-impacted individuals should be sentenced for life and be marginalized and often excluded from fully participating in our economy.

As President Kashkari stated, if we are going to leave people on the sidelines, we are hurting them. We are also hurting our economy's potential. That is the crux of it all. As we continue to leave people on the sidelines, do we even know that they are there? As Ms. Gentry stated, what is the danger of inaction? In Minnesota we have the 15th highest rate of correctional control in the nation. It is a state in which 80 percent is White, while nearly half of the people in Minnesota prisons are Indigenous or people of color. This disparities are even more exacerbated in the juvenile justice system. Today, we heard from Nick Turner as well that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population, but accounts for more than 20 percent of the incarcerated population. Ms. Hernandez raised this point that often it is men that are arrested, but bail is paid disproportionately by women in their lives, which has far-reaching impact on the economy. It takes away transportation costs, rent money, lessons for children, as well as other opportunities. The hidden cost of families to children, to communities, is beyond unacceptable. It is immoral and in some cases criminal, like what we witnessed with George Floyd. As our attorney general, Keith Ellison, stated the biggest cost at risk is one of human creativity and potential.

The last point I want to hammer is one in connection with criminal justice and safety, a point raised in the fireside chat between our Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, and our Minnesota Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari, and that is that economy works for everyone. An economy that works for everyone is a foundation for safety. Violence is one indication when safety is the prize, and we are seeing that happening across the country in real time. As we think through together, how do we maximize our economy's potential? How do we maximize our young people's potential, and our family's potential? I want to turn to our presidents to have you now engage and see if you were impacted as I was today listening to the experts in the conversation that we had. First, I want to start out and just ask why this conversation was so important and why it was important for the Federal Reserves to be engaged? And I'm going to start with you President Rosengren.

Eric Rosengren: Thank you very much, Chanda. And I think this was a really great set of panels and panelists. I learned a lot from this session. And I would say the first thing that I took away from the discussion was how expensive it is to have a society so focused on mass incarceration. I think that came through in each of the panels, that the United States has so many people incarcerated because society has made that choice to incarcerate many more people than are necessary, and it disproportionately affects people of color. I think that came loud and clear through all the panels. I would also say as an economist that all the panels really highlighted the misallocation of resources that we're currently spending on the criminal justice system. I'll highlight three that came from the panels that I thought were particularly persuasive.

The first is trying to get the police to handle social issues instead of safety issues. I thought that was a great theme. If we don't spend appropriately to address social issues, that's mental illness, that's substance abuse, other types of issues related to that, it puts a burden on the legal system that it's not designed for. We need to be spending more money on those other areas because prevention has to be much less expensive than what we're doing currently with the legal system. The second is that we overly criminalized non-safety issues. I think a perfect example is how many people were incarcerated for marijuana charges when across the country states have now legalized marijuana. The fact that so many people spent so much time in jail, had a criminal record that permanently affected their ability to get jobs for something that we now view as non-safety related issue that should not be criminalized, really highlights that we need to take a fresh look at a variety of the rules, regulations, and laws that we have to see where else we ought to be thinking about decriminalizing. The third is how do we reduce the long-term labor costs of people having a criminal record? Here I would have actually liked to have a little bit more of a discussion on expungement. Rachel talked about flipping the presumption in some of the work that she's doing. I think now you have to apply for expungement. It would be much more effective if particularly for nonviolent crimes, expungement was automatic, unless there was a good reason to deny it to you. So rather than have people apply for expungement, which is going to have racial overtones, it's certainly going to have economic overtones, you need to pay for a lawyer, you need to go back in order to get the record expunged. It's not straightforward to do. We need to think about minimizing the long-term costs and reintegrating people successfully into society. That can't be done if we make it so difficult for people to eliminate the record that they have. So those were some of the takeaways I took away.

Baker: I appreciate that. President Bostic would you like to add your takeaways for today?

Bostic: I sure would, and I'll start where President Rosengren finished, which is around expungement. I think it was the District Attorney Rollins, who said a criminal record is like a credit report. If you think about credit reports after seven years, most of that stuff just wipes away and it doesn't require an application, or it doesn't require assignment or any of those sorts of things. And that's an interesting analogy that people can make mistakes, people can have bad outcomes, but should they stay with someone for a long period of time? I think there was something that we really do need to think hard about that. I also think that I was also drawn to the idea of misallocation of resources, particularly in the context of policing. I thought that Yvette Gentry, when she was talking about why the police are being asked to do so many sort of nonviolent non-dangerous things is because nobody else is around, I thought that was a really interesting observation. It's something that I think we collectively have to reflect upon because the very first point that was made today about the criminal justice system was that it's actually not a system. We don't think about it in a systemic way so that all of these holes can emerge. There's no one who actually has the job to say, how are we going to fill this thing? We need to really start to, I think, reorient how we approach criminal justice to say, look, this has got to be a system we've got an acknowledged the holes, and we've got to find a way to move forward. The last thing I would just say on this is that I really liked the notion of the mythology of criminals that came up in that last panel. Because as I was listening through the day, the one word that never came up was fear.

A lot of how and why our criminal justice system plays out the way it does in my view is because people are afraid. People have in their mind an idea about who these people are and what their default behaviors are likely to be, and that's all mythology. That gets back to the implicit justice or the implicit bias issues that were discussed in the very first panel. And to me, I think we have to break that down. We have to give people a chance to actually just be people and be taken on their merits and let our experience with them govern how we respond rather than our expectations about what our experiences will be. I think we can make progress there.

Baker: I appreciate your comments. Neel Kashkari, you touched on this a little bit in terms of their importance in your fireside chat, but I'm wondering whether or not you would be willing to share some additional thoughts on the importance of this conversation?

Kashkari: Yes. Thank you. Let me just build on, I mean, I thought Eric and Raphael's comments were excellent and I'll just add a couple of things to their observations.

One is I knew coming into this conversation that I knew intuitively that the economic costs of the system that we have today are large, as we said earlier. And you said it in your introduction, leaving people on the sidelines, what is the cost to society of our economic potential being diminished by that. But then the misallocation of resources that Eric and Raphael talked about, and some of the panelists talked about, I think I have a better appreciation. The costs are even larger than I expected, but for me, I think we need to do more work to try to quantify what are those costs. And imagine if we had a different society, imagine if we had a society that was not so geared towards criminalizing people, locking them up, what could that society look like? And what could that economy look like?

I think for me, I need to do more work and I think we need to do more work to try to quantify what that looks like. Because I think the potential there could be very, very large. Then second thing that I heard from a number of the speakers, especially the attorney general, was the structural incentive barriers to making systematic changes. I mean, Attorney General Ellison talked about how limited police chiefs are of holding their own staffs accountable. If you cannot hold your staff accountable, you are not going to change behavior, you are not going to lead to systematic reform. I thought for me, he really highlighted that there may need to be laws passed, state laws passed, but that really can lead to the kind of changes that we need. It's not simply going to be talking and encouraging, that's going to lead to these fundamental changes. We need legal changes that are more than just micro changes around the edges. Today was a big learning experience for me, a lot for me to digest, but I'm really appreciative of all of our speakers and their willingness to share their expertise.

Baker: Yeah. You both, President Bostic and Neel Kashkari, you guys both touched on a little bit. You touched on implicit bias and you talked about systemic issues and I'm just going to go to the crux of what I think this is about, which is racism and systemic racism in our system. And I'm wondering following on the conversation today, do you more deeply understand how racism in our criminal justice system is causing harm to our economy?

Kashkari: I'm happy to start and just say I better understand it than I did before, but I don't want to pretend that I completely understand it. And I'll just give you a personal example. I've been driving a car for more than 30 years. I have a habit of driving five or 10 miles an hour over the speed limit and I've gotten my share of traffic tickets. Every time I've been pulled over 100 percent of the time, I have felt safe and respected. I now better understand that if I were African American, that might not be the case, maybe that would likely not be the case. Why is that? Why is it that two Americans can have such different experiences for doing the same crime, for committing the same crime, the same infraction? And that's just one little micro example. There are millions of those examples happening throughout our country every day, and does directly lead to real economic drag for those individuals, but for society as a whole.

Baker: Sure. President Rosengren.

Rosengren: Yeah. I would just highlight the connection that this session has with some of the other sessions that we had. And in particular, the employment session. So currently the unemployment rate for Whites is 5.2 percent. The unemployment for Blacks is 9.2 percent. And certainly one, not only, but one of the reasons is because of the difference in incarceration that we talked about today. And as a result, once you've gone through an experience with our criminal justice system, you are permanently scarred in the labor market in a way that just can't be justified from a society standpoint. I really like Rachel's comment that when somebody ended up in a German jail, they were still German and it was viewed as a mistake of German society, not just the mistake of an individual. I think we need to have that type of lens that people don't stop becoming American because they get into trouble once or twice in their life. And that we have to think about what we have to do as a society to make sure that the disproportionate effect that people of color have experienced through our legal system does not continue on. I think the call to try to do more in this area came through in all the sessions in a very effective way.

Baker: I appreciate that. And President Bostic, it looked like you were trying to jump in and...

Bostic: There's too much good stuff in this one. Yeah, I wanted to just speak to Neel, whenever I see police lights go on, I get nervous because I have no idea what's going to happen. And we have too many episodes where that's ended badly for people that look like me. And so that's real. I do think a lot about the portrayal of Black men in particular and how people respond to the sight of them. I've been in too many stories where people just follow me, where the security follow me around because they don't think I should be there. Or I've had people walk on the other side of the street as I walked down the street. This is the reality that Black men have in this country, people of color in general. When the law enforcement, they are of our society as well, and they're going to approach this in exactly the same way.

That to me, I think is at the root of a lot of this. But I also wanted to echo President Rosengren and tie this to another session that we've had here, which was the education session. I remember Jeffrey Canada talked about graduation rates, and he said graduation rates haven't changed in 40 or 50 years and they weren't great then, and why is this not a crisis now? And in today's session, I think that DA Rollins talked about a 69 percent recidivism rate. If you were a producer and 69 percent of the time your product failed, that would be a crisis and you would want to do something pretty dramatic. To me, this calls for something very similar, that what we're doing right now is not working and is causing us to lose a lot of potential that could really help us.

One of the things I've seen in my time in this role is that people are in a hard way. I've not met any who wouldn't want to try to find a productive way to contribute to the societies that they're in, but they feel trapped and locked out. We need to be thinking about collectively, and this goes way beyond the Federal Reserve, and I want to emphasize that, that how do we unlock the door and allow that potential to become part of our community and our society. And how we're working out is really critical. One last thing I'll say here, the very first session, I think Victor talked about a theme which is small things can be big. Hiring someone for a summer job and saying, look, if you're going to have this job, on the weekends just don't get into trouble. Like that's not a lot, that's not millions of dollars. It's not a lot of those sort of issues, but they can make a huge difference. Similarly, small infractions can have big implications. Do we really want that to be the character of our legal system, our criminal legal system? These are questions we should really be asking ourselves. And I think a number of the panelists that spoke through the course of the day are saying, well, maybe not. I really appreciate that we are starting to build an evidence basis which will allow us to have a conversation about how do we most efficiently and effectively use the resources to get the safe streets we want while at the same time maximizing our economic potential.

Baker: Yeah. I really appreciate the way that you framed out the questions that came forward in today's event. I know for me, it just feels like it's so big. I wish we had two more days of this conversation. What I hope is that it's instigated a curiosity of those that are listening and that will watch that we'll want to get deeper into this issue. I guess as we close, I'm curious to know whether or not there were questions that are lingering for you that you want to know more about, that you'd like to share or things that really spoke to you that you have not shared. So are there any questions that you're like, wow, I didn't think about that. I'd love to learn more that came up in today's conversation. I'll go to whoever wants to sort of... yeah go ahead.

Bostic: I'll go first and I'll be brief. To me the one thing that really jumped out at me is the voice of law enforcers themselves. And I thought that perspective was not... We have no issues. Their perspective was, oh, we need a redefinition of our job, and to make sure that we're trained to do that job. If we can do that, then we're good. And so maybe we'll have fewer resources. I think that voice has been absent from most of the debates that I've seen and that was really interesting today.

Baker: Yeah. How about you, President Kashkari?

Kashkari: I agree with what Raphael had just said, that stuck out for me as well. And then I'm just going to repeat myself, just this broader question of, let's really try to add up the economic costs of what we're doing, because it's easy to keep doing what you've been doing because you've been doing it forever. It feels like, well, this must be the only way. But if you look around the world, as we heard from some of the experts today, other countries have different approaches and what we can learn from them, and what are the economic implications of a very different approach to a criminal justice system that is more focused on outcomes and rehabilitation and not simply focused on incarceration. That for me, is something where I want to spend more time and learn a lot more about.

Baker: Thank you for that. President Rosengren, you are going to close this out today. You have some closing comments. As I wrap this panel, I'm hoping that you will integrate any questions that you might have into your closing comments. Thank you to you all for really paying attention to systemic racism, its impact on our communities, and hosting this series. It's been very impactful.

Kashkari: Thank you.

Rosengren: Well, this has been a great session and I think at least for some people they were thinking that this might be tangential to the economy. I would certainly disagree with that, and I think almost all the panelists made clear why you should disagree with that. Maximum employment, which is the responsibility of the Federal Reserve, is difficult to achieve if a prison record creates permanent barriers to participation in the labor market and achieving economic stability. As people highlighted in their comments, we have a little under two million people that are currently incarcerated in the United States, a much larger share than in other countries. I don't think we've fully explored what the impact on the economy is of having so many citizens facing not only incarceration, but the labor market impediments that follow that incarceration. The situation as Raphael just highlighted, I think is particularly important for Black and Latinx men. They have disproportionately experienced criminal records. They also face much higher unemployment rates than the population as a whole. Today's discussion highlights one of the many impediments to maximum employment for people of color. I think we could hear a little bit more from policy makers to understand how to think about this more holistically if we want to make sure that all Americans have an opportunity to have access to gainful employment. Today, we have delved into challenging and complex issues that among other things affect employment and economic prospects for citizens and the prosperity of individuals and communities by race. I'd like to thank you all for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you at our next racism and the economy session. Thank you, everybody.