Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 456: Criminal Injustice PART 2

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

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This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. this is me coming in again to let you know this is a long form show, the second half of last week's show. So if you missed last week's show, go download last week's show, listen to the first part of this, and you'll be sort of have a primer of exactly what we're going to be talking about in this episode. It's very similar topics. We will be shifting a little bit in this episode, focusing on some stuff that's happening in more in Scandinavian prisons and a little bit on, on faulty investigations. But we think that, that this, this show is, but we think this show is, is definitely worth your time. It is a little different than what we normally do. It's not a

bunch of stories. It is sort of just one topic. We'll be back next week with a brand new show, but we hope you enjoy this. And here's Tom. But we hope you enjoy this. And here's Tom. Recording live from GlorHill Studios in Chicago, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's very much political. And there is not yet a welcome mat,

but we're working on it. We promise. This is episode 457. This is the continuation of episode 456. Maybe this is episode 456 part two. Right. Or 456B. 456B.

It's almost like we don't want to have a 13th floor in a building. Right. We're going to skip episode 457. It's 12B or it's almost like we don't want to have a 13th floor in a building so we'll call it 14 it's 12B or it's 14A whatever it is but we want to continue our conversation it's going to be hard to sort of continue where we left off but we're going to do our best well and we're not committed to the truth

you know the investigative processes demonstrate that we're not committed to finding truth we are committed to the truth. Yeah. You know, the investigative processes demonstrate that we're not committed to finding truth. We are committed to finding someone to pin things on. The rate at which major crimes go unsolved is egregious. Right. But you cannot compound the egregiousness of unsolved crime by being lazy about solving the ones that you pretend you put in the win column. You know, you watch all of these.

You listen to like Barry Sheck. You listen to these guys in the Innocence Project. They have to fight to get DNA evidence reevaluated. The prosecution has to, at least initially, and they can force the hand through a set of processes, but they have to agree to allow evidence to be reexamined. If we gave a shit, if we cared, if we gave a shit, what we would do is we would have a national DNA database. If you enter the criminal justice system, your DNA swabbed, just like your fingerprinted.

As soon as you enter and everybody currently incarcerated, we get DNA swabbed. If we actually gave a shit, we would take everybody entering the system, we'd DNA swab all of them. We'd have that in a big, one big pool of information. Then nationally, we would take all of the rape kits and the dna evidence and all of that shit and we would triage the most important cases based on whatever factors we felt like and we would begin testing all of those cases but instead we leave this up to the states we leave this up to the counties we leave this up to cities often over

burdened often with a a um not just a disinterest in doing this, but more than a disinterest in doing this, there is an incentive not to do this. There's a disincentive to overturn convictions because in the prosecution, the police look like they lose face. We need to change the way we think about this, that it's not losing face. It's, hey, we got it right. And we're really, really sorry. We used the best tools we had at the time. The tools we have now are better. And we, as the prosecution, if we really give a shit about what's true, we should be the ones doing the work up front. It shouldn't be up to defendants who have to muster the money or ask for someone to work for free in order to find this out. It's interesting because in the

Making a Murderer trial, especially, they keep flashing back to the victim's brother and the victim's brother keeps saying, I just want her to be at rest. You know, why do they keep on, why do they keep on trying to appeal this? Why do they keep on trying to do this? They won't let this rest. They won't let this rest. Basically you won't take your punishment. And what, what passes through my head, you know, when people walk out of the, out of the room and they're crying because the person's shit is overturned, I'm blown away by that because I'm like, don't you want the real person to be? And there's another one, the innocent man, at least there's an older woman in there who eventually says, you know what? I kind of want the real person to have to do it. Like she comes to terms with it. Initially she's really upset

and she lets her emotions get the better of her. But as time goes on, she finally realizes, no, what I really want is the person who actually did it. What I don't want is just a bandaid that's not going to fix anything. What I want is somebody, it's not even a bandaid. I mean, it's a real, like it's an actual damaging thing to another human being to make you feel better, which doesn't even make any sense. But it's the idea is, is that she finally comes around, but there's this, this idea that, you know, like once it's done, it's done. And it's a, it's a stupid, I think it's a stupid way to look at it. And I don't want to keep on adjudicating cases forever and ever and ever, because especially, you know, once a case

is adjudicated, I get it. We don't have the resources to do that forever, but I don't think we care about the truth. If like you say, you have to petition all this other stuff. When new technology comes out that can exonerate the person, we should be paying attention to that. Yeah, and we shouldn't just use it on a go-forward basis, right? If new technology comes out,

then we need to say, okay, we have a way. We need to double-check. We always need to double-check. Yeah. Because if we get it wrong once, it's such a fucking horror. Look, if they could get it wrong with someone, they'd get it wrong with you and I.

You know, there's a graph I'm going to put on this week's notes. It's exonerations by state. And this only goes back to 1989. But look at that graph, Tom. And you can see it sort of bows up. And look at the reason why it does that is technology, right? It does that because we figured out ways in which to make sure that people are or not are not guilty of a crime. And you start looking at how many exonerations there are in a year.

There's one hundred and seventy seven exonerations in 2016. You know, and look at these these years by one seventy one one fifty eight. These are that's a lot of people that are getting exonerated. Yeah. And there's a lot of people that are in in these prisons that will never have this opportunity because, like you said earlier, they're triaging the most egregious cases. They're not putting those cases where people are serving life in prison in their cushy, cushy, cushy cell. And an exoneration, to be clear, is the highest possible bar. We convict people on low, low, low bar stuff, and most crimes are not going to have a possibility for DNA evidence to be involved. So if we get it wrong, you have to just extrapolate the littlest bit and think, like, if we get it wrong and we have DNA evidence a fraction of the time, we almost never have DNA evidence from, you know, robberies and assaults. And if we get it wrong on those other

cases, we're getting it wrong on many more where DNA evidence will never exonerate anyone. Yeah. So there's a tremendous number of people who cannot cross that extraordinarily high bar threshold. Yeah. I think that there's a perception in the American public, because I used to have it, so I will say at least for me there was, that there were a lot of people who won on appeal based on bullshit procedural grounds. Somebody didn't dot some I on some fucking form. Right. And then, you know, a murderer went out and they, you know, just raped everybody that they ever met ever.

And so the world is terrible. Snapped their fingers like Thanos and half of us died. Right. Yeah. And to be extraordinarily clear, it's so hard to get out. died. Right. Yeah. And to be extraordinarily clear, it's so hard to get out. Once you're convicted, the difficulty in getting out, even with exculpatory evidence, even with evidence of Brady violations, even with so many other pieces of the puzzle where you just look at it as a regular person and you just think like, there's no way, there's no way if this were

tried today with what we know now, there's no way you could possibly vote to convict that person. That is insufficient in the vast majority of cases to get somebody out on an appeal. People are not getting released on bullshit procedural grounds. So that exoneration bar is insanely high. And even with that incredibly high bar, we know we get it wrong frequently. Yeah. I want to read something, Tom. This is from an article that we read. A justice in South Carolina district attorney said, the system is not perfect. The reversals prove that the system works, is what they said out loud. And what kept on going through my mind is, do you remember when we ordered? We ordered one night from Giordano's. and Giordano's is a pizza place here in Chicago.

Chicago, of course, has the best pizza on the planet. We just want to get that out there. Just want to throw that out there. Well, I don't know if it's the best on the planet. I do know that it's better than anything available on the East Coast. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I'll say the same thing. You can't go East and get better pizza. It's not possible. So we order pizza and it's 9.45 and it's been two hours. And so I call him on the phone and I say, because the order just disappears. There's an electronic order and the order just disappears. And I say to him, yeah, well, where's my pizza?

And the guy said, what pizza? And I said, oh, we ordered one. And then the order just got deleted. Right. And he said, oh, I'm really sorry. I'll give you $5 off next time is what he did. The system works, Tom, because I got $5 off the next time. I remember how I never got a pizza.

We were so mixed. It's like, well, now it's 10 o'clock and I'm hungry. Yeah. And I don't want $5. I want to exchange you money for pizza. Yeah. What I want is for you to do that. That's what I wanted to do.

Yeah. Like, you're giving me my money back. That's happened to me too. When I've ordered from Uber Eats, I just stopped using because I've done it to me three times. They're like, I'll get an order and then time will go by and then it'll be like an hour and a half. And then they're like, we canceled your order.

Or one time they just couldn't find my house. Another time they delivered it to the wrong place. And I call them and they're like, well, here's your money back. I'm like, I need food. What I wanted was the food. I had the money. I didn't want that. I wanted to trade it to you for food. I wanted the foods. Right. Yeah. But getting back to, you know, exonerations, you know, we're talking about one part of this one article that we read and said a Chicago Tribune investigation published earlier this year found that

since 1963, at least 381 homicide convictions nationwide have been overturned because prosecutors concealed evidence of innocence or presented evidence they knew to be false. But none of these prosecutors have been convicted of a crime or barred from practicing law. I think that's incredible. Isn't that incredible? And I think the problem there, I understand the pressures that people are under. I get it. I mean, I think we're underfunded when it comes to whether like our law enforcement and, you know, the justice system, I think is just underfunded. I think it's just,

it just needs more people, needs more people to do more work. It just needs it. But, you know, the fact that they're concealing evidence or making sure that they don't present evidence that they know is false. There's no excuse for that, right? But that's part of that pressure to win. That's part of that, like, it's part of the problem when you have people who are in a position where they're running for office, where they have a tremendous amount of pressure from, really like pressure from the public to get those big wins, to look tough on crime, et cetera, et cetera. I really feel like the prosecutor's office should be entirely separated from that.

I think there's some structural things you can do. Yeah. You can separate your prosecutor's office entirely from the political system. You can just disengage it from the political system entirely. Make this a wholly independent group of people and a wholly independent board with its own watchdogs. I think it also needs watchdogs. I absolutely agree. I think there needs to be a lot of independent watchdogs.

I also think, you know, talking about evidence and like how it's gathered, I also think we have a real problem where we hire somebody as a police officer and then they move up the ranks and they become a detective. I don't think that that's necessarily bad, but I also don't think that it's necessarily required, right? What I mean by that is like, I can't go to school and graduate and become a detective because I'm really good at investigation. What I believe in very strongly, because I think almost all of the evidence points to the success of it is like, as the world becomes more complicated, the need for expertise becomes more and more, you know, necessary. So what really we should have is we should have guys out on the street doing the street work, right? And we should have detectives doing investigatory work and we should have interrogators. So the detective brings a guy in for questioning and

hands them off to people who are great at interrogating. And their job should not be to interrogate in order to get a confession. Their job should be to interrogate to get to the truth. And they should all be independently evaluated on their ability to gather truth, right? And those systems should have a push-pull. And what I mean by that is like you could set them up like any other push pull system where it's slightly adversarial, adversarial system, self-correct. Right. And that's why we create a lot of adversarial systems. The whole policing system is not adversarial. It's all brotherhood. Right. Yeah. It's all. I'm one guy. I walk somebody through my process, start to finish. All my friends are incentivized to the

same way. But really, if your incentives coincide, but also in some ways clash with somebody else's incentives, you create an adversarial system. So you could bring somebody in from the street, and they have to turn somebody over and say, like, Harry, there's a crime that's been committed. It rises to a certain level. It goes to a detective. A detective is somebody who's gone through and has a four-year degree on investigation. And they have certain prerequisites like any other job, and they've got to go through it. Now they hand it over to an investigator. An investigator goes out and does the investigation. Then they bring somebody back in. They hand them over to an interrogator. And an interrogator's job is to interrogate and get

to the truth of the matter, right? Those things could all be separated. The idea that we have one set of guys, the amount of money doing all those jobs. Yeah, you got to get a guy who's a jack of all trades every single time because he's got to be good at all those things. That's a fucked system. And it also doesn't make sense. That's not something that is just logically that's not somebody. Because if you look at any work, look at your work, you know, listener, look at your work and, and say how many people can come in and do your job. You know, there's not a lot of people I know for sure where I work. I'm like I said, I really are a media specialist.

I don't know anybody on my floor that I work with that could do my job. I don't know a single person that could do my job. They couldn't even fill in for me to do my job. Other people on my floor, I don't know that I could fill in for them because I'm very specifically, and we do this in business all the time. There's a very specific person whose their job is to do this work. It's also expensive. Expense is going to be huge. We got to fund. If we want to be safe and we want to make sure that we care about the truth, we're going to fund that. We're going to make sure we fund that. But I don't think we care about the truth. I think that's the big thing. I think what we care about is the feelies. Do we feel safe?

That's the difference. Do we look tough? Yeah, that's another thing. How tough do we look? Yeah, how tough on crime? Joe Arpaio is a perfect example of this, right? How tough do we look? How much can we shame people?

That's the other portion of what Joe Arpaio does. But not only does it cost a lot, but I also think too, there's a level at which people would argue that you shouldn't pass somebody off because you're the most familiar person because you're the investigator. So you've been investigating this thing. You know all the threads. Why should you pass it off to somebody else who doesn't know all the threads? And what that means is, is that we don't expect them to have enough time to prepare. And with everything't expect them to have enough time to prepare. And with everything, you would just have enough time to prepare.

They would be able to produce a document that would be able to like lead you through what's happening. And then you would be able to prepare for it and then interrogate as you see fit. But instead, what we do is we just say, well, that's one guy. So we don't have to do all that extra work. And even if, even if you didn't go that far, even if you didn't go that far, if you separated the investigator, and the investigator did not have to come up through the ranks as cop, but the investigator got

trained in investigation. Exactly. Trained in all those things. And only in that. They don't need to know how to subdue a dude and do all the rest of the fucking cop stuff. They don't need to know how to write speeding tickets. And I don't mean to minimize the street cop stuff. They don't need to know how to write speeding tickets. And I don't mean to minimize the street cop stuff, but they don't need to know that. We could separate these two lines of work entirely so that one is not a prerequisite for the other. And then you could create a separate

set of educational and training prerequisites, which are difficult. And I will say this, as Tom, I would have considered going to school to be a detective. That would have been work that would have appealed to my intellect. Absolutely. It would have appealed to my sense of justice. It would have appealed to many things. I did not, however, want to be a cop. Yeah.

Right? No. I did not want to put on a fucking uniform and drive around in the squad car and do that part of the work. That was never work I wanted to do. But I recognize it like, oh man, there's no getting here from there. But there should be. Because to say that one person who's a great street cop is also going to be a great investigator

or that a great investigator also has to have been a great street cop, these two things are not necessarily related to one another. It's like the army when you go to officer school or you're an enlisted person. Right. You know, like those types of things. Like they recognize that there's a group of people that are more interested in doing the officer school and they're going to do that.

And there's a group of people that are not going to make it there or are not interested in it and they do the enlisted stuff. And that's just how it works. You know, I want to talk about how often, you know, we're talking about how often they make mistakes. I want to read this from another article. Again, all these articles will be available. They're all available on this episode's show notes.

It says, there's no logical reason to think that police error rates in criminal investigations lacking DNA evidence are better than the 25% error rate in those where it's present. Isn't that insane? 25%.

There's a lot of things in this world that you do that have a much less error rate than that. And they are risky. Yeah. Can you imagine if bungee jumping had a 25% error rate or driving your car had a 25% crash rate? Right. Or like, imagine if they rolled out a birth control method that was 25% error, like 25% of the time, it does not work. 25% of the people that climbed up Marlon Everest died. Right. And we didn't do it.

25% is not an acceptable level of risk for almost anything. Yeah. Like the only time 25%, that 75% sounds good is it's like, you got pancreatic cancer, but we have a 75% chance of like, then you'd be like, okay. Then you'd be like, okay. All right. Because I had a horrible.

Well, because it's versus 100%. Right. It's versus 100% of death. Right. And you're like, okay, that's fine. But most people do not face 100% chance in being in prison. While most people do not face 100% chance of being brought up on charges and then maybe put on death row. Right.

And so to be clear, like from the article that you read, and I think I remember this right, what it was specifically citing was DNA from rape kits. Yeah. Like it was, it's very specific, like unequivocal. It was like 8,000. Yeah. It says found in 8,048 rape and rape murder cases referred to the FBI crime lab from 1988 to mid 1995, a staggering 2112 of the primary suspects were exonerated and owning to DNA evidence alone. Had DNA analysis been available, it was not a decade earlier. Several hundred of the 2112 would have probably never been tried, convicted,

sentenced to crimes they didn't commit. Yeah. That's insane. That is, that is. And like, if we're getting, and think about too, like the level of resources that we bring to these sorts of cases versus the amount of resources we bring to what we would consider like lower level offenses. Right. So it's not just like rape and murder. And those are terrible, terrible crimes. So don't don't mistake me. But think about like assault and robbery and what we would consider less than those bigger crimes.

If we're getting it wrong when we have more resources. So when we're trying to solve a murder, trying to solve a rape, trying to solve a home invasion, things along those lines that are sort of like the cop-up version of a big ticket item, right? Where they're going to put more of their resources in those investigations. Like think about how shit a job we're doing on the rest of it. We're probably doing an even shittier job of the rest of those things because we're investing even less resources in them, which is why the solve rate for some of these things is just abysmal. The solve rate, if you look up the solve rate by crime, most crimes go unsolved. Just most. That's just a crazy thing I had never considered. I had never considered that most, most of the crimes that get reported, just, we're just not going to get an answer on that.

That's just like, we're not talking about a stolen bike. We're talking about major crimes here. Just they don't, nobody ever gets in trouble. That's it. That's it. That's just it. It's just goes away forever. What this all boils down to, what this all boils down to is we are for our safety, for the safety of the group, willing to, with an error margin that is unacceptable, put people that are innocent of these crimes away for a long time, kill them, whatever. We are willing to do that for our own safety. But if most crimes go unsolved anyway, What level are we doing? Like, how many are we doing that for?

Well, you know, and what occurs to me is like, do we know this? And what we're worried about is saying, look, it's 50% of rapes go. I'm just using a number. I don't know if that's true. 50% of rapes go unsolved. But if I am required to do real diligence and make sure, then it's going to go from 50 to 35. And I don't want to look that ineffective.

Yeah. I wonder, is it that? Yeah. Because if it's that, then we need to get it right. We need to be 100% right 35% of the time. You know what I mean? Yeah. Not 80% right 50% time. You know, now I feel like I'm the fucking anchorman guy. Gosh, I don't know what I'm...

60% of the time it works every time. Yeah. The bicentennial was in 1976. Okay, and if a train is traveling at 60 miles an hour, head it east. If we... But the thing that you think I'm saying, that's what I mean.

You do know what I'm saying. Yeah. So we need to be... When we say, this is the guy, we got to be right. Yeah. We got to be not a little right.

We got to not be mostly right. We got to be right. One of We got to be not a little right. We got to not be mostly right. We got to be right. One of the reasons why I read and what you maybe heard why they dig in their heels is because there's a chain of chain reaction. If if the cop is wrong and the cop knows he's wrong. That's why we're just talking about people who just like hide information and shit. The cop knows he's wrong. How many people get disappointed? And you mentioned earlier that it's, you know, there's three levels. There's the people who are, you know, possibly, you know, they're the victim's family. There's, you know, there's a level of people that are, and then you also think about, you know, if the cop says he's wrong, now the

prosecutor wasted his time or her time on this case and the judge and the jury and all that stuff, they wasted their time on this case. And so, you know, there is incentive for people to dig their heels in. Sunk cost fallacy. Right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. That's exactly it. And so there's this incentive that people have to dig their heels in and we don't let, you know, what happens if a cop is wrong? Right. Well, what happens if the cop's wrong and he goes to the thing and he realizes halfway through the trial that he's wrong? What would happen, right? Well, you wonder, like, would it blow his credibility with the prosecutor? Because right now, you know, there was a case that we read about, you know, where somebody got a, somebody

had a letter signed from a judge saying, I think you've got the wrong guy. I think a guy I already fucking had in my court did this yeah this this crime but the prosecution does not weigh that because they're you know sunk cost they're in for a penny they're in for a pound for it all the wheels of justice are in motion at this point um you can't count on i think you got to fix this problem on the policing side right because you can't count on the court system to fix this we know the court court system is not good. Once you're arrested and you're indicted and all of those things, I mean, I was thinking about this like reading a bunch of these stories. Imagine that you got arrested for a crime that you didn't commit.

And the system worked exactly the way that it was supposed to. It's not like everything worked out for you. You may have been in jail for a year, 16 months. Sure, a long time. You know, your job, your work does not keep your job open. Yeah. Especially if they think you're like a rapist or something. But beyond that, it's not FMLA. Yeah. You're in jail. Yeah. They don't have any obligation to keep your job open. Why would they bother? So they don't know if you're going to get convicted or not convicted or come back. They got a position to fill. Right. So you just lost your job. Yeah.

And your family lost their support. They've lost that source of income. They lost your job. And your family lost their support. They lost that source of income. They lost your involvement in their day-to-day lives. Your relationships are all strained, probably to the breaking point. There's physical dangers to yourself while you're in jail. Can you imagine going to Cook County Jail and spending 16 months in Cook County Jail? I'd be terrified.

I'd be terrified. And then the experiences that you have there would shape to how you think and how you feel. And like, it's not like these are items of no consequence. So when the system works, if it gets the wrong guy, the system still doesn't work. Right. You're still fucked. Yeah. Because you still spent. We don't have we have a right to a speedy trial, but we never give people a speedy trial. Right. People go to jail sometimes for years. Before the trial comes out, yeah. Haley and I were talking about, in an article she found, was reading, people in Rikers Island have spent six, seven, eight years in the jail at Rikers Island without a conviction. They've died at Rikers Island waiting to be tried. We have a constitutional right to a speedy trial, but this continuance process pushes that out, pushes that out, pushes that out. We don't have those protections. The system fails us if we rely on it at the court side.

I don't see any way around that unless there's a massive investment. Massive, massive, massive investment. It's interesting because I also wonder, too, what do you do with the police officers, right? Police officer, you want to encourage them to come forward if they're wrong, but you also, there's part of you that wants to punish them for being wrong, right? The police officers that worked on, let's go back to making a murderer and let's go to Brandon Dassey. Those police officers that got him in that room and spent all that time with him and forced him to make this confession and then separated from his parents and then called in like the prosecutor at one point allowed them to interview

him and all this crazy shit there's a bunch of crazy shit that happens with this poor kid but all those they did a bunch of things wrong yeah they fucked up a bunch of times do you want to trust them again but you want to encourage them to come forward and say oh no we fucked up but you also want to like at a certain point i think we want to punish them and, but you want to encourage them to come forward and say, oh no, we fucked up. But you also want to like at a certain point, I think we want to punish them. And so there's this weird tension there because everything, all the stakes are so high. The stakes

are so high because you lose part of your life. That's time he never gets back. He'll never be a 17 year old again. He'll never be, you know, how long has he been in there? 10 years? 15 years? He'll never be any of those ages again. And he spent the best of his life in jail. Right.

Yeah. And not only that, like he will have formed his impression of who he is inside. Based who he is. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like we're watching the thing about the Central Park Five. Yeah. And the one guy, when he got out, he went in when he was 14 or 15.

When he got out, he struggled desperately. He spent a lot of time in his room. He showered with his boxers on. He couldn't look people in the eye. He wasn't comfortable in places that were crowded because he was nervous about keeping an eye on people. You know, like who he is. It's not like he got out of jail and was like normal. He had terrible experiences in the hell house that is jail.

Yeah. Yeah. He had terrible experiences in the hell house that is jail. Yeah. And got out and is fundamentally always going to be a different person than if that had not happened to him. So there's no money that you can offer. Yeah. To your point about like, how do you fix this with the prosecutors and the police? Like, I do think that there is a level of negligence or maybe not even negligence, but there's a level to which certainly actions

can rise up to criminality. Or at least one would think. They don't in practice. In practice when these things happen, the prosecutors are never punished. No. In our current system. No. The police are almost never punished. Right. In our current system. Prosecutors, from everything we read,

that's just a no. They're just never punished. Yeah. The police are shielded from almost all criminal and civil liability that they would have unless it rises beyond the level of a Rodney King beat. Sure.

Right. So the bar is incredibly high. And I'm not sure that that's always the worst idea because they are taking on a risky job and it's fraught and kind of who would want to do it otherwise.

But I do think you could have a system where it's like, look, certain things are beyond the pale. You can't do. Brady violations, you can't do. Like hiding evidence that's exculpatory. I can't believe that that happens. I don't understand how when that happens, it's not automatically a retrial.

What's amazing to me is how hard it is to get a retrial. We watched and we listened to these things. We read a fairrial. Right. What's amazing to me is how hard it is to get a retrial. We watched and we listened to these things. We read a fair number of articles, read. It's so hard to get a retrial, to get a rehearing

of the facts. It's like, yeah, this exculpatory evidence was intentionally withheld by the prosecution. It'll go to an appeals court and the appeals court will be like,

we're going to decide that was immaterial. Your constitutional rights, the violation of your constitutional rights was immaterial. Stay in jail, the violation of your constitutional rights was immaterial. Stay in jail, stupid. And one prosecutor even said, like, look, if it's that important, he won't mind spending a few more months in jail. He's already spent 10 years.

Every day is a state-sponsored kidnapping. Yeah, that's exactly true. Every day is a state-sponsored kidnapping. We talk about the way in which people are incarcerated, and there's several of these people that were in jail. We read a bunch of stories and heard a bunch of stories about these people that are in jail, and they won't admit to guilt because they weren't guilty.

They were eventually exonerated. And that slows down their actual chance to get out of jail because parole hearings themselves are the things that we require those people to feel sorry for the crime that they did. It's express remorse. Exactly. Yeah. So they have to be remorseful for the thing that they did. And if they come in and say, look, I never did this before and I didn't do this crime. I didn't commit it. But I served 15 years here in this facility. And I've never once had an infraction. I've been a model citizen of this facility. I've been employed the entire time, working hard, just basically trying

to get out of here. And I've done all the things, I've jumped through all the hoops that she wanted me to jump through. And I've done it all. And just because I think that the state wrongfully convicted me, you won't let me out and you will just send me back in there to rot forever because neither of us will budge on this. And that's a stupid system that we have.

I feel like we should stop wondering about whether or not, like if somebody says that they're innocent of the crime, you know, look, we're going to pay attention to them when they leave anyway. It's a parole hearing. They're not, you don't just give them their fucking wings and they become angels when they leave. It's not, you know, we're going to be keeping tabs on these people, right? They don't leave and they immediately, when it's a parole, you don't leave and you're just immediately like, you're free, go do whatever you want. Kill and fuck and do whatever you got to do. Take whatever you want. No, these people have to check in all the time. They have to get jobs. They have to prove they have work. They have to live in halfway houses

sometimes. Like these are people that we're keeping on, we are monitoring these people. So the fact of whether or not they're deciding that they disclose to you that they are guilty or not is irrelevant to the fact that we're already going to take care of them. We're already going to watch them. Well, we're keeping people in jail because we don't like their feelings. Yeah. Like that's what remorse is, right? Remorse is an internal feeling about your – we are deciding that we are keeping people in prison because they don't feel the thing we want them to feel. And it requires the operation of someone else's mind, right? Because I got to

believe that you are remorse. Right. None of that should make any difference. If parole is meaningful, parole is meaningful because what I mean, like, as I would understand it, parole would be this, right? Cecil, you committed a crime and we said you're going to go to jail for 10 years for him. She's an easy number. Yeah. I'm going to go to jail for 10 years for it. But look, it's not in society's best interests to keep you locked up and spend that money and spend that time for 10 years if I don't have to.

So there's an opportunity for you to turn your life around and to reenter society. And society stands to gain if we do that. If society does not stand to gain, parole wouldn't make any sense. Sure. Right? I don't need to know your feelings.

I don't need to know your feelings. I need to know your actions. How did you behave? What do you do? Your actions, your actions are always stronger than your feelings. Like, I can tell you anything

about, like, the big feels, right? Yeah. I can tell you anything about, like, the big feels, right? Yeah, I can lie to you, man. Yeah. I can tell you anything about how I feel. It doesn't matter. All that makes any difference. The only way to evaluate what somebody is is to look at their actions.

Because I got to say, like, I don't give a shit if they feel sorry. And then they go out and they do something else. I don't give a shit if they didn't feel sorry and they go out and do something. You know what I mean? Like, all I care about are your actions. Yeah. It's it. It's the only way to know what somebody is capable of doing and willing to do.

Sure. What do they demonstrate with their fucking body? Right. It's, it's a very different system in other parts of the world. And we, we touched on this a little, but I'd like to touch on it a little more.

Um, like I talked about earlier than the countries in Scandinavia have a very different approach to the way in which they handle incarcerated people. And I watched a documentary that I found on YouTube. I was just doing some searches and it just took a 20 or 30 minute documentary. And it was subtitled because the people were, they were from, like, I want to say it was Norway or Finland or something like that. And they took the guy, there's a guy who's like a superintendent of Attica

in New York, right? So the prison or whatever their jail, I don't know if it's a jail or prison, I don't know what the distinction is. They took him overseas. They paid for him to come over and walk through four of their facilities to take a look at it. Now this is a guy who was like a warden or a superintendent of one of these big places where we keep incarcerated people in the States.

And one of the things that he said, which was really telling, was these people, you know, I don't need to give these people rights because they did something to be here, right? And so at one point they go into a cell in Sweden or whatever, and it looks a lot like a cell here, except for the people had like a TV or whatever. It was a little, it looked like a little more, but it really did look like a cell. I mean, they had a window, but it was clearly like, you know, it was a bigger window, much bigger window than we might have here. But it was a super, but it was, but it was a, yeah, I mean, I'm sure it was a fucking super thick window, whatever. And they had a tree outside and it was a concrete fucking block

room. There wasn't anything special. It just had a bed and there was a little bit of amenities in there, but that was it. And they asked the warden, the one of the guys who's there says, you know, what would you do to search this cell? And the warden says, well, I'd take first things I'd do is I'd take that bed mattress and I'd flip it on the ground. And then I would work my way around the room and I would touch everything that could move and I would look at it and I would throw it on the box spring there. And I would throw it and take it and throw it on the box spring until I got all the way around the entire room. And then I would have a giant pile of their belongings in the box spring and then the mattress would be on the ground. And then I would call them back in.

And the officer there, the guy who's the guard, says you wouldn't put their stuff back where you found it? And the warden says to them, very telling, I think, I didn't do anything to get them here. They did all the things to get them here. So no, I wouldn't. It doesn't matter how I treat them. It doesn't matter how I'm treating them.

It doesn't matter whether or not I treat them poorly. What matters is, is that they did all the things to deserve that. And what we think when we think about crime, we think about a single moment that defines the rest of your existence, right? So crime, when we think about it as like that person is a murderer, that person is a rapist, that person is an armed robber. That's one moment of their life that now thus defines the rest of their life. And that's how we treat them when they come into prison. This person is an armed robber. That's what they were. But we never pay attention to any part of their life

leading up to that and how they were formed. We don't talk about societal ills, the things that might push someone to do something bad. Maybe they didn't grow up without a father. Maybe they grew up without a family, some sort of family figure that could help them. Maybe they grew up without a support system. Maybe that, you know, maybe the society had something to do with that. Right. But instead, what we say is that one thing now defines you. And that means that we can treat you however you want because of that one moment in your

life. And I feel like when you look at the Scandinavian system, their guards, they're not guards. Their guards aren't people who can just swing a stick real hard and push somebody back into a cell and zip tie somebody's hands and throw a bag over their head if they're spitting, right? That's not what they are. They can do that stuff, but they're also their social worker, right? They're the person who helps them reintegrate into society. So they're a person they can go to at all times to help them with any problems that they're currently having. It's a totally different system over there. They just think about it in a totally different way. It's not, this guy's here to watch you. It's, this guy's here to help you. And it's a totally

different system. That's kind of fascinating. Right. That's kind of fascinating. You know, I confess that like, when I was thinking about these issues, I was thinking like, I think that there are some moments I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about your comment about, you know, a moment in your life that can define the rest of your life. Sure. And you know, one sheep, you know, I, you know, whoever has that video, stop posting it. Everyone's seen it. All right. It's getting old. You know, like I do think like there are things that can be done,

which are egregious enough that rehabilitation is not necessarily socially appropriate. But what occurs to me is like we have, we are so indiscriminate in the States about the way that we treat crime. We identify two types of crime, misdemeanors and felonies. Any felon just, you know, any felon that goes to jail goes to the same. And we have security variations. But we don't differentiate between the people that we need to rehabilitate, the people who we want to pay back something to society, and then the people who are going to be removed from society for the safety of society, right?

And I think that there's three different kind of layers there that need to be thought about when it comes to like, you know, you've got victimless crimes. You know, victimless crimes, we should probably say, okay, this is somebody who nobody got hurt. There was no victim here. They did something that broke the social contract. They owe something back to society. We'll decide what they owe and we'll decide how they pay.

But they need to pay something back to society because they broke the contract. Right. And they're owing to us now. Then I think that there are people who have done something kind of in the middle ground where it's like, yeah, look, there is a certain amount of punishment

that is necessary right now. Like there's no such thing as justice without some kind of punishment. If somebody, you know, beats me unconscious, I don't want them to get taught how to be a welder and sent home. That doesn't seem fair, right? So there's some amount of punishment, but also being segregated from the rest of the world is a part of that punishment, right? But I do think that there's a middle ground where we can say, look, these are people we think are rehabilitated possibilities. I don't know how to phrase it.

It's possible to rehabilitate these people. So we need to have a system where they can be simultaneously made to understand the gravity of what they've done and then genuinely rehabilitated and turned back loose in a society. And then there is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fragment of people that just need to be kept away from the rest of the world. Sure. And that's that.

And just perfect. Yes. Right. And we need to treat them all as separate categories. We need to stop putting everybody in the same two buckets. Sure. We have just a bucket system. I don't know.

You forged a bunch of checks and you sold some marijuana and you robbed a liquor store. One had a gun. One was a drug thing. One was a white collar crime. Throw them all in the same. You're all in the same bucket. They're not all the same bucket. And what we want from them should be different.

The way that they repay us socially should be different. But we don't think about that. We just, we only have, we have a one size fits all justice system and it fits nobody. We don't have a justice system. We have a vengeance system. I'm going to argue that until I die.

They take away all the things that can help reintegrate people into society. We cut all those. Those are the first things to go. We used to have in this state a thing that would allow you to take classes and get a degree in college, like an associate's degree while you were in prison. associate's degree while you were in prison. They don't have that anymore. We don't allow them to have Pell Grants. We don't allow them to do any of that stuff. We don't do that anymore. We cut that shit. We stopped allowing them to better themselves.

We stopped allowing them to maybe rehabilitate and leave and have some sort of future. Instead, what we've allowed them to do is stagnate in prison, leave, feel ostracized, and then basically do something else to do it again. Right. And, you know, I can't help but think that this has something to do with the privatization of prisons, right? There's money being spent on people trying to make us afraid of criminals. It's constant in our political system. They're always trying to make us feel afraid of criminals.

Why is that? Where does that money come from? Do they try to influence all these people who are currently politicians to make sure that that's a talking point that they bring up all the time so that we constantly want to make sure that we keep funding the prisons and we keep making sure that there's enough people in there that are going to be tough on crime so that they don't care whether they make mistakes. They put a bunch of people behind bars. I feel like we are stepping in all the wrong directions when it comes to making sure that people are,

they step away from prison and they're ready to reintegrate into society. We're not letting them, we're not giving them that chance. We're not giving, we're throwing their lives away, essentially. I just had a realization. Yeah.

And I think that this might be distressingly true. Part of the reason that we don't do that, I think, and I really think this might be the case, is because we have no social safety net for regular people. Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Because one of the things that I can feel, I can sense, is like, well, fuck, I had to put myself through college and learn how to fucking go to school and be a plumber myself. And some other guy like what robs a liquor store and goes to jail and gets taught a trade. And then he comes out. Yeah. The problem isn't the second part. The problem is the first part. Yeah. The problem is that like regular people, you know, we are not providing them any kind of social system resources.

we are not providing them any kind of social system resources. The social system resources that we provide, if we provide a system of resources for education and trade learning and all of this to prisoners, and that helps them get out of jail and find meaningful work and be a part of the world, that seems like a fucking no-brainer. And I think the reason that, like, people push back against it is like,

well, I didn't get that. Sure. And I think the answer is like, well, yeah, that's a separate problem we got to fix. You should have gotten that. Yeah. Everybody should get that. It's the argument about wages

when they talk about minimum wage and they start bringing up, well, a paramedic doesn't make $15 an hour. And you're like, yeah, well, they should. They should make more than the person who's at McDonald's. Yes. It's the same thing. It's like, well, I had to work 100 hours a week when I was a resident. And it's like, well, is that ideal? Is that really what we want? Does that produce the result we want? I think there would not be that resentment of, well, why are

they getting? Because I can feel it. I can feel it personally. Why did I have to work so hard and I followed the rules? And somebody who doesn't follow the rules gets a free education or a free trade learning or, you know, three hots and a cut. You know, you hear that kind of thing. And I am genuinely sympathetic to that in the sense that it does not match how hard other people have had to work without breaking the rules. And I think the answer is like, well, we don't fix it by saying, well, now nobody gets a social safety net. I said, everybody gets a social safety net. And it strikes me that in Scandinavian countries, they have a great social safety net.

Everybody has that social safety net. So that resentment wouldn't be there. I also think too, you're looking at only the goal. You're looking at only the end point. That guy now has a degree. That guy also spent 10 years in prison, right? You know, like we look at and we say, well, that guy got a degree. Yeah. Are you willing to trade your time outside of prison for a degree? Are you willing to say, yeah, I had to work a hundred

hours a week because I was going to school and working. Yeah. You were also a free man, right? You were also not, you also didn't have to worry about getting shivved in the shower, right? You know? So yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. But it's like those people who complain when we give the homeless people houses and we're like, well, they can have a house. We're like, would you trade your current life so you could just get a house? No, you wouldn't do that. You would never do that. Right. And we always only look at what they got. We're always constantly looking at our fucking neighbor's plate and not worrying about how we all got a plate. Right. We're not paying attention to it. And I think that's the real problem. That's the

resets where the resentment comes in because I agree with you, right? Like, yeah. Do I want somebody who, you know, possibly hurt another human being to wind up in the exact same position I am? And I got, and I did all this stuff. No, I don't. I do want them to be punished, but I think that time away from society is the punishment. We got to pay attention to that. We got to look at that. Yeah. Right. But if it, if it, but I get it, like, I'm just saying like, I get that. Like, if it feels like a sort of boarding school, right. You know what I mean? Sure. Then, then there's going to be that natural resentment where no progress will be made. So I think the way to, to begin fixing that is to be like, you know what, let's make sure everybody

has an education. Yeah. Let's make sure everybody learns a trade. Everybody. And then like, yeah, well, it wouldn't even be controversial then. Like, oh, Tom went to jail and learned a trade. It's like, well, everybody learns a trade. Yeah. We all get to learn a trade. So it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't even feel like it. Right. I want to read two paragraphs from a piece that I found. It was, again, it's an Atlantic article on recidivism and on Scandinavian prisons. The punishment is the restriction of liberty. No other rights have been removed,

reads a fact sheet on a criminal services in Norway. During the service of the sentence, life inside will resemble life outside as much as possible. You need a reason to deny a sentenced offender his rights, not to grant them.

Progression through a sentence should be aimed as much as possible at returning to the community. The more closed the system is, the harder it will be to return to freedom. One has to wonder if 10 years in such a glass funnel, redirecting all the shame, anger, recrimination back onto oneself is not morally harsher sentence than twice that time inside a 24-hour war zone where some of the most powerful warriors wear state uniforms, where, where family visits are made into scenes of collective humiliation and where

few rehabilitative programs are run either by prisons or by unionized staff who suffer less scrutiny than the guards. And they're talking about the fact that these people, some of these people, and I was reading about the prisons in Scandinavia, these people, they leave the prison and go to school. They go to university and then they come back to the prison. Now, these are not maximum security prisons, right? These are minimum security prisons that people are in. And we have cushy minimum security prisons here in the States too. It's not, let's not forget that those things exist. We have weekend prison. You can go to a weekend jail.

So these things exist. And these people, they go to school and they come home, but they have an ankle bracelet and they don't, you know, they can't, you know, leave and they can't, they've got to be there in the end, at the end of the day, they'll lose privileges if they don't, right? I'm saying like, they'll lose them if they, there's got to be a reason to lose those privileges. But in the article, they're talking about like, well, they're reflecting on themselves all the time. They're constantly reflecting on themselves because they are different than the rest of the people around them. Then the people around them can't pick out that they're different. They don't know that they're different, but you,

you know, you're different. You know, you're, you're never free the entire time. You're never free. Right. And so how, how does that affect somebody and does that make them want to instead, you know what I'm part, I can't really ever truly be part of society if I'm in here. And that might change people's minds on how they do it. Their recidivism rates really do show through too, because their recidivism rates are lower than our recidivism rates.

Are they a little lower, Cecil? They're a lot lower. Oh, really? It's interesting. Our recidivism rates, within three years of release, two-thirds of released prisoners were re-arrested. So that was a study of 30 states

that tracked 404,000 prisoners. Well, that sample size is pretty small. It's not nearly as many people as are in prison in our country. That's for damn sure. 67.8% were rearrested. Within five years of release, three quarters,

76.7% of prisoners released were rearrested. Wow. Now, however, though, of those prisoners who were rearrested, more than half were arrested by the end of the first year. And property offenders were most likely to be arrested at 82.1%.

And I suspect that's burglary and things like that. Or real estate fraud. I don't know. And then it says 76.9% for drug offenders, 73.6% for public order offenders, and 71.3% for violent offenders. So violent offenders is actually smaller,

but it's still a lot. It's still a hell of a lot. It's still a lot. Now, I'm talking about people who are re-arrested. Many of those re-arrested are not convicted or sent back to prison. The re-arrest rate for the first eight years after a release is 49%, and the reconviction rate is 32%. And what that tells me is, once you do something, now you're part of the usual suspects, and we're going to re-arrest you a fucking whole hell of a lot. That's going to happen all the time. And again, that plays back

into we're arresting the wrong people. We're clogging up the system by not having good systems and we're making it so that we're just bringing in the same people because we think that they're always constantly doing the wrong thing. Yeah. Once a felon, always a felon. Yeah. I mean, that's just, I read an interesting article about the misdemeanor system and how the misdemeanor system in many ways is a way to get your name recognized, like to begin with a series of small, generally meaningless, generally just totally socially meaningless offenses that begin to build a record for people. And it's generally people that are undesirable, right? It's poor people, people of color.

So the misdemeanor system brings them in. Then they get, you know, in the system, they don't have enough money to fight this, that, or the other thing. And now they've got a name and now they've got a record and now they've got a rap sheet. And as soon as you have all those things, your chances for leniency, your chances for understanding, they're less every single time. Have you ever had a run in out of curiosity with the misdemeanor system at all? I've been charged with a couple of misdemeanors myself. I was almost

charged with a speeding misdemeanor. I was thinking about this when I read that article. So just a sunny afternoon, I was driving to my office. I wasn't paying attention. And I was speeding like a motherfucker down this street. It's like a four lane, but not highway. And I was just absolutely speeding like a motherfucker. And they pulled me over and I was going like 23 or 24 over the limit. That's pretty fast. Fast, right? So I was just absolutely flying.

You were 67 in a 45. Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so I got a big giant speeding ticket and i had to go to court so i went to court thinking i'm going to get a big fine and i got there and they said okay when you're going a trillion miles over the limit that's a misdemeanor potentially a misdemeanor so you know it's punishable by a 1500 fine and up to six months in jail what and i was like i was looking like, I think you got the wrong guy.

I should have got a lawyer. Like, I was just in a car. Wow. I didn't hit anybody. I wasn't drunk. I was just, I was just cruising on a sunny afternoon

and not paying attention to the speed, you know? And so I was immediately like a little taken aback. I was a little scared. And they were like, okay, well, you can plead guilty to it

and we'll reduce the sentence to driving 15 over. So if I agree that I was driving, if I agree to something that's not true, because I was driving more than 15 over, if I agree to something that's not true, we'll reduce the sentence. It won't be a misdemeanor, but you got to pay like, I mean, I got a five or $600 ticket. It was a very expensive ticket. They basically just wanted a bunch of money from me, right? If I agree to this other thing and pay him a great big fine, then I'm not in big trouble.

I'm in little trouble again. It's just a speeding ticket. Go home. So I gave him a bunch of money and I went home and all was well. And I thought about that experience when I read the article about how misdemeanors unfairly disadvantage people of color and people who are poor. That same exact experience, doing the same thing, breaking the social contract in the same way, just speeding.

You know, if I wasn't able to write a check that day for a goodly sum of money, I get a misdemeanor. That's what would have happened. And then I don't know what else, but I would have gotten a misdemeanor. Now, they probably wouldn't have thrown me in jail, et cetera, et cetera. Sure, yeah, yeah. But I would have been a part of that system. And then the next time I got in trouble and they ran me, they'd see that I had a misdemeanor. Hey, this guy's got a misdemeanor. And then the next time I got in trouble and they ran me, they'd see that I had a misdemeanor. Hey, this guy's got a misdemeanor.

And now do they give me the... Because a couple of years later, I was driving along and I got pulled over and I got a warning. I don't think I'd have gotten that warning. No, not if you had a misdemeanor. Every time I interact with the system, it's an escalation.

Yeah. As soon as I am engaged with that system as a misdemeanor, a felon, et cetera, et cetera. So like we put these people in jail and their life, even after they get out, it's not the same life. No. It's not just that we put them in jail.

It's that we've, now they're engaged in a set of processes in a set of an amaze that's very difficult to escape. One of the things that you were saying was, you know, you admit to something you didn't do. And we're talking about the Alfred plea. Oh my God.

Which is something that I had never heard of before we started, before we started actually doing any of this research. And I want to read what it is. An Alfred plea, when offering an Alfred plea, a defendant asserts his innocence, but admits that sufficient evidence exists to convict him of the offense. How weird is that plea? And then here's the crazy thing. It's offered by prosecutors as a get out of jail, not quite free card, right? So it's like the prosecutors offer it

and then you get out of jail. The time served is time served. And you're going to say you're still convicted, but you get to say you're innocent sometimes. Sometimes, you know, you're going to say you get to say you're innocent. We're going to say time served. And we're just basically going to say you're still convicted, but you get to say you're innocent sometimes. Sometimes you don't. You're going to say you're, you get to say you're innocent.

We're going to say time served. And we're just basically going to call this whole thing a wink and a nut and a wash. This is the most unfair, like it, it is, it is so explicitly cruel and explicitly unfair and unjust. And it's just, it's just saying like, look, we got it wrong and you know it and I know it, but you're probably exhausted from fighting. Yeah. And you've been in prison for a long time. I'll just let you out as long as you don't call me on my shit. Right. Right. It's, there was a, there was an interesting article that compared the cases of two people arrested

for the same crime. Like, so it was two guys, Owens and Thompson, they were both arrested for a rape charge, like a rape and murder charge or something. They both went, and neither one of them did it. One of them did such a stupid thing, though, and walked up to the people with the knife. He had found a knife. This happens sometimes, too, where the police put

out a reward, and their reward is for a little bit of money, and someone will say, oh, well, I can maybe trick the police into thinking I know something about this. Maybe give them a piece, an item or something like that. And then I can get away with a lot of money. And then who cares what happens in this particular case? And they said they were looking for a knife. There was a thousand dollar reward. And he walked up with a knife, I think his own knife. And he's like, yeah, I found this on the ground last night. It's a switchblade. And there was a little bit of blood on it. And then basically he got charged with it. And then he pan, yeah, I found this on the ground last night. It's a switchblade and there was a little bit of blood on it. And then basically

he got charged with it. And then he panicked after he got charged and he fingered an ex-friend to his. And those are the two guys, Owen and Thompson. Right. Yeah. So these guys, they didn't do it. They just, the DNA exonerates them, right? So that's, but even after that, the prosecutor is like, look, you know, we can

go to court and do a retrial. Maybe you win, maybe you don't. Yeah. If you don't, you go back to jail or I'll give, I'll let you have this Alfred plea. I still keep my conviction. You're still a convicted felon. You still, you know, when you fill out a job application that says, have you ever been convicted of a felony? The answer is yes for you. I'm a felon. Absolutely. But you get out today. You get out now. It's an enticement to accept an untruth. It's an enticement to accept an explicitly unjust sentence for an innocent person. And if they take it, which I would not blame anybody for. No, because you're in prison for a long time, especially these guys.

And you already don't trust the system, right? Because the system already, you were already innocent once. Yeah. And got fucked. Yeah. So the idea that you're still the same amount of innocent. Yeah. Reengaging the same criminal justice system, but now with 10 years behind you in jail where

you look even less innocent. Like, so, but what they don't get to do is sue the state for wrongful. You don't get any of the actions. You don't get any. You don't get anything. And you're not a free man in the right way. No. You're not free in the sense.

Yeah. You're still like eating the shit of a felon. You still, maybe right way. No. You're not free in the sense. Yeah, you're still like eating the shit of a felon. You still, maybe you can't vote. You can't go to Canada. You can't like you know, you can't, you have to register as a sex offender if you were a sex offender. You have to do all those things. All that shit follows you. And you didn't

do shit. And the prosecutor knows it. And that's the only way that they would give you this plea. Yeah. The only reason they give you that plea is because they fucking know. They fucking know. And they don't want what they don't want on their record. It's a cover your ass. It's covering your own ass.

It's what they don't want on their record. And they allow it. They allow them to make this plea and essentially walk out of jail. But like you said, with the baggage of being that guy. And we were reading this story. And the one know, like you said, with the baggage of being that guy. And like we were reading this story and like, you know, the one guy, like the prosecutors play games, they oppose bail. So like all the evidence coming up to the retrial. So the retrial is an opportunity to read you to get the issue of bail. They oppose bail. They keep people in jail as long as possible.

They push the trial out as long as possible to keep that person in jail and suffering. Yep. Every day in jail is state-sponsored kidnapping. It is suffering. They keep them in suffering and keep them in wondering. They push that envelope with that plea hanging over their head. Just go ahead and sign. Say yes that you were the, you know, come on, just say yes. Yeah. Say yes and you're out tomorrow. Yeah. You could end this tomorrow as long as you just are willing to let go of that principle of your own innocence. And then these guys, they get all the way to the point and then the prosecutors, we're going to go ahead and decline to prosecute. Because they know they have no case.

They can't take it through that second trial. They knew that 10, 11, 12 months ago, 16 months. That's horrible. And they let somebody fucking rot. They let a human being sit in jail and rot. The Alford plea might be one of the most unconscionably evil things I have ever heard. I had no idea. I didn't know existed two weeks ago. I was fucking floored. I was blown away by it. And you're right. You're absolutely right. And maybe again, this is a point where a lawyer might come in and say, well, here's where it works. Here's where the thing is, you know, good. But I, for the life of me,

I couldn't figure out why that existed. Except for a cover your own ass. Like it's, it's almost like a, you know, it's almost like when the, when the politicians

make a rule that, you know, you can't fuck with me after I'm gone or something. You know, something like that. Like it feels like a cover your own ass thing.

Yeah. It's horrifying. I'm curious too, like, like when you walked away from the Central Park Five, what did you think about Donald Trump's involvement in that? Well, yeah, Donald Trump is a shit stirrer, right? In the Central Park Five, he took out a full page ad and said, bring back the police, bring back the death penalty.

And he took out a full page ad, you know, kind of race baiting. Yeah. It's really what he was doing. Absolutely. You know, like a lot of people were after that case. And 2016, he was asked about that issue again.

Sure. And in 2016, he doubled down back on it and said, look, these guys confessed to doing it. The police said that they did it. They did it. He has doubled down on it after their exoneration, he is absolutely unrepentant because he is pathologically unable

to have a fucking conscience and re-examine his positions. I'm at what was crazy when I watched that documentary. It's a really great documentary, by the way. It's on Amazon Prime and it's Ken Burns did it. And so it's really, really well done. But I was amazed at that documentary when they would like talk to these people who, you know, years later were on the wrong side of this.

And some of them are just like, it doesn't even feel like it affects them. And I would just be like, fuck, that would make me crazy. Talking about Ed Koch, right? Because like the prosecutors and cops all declined to be in it.

They didn't, they weren't even involved. Yeah. But like Ed Koch was like on TV back in the late 80s when this happened, saying like, I have to say allege, but we know that they did it. Yeah. The fucking mayor. Yeah. The fucking mayor is saying, I have to say allege, but come on, we know.

And then later he's like, I trusted my prosecutor implicitly. Yeah. Like that's what I did. I trusted him. I couldn't believe that he would even be interviewed for that. What I don't understand is like, I mean, I do and I don't, but like, we also like culturally, like we need to be okay with being wrong. We need to be okay with being morally wrong.

We need to be okay with saying like, I didn't know better and I fucked up or I knew better and I fucked up. And I'm, you know, I like, I'm not, I'm going to try to not fuck up again. I really am. And I, I, I've thought about this and it haunts me and it bothers me. Like, and I try to be a better person because I know that the ways I've thought about this and it haunts me and it bothers me. And I try to be a better person because I know that the ways I behaved in the past are not the man I want to be in the future. And we need to be okay with hearing people that say that and recognizing that like,

yeah, I'm the same guy. There's no part of me that's not that guy. There's no part of me that hasn't fucked up or made a bad decision. There are things I've done when I was a youth that were stupid and foolhardy and dangerous, etc., etc. You're talking about being defined. We need to be able to come back and say, yeah, I regret that. And not be like...

When a politician does it, a lot of times, they're wishy-washy. They're flip-flopping. We don't stop and think human beings can change, right? We don't ever think about that. We always think about people as if they were, you know, static. Right. You know, we're dynamic.

I'm a very different person than I was when I was a kid. I'm super different. I was disrespectful as a kid. You know, I was bullied as a kid. I bullied kids as a kid. I was, you know, there's all these bad things that happened in my life that I would like look back on. And I wasn't, I definitely wasn't an angel, right? I wasn't an angel. I did bad things. I recognize that. I think, you know, when I told that story about the police, I think they had every reason to believe that I might've been involved in that

because I was, I was a shitty kid. Right. I wasn't super, I knew a lot shittier kids that I hung out with. They were very shitty. They were thieves and liars and they were bad kids. I get it. And I think I wasn't always, I wasn't like that. I think I look back and I don't know, maybe it's just me looking back at me and thinking I'm above that. But I look back and I know I did wrong things.

I know I did the wrong thing. I vandalized things. I know that. I know I stole stuff when I was a kid. I know that I did that. But there was a cutoff point for me in my youth where I realized I was doing the wrong thing and I shouldn't do that. There was a cutoff point where my morality said, you're an adult. Don't do this. What is wrong with you? And I changed. I changed, I think, for the better. I changed for

the better. I became a person who I think is a better person than I was. But if I was judged just strictly by that moment, it would be a difficult thing. But I think like, you know, we have a system currently where the entire world now judges you for basically a juvenile crime. These kids that did this central park five that, you know, we're not involved in, but, you know, they were accused of it. They were all minors. Yeah. So even if, let's just say they did it, right? Let's just say a 14-year-old

did something horrible like that. Do you think that that 14-year-old is going to be like that for the rest of their life? Are they shattered and broken forever? But I want to talk about that idea too, because like a couple of things in that struck me as really important in terms of like how we think about youth and crime and you know violence and all of these

things like 18 is arbitrary like let's just let's just have that out like there's nothing yeah nobody decided 18 based on any research the idea of 18 is not based on anything more substantive than we threw a fucking dart at a dartboard. It's really nothing. You pick it. So the idea that 18 is some magical age at which things fundamentally change about who we are, that we enter adulthood. We don't enter adulthood.

We know for a dead certainty that our brains are not done forming at 18. We are still literally forming done forming at 18. We are still literally forming brain structure at 18. The idea that 18 is an adulthood, it is an idea that has no basis in fact. It's a social idea. It's not a scientific idea. The idea too, that we would take young people, 14, 15, 16 years old, and we could try them as adults if the crime is awful enough. That's a travesty. That's a travesty? That's a Pat Robertson's.

That's a Travis Shamockery. It's a Travis Shamockery. It's a tragedy. Yeah. It's a travesty. It's both of them. There's no psychological, biological reason to do that.

There's no scientific evidence that says that's something we should do. That's just because we want to hurt somebody because somebody got hurt. Yeah, right. It's mean. It's just meanness. It's the cruelty in us that demands blood for blood when we do that. It's not right.

It's not okay. I think a total reexamination of like, when are people morally culpable? And are people morally culpable at the same time that they are intellectually culpable? I don't know that they are. And I don't know how we contend with that. I don't have an answer for how we contend with that. I don't want to pretend that I do. I'm just some fucking dude.

But I know that there's no evidence that 18 is a magical number. And I know there's no evidence that 16 means you can send a kid to Rikers Island. Unlike his 14-year-old buddies. Like, that's terrible. I know that nobody benefits from that. you can send a kid to Rikers Island. Yeah. Unlike his 14-year-old buddies. Yeah. Like, that's terrible. I know that nobody benefits from that. Not that kid, not society, nobody. I know that's for true.

I know that's got to get fixed. Yeah. The one thing that we forget is that, you know, when we talk about these people that have been in jail for a long time that are, you know, false convictions, we forget about the pain that they experienced in jail, like the stuff that they did that happened. We think about the time that they lost. That's something that I think we all kind of figure out. But we sometimes forget about

how tough it is to do to even be there. And I was reading a story about a guy who he was accused of killing a child. And when he went to jail, people wanted to beat him up and hurt him. And he said he got his skull fractured because somebody threw a bunch of batteries in his sock and beat the shit out of him with it. And we realized that he didn't do the crime. He was exonerated through DNA evidence. He wound up leaving the prison,

but he got his fucking ass beat with a sock full of batteries. That's something I'll never have to experience. That's some kind of torture I'll never have to go through in my, hopefully, you know, fingers crossed, never have to go through in my life. But that's something that we decided was okay for another person to go through, a perfectly innocent person, person just as innocent of the crime as I am. We thought as a society that was okay for them to go through because we wanted to be safe. And I think like, when I think back on it like that, I don't feel like it's a good trade. I think it's a bad trade.

And you know, I saw something, there was just an article the other day that I read in the news. It was about some guys were sitting at a table like in the rec room at a maximum security prison, and they're all shackled to the table and they're playing cards. And it's a max security thing so they can't get up from the table. They're all shackled together. Some other dude gets unshackled,

gets a seven inch shiv from his cell and runs over and stabs the fuck out of these four dudes. There's video of it. Stabs the fuck out of these four dudes. And it doesn't kill anyone, but like stabs one dude like 32 times. Stabs a guard, just stabbing McGee, stabbing everyone. And I doesn't kill on him, but like stabs one dude like 32 times. Jesus Christ.

Stabs a guard, just stabbing McGee, stabbing everyone. And I was reading this story and one of the things that jumped out off the page was that most of the time, if somebody is serving a life sentence, they are not prosecuted for the crimes they commit in jail. So this guy attempted to murder four people.

And if the video hadn't surfaced and hadn't gained some attention, he would not have been charged. I had no idea about this. Maybe this is common knowledge for everybody else. I had no idea. He would not have been charged because he's already in jail.

So what happens in jail stays in jail. Jesus Christ. Which means that we implicitly look at the people in jail and we say, your lives, even when those lives are, even when you're subject to all the same depredations that we condemn on the outside, if you're assaulted, if you're raped, if you're, you know, whatever on the inside,

doesn't count. It just doesn't count. And so like you put the wrong guy. First of all, I think that's wrong, right? You know, it's just, I think that's just patently wrong. But think about how much worse it is if you're the wrong guy in jail. You're the wrong guy in jail and you don't even get, you get beaten with a sock and nobody even gets. Nothing happens. Nothing happens

except for maybe their sentence gets arbitrarily extended. Spend some time in the hole. Yeah, right. But you know, you don't get any justice. You didn't do anything. There's no such thing as justice for the wrongfully convicted. They're kidnapped. Yeah, kidnapped by the state. It's a good way to put it. So I want to end

today. I know it's been a long couple of episodes that we've covered this and that this is a very different type of podcast than we normally put out. And it's been kind of depressing. So I want to end on a little up note. If you want to donate to the Innocence Project, we're going to put a link on this week's show notes.

The Innocence Project helps people get DNA evidence run through and scientifically examined and hopefully removed. They add to their exonerations. They add to the people that they've helped exonerate from prison. And so we're going to put a link on this week's show notes to that. You know, that's a plus.

That we're trying to, there's some error correcting system out there, even if it is a privately, you know, charitably funded organization. There's some error correction system out there. And hopefully, you know, people, if you're moved,

you can, you can go and, and donate to the, to the Innocence Project. All you have to do is go to our website, dissonancepod.com. It'll be on this week's show notes. So we, uh, did not, uh, do any email last week or this week.

We had recorded all this in one sort of big sitting. So we're not going to do any email, but we will promise, we promise we'll come back with patrons and email next week. We love to get your letters. So if you want to send us anything, you can go dissonance.podcast at gmail.com. We'd love to get messages from you,

but we will be reading all our email between now and the next time we record. But we're going to leave you now, like we always do, with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit.

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